Conga CPQ empowers sales, partners, and customers to efficiently configure complex products and services offerings, and provide personalized prices and quotes, utilizing codified product and pricing information - to drive higher win rates and a more pleasurable buying experience. Conga CPQ also helps to maintain a single price book, discounting structure, and quoting structure across all channels. With an API-first approach, configuration, pricing, or quoting…
$35
per month per user
IT Glue
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
IT Glue, a Kaseya company since the December 2018 acquisition, is an information management platform that allows for efficient storage and retrieval of all the documentation an organization needs to help their MSP run better. By integrating PSA and RMM data, the vendor says they can help increase efficiency, and reduce onboarding times.
It is well suited to providing quick pricing recommendations, allowing those who are quoting to get our agreements out efficiently. Where I find there may be some limitations is around the details that it uses to establish recommendations and the overrides. For example it would be nice to have a way to set overrides for those criteria like length of agreement, etc. and have it apply across the board
It is best suited for an MSP but it is also best not suited for an MSP. It is well suited for folks with a minimal knowledge of a client and are attempting to learn what they can. Perhaps just bumbling about and can find the same thing consistently. At my particular work, we pay somebody full time to manage the system. I feel this is unnecessary.
The perceived power strength is that it is supposed to contain CPQ, Contract Management, Document generation and template manipulation, and cash/invoice process all in one wrapped package.
It was developed on the Force.com platform.
They provide multiple releases of their product per year.
The UI has been set up perfectly, there is a sub-menu for every possible bit of information you wish to store.
There are a number of excellent features such as the autohiding passwords and quick searching from anywhere on the page.
The recent addition of the IT Glue is also an excellent feature, it features online self-guided courses to become a certified IT Glue user.
You can create and group custom documents together.
IT Glue can be integrated with a number of platforms such as Autotask.
IT Glue also integrates well with N-Central to automatically populate the configurations tab with all the relevant Workstation, Printer, and Server information making client on-boarding a breeze.
Our number one complaint with Conga CPQ has been speed. In my experience, Conga CPQ is extremely slow, especially for large orders.
In my opinion, the configuration methods of Conga CPQ are outdated and error-prone. One literally puts configurations into string-based custom settings, including the API field names. This often leads to deployment issues and run-time configuration errors.
In my experience, Conga CPQ is everything but simple to develop. You need things like a 12-step pricing callback to support custom pricing.
In my experience, Conga CPQ support is not responsive.
When it comes time to lock in a renewal contract for Conga CPQ, in my experience, they delay engagement, so you are truly behind the 8 ball when it comes time to decide if you are going to continue with Conga CPQ.
Like many other MSPs we had the majority of our SOPs and KBs in Word docs. The best case scenario would be to simply drop those files directly into ITG without having to import them into the ITG documentation format. The import function is so broken as to not be an option because it completely ruins formatting and tends to drop images. Thus we have to manually copy/paste text and individually upload each image.
They marketed the product as having true branding but that is stretching the truth. SSL is not an option so client-facing documents will give security errors in browsers. ITG does not appear to be concerned about this even though security is a major concern for all MSPs.
The rating is based on several things: 1) Ongoing support requirements being able to be addressed by cross training existing Salesforce administrators 2) Apttus superior corporate vision for the quote to cash space 3) Apttus execution of the corporate vision with automated agents (Max), and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning offerings to leverage the investment in Configure Price Quote 4) Apttus corporate health and investment in the product line
Overall IT Glue meets every need that we need it to. IT is easy to use and convenient and we have not had very many issues with it since the inception. I would easily recommend it to anyone who needs this software.
Conga CPQ is a great tool but lacks good support and [a] very limited knowledge base which doesn't include day to day errors which users face, thus leading us to support and take more time in turn. Also cart performance can be improved drastically which will enhance the user experience as the user doesn't have to wait for the pricing.
The interface is excellent and very easy to use. As long as the text you input into the system can be easily read, you will have no problem finding it with all the different categories offered. Sometimes, the slider on the right can blend in with dark backgrounds, making it hard to see.
Other than a few access outages, ITGlue is always up and available to us. Their ability to export Playbook, that contain our customers data, and securely send those over to them is amazing and are produced pretty fast. We have IT Glue linked with several other services and software and we have not found that it slows anything down.
Tier1/tier 2 support can only handle native functionality. Customizations have to be escalated to developers which aren’t included in the support program.
I go ahead and copy the people I directly worked with on implementation for assistance. I would rate them an 8 for support assistance.
No problems with support when needed it. Their answers on how to handle DR/BC situations when ITG is down are not stellar. They don't seem to get the business risks of their suggestions to just give the xls backup to engineers (aka give all passwords of ALL clients to engineers in an unencrypted flat-file where it is easy to copy, print, etc.)
Be iterative. Take the opportunity to build a catalog based on how Apttus works well. Learn the tool yourself or use an SI. Take the time to build a configuration / pricing migration tool with X-Author for Excel or roll your own. Stick with OOTB Apttus as any customization will cost you every time a new version is released
We selected Apttus CPQ over SteelBrick due to the simplicity of SteelBrick's out of the box pricing and ability to customize quoted products. As a global organization with selling a highly configurable products, we felt the ability of Apttus to handle our requirements as standard functionalty rather than a customization was a material difference between the platforms.
We chose IT Glue particularly because it's tailored to IT documentation. As a managed IT service provider, it's perfectly in line with what we were looking for. The flexibility and tagging in particular were the kind of features we were looking for. Confluence is very good, and can be used for a number of things, not just IT documentation, but IT Glue shines for that.
The ability to generate engineered configurations that is right by construction has reduced the cycle time of the customer engagement. The fact that we are able to guide the process and end up with a validated bill of material reduces the iterations with the customers.
As long as the validations rules are correct the generated bill of material is accurate. We are now looking at using Apttus to perform quality checks in our product rules since the tool is able to test different configurations quickly and efficiently.
Configuration that use to take weeks and consumed valuable engineering resources has been transformed to become a customer facing application that is simple enough for customer to self-service.
