CVM Solutions finds success by migrating solutions to Force.com

CVM Solutions is one of the fastest growing providers of supplier management solutions as well as a cloud-computing pioneer. For the past 7 years, the company has been helping Fortune 500 clients centralize vendor management, manage supplier diversity, and mitigate risk using products built on its proprietary cloud-computing platform. To sustain growth—and ensure the scalability and innovation its customers demand—the company migrated its industry-leading supplier management applications to the Force.com platform.

Pioneering in the cloud

Today, successful businesses need to get the most out of every dollar and mitigate business risk. Those are the reasons behind the fast growth of CVM Solutions. The company’s products help clients more proactively manage vendors, lower costs and optimize performance in the supply base. CVM has proven that cloud-computing solutions are cost-effective for even the thriftiest companies to deploy and use.

Rajesh Voddiraju, CVM’s president, is a former IT consultant with a background in CRM—and a long-time believer in cloud computing. When the company started in 2002, Voddiraju and the other founders knew that offering a cloud-based solution was essential to position their fledgling company for long-term growth. For its first cloud-computing applications, CVM developed a proprietary platform, built on Microsoft technologies, including SQL server, the .NET framework, and C#.

Even so, CVM didn’t start out as a pure cloud-computing venture. According to Voddiraju, “Back in 2002, we hedged our bets by offering both licensed and hosted solutions. Our first client chose the hosted solution. Our second client—Dell—chose the licensed version. Every other customer after that requested the hosted version, validating our decision to build a cloud product. Earlier this year, we discontinued the on-premises version and are now 100 percent cloud computing.”

Focusing on innovation

When Voddiraju and team kicked off planning for Supplier Central version 10.0, they considered alternatives to their proprietary platform for the first time. “A lot of our clients were looking to expand their footprint, so scalability was becoming more important,” he explains. “Last year, we processed more than 16 million individual suppliers. We need to ensure that as we take on more clients, we can continue to deliver the performance they demand.”

“Over time, we also found that we needed a way to deliver customer-driven innovation faster, better, and in a more cost effective manner,” he continues. “We’re self-funded, so we’re even more particular about how we spend our dollars. Solving our clients’ business issues is the most important thing.”
 

The CVM team did an exhaustive evaluation of cloud-computing applications and platforms, including Bungee Connect, Coghead, LongJump, Rollbase, SplendidCRM, SugarCRM, and more. The company also considered building a new proprietary platform that could accommodate its rapid growth. None of these options met CVM’s goals for rapidly delivering innovation—except Force.com.
 

Moving to Force.com

CVM had been using Salesforce CRM to help manage its customer relationships for more than 5 years. The company initially deployed traditional CRM to its sales team; product and finance managers were brought on later.

After Voddiraju was introduced to Force.com, he added more complex applications. “With more than 300 clients, we have a lot of contracts, so we built an enhanced contract repository to help track expirations and amendments. Then we built a tool to help track our professional services group. We feed in time and expenses and we’re able to measure project profitability all the way from lead to completion.”

After a proof of concept, CVM decided to port its Supplier Central™ products to Force.com. Using Force.com, building the new solutions has been fast and cost-effective. According to Voddiraju, “With Force.com, we’ve seen a 3x improvement in speed over developing with traditional platforms and a 60 to 70 percent improvement in costs because we’re not building the infrastructure.”

Preparing for the future

More than half of CVM’s clients use salesforce.com to help run their businesses. The automatic integration of Supplier Central v. 10 and Salesforce CRM is powerful, and Voddiraju plans to connect the two even more tightly in the future. He says, “For the first time, customers will be able to link suppliers directly to customer revenue. Measuring trade issues and supplier risk impact are increasingly important in today’s global economy, and we’ll make it easier than ever before for our customers to see the effect.”

CVM has already released the new version of Supplier Central with several leading Fortune 500 clients. Following the rollout, the company plans to make its applications available on the AppExchange, so salesforce.com customers can easily find and test drive them. Voddiraju sees the AppExchange as a key vehicle for reaching potential customers. “As more and more IT organizations adopt Force.com, they’ll be an increasing influencer for our products, and we want to ensure that we’re top of mind for these tech users.”

The salesforce.com name is a key selling point for the new version. “We primarily serve blue chip, Fortune 1,000 companies like AT&T, Dell, , and Wal-Mart One of the big things for them is making sure that they’re selecting a vendor or supplier that’s going to be around for a long time. Salesforce.com gives them that security,” he adds. “We’re looking forward to working together for a long time.”

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