Callidus Introduces SPM Community: OpenCommissions

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Author: Michael Stus

Callidus Software announced the launch of OpenCommissions a community sales performance management (SPM) website today with this press release. Featured are SPM related forums, a wiki, blogs, and even sales compensation management Excel and Word templates. Essentially what Callidus has done to create OpenCommissions is to make public parts of TrueConnect, the community site previously exclusively available to verified Callidus customers. Today's visitors will find some of the content immediately available upon arrival; additional content is available after a free registration and finally, some content is still restricted to only Callidus customers.

The press release and the site developers I talked with yesterday promote the vendor neutrality of OpenCommissions and sure enough, links to information about competitive products can be found on the site. However, it is very clear that Callidus is making a significant marketing investment here and no one will mistake vendor neutrality claims for true impartiality. Not wanting to endorse and promote a competitive marketing effort, I doubt we'll see active participation by Callidus competitors at OpenCommissions. Nonetheless there seems to be a lot of information anyone interested in the SPM industry will find beneficial.

Update:

Andrew Sevillia, the administrator of OpenCommissions, was kind enough to provide me a demo of the site yesterday. One item that I found particularly interesting that I did not see until the demo is the People Map feature. This tool provides a visual representation of community members that have interests similar to your own. It's a product from Leverage Software, a company specializing in online community software. Take a look here.