Integrated data delivers trusted insights into compensation programs

Human capital is every company’s greatest asset. But how do you attract and retain the people who can make your company great? That’s exactly where Xactly adds value.

Xactly helps companies establish incentive compensation programs designed to attract and retain outstanding employees. It provides decision-makers with the insights they need to manage compensation more effectively. Xactly Incent, for example, is a cloud-based enterprise-class incentive compensation solution for sales, finance, and executive teams. It automates sales compensation workflows and provides real-time visibility and analytics capabilities, with support for modeling, credit assignment, eDocs, approvals, and more.

But Xactly Incent needs a great amount of data to produce great insights, and every customer’s data infrastructure is different. For Xactly, this posed a fundamental challenge: How best to enable its cloud-based solutions to work with real customer data? Having customers upload data using Excel templates was difficult, slow, and error-prone; it provided neither the experience nor the quality of results customers wanted.

What Xactly needed was a swift way to seamlessly integrate large volumes of data from a wide variety of transaction and order management systems—which is exactly what it found in Actian DataConnect™.

Data From Anywhere

Actian DataConnect enables Xactly Incent to aggregate data from any customer source and from any combination of SaaS or onsite environments. DataConnect can handle any volume of data, even highly volatile data volumes, and support multiple users and applications with ease. The reusable integration templates in Actian DataConnect make it easy for Xactly to transfer customer data into Incent, and the speed with which even complex integrations can be completed enables Xactly to scale its business in line with customer demand.

Xactly can access, configure, and run its DataConnect solutions through a web browser, and the DataConnect platform supports both automatic delivery of updates and real-time activity tracking and usage monitoring by account, application, or user.

“Actian DataConnect enables us to complete customer implementations in days instead of months,” says Laura Roach, former Senior Director of Solution Services at Xactly, “and that provides real value to our customers. Whether they want seamless integration right away, with a full-blown, real-time, open API, or whether they want to take a baby-step approach, we can give them that flexibility, and they are much happier.”

Exactly the Data Required

The benefits that Xactly and its customers gain from Actian DataConnect extend beyond the ease with which Xactly can integrate customer data into its insight infrastructure. Use of Actian DataConnect provides important compliance benefits.

“Xactly Incent takes in a lot of data to calculate commissions,” says Roach. “These types of calculations typically pull information from bookings, quotas, CRM, billing, HR, and other data sources, and businesses today are increasingly concerned about validating commission pay-outs against sales activity. Actian DataConnect enables us to do that by matching up and integration so that the system can calculate and report on the commissions accurately.”

Interacting With Actian

While “the number of connectors, the number of adapters, and how incredibly easy it is to integrate with various applications in the marketplace” were compelling reasons to adopt Actian DataConnect, says Roach, the ease with which Xactly developers could integrate Actian DataConnect with Incent itself was also important.

“The Actian API for Java was solid and well documented,” said Anil Kona, Director of Engineering at Xactly. “It only took us about 3 or 4 weeks to deploy Actian DataConnect within our application.”

Xactly is taking full advantage of the multi-tenant architecture of Actian DataConnect, which ensures the security and isolation of each customer’s sensitive data while empowering Xactly and its customers to take advantage of a common set of tools. Kona says that customers have been pleased with the transparency of the DataConnect component from the outset.

“Giving customers a way to look at their integration points from within our application—and then the ability to run, monitor, and check the status of those integrations in real time—is a crucial feature that our customers like.”