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Knowledge sharing, is the key essence in our culture. We are learning and teaching, upskilling and adding value to the community no matter the circumstances (we are looking at you, Covid-19). The desire to spread the best practices has inspired us not only to host the Tech Savvy Talks but to distribute a brand-new experience by opening the events for a live audience". And we didn't stop there. Learn more about it by continuing to read below. As the song says, in the summertime, when the weather is fine, we thought to catch the wave and bring the Tech Savvy talk to another level by doing it live in our Plovdiv, Bulgaria office in front of a real audience. Not in one, but in two days during June. On the 16th, our CTO, Krasimir Kostadinov, welcomed our savvy attendees and, as you can see by the photos, had a fantastic time talking and discussing IPC Distributed Systems, MassTransit and Micro Services. Answers were given to questions like “Could Metcalfe's law save us, and what is its dark side? How do we handle exponentially growing data with asymptotically improving hardware? The limits of humanity's collective mind - are we on the edge of falling off a Cloud?” Ivan Stefanov, Senior Engineer at Scalefocus, had a panel on presenting communication between .NET microservices via MassTransit. Asen Tolsuzov, one of our Front-End Technology Team Leads, explained how to make React and Angular part of a Web application, implemented with Micro Frontend architecture. And all of this is just a glimpse of all that was shared during the event. On the 23rd of June, the second part of Plovdiv’s live Tech Savvy Talk was held. The main characters were Daniel Dutin, Quality Engineer at Scalefocus and Dimitar Tachev, a DevOps Engineer at the company. As you probably already guessed by their titles, the topics of the event were in the field of QA и DevOps. The speciality, served by Daniel was Using Postman as an automated testing alternative and integrating it with Newman in CI. Dimitar fed the audience details about creating a complete CI/CD pipeline in GitLab, including creating containers and running external applications in their deployment process using best practices. On the 4th of July, something revolutionary happened. Our Burgas office collaborated with the BurgasJS to bring you a new technology event. On the seaside shore, in front of a lively and diverse group of people, the CTO of Scalefocus, Krasimir Kostadinov, teamed up with Georgi 'Johny' Ganchev. Krasi shared the hacks of creating cryptography with pen and paper, talked about its importance and place in the world of technology and predicted its future. The other topic presented by Johny was as crucial as the first one - Who's the one to blame for YOUR burnout? Together we found the responsible people and factors, and we'll keep in mind what we learned. Hopefully, it will help us to keep our heads above the deep water. Overall, we had a blast with BurgasJS near the beach. When slicing and dicing code and computing gets to your fingers - limitations of distributed software systems… Krasi gives one more talk on IPC & Distributed Systems. Yes, the previous ones were so successful. This time it was held in Sofia. Again - a live event open to anyone's interest and completely free, just like the rest of our knowledge-sharing sessions. If you missed it - here are some photos. Meanwhile, the Beer.js was happening, and we just had to be there. The venue was a favorite spot of ours - Maimunarnika at Borisova garden. Petar Kadakevliev, Technology Team Lead at Scalefocus, talked about Building high-speed apps with Svelte. Because you know - we are early adopters, and this relatively new but super promising technology nails it! A lot of features that require a 3rd party library or a lot of code are either built-in or can be done with a few lines of dead simple code. Petar compared it with a hegemon at the moment, React, and explored how even in a simple web app built with both technologies - the many benefits of Svelte put it much ahead of its rival(s). All the exchanged knowledge during the past months was garnished with cold beers to cool down the heated atmosphere by the hot topics. If you missed our geek sessions, don’t give yourself a hard time. We have plenty more around the corner. Open your calendar and put reminders. Do you want the best from both worlds? We got you covered with another Tech Savvy Live planned by the sea on the 29th of September in Varna. Expect lightning talks on hot tech tracks such as Java, FE, QE & .NET. We know from experience that it’s the best way to share and learn new stuff while enjoying the beach. In case you are adventurous, you are more than welcome in Skopje, where our team is preparing two (or more) events between the 13th and 20th of September. Swing by our YouTube channel to catch up with all the previous Tech Savvy talks: That’s all (for now), folks. Hope to see you soon. Anna-Mariya Yordanova Content Specialist

Table of Contents: What is Conga CPQ? Are Apttus and Conga the same? Pros of Conga CPQ Cons of Conga CPQ Conga CPQ at Scalefocus Conclusion What is Conga CPQ? Conga CPQ enables/empowers sellers to achieve better deal margins and faster sales cycles. Relying on its AI and ML capabilities sales professionals can manage unlimited product complexity with a centralized view of sales quotes and orders. The result? Up-to-date pricing across all channels, the ability to cross-sell and upsell, bigger deals and, ultimately, increased revenue. Sales is a tough field. A lot of decision-makers believe that salespeople are generally unprepared. On top of that, sales often get delayed because of complicated catalogs, quoting errors and various manual processes. This results in revenue leakage and inconsistent pricing, which, combined with rogue discounting, can impact margins negatively. To combat this and enable their sales teams to sell more effectively in less time, companies use CPQ software. CPQ stands for Configure, Price, Quote. It is a technology solution that is an extension of your CRM and works together with ERP systems. It improves sales processes by automating approvals, controlling discounting, increasing quote accuracy and customer relations. Are Apttus and Conga the same? No, but also, yes. Apttus, the leader in quote-to-cash (QTC) software, acquired Conga, the leader in Digital Document Transformation, back in 2020. The goal was to modernize revenue generation for both small and large enterprises. The newly created company operates under the Conga brand. Its end-to-end solution allows for streamlined workflows resulting in better buying experiences that match customers’ needs. Pros of Conga CPQ 1. Creating accurate quotes faster Selling a product with different configurations often slows down processing times and creates delays in the delivery of quotes to customers. What this means is that often sales representatives waste time they could spend working on actual deals. Conga CPQ speeds up even the most complex quotes leading to faster sales cycles. Customers expect to get offers instantly and delivering quotes within seconds significantly impacts the outcome of a deal. 2. Integration with Salesforce Conga CPQ is built and runs within Salesforce – it is native to the Platform and not a standalone application. There are no data synchronization or connection issues. Updates are made in one place and are available instantly. Your data is in the Salesforce database which means you can access it faster and generate reports more easily. It also means its security is guaranteed. 3. Ease of use and configuration Conga CPQ’s developer guide is well structured and contains in-depth explanations that are simple to follow. The design is user-friendly and sellers can access quoting information in various ways through the home page. You can either use the standard Salesforce UI or choose the CPQ Admin console to create a product. You can then associate it with categories, price lists and price items on a single page. 4. Drafting quotes for different scenarios Conga CPQ maintains a separate price list for each customer and has the business logic built in to meet different scenarios for different clients. Sellers can insert data and customize processes from multiple models to deliver a unique quoting and purchasing experience and use CPQ to create their working catalog page. Conga CPQ is designed to create accurate price quotes with any product configuration scenario. 5. Highly scalable solution Conga CPQ is the most secure and scalable CPQ solution available for enterprises today. Sellers using the platform can create repeatable quoting and contracting processes that could increase profits and support annual revenue growth. Conga CPQ makes their processes faster and more scalable by rebuilding their pricing engine from scratch on their own infrastructure that is not artificially limited. 6. Managing unlimited product complexity Conga CPQ allows for the creation of either standalone or bundles of products, including such with attributes and options. The deal management process is straightforward thanks to two important features: Product Rules and Collaboration Requests. The first one means product rules exist inside the catalog as well as for compatibility, replacements, recommendations, etc. The second allows sellers, managers and other stakeholders to collaborate on quote creation. Cons of Conga CPQ 1. Implementation requires business and tech expertise CPQ projects are often thought of as mostly technical but business understanding is also critical here. In reality, teams working on implementation and customization need both technical and business domain knowledge and skills to set up processes effectively. 2. Support with customization is suboptimal While support engineers deliver great customer experience, if you use Conga CPQ’s out-of-the-box functionalities, they are not always helpful enough if you have made heavy customizations. CPQ projects often do require some degree of customization which means agents might not have a full grasp on the issues you could be facing. 3. Pricing conditions are not very clear Conga CPQ has a licensed-based pricing model and is available in Salesforce AppExchange. Although customers are asked to request a quote specific for their case, initial research is confusing and the process makes it hard to estimate a provisional budget. Conga CPQ at Scalefocus When it comes to working with Conga CPQ (formerly Apttus CPQ), our consultants have comprehensive technical experience combined with excellent industry know-how. We put this expertise to practice by implementing the solution for a Dutch medical equipment manufacturer and enabled them to create error free quotes. The client wanted to combine the sales processes for products and services and speed up quoting times. They also needed to centralize fragmented internal procedures across business departments and improve catalog management by automating manual interactions. Our team performed an end-to-end implementation of Conga Configure, Price, Quote and data migration. We improved the product record and catalog structure through in-depth analysis and continuous collaboration with various business units. The results: Process standardization and automation of manual tasks Improved response times from an average of 30–60 days to several hours for quoting Evolved revenue operations with real-time product and pricing configuration Full auditing trail and visibility with granular permissions configuration Automated approval, simplifying business processes Conclusion Conga CPQ (formerly Apttus CPQ) is not without its flaws. Some users have pointed out that its implementation requires advanced tech and business skills. Also, customer support is not impeccable when handling customization issues and its pricing terms are sometimes hard to figure out. However, it’s by far the most robust CPQ solution out there. It enables a seamless experience for sales teams by allowing them to create accurate quotes for different scenarios faster and is fully integrated with Salesforce.com. On top of that, it’s intuitive and exceptionally scalable. If your company is looking to achieve significantly better business results, adopting Conga CPQ is definitely the thing to do. Scalefocus is the type of technology partner who not only provides excellent Conga CPQ implementation services but brings additional value to your organization thanks to our industry knowledge. Our team will help you sell faster and more efficiently while eliminating revenue leakage. In the end, adopting Conga CPQ with the guided assistance of Scalefocus will result in more closed deals, improved customer success and, ultimately, higher revenue. Get in touch today so we can begin mapping out the transformation of your company’s entire sales cycle and get you where you need to be – ahead of the competition. Velina Derilova Senior Content Writer

Table of Contents: What Are the 6 Types of Salesforce Clouds? Sales Cloud Service Cloud Marketing Cloud Commerce Cloud Experience Cloud Analytics Cloud Salesforce Clouds at Scalefocus Conclusion 6 Types of Salesforce Clouds Salesforce is a collection of tools and services designed to serve different functions. The platform enables companies to build process automation into their business and create seamless workflows. Read on to learn more about the different types of Salesforce Clouds and how these platforms manage your company’s sales, marketing, and customer relationship. 1. Sales Cloud The Salesforce Sales Cloud is an application designed to help organizations sell smarter and faster by centralizing customer information, logging interactions, allowing collaboration across teams, and automating various tasks. It puts all your customer and prospect information in one place and makes sales teams more productive. As a business leader, you can: Easily get insight into your business, so you know where to focus your efforts and make decisions based on market changes. Visualize and redistribute your customers’ territories, shifting your sales coverage to changing market demands. Quickly update end-to-end operations of a company’s Sales department to adapt to change. As a sales rep, you can: Manage deals from a single workspace. Maintain Customer Contacts, Triggering Emails, Reports, and Dashboard features. Track every customer interaction from a customer 360 data, powered by AI. 2. Service Cloud Salesforce Service Cloud is among the most significant Salesforce Clouds and provides all the necessary functionalities that boost customer engagement. Its intelligent workflow automates business processes, facilitates customer interactions across channels, obtains real-time customer information, and uses Artificial Intelligence to increase sales and revenue. 3. Marketing Cloud The Salesforce Marketing Cloud connects companies with every customer interaction and experience across different channels. It is easy to control messaging flows, react to customer actions, and discover useful insights to grow your business. 4. Commerce Cloud The name says it all – Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a cloud-based eCommerce platform from the commerce cloud market where we can create eCommerce websites, manage, and sell products. It provides businesses with a complete infrastructure and tools to set up an eCommerce store effortlessly. Commerce Cloud major takeaways: Quick online sales with the world’s most trusted commerce platform. Access to hundreds of out-of-the-box features, drag-and-drop tools, and commerce portals alongside Salesforce CMS. Ability to use Einstein intelligence to increase average order value and shopper engagement. Self-service capabilities, like curb-side pickup and chat, are available. Everything is connected to Customer 360 data, so you can quickly build an integrated B2B commerce channel. Buyer Managers have the control to set up account-based rules such as contract pricing, custom catalogs, and approval workflows. 5. Experience Cloud The Salesforce Experience Cloud platform is integrated with Salesforce and enables businesses to engage with customers, partners, and employees. It consists of online portals or websites hosted by Salesforce named Experience Sites – exquisitely branded digital experiences that are easy to create and maintain. Experience Cloud ensures that the data displayed on the site is already recorded in your unique Salesforce CRM platform. The data shared and displayed is more than safe as the admins decide what to give access to and with whom. Sharing different data with different audiences enables the creation of multiple sites and experiences and customizing exactly what each user accesses. 6. Analytics Cloud Analytics Cloud is a robust cloud-based analytical solution that accelerates exploring and analyzing huge volumes of data. The Salesforce Analytics Cloud is powered by Einstein Analytics and Tableau tools. Analytics Cloud users can identify trends, improve efficiency and comprehend the logic behind the data. The solution bolsters Customer Relationship Management (CRM) by providing self-service analytics applications that offer deep insights into the collected data and trends. Salesforce Clouds at Scalefocus Salesforce Clouds represent standardized business processes based on very detailed and thorough research. Yet, every company is different, and every business operates with its own specifics. Taking this into account, Salesforce allows for multiple customizations. As a Salesforce partner, we work to provide expertise in specific business domains and industries next to our purely technical knowledge of configuration and customizations. Our Salesforce team covers all roles from Administrators to Salesforce Consultants with industry-specific expertise. On the technical side, we work with some of the best software developers and technical and solution architects. Conclusion Businesses can use Salesforce Clouds as a standalone solution to help a specific department increase efficiency and productivity by having a single location to record all operational data. The charm of Salesforce lies elsewhere. All of the clouds share the same database instance. They are connected and allow data to flow freely across applications. This way, the Sales team can recognize the Marketing department’s efforts and build upon them. One united platform to help all departments across the organization work together is the biggest strength of Salesforce. The Salesforce team at Scalefocus has vast experience with cloud-based CRM and all sorts of cloud computing projects that have helped our partners drastically improve their sales processes. Contact us today and schedule a chat with our experts, we are certain there is a lot you can learn, and our collaboration will be a success! Tanya Marinova Senior Salesforce Consultant

Case Studies We let our clients speak for our success. Check out the results of our work from Fortune 500 companies, innovative startups and industry leaders in Information Technology, E-Commerce, Insurance, Healthcare, Finance and Energy & Utilities. Home / Our Work Anchor 1 All Technology Strategy Banking, Financial Services & Insurance Energy & Utilities Healthcare & Life Science E-Commerce & Retail Logistics Telecom & Media Banking, Financial Services & Insurance Remote Delivery Center for Global Leader in Quote-to-Cash Solutions Read more Telecom & Media Creating a Self-Care App for a Global Telco Provider Read more Telecom & Media Doubling Productivity with Offshore Software Development Center Read more Telecom & Media Premium Video App Development Read more Banking, Financial Services & Insurance Building The First All-Digital Bank in The Middle East Read more Healthcare & Life Science Next Level DevOps Maturity with Azure DevOps Server Read more Technology Strategy Mobile Solution for Geospatial Activities Read more Healthcare & Life Science Faster Early Cancer Diagnostics through Hardware Automation Read more Healthcare & Life Science Automated Claim Settlement Cuts Down Processing Time in Half Read more Load more Ready to scale and meet the technology challenges of tomorrow? We help business grow by bringing together a world-class engineering team, industry expertise and technology excellence. Contact us today

Case Studies We let our clients speak for our success. Check out the results of our work from Fortune 500 companies, innovative startups and industry leaders in Information Technology, E-Commerce, Insurance, Healthcare, Finance and Energy & Utilities. Home / Our Work Anchor 1 All Technology Strategy Banking, Financial Services & Insurance Energy & Utilities Healthcare & Life Science E-Commerce & Retail Logistics Telecom & Media Banking, Financial Services & Insurance Remote Delivery Center for Global Leader in Quote-to-Cash Solutions Read more Telecom & Media Creating a Self-Care App for a Global Telco Provider Read more Telecom & Media Doubling Productivity with Offshore Software Development Center Read more Telecom & Media Premium Video App Development Read more Banking, Financial Services & Insurance Building The First All-Digital Bank in The Middle East Read more Healthcare & Life Science Next Level DevOps Maturity with Azure DevOps Server Read more Technology Strategy Mobile Solution for Geospatial Activities Read more Healthcare & Life Science Faster Early Cancer Diagnostics through Hardware Automation Read more Healthcare & Life Science Automated Claim Settlement Cuts Down Processing Time in Half Read more Load more Ready to scale and meet the technology challenges of tomorrow? We help business grow by bringing together a world-class engineering team, industry expertise and technology excellence. Contact us today

Energy & Utilities Model Orchestration Platform for Improved Cross-Team Collaboration Home / Case Studies Anchor 1 Success Story Our client faced multiple business challenges, with distributed teams operating in a disconnected digital and data environment, following suboptimal internal processes, and little or no cross-team resource interchangeability. Severe bottlenecks in developing crucial simulations, statistical, and machine learning models, led to increased resource management overhead and longer time-to-market. We rolled out a solution that turned into a centralized platform for all teams, offering them model orchestration, management, monitoring, and ease of deployment in a consistent way. The Model Orchestration platform provided a standard set of tools that are reusable, scalable, and fault-tolerant. Its implementation improved productivity, collaboration and enabled faster iteration of ideas to production. 80% Reduction of Model Crashes 40% Quicker Diagnosis of Root-Causes 24% Decrease in Model Execution Times The Client An international energy company that operates numerous power plants and leverages advanced technologies and innovations to manage large-scale power systems and infrastructure. The company sources oil, natural gas, and global commodities and trades electricity, emissions certificates, natural gas, LNG, and coal. They operate a sophisticated ecosystem of power plants and manage their own power infrastructure business. The Solution In order to modernize and harmonize our client’s modelling setup, we took a two-pronged approach. First, we consulted and advised their internal teams on best practices for software development and governance. As a second step, we designed and implemented a modelling platform, which would be used across different departments, serving various use cases, each with its own technical and functional requirements. I. Process consultancy We began by performing a detailed analysis of our client’s needs and workflows when developing, orchestrating and collaborating on different models. We proceeded to create a comprehensive gap analysis, which outlined our findings and suggested improvements. We implemented several CI/CD pipelines following industry standards and best practices, which allowed the in-house engineers to collaborate in model creation and efficiently utilize the Modelling Platform’s capabilities. As a result we: Harmonized the technological stack and tools used by teams across departments; Implemented a proper Gitflow for version control; Set up centralized Azure DevOps pipelines for building, testing and dockerizing models; Set up a central Container Registry for image distribution. II. Modelling platform To enhance the cross-team collaboration, we implemented a central modelling platform to be used as an orchestration, execution, and monitoring tool, tailored to satisfy all current use cases. The platform is based on Azure technologies and allows for the deployment, orchestration, monitoring, and debugging of various models with different technical and functional requirements. It is designed with extensibility in mind, so it can be easily adapted whenever new requirements and use cases surface in the future. Results As a result, our client’s internal collaboration was significantly improved, inter-department projects were vastly facilitated and overall model quality was enhanced. Unlocked business value: 80% reduction of model crashes. Improved model stability & IT infrastructure; 40% quicker diagnosis of root-causes; 24% decrease in average model execution times; Faster Time-to-Market. Model deployment/release timelines reduced from avg of 1-2 hours to 10 min; Robust processes and collaboration. Our Work We have a global client base that includes Fortune 500 companies, innovative startups and industry leaders in Information Technology, E-Commerce, Insurance, Healthcare, Finance and Energy & Utilities. Energy & Utilities Increasing Employee Engagement with Energy Market Insights Read more Energy & Utilities Next-Generation Digital Platform for Energy Supply and Sales Read more Energy & Utilities Building an Innovative Digital Experience in the Energy Trading Domain Read more Explore all Start your technology transformation today Scalefocus exists to bring innovative tech-centric software solutions, which exceed client expectations and bring excellent, scalable results. Get in touch