This saying is also true for Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) tools! While we obviously don’t require a picture for every product that we buy (e.g. Software, Services), it is challenging to buy many products without some form of visualization (e.g. picture, 2D drawing, 3D model). One obvious example is a car or motorcycle. As online customers we want to see immediately what happens when we make changes to the car we are researching. For example when we change the color of the car from red to black or when we change the seat color from black to beige. While some of these changes could be displayed with static images other product displays are more complex and require many, many different images or models to show all possible combinations. At that point more advanced visual and virtual formats are needed.

More advanced visual formats are 2D and 3D images/models and more advanced virtual formats are Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). While 2D and 3D are supported formats for CPQ tools, VR and AR are not widely supported and used yet. At this time there are many more showcases for VR/AR than actual production use cases.  In this context it is important to note that there are many CPQ Solutions that do not support any visual or virtual product displays. In fact CPQ vendors that offer visual and virtual solutions are more an exception than a rule.

But Forecast Reports from firms like IDC show huge growth numbers (from $5.2B in 2016 to $162B in 2020) in AR and VR for the coming years. So it is interesting to learn if, how and when these various visualization formats are currently used in CPQ and what we should expect in the coming years.

This was the reason why I worked together with Anjali Mulgaonkar and a number of visual (2D/3D) & virtual (VR/AR) CPQ vendors from North America and Europe over the last two months to address questions like “Do these visual additions to CPQ indeed make a difference to the bottom line, and at what cost?” to discover  

• the role product visualization plays in CPQ Solutions,now and going forward
• the visualization technologies that are most promising for improving CPQ productivity and efficiency
• the expectation of CPQ vendors and customers from visual and virtual CPQ Solutions
• the Key Challenges for CPQ vendors and customers to adopt 3D CPQ Solutions
• the maintenance requirements for visual and virtual CPQ Solutions

If you are interested to learn more about this topic then read our first Visual & Virtual CPQ Research Report 2017 here.

One additional interesting note here is that many of the visual & virtual CPQ vendors are smaller companies (<50 employees). It will be interesting to watch what happens with them as the market grows. Will they grow into larger companies and also offer non-visual CPQ capabilities or will larger non-visual, non-virtual CPQ Vendors buy them to expand their offering. In any case it should be interesting to keep a close eye on this market since the expectation is that younger users will require more and more visualization soon.