Let me first clarify what Tacton Days is. Tacton is a Swedish CPQ Vendor specialized in the manufacturing industry. They organize an annual two-day event called “Tacton Days” in Stockholm, Sweden. This is one way for them to inform their customers, partners and prospects about their latest Product Updates. The reason I got invited, even though I’m not a partner, was that the Tacton Team wanted me to provide a vendor agnostic CPQ Market Overview for this event. So I used this opportunity to meet some more Tacton CPQ consultants and to learn more about Tacton’s products, their customers and prospects.

Let me start by saying that Stockholm is a great and modern city, even in October. Yes, there was some cold and rain but there was also some sunshine (on Friday)! Alas I did not have much time for sightseeing.

The first day of the event started with a couple of speakers before Nils Olsson, SVP of Products at Tacton, announced a number of product updates/news. The most memorable announcement was the Tacton Extension for Salesforce. While this was already announced at Dreamforce it was the official announcement for Europe. Frederic Laziou, Tacton CEO, then announced that they would soon open an office in Chicago to support this new combined Salesforce CPQ offering for the US market.  This was an interesting start to the meeting before they broke for lunch. Then the breakout sessions started.

One session in particular was interesting to me and provided an opportunity to do something that was not possible at Dreamforce. That was to use a virtual headset for configuration purposes. Tacton’s visualization partner Lumo Graphics had setup a virtual Viking Ship and I have to say the look and feel was impressive. While I could not have worn the headset for more than five minutes I think it may, at one point, provide a valuable addition for certain use cases and industries (e.g. Operation Rooms, Dentist Chairs, Furniture etc.). Before I put on the headset I noticed that two “sensors” were used to limit the visual “Play-Space”. To use this plus the laptop and VR headset indicates that the required setup is not yet at a point that it can be used by Sales Reps for regular day-to-day situations. Which Sales Rep or Channel Partner will carry all of this around?

In any case when I wore the headset it was like entering a different world. Cool! While I noticed some little hiccups (e.g. when someone changed the configuration settings the virtual image flickered somewhat as well as when I moved my head too fast) it was still a realistic feeling! I’m looking forward to the next developments in this area and see how customers can benefit from it. By the way I was told the hiccups were due to the connection layers from Tacton-to-Salesforce and then from Tacton-to-Lumo Graphics.

The first day ended with a dinner at Tacton’s office.  This was a nice opportunity to meet and greet people and learn more about their CPQ experiences.

The second day started with an announcement from Frederic Laziou and Marc Herling, Lumo Graphics CEO, that Tacton had acquired Lumo Graphics. While that was not a complete surprise, since the two had been partners for almost a year, I did not expect that announcement. In any case this acquisition will provide Tacton a larger presence in Germany. I’m interested to see what this will mean for customers of both companies and for their combined solution offering!

So all in all it was a good event with some surprising news. Stay tuned next week I’m going to speak at Cincom’s CPQ User Conference in San Antonio, TX and I will write a short blog post about that as well.