Price management software purveyor Vendavo this week extended its reach into the enterprise with a new version of its flagship suite built on salesforce.com’s Force.com cloud computing platform.

By building its Enterprise Pricing Suite on the Force.com platform, Vendavo has made it easier for its customers to integrate price optimization capabilities into Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) system, the company said. For example, users can combine CRM data with sales cycle information such as up-to-the-minute pricing, guidance, and deal scores, to manage and negotiate product pricing, the company said.

Until this announcement, Vendavo had focused primarily on on-premise deployments, having inked a 2005 reseller agreement with enterprise apps leader SAP. Vendavo’s products are also available in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, but the salesforce.com integration is its first big commitment to the cloud, a company spokesperson told Managing Automation.

Cloud computing removes the burden of managing on-premise hardware and software by deploying the application in a hosted, multi-tenancy architecture. Force.com is the application development framework for salesforce.com’s cloud computing infrastructure. It enables salesforce.com partners to integrate their applications with the subscription-based CRM system and to take part in the salesforce.com AppExchange marketplace.

As part of the AppExchange, Vendavo joins approximately 800 vendors in a marketplace that allows customers to pick and choose business applications. “It’s the iTunes of business software,” said a salesforce.com spokesperson.

For Vendavo, whose software is operational in some 160 divisions of large CPG, high-tech, chemical, and industrial manufacturing companies, the salesforce.com partnership is a chance to broaden its customer base.

"Joint salesforce.com-Vendavo customers will now have access to the right pricing information at the right time to make informed business decisions and ultimately drive profits," said Jamie Rapperport, Vendavo’s co-founder and executive vice president of marketing and business development, in a statement.