Configure, Price, Quote Solutions

Forrester addressed its 2017 evaluation of this market to application development and delivery professionals supporting sales organisations. By 2023 it was addressing revenue and sales professionals directly.

That is not a formatting change. In 2017 CPQ was an integration project that IT delivered on behalf of sales. By 2023 it was a revenue system that the revenue function owned, evaluated, and lived with. The technology did not change nearly as much as the ownership did.

The problem CPQ exists to solve

Some products cannot simply be listed with a price.

An industrial pump comes with a housing material, an impeller type, a motor rating, a seal configuration, and a control package, and roughly a third of the theoretically possible combinations do not physically work together. A telecommunications contract has term length, bandwidth tiers, service levels, installation charges, and early termination provisions that interact. Enterprise software has user tiers, module selections, deployment options, and volume commitments that all move the price.

Left to their own devices, sales representatives handle this with spreadsheets, inherited templates, and a phone call to the one person in engineering who knows which combinations are valid. The results are predictable: quotes that take days, configurations that cannot be built, prices that undercut margin without anyone noticing until the deal is booked, and terms nobody in legal approved.

CPQ encodes the rules. Configure enforces what can actually be sold together. Price applies the pricing logic, including discount authority, volume breaks, contracted rates, and approval thresholds. Quote produces the document that goes to the customer.

The strategic value is not speed, though speed is what gets sold. It is that pricing policy becomes something the organisation controls centrally rather than something each representative negotiates independently.

The category consolidated hard

The vendor lists tell that story compactly.

The Forrester Wave: Configure-Price-Quote Solutions, Q1 2017, authored by John Bruno, scored eleven vendors against thirty six criteria: Apttus, CallidusCloud, Cincom, FPX, IBM, Infor, Model N, Oracle, PROS, Salesforce, and SAP. Oracle, Apttus, and CallidusCloud led.

Of the three leaders in that edition, two no longer exist under those names. Apttus became Conga following restructuring and merger. CallidusCloud was acquired by SAP. FPX was also absorbed.

Six years later, The Forrester Wave: Configure, Price, Quote Solutions, Q2 2023, authored by Robert Munoz, scored fourteen vendors against twenty four criteria. The criteria count fell by twelve while the vendor count rose by three, which is what happens when a market matures: fewer things discriminate between products, and more products clear the bar.

The Forrester Wave: Configure, Price, Quote Solutions, Q1 2025 scored thirteen vendors and named four Leaders.

Inside The Forrester Wave: Configure, Price, Quote Solutions, Q1 2025

Oracle placed as a Leader with Fusion Cloud CPQ, taking the highest score in the strategy category. Forrester's assessment described Oracle as viewing CPQ as the engine at the centre of all B2B buying and selling processes across every sales channel, in diverse industries and for a wide range of business models, with an AI-first innovation strategy and an API-first composable platform supporting revenue transformation.

That framing is the thing to notice rather than the placement. CPQ started as a tool for a sales representative building a quote. Oracle's positioning describes it as the engine underneath every selling motion, including self-service digital buying where no representative is involved at all.

In the 2023 edition Oracle scored highest of all evaluated vendors in both strategy and current offering, with the maximum score in market presence. Salesforce also placed as a Leader in that edition.

Note the methodology difference between the two. The 2023 Wave scored market presence as a dimension. Forrester has since replaced that with customer feedback in newer evaluations, which means a vendor's size counted in 2023 in a way it does not now.

Where CPQ actually sits

The category is defined by what it connects to, and this is where implementations succeed or fail.

Upstream sits the CRM, holding the opportunity, the account, and the contracted terms that may already apply. CPQ has to read that context or representatives will re-enter it.

Downstream sits contract lifecycle management, then billing, then revenue recognition. A quote becomes an order becomes an invoice becomes recognised revenue, and every handoff is a place where data can diverge.

Alongside sits the product catalogue and, in manufacturing, the engineering bill of materials, which determines what can actually be built.

The industry calls the whole chain quote-to-cash or, more expansively, lead-to-cash. CPQ is the piece where commercial policy gets encoded, which makes it the piece where inconsistency is most expensive. A pricing rule that exists in CPQ but not in billing produces invoices that do not match quotes, which is a customer relationship problem before it is a finance problem.

The rules are the project

Here is the thing nobody discovers in a demonstration.

Every CPQ vendor will show you a configurator that handles complex product logic elegantly. What none of them can show you is your own product logic, because your product logic does not exist in a documented form. It exists in the heads of long-tenured sales engineers, in spreadsheet formulas nobody has audited, and in a shared understanding of which discounts are acceptable that has never been written down.

CPQ implementation is therefore mostly an exercise in extracting, formalising, and rationalising rules that were previously informal. That work is slow, it surfaces disagreements between sales, finance, and product about what the policy actually is, and it is the reason these projects run long.

It also produces the category's most common failure mode. An organisation encodes its existing complexity faithfully, ending up with a system that reproduces four thousand rules including the ones that exist because of a customer request from 2014. The configuration is accurate and unmaintainable.

The organisations that do this well treat implementation as an opportunity to simplify the commercial model rather than to automate it as found. That is a business decision made before the software is chosen, and it determines the outcome more than vendor selection does.

The buyer stopped being a person

The most consequential shift in this category is that the entity building the quote is increasingly not a sales representative.

B2B buyers expect to configure and price themselves, in the way they do everywhere else in their lives, which turns CPQ from an internal productivity tool into a customer-facing system. Oracle's assessment explicitly connects CPQ to seamless digital buying experiences for customers rather than only to seller efficiency.

That change raises the requirements substantially. An internal tool can tolerate a confusing interface because representatives get trained. A customer-facing configurator cannot. An internal tool can afford to be slow because a representative waits. A customer will not.

The next step is further again. If agentic commerce reaches B2B procurement, the entity configuring a quote may be software acting for the buyer, negotiating against pricing logic rather than against a person. Every rule in the system then becomes machine-readable policy that an agent will probe systematically, including the rules that existed for reasons nobody remembers.

That is a reason to care about rule hygiene beyond maintainability. Inconsistencies that a human representative would smooth over become exploitable when the counterparty is patient, tireless, and testing every combination.

What to test

Configure your hardest product. Not the demonstration catalogue. The item with the most interdependencies, the one your best sales engineer handles personally. If a vendor can model it during evaluation, that is a real signal. If they defer it to implementation, note how confidently.

Trace a quote end to end through your actual downstream systems. Quote to order to invoice, with a mid-term change applied. The change scenario is where quote-to-cash chains break, and it is the scenario most demonstrations skip.

Ask who maintains the rules after go-live. If every pricing change requires a partner engagement, your commercial agility is now a procurement cycle. Several vendors differentiate specifically on business-user maintainability, and it is worth weighting heavily.

Test approval workflows against your real escalation paths, including the ones that route around themselves when a deal is large and the quarter is ending. Systems that cannot accommodate legitimate exceptions get bypassed entirely.

Ask about self-service specifically. Whether the same configuration engine serves a customer-facing experience, or whether that is a separate product with separate rules to maintain. Two rule sets diverge, always.

And establish what the implementation actually requires from you. Rule extraction is your work, not the vendor's, and the projects that go badly are the ones where nobody budgeted internal time for it.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.