Midmarket enterprise resource planning vendor QAD Inc. is broadening its application suite to include sales-force automation software. The company next week will announce a worldwide reseller agreement with Access Productique, a French sales-force automation vendor. Under the terms of the agreement, QAD will immediately market Access' Cameleon product line, which includes an opportunity-management and sales-analysis system, as well as a sales-configuration engine for manufacturing companies that make highly customizable products.

For the past year, major ERP vendors, such as Oracle and SAP, have been working to integrate their traditional back- office manufacturing and financial applications with front- office sales systems. The benefits of an integrated front- and back-office system is clear: Salespeople will be able to determine what's in stock and what's on order while with customers. They will then be able to pass customer orders directly into the manufacturing system, eliminating manual handoffs and cutting the time between getting orders and completing them.

So far, QAD officials say they have 30 customers who are jointly using software from Access Productique. Officials add that the two products are already integrated, and that application programming interfaces linking the two products are available.