Configure, price and quote
Configure, price, quote (CPQ) software is a term used in business to describe software systems that help sellers quote complex and configurable products. An example could be a maker of heavy trucks. If the customer chooses a certain chassis (the base frame of a motor vehicle), the choice of engines may be limited, because certain engines might not fit a certain chassis. Given a certain choice of engine, the choice of trailer may be limited (e.g. a heavy trailer requires a stronger engine), and so on. If the product is highly configurable, the user may face  combinatorial explosion, which means the rapid growth of the complexity of a problem. Thus a configuration engine is employed to alleviate this problem. Configuration engines. The "configure" in CPQ deals with the complex challenges of combining components and parts into a more viable product. There are three main approaches used to alleviate the problem of combinatorial explosion: Industry. The CPQ industry has many vendors. Some vendors focus more on one component, for example, a price optimization provider may integrate their pricing software with another provider's configuration engine - and vice versa. The IT research and advisory firm Gartner estimated that  the CPQ market was $1.4 billion in 2019, up 16% year over year. The market is fragmented, with the largest vendor capturing only a 17% share. Gartner identified the following vendors as leaders in the CPQ software market in 2019, while G2, another peer-reviewed software comparison tool for businesses, identified the following vendors as leaders in the CPQ software market in 2021: