A couple of years ago, as Network Appliance Inc. grew by leaps and bounds, its payroll department was finding it increasingly difficult to calculate the commissions it owed salespeople under the company's many different incentive programs.

Its solution? The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based vendor of network storage systems installed Callidus Software Inc.'s incentive compensation management (ICM) system, which takes sales information from the company's data warehouse, calculates how much each salesperson and sales manager is owed and feeds its results to the payroll department. The system generates reports for sales managers and its data is accessible to everyone involved.

Ric McCormick, Network Appliance's senior director of business applications, says the payroll department can now generate commission checks by the end of the second month of the new fiscal year, up to two months sooner than it could using spreadsheets under the old system. "What it allowed us to do is handle the processing load much faster," McCormick says. And while the company's sales force grew by about 70% over the last two years, the sales payroll is still handled by just two people, he notes.