by twieberneit | Mar 12, 2025 | Blog |
The analyst’s day is full of research. Now, this is the age of AI and AI is here to help, isn’t it? As everyone is talking about copilots and AI agents, why not using the tools at hand to do a little research on research. NB., no one really has a good definition of an AI agent, so this might become an additional topic for research. But I digress. Imagine the following project at hand, which is not only interesting for analysts, btw, but also for a variety of roles in the corporate world. Let’s call it vendor (competitor) monitoring. The job is the following: Research reputable sites for news about a number of vendors, relating to a set of keywords. Reputable sites are high quality news sites, high quality tech publications, high quality analyst sites and, of course the news pages of the vendors in question. Limit the time frame of the search matching to the cadence of my information requirement, e.g., “yesterday” for a daily update or “last week” for a weekly update Provide a summary of the news Give an assessment of how the news affects the positions of the vendors in the marketplace re the key words in question Provide these news with their assessments as a prioritized list, sorted from high impact to low impact Add an executive summary as a preface Send it to me as an email So far, so simple. After all, a lot of folks, yours truly included, do this every day. And it is taking quite some time. So, this job is a perfect one for an automated update...
by twieberneit | Feb 24, 2025 | Blog, Case Study, Sponsored |
ZohoDay 2025 offered the possibility for some good conversations with Zoho enterprise customers about their journey with Zoho. Another in-depth conversation I had during this event was with Adrian Castellanos of Selectra. Selectra is a French company that was founded in 2007. It specializes in helping customers, mainly consumers, compare and move between energy providers. From this segment, the company has expanded into other segments, with the mission to make the managing of utility bills simpler, cheaper, and greener. The company has more than 2,000 employees and is active in 17 countries across Europe, APAC and America. As Selectra’s business model is highly digital and fast moving, it requires strong, ideally real-time analytics capabilities to provide its services. Due to operating in different countries and different verticals, reporting processes have been based on Microsoft Excel, with these Excels differing across countries and even across verticals. Castellanos says that Selectra had “3 different countries, each one with several verticals. And the reporting was Excel. We had Excel for everything. Each department had their own Excels, their own reports. And you had managers spending two, three hours each week to update all their reporting. If they had to create a new one, they could spend one week doing only that. People that were more valuable doing their actual managers roles or if they were working with interns. Okay, it was the intern. But the interns need to learn the real work and not just the reporting. So, we require something. Hey, let’s automatize this. We are losing too much time. We are losing uh work hours uh each week just to...
by twieberneit | Feb 11, 2025 | Analysis, Blog |
Zoho held its annual ZohoDays outside of Austin in the beautiful Horseshoe Bay resort. While this is a good way away from Austin proper, it also gave the opportunity to have long and good conversations with Zoho execs, customers and fellow analysts outside of the conference and meeting rooms. And guess what, this is exactly what happened. Big time kudos to Sandy Lo with her amazing team for organizing this and of course also to all the Zoho execs, including the newly minted Chief Scientist Sridhar Vembu, Zoho’s new CEO Mani Vembu, Tony Thomas, Raju Vegesna, Vijay Sundaram and many more, who all were more than willing to share information and, even more importantly, get feedback. The latter is not something that we analysts take for granted. Besides the usual – and important – state of the business update by Vijay Sundaram, the event revolved around three main topics · AI · Enterprise and partner strategy · Industry strategy As Zoho is privately held, we are not given details, nor at liberty to divulge as much as we learned. So, suffice it to say, that Zoho grows healthily in the value chain from unpaid users to customers, to revenue to retention. The company announced having hit the milestone of $1bn US in revenue already in 2022 and is growing healthily in all of these categories while being healthily profitable. With this out of the way, let’s have a look at the main topics. Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence is one of the main reasons for Sridhar Vembu focusing on technology. He was very hands-on...
by twieberneit | Jan 31, 2025 | Analysis, Blog |
Fresh from the 2025 SugarCRM Analyst Summit, waiting for my plane home, it is time to sort my thoughts. From Monday, 1/27 evening to Wednesday 1/29 in the morning we had some time jam packed with information and good conversations with SugarCRM execs, customers, and in between analysts. The main summit started with a bang, namely the announcement that industry icon Bob Stutz joins the SugarCRM board of directors, which is something that few of us, if any, had foreseen. This is exciting news. With David Roberts, who succeeded Craig Charlton in September 2024, SugarCRM itself has a new CEO with a long time CRM pedigree. As with every leadership change, this promises some change. Every new CEO evaluates what they see vs. where they want their company to go and then, together with the team, establishes and executes a plan to get there. Usually, this involves some change in the structure of the executive leadership team, too. This is what happened and happens with SugarCRM. The company had and has a strong leadership team, with new faces like Paul Farrell (joined in March 2024), Jason Glass, and soon a new Chief Customer Officer – although with Christian Wettre or Chris Pennington some other strong players left for various reasons. As I have written in the past, the company has a great yet varied history and, more importantly, potential due to great software. What SugarCRM to some extent is missing is a distinguishable identity. In a market that is as crowded as the CRM/CX market, differentiation is of crucial importance. As I have said and written before, SugarCRM’s messaging...
by twieberneit | Jan 25, 2025 | Blog |
Cloud Wars’ Bob Evans recently did an excellent and very interesting interview with SAP CEO Christian Klein about SAP’s priorities, which include integrating generative AI with SAP Business AI “to address complex business challenges an drive holistic transformation by optimizing processes like quote to cash”. Klein repeatedly referred to end-to-end (E2E) and SAP’s great library of E2E processes that gives the essence of or at least a standardized framework for the value streams within a business. Not surprisingly, and correctly so, Klein also repeatedly emphasized the value of AI and, in particular, generative AI, to create customer value. This happens via Joule’s ability to orchestrate different agents across the value chain, i.e., different E2E processes. Joule is SAP’s Ai assistant. He also emphasized on the value of the suite and on the importance to “in the core business” not run with “agents of 100s of different tech companies”. This is where “the suite is winning”. Evans writes that SAP had “significant growth in applications, outpacing competitors. Klein attributes this to SAP’s suite approach, which provides a comprehensive solution for core business processes. He talks about the importance of integration and extensibility, allowing customers to choose the best solutions for their needs.” This is technically a correct statement. I am fairly sure that SAP will report another outstanding year on January 28, 2025. In the first three quarters of FY 2024 SAP certainly outpaced the cloud business applications competition, including Salesforce. However, there is a caveat to it. This growth is largely attributable to S/4HANA cloud. Don’t get me wrong, doing this is no mean feat. SAP profitably grows while...
