Does Creatio create a new future for enterprise software?
The news I had the pleasure of spending two days at the Creatio NoCode Days in the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando, together with customers, partners and some fellow analysts to learn about what is new and to generally learn more about Creatio itself. The event itself showed a very vibrant community of customers and partners. On topic, in a nutshell, the event was all about whether and how AI reshapes business software, its creation, deployment, use and the corresponding impact on a business’s ecosystem. Creatio reiterated its four pillars of having AI at the core, AI being actionable, creating unified data through AI and offering a composable architecture, demonstrating this with four core agents, the marketing, sales, service, and studio twins, and how they help users become more efficient. Based on these pillars, Creatio enables customers to have fast turnaround times when implementing necessary changes. This drives a high user adoption and satisfaction plus a low total cost of ownership. It also changes the role of the CIO and, equally crucial, of implementation partners. CIOs morph more into partners and advisors for the business units while implementation partners focus less on the actual implementation but on identifying the value of an implementation, therefore turning more into consultants. There have been a multitude of customers and partners – on and off stage – who shared their experiences. Extreme ones include the functional replacement of a failed CRM implementation in a mere weekend and a seven thousand seat implementation with a 100 per cent user adoption that the company attributes to the flexibility of the system and the users’ ability to (within...
AI killed the Platform Star – or didn’t it?
Do you remember the uproar that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently created about the death of SaaS? Although this is obviously some hyperbolic BS, there is a grain of truth in there. Not the death of a business model, but something that is hidden somewhat deeper. It is about the eternal struggle between suites and best of breed software, which is in its third iteration – at least – since I am in the CRM world. The grain of truth lies in the potential change of the way that business and other applications actually are built. When I look at ERP and CRM systems, I see software stacks that often are twenty years old, or even older. Look at S/4HANA. It still has a lot of R/3 inside although there are many new parts. Or Salesforce, which essentially dates back to the early noughts. SugarCRM has a fairly old core, too, even posterchild Zoho has software that dates back twenty years. The list goes on and on. Essentially, all these systems have morphed from fairly specialized solutions into monolithic giants. Mind you, this is not all bad, as these systems are often incredibly powerful. However, there are some challenges with it. I admit that, although I am a suite guy myself. These challenges are often around speed of innovation and, by definition, a degree of incompleteness. Requirements change faster than any software product vendor can implement them. And even if they successfully implement them, the software stack becomes increasingly more complex and harder to enhance and to maintain. Harder to maintain not only for the vendor but also for...
Nimble goes Marketing
The news On April 3, 2025, Nimble introduced e-mail marketing capabilities including a template editor to power scalable campaigns and outreach. This new capability empowers businesses to send unlimited, HTML-powered, and trackable emails, enabling large-scale outreach. This can be used e.g., for newsletters, webinars, product announcements, seasonal promotions, and more — all from within the Nimble platform. According to the press release, Nimble Email Marketing allows users to send unlimited e-mails and to create campaigns using a drg-and-drop editor or pre-delivered templates. Jon Ferrara, founder and CEO of Nimble says that “With Nimble Email Marketing, our customers can now scale their outreach and strengthen relationships like never before.” The e-mail marketing tool leverages existing features like group messaging and sequences. This enables teams to manage outreach, nurturing of leads and deepen relationships. With the combination of these capabilities, Nimble offers the ability to send one-off e-mails to larger audiences as well as to automate a multi-step outreach. Nimble’s e-mail marketing capabilities including the template editor are available as an add-on for Nimble users for the price of $15 per company per month. For this, each user gets an allocation of 1,000 e-mails per month with the option to purchase additional packages as required. The bigger picture There is a lot of scope for full-fledged CRM solutions targeting smaller businesses. Many of the existing solutions correlate smaller companies with lower complexity of requirements. Most of these solutions also cover only a part of the CRM processes, be it marketing, sales, or service, sometimes even being more niche, focusing on engagement only. Although pronounced dead multiple times, e-mail is still one...