AI killed the Platform Star – or didn’t it?

by Thomas Wieberneit | Apr 18, 2025 | Blog |

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

by Thomas Wieberneit | Apr 7, 2025 | Analysis, Blog |

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...

You think you can’t achieve 100% CRM adoption? Try this!

by Thomas Wieberneit | Apr 4, 2025 | Blog, Case Study, Sponsored |

During ZohoDay2025 I had the pleasure of having a conversation with Udit Pahwa, CIO of Blue Star Ltd. Blue Star is a nearly 80-year-old company, based in India, which is a leader in cooling solutions for both the residential and commercial market. The company offers a variety of cooling products, including deep freezers, air conditioners, and chillers. Solutions are provided through direct sales, channel sales, or a combination of both. Blue Star went through a series of five CRM proof of concepts, evaluations and implementation attempts with limited success before settling on Zoho CRM. Blue Star certainly has been a “burnt child” at that time. The main reason for Blue Star deciding for going with Zoho CRM is that Blue Star did not want to go for what Pahwa calls a canned solution. Zoho offered the willingness and ability to co-create a solution that is tailored to Blue Star’s needs. “They’re ready to tailor it for us. That was a big advantage” he says. Before embarking into this sixth implementation, Blue Star performed what Pahwa calls an introspection to find out why there was no adoption but, in fact, resistance. He says that “what we came to know is any CRM for a sales guy is looked upon as moral policing”. This is not terribly uncommon and can be addressed. Blue Star chose to work with a comprehensive set of three levers to drive adoption. Here you can watch the full conversation with Udit Pahwa, The company started with executive sponsorship and a top-down approach in a division that had what Pahwa calls a “visionary leader who was also...

LLM Showdown: Comparing ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok for Automated News Research

by Thomas Wieberneit | 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...

How to Get From Excel-Mania to Enterprise Reporting

by Thomas Wieberneit | 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...