CPQ, Meet Price Optimization: Your Revenue Lifecycle Just Got Serious
The news On October 1, 2025, Conga announced its intent to acquire the B2B business of PROS, following PRO’s acquisition by Thomas Bravo. At the same time, ThomaBravo and PROS announced that PRO’s travel business segment will be run as a standalone business. The bigger picture Revenue operations, revenue management and revenue lifecycle management have become a thing in the past years, as evidenced by the number of specialized companies that solve parts of the overall problem of optimizing revenue. It also got abused to some extent (e.g., surge pricing models) when the users of the corresponding capabilities consider optimizing being the same as maximizing. Reality check: It is not. While optimizing involves a bit of identifying how much a customer is willing to pay, it also involves the thought of repeat business, or in other words customer loyalty, even without a formal loyalty program. And that involves the customer experience, part of which the speed of creating a quote with matching scope and a price that is acceptable for both parties is an important element in B2B. So, the combination of CPQ and price optimization makes perfect sense. As an example, already in 2019, I was involved in a project that in part targeted at combining CPQ and price optimization to get to a good quote, fast. And it worked, although the solution looked different in the end than anticipated at the start of the project. My analysis and point of view Already when the original news of Thoma Bravo acquiring PROS broke I have seen quite some synergies with Conga but also some other players in the...
Zoho goes all in with AI – bold or inevitable?
The news On July 17, 2025 Zoho launched Zia LLM and deepened its AI portfolio with agents, an agent builder, MCP support and an agent marketplace. Key announcements from the press release include: In-House LLM: Zoho has developed its own large language model, Zia LLM, which comes in three sizes (1.3B, 2.6B, and 7B parameters) to optimize for different business use cases. This allows customers to leverage AI while keeping their data within Zoho’s ecosystem, ensuring privacy. The three models allow Zoho to always optimize the right model for the right user context, striking the proper balance between power and resource management. This focus on right-sizing the model is an ongoing development strategy for Zoho. Speech-to-Text Models: The company also unveiled two proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for English and Hindi, with plans to support more languages in the future. Prebuilt AI Agents: To facilitate immediate adoption, Zoho has introduced a range of AI agents that are integrated directly into its products. These agents are designed to automate tasks for various business roles such as sales development, customer support, and account management. Global and Private Cloud Deployment: The new Zia LLM will be deployed across Zoho’s data centers in the US, India, and Europe. Continued Support for Other Models: While promoting its own AI, Zoho will continue to support integrations with other popular large language models like ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek. Zoho will continue to scale Zia LLM’s mode sizes. A2A capabilities are on the roadmap. The bigger picture Enterprise software has been a platform game for a long time. AI, in particular generative and agentic AI, have...
Creatio goes agentic but adds an interesting twist
The news On June 25, Creatio announced the launch of version 8.3 of its platform, dubbed as the “Twin release”. The release features new prebuilt role-based AI agents, a unified conversational interface, and AI-powered no-code development tools. These new capabilities are natively embedded into the core of the platform. According to Creatio, the “Twin” release reflects the company’s vision of AI as a collaborative force within the enterprise. Katherine Kostereva, CEO at Creatio, stated, “Our approach is human-centric. With this release, we continue to expand our AI-native platform, placing unified, actionable, and composable AI automation at the very core of Creatio. The 8.3 release takes our AI automation to a new level, empowering organizations to transform processes and deliver results like never before.” Key innovations in this release include Natively Embedded AI and a Unified Conversational Interface: The 8.3 “Twin” Release advances Creatio’s AI-native strategy by embedding Creatio’s AI deeper into and across every layer of the platform. Creatio.ai is designed to power real-time automation, provide grounded recommendations, and offer a seamless natural language experience. Users can now interact with Creatio using natural language as the default mode through a refreshed, AI-optimized interface. The assistant utilizes retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to provide responses based on company-specific context. These conversational capabilities are natively available across Creatio’s web and mobile applications, as well as within productivity tools such as MS Outlook and MS Teams. Prebuilt, Role-Based AI Agents: The release introduces new prebuilt, role-based AI agents that cover sales, service, marketing and development. These agents are designed to help employees and customers achieve business results faster. AI-Powered No-Code Development: Creatio 8.3 enhances...
Agentforce 3 – finally ready for the enterprise?
The news On June 23, 2025, Salesforce announced Agentforce 3, the third iteration of its Agentforce platform. Agentforce 3 is a major upgrade to Salesforce’s digital labor platform. It gives customers the visibility and control that is needed to scale AI agents that already have proven useful at many companies. The release covers several additional capabilities. Salesforce has introduced the Agentforce Command Center, an observability console designed for managing AI agents. This tool allows businesses to track and scale AI agent activities. It is built into Agentforce Studio and includes features for monitoring performance metrics such as latency and error rates through live analytics. The update also brings native support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which enables Agentforce to connect with any MCP-compliant server without requiring custom coding. The platform’s Atlas architecture has been enhanced to improve latency, accuracy, and resiliency. Support for additional Large Language Models has been added, including Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet via Amazon Bedrock, with future support planned for Google Gemini. Agentforce 3 includes over 200 pre-built industry actions, with half of these being new additions. The agents are now capable of performing web searches and providing citations for the information they retrieve. The platform’s availability has been expanded to Canada, the U.K., India, Japan, and Brazil, adding support for six new languages. More than 30 new partners have been added to the AgentExchange marketplace. These include companies such as AWS, Box, Cisco, Google Cloud, IBM, PayPal, and Stripe. Salesforce has also introduced new pricing options, including per-user plans for its Sales, Service, and Industry Clouds that provide unlimited usage of actions for employee-facing agents....