by Thomas Wieberneit | Jun 3, 2025 | Analysis, Blog |
The past weeks certainly brought a lot of news, with SAP Sapphire and Salesforce’s surely strategically timed announcement of acquiring Informatica, ranging at the top. I have covered both in recent articles. The enterprise software landscape is crackling with energy, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is certainly the star of the show. It isn’t anymore about AI as a mere feature; it’s about AI as the strategic core of enterprise software. Two recent announcements underscored this shift: SAP’s ambitious AI-centric vision that was unveiled at its Sapphire 2025 conference, and, arriving hot on its heels, Salesforce’s agreement to acquire data management titan Informatica for $8 billion. Both signal an intensified battle for AI supremacy, where trusted, enterprise-wide data is the undisputed new monarch. Of course, SAP and Salesforce are not the only ones duking this one out. SAP’s Sapphire Vision: An AI-Powered, Integrated Enterprise At its Sapphire 2025 event in Orlando, SAP laid out a sweeping vision for an AI-driven future. The central themes resonating from Sapphire were “AI everywhere” and “the AI flywheel”, with intelligence deeply woven into its integrated suite of applications and powered by the SAP Business Data Cloud as a strong, unified data layer. Joule, SAP’s AI copilot, is slated to become “omnipresent,” extending its reach not only across the entire SAP ecosystem but also into third-party applications. It’s designed to proactively assist users and launch autonomous “Joule Agents” to automate a wide array of workflows. SAP has ambitious plans to significantly expand its library of these specialized agents. Underpinning this is the SAP AI Foundation that includes Joule Studio for agent development, a Knowledge Graph...
by Thomas Wieberneit | May 27, 2025 | Analysis, Blog |
The news On May 27, 2025, Salesforce announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Informatica for about $8bn. According to the press release, “bringing together Informatica’s cloud-native capabilities — including its extensive data catalog, data integration, governance, quality and privacy, metadata management, and MDM — with the Salesforce platform will unlock new capabilities for Salesforce’s enterprise data stack, delivering a complete solution to the challenges of AI at scale”. The acquisition is planned to enhance Salesforce’ data foundation which is critical for deploying agentic AI. “The combination of Informatica’s rich data catalog, data integration, governance, quality and privacy, metadata management, and Master Data Management (MDM) services with the Salesforce platform will establish a unified architecture for agentic AI — enabling AI agents to operate safely, responsibly, and at scale across the modern enterprise”. The bigger picture For agentic AI systems – or agents in general – to operate efficiently, it needs two things: data and data. Data from a vendor’s own systems as well as data from external systems that can get harmonized and accessed/used by the software agents. SAP during its annual Sapphire event just made exactly this point by showcasing how its Joule family of agents can use data from SAP and non-SAP applications. As there is no vendor to rule them all (thanks to J.R.R. Tolkien for this inspiration) there is an importance on again two things: (zero copy) data integration and data management including its governance. These seemingly not-so-sexy capabilities are sorely lacked by many application vendors but, again, thanks to AI, increasingly necessary. Again, AI, especially autonomous AI systems, cannot be...
by Thomas Wieberneit | May 26, 2025 | Analysis, Blog |
The news SAP just held its annual Sapphire event in Orlando, FL. It is totally under the theme of uncertainty and how technology, in particular SAP’s technology, can help businesses steer through poorly charted waters, to use a nautical metaphor. Uncertainty is caused by evolving regulatory situations, tariffs and shipping delays with their impact on the supply chain, waning consumer confidence in the light of all of this, and of course, the big gorilla in the room: AI. SAP’s response to this is the “SAP Flywheel”, which consists of three components Applications, of which SAP commands the broadest portfolio amongst all business applications vendors Data, which all these applications create, which in turn gives SAP extensive access to semantically rich business data AI, which analyses all this data, makes it actionable and, in turn feeds it back to the applications, closing the loop to establish the flywheel. SAP demonstrated how this works in a scenario that showed how a C-suite consisting of a CFO, CRO, COO and CHRO use the integrated SAP suite with embedded AI to rapidly respond to new tariffs, managing compliance, assessing financial impact, developing strategies, adjusting supply chain plans, and aligning people strategy, all based on unified data. Key announcements are based on the concept that AI is changing how businesses, and therefore its business applications, operate. Supporting this, is the purpose of SAP’s business AI, which has its foundation in SAP’s Business Technology Platform, BTP. A centerpiece of this change in how businesses – and users – operate is Joule, which is embedded (or will be soon) in all SAP applications and being expanded...
by Thomas Wieberneit | May 16, 2025 | Analysis, Blog |
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...
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...
by Thomas Wieberneit | 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...
