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...
AI Agents: Finally, a Digital Assistant That Doesn’t Just Sound Smart?
So, the time of agentic AI has come? What does this mean? Not for businesses, but for business users. These days, the main tool in the quiver of every business user in an enterprise is … the web browser. Initially web interfaces to business software and then SaaS software has seen to this. The result? Employees needed to build their workflows around a plethora of different web applications, having open a corresponding number of tabs at any given time. I just counted the ones that I have open: fifty-three. And that doesn’t even count the web browsers that I do not even recognize as such. For example, Apple Calendar, or Microsoft Outlook. Maybe even MS Word … one never knows where there’s a browser these days … Now, with agentic AI moving into the business, these workflows will need to change. How, that heavily depends on the vendors one works with and, of course, the size of the own business. One of the main considerations when moving towards agentic workflows or agent-supported workflows is the orchestration of agents. This becomes especially important when working with different software packages and this is also a core reason for the emergence of protocols like MCP (model context protocol) and A2A (agent to agent) or ACP (Agent Communication Protocol) that are currently developed. Plus, there are a few “agentic” browsers emerging that allow for the orchestration of different agents on the user level. But what is best, what to use – and when? After all, many of the vendors that are already in house, have their own strategies. And many of the buyers,...
Beyond the Call Center: Unifying CX, One Definition at a Time (Finally!)
Beginning of September 2025, the CRM Magazine published its 2025 CRM Industry Leader Awards on Destination CRM. This year, the awards nominate five outstanding companies across eleven categories. As in recent years, CRM Magazine asked some renowned analysts to chose Industry Leaders for 2025 using a simple question: “If you had to recommend a CRM solution—whether an enterprise suite, contact center infrastructure, or a customer data platform—to a client, what would they choose, and why?” And, of course, the analysts – being analysts – gave their answers. And good answers they are. But this is not the topic of this post. What is it then? Glad you asked … It is about the term “unified customer experience platform” and the corresponding award category. Looking at the winners and their corresponding descriptions, it turns out that there seems to be a clear dominance of customer service and contact center solutions in this area – with the exception of the honorary mention of Sprinklr, which has its origins in the social media sphere. This dominance suggests that customer experience is somehow made equivalent to customer service. This shows quite some success of the narratives that CCaaS and customer service vendors are telling. This is especially true if very renowned analysts, who are in part thought leaders as well, follow it. Which somewhat irks me. And it reminds me of how the term CRM got more and more appropriated by vendors of sales force automation, SFA, solutions, until CRM almost became synonymous to SFA, which it isn’t. And never was. Again, this is not about the winners. They are great and very...
The great CCaaS Meltdown: What It Means for Customers and CX
The past weeks showed quite some interesting activity on the mergers and acquisitions and the partnership frontiers. NiCE acquired the German conversational AI rock star Cognigy for $955M and a short time later announced that the company enhanced its partnership with Salesforce. At nearly the same time, Genesys received an additional funding of $1.5 bn from Salesforce and ServiceNow. Salesforce acquired Waii and Bluebird. VC company Thoma Bravo acquired the still leading CCaaS vendor Verint, to name but a few of the more interesting, and perhaps consequential ones. On top of all this, Avaya seems to have offered all employees a voluntary exit package. What all this shows is that there is significant consolidation going on in the AI-assisted (or should I say, driven?) CCaaS market and that various players are battling to provide – or at least be perceived to provide – the most comprehensive and valuable platform while others fight for survival. Yes, it’s nothing new, but can’t be repeated often enough. The CX market is and always was a high stakes platform game. The stakes got even higher with the advent, the promise and the necessary investments that generative AI and agentic AI require. While one can consider Salesforce’s acquisitions as tuck-ins that help rounding off its Agentforce platform, the other ones are a sign of something bigger going on in the CCaaS and customer service market segments. It is also notable that exactly these sectors get more and more referred to as CX market, whether this is a correct, or only good, attribution, or not. Hint: It isn’t. Not unexpectedly, Salesforce is in the thick...