by Thomas Wieberneit | Jun 5, 2025 | Blog |
In the past few years, I have written about CDPs, what they are and what their value is – or rather can be. My definition of a CDP that I laid out in one of my column articles on CustomerThink is: A Customer Data Platform is a software that creates persistent, unified customer records that enable business processesthat have the customers’ interests and objectives in mind. It is a good thing that CDPs evolved from its origins of being a packaged software owned by marketers, serving marketers. Having looked at CDP’s as a band aid that fixes the proliferation of data silos that emerged for a number of reasons, I have ultimately come to the conclusion and am here to say that the customer data platform as an entity is increasingly becoming irrelevant – or in the typical marketing hyperbole – dead. Why is that? There are mainly four reasons for it. For one, many an application has its own CDP variant already embedded as part of enabling its core functionality. Any engagement solution that is worth a grain of salt needs the analytical capabilities that a CDP offers, and hence offers them itself. Why do the additional investment of buying things that one already has once more? This only increases cost and IT landscape complexity while acquiring capabilities that partially are already available. In addition, there is no real and concise definition anymore, with even the CDP Institute differentiating use types and/or scopes of CDPs. If you are looking at what other vendors (Salesforce, Oracle) or analysts (here: Gartner) are saying, the water becomes even more muddy. The...
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 23, 2025 | Blog, Case Study, Sponsored |
During the recent ZohoDay 2025, I had the pleasure of talking to Jaroslaw Pietraszko, CIO for IFFCO Group, about what IFFCO is doing with Zoho, why, and what the outcomes of their Zoho implementation are. IFFCO is a privately held multinational company that is active in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector that also has some beauty business and is active in packaging and transportation. The company has its headquarters in Dubai, UAE and has operations in 50+ countries on five continents. The company has more than fifteen thousand employees. Due to its distributed nature and also multiple ERP systems in the back end, IFFCO – and in particular also IFFCO’s employees – suffered from slow, inconsistent and regularly manual expense management process. This also caused a policy adherence and compliance problem, as reporting was virtually impossible. Only two countries used an Intranet based digital process that still was cumbersome due to the company’s matrix organization. “It was completely manual process. So just imagine that someone from the one category of the businesses has some marketing spend in Indonesia. Line manager sometimes is not aware because it’s a matrix reporting. They need to exchange multiple emails between the Indonesia then the finance and the potential marketing from UAE to get this approval and that you can proceed and claim this expense. So, it was very inefficient process. It could take between two to three weeks to get this something approved.” So, there was very clearly a need for a streamlined solution that could be rolled out globally and that ultimately could cover travel, expenses, and petty cash transactions. Here...
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...
