Does Creatio create a new future for enterprise software?
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...
SaaS or the Rise of the Undead
SaaS is dead! It will be replaced by agentic systems that replace coded business logic by AI agents that autonomously interact to bring said business logic to life, just smarter. Satya Nadella said it – or at least something in these lines, if I believe all the pundits around. His words lit up the Internet. And Satya Nadella being the CEO of a 3 trillion dollar company is the ultimate fount of truth and wisdom, when it comes to business applications. Is he not? So, what should we take from his statements? After all, the words of the CEO of one of the top 3 valuable companies on this Earth carry some weight. Let me start straight. I call BS! SaaS, first of all, is a delivery model of logic that also had some implications on vendors‘ business models and their approaches to pricing. For a variety of good and not so good reasons this delivery model succeeded vs. the prevalent model of on-premises software. Some of the more important reasons have been “no lock in by vendors”, “only pay for what you use”, “reduction of own infrastructure cost”. Of course, there are more. All of them being true – or not so much. One thing is for sure, SaaS led to a considerable centralization of compute resources. Hyperscalers emerged. Vendors took over the management of the application stack for their clients. It is very hard to envision that this gets reverted any time soon, even in a world with increasing trust issues and a good argument for edge computing. What SaaS is not, or only marginally, is a way...
Who’s in the driver’s seat – Human or Agent?
Oracle Cloud World is in the books, Dreamforce just wrapped up, Hubspot’s Inbound event is still on, and there is one key theme that overarches all three events. And no, it is not Larry Ellison getting all cozy with AWS (or Azure, for that matter). It is also not that his keynote was distinctly geeky, after some years of Oracle putting business solutions to the front. Or that Mark Benioff apparently tore up his keynote in the last moment. It is also not that Hubspot CEO Yamini Rangan found that the sales process is broken and that customers know more about you as you about your customer. No, the theme is … drumroll … you will have guessed it … AI agents. Oracle’s Steve Miranda talked about them at length in a line of business context, while Larry focused on IT, security, and database-oriented agents. For Salesforce, agents are even more of a topic, dubbing Dreamforce the biggest AI event and Salesforce the most successful AI CRM – both technically right but probably somewhat short selling the full value of both. For Salesforce, the next big thing is Agentforce, it’s AI Agent platform. And Hubspot announced Breeze, its AI to power the customer platform, which, you guess it, includes agents. CEO Yamani Rangan talked about marketing, sales, and service agents. Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah then spent considerable time in his keynote, talking about agent.ai, Hubspots “professional network for AI agents”. What struck me watching all three keynotes – Ellison’s, Benioff’s and Shah’s – is the change from last year’s messaging to this year’s messaging. Last years it was...