Sweet Transformation: Inside SugarCRM’s New Direction
Fresh from the 2025 SugarCRM Analyst Summit, waiting for my plane home, it is time to sort my thoughts. From Monday, 1/27 evening to Wednesday 1/29 in the morning we had some time jam packed with information and good conversations with SugarCRM execs, customers, and in between analysts. The main summit started with a bang, namely the announcement that industry icon Bob Stutz joins the SugarCRM board of directors, which is something that few of us, if any, had foreseen. This is exciting news. With David Roberts, who succeeded Craig Charlton in September 2024, SugarCRM itself has a new CEO with a long time CRM pedigree. As with every leadership change, this promises some change. Every new CEO evaluates what they see vs. where they want their company to go and then, together with the team, establishes and executes a plan to get there. Usually, this involves some change in the structure of the executive leadership team, too. This is what happened and happens with SugarCRM. The company had and has a strong leadership team, with new faces like Paul Farrell (joined in March 2024), Jason Glass, and soon a new Chief Customer Officer – although with Christian Wettre or Chris Pennington some other strong players left for various reasons. As I have written in the past, the company has a great yet varied history and, more importantly, potential due to great software. What SugarCRM to some extent is missing is a distinguishable identity. In a market that is as crowded as the CRM/CX market, differentiation is of crucial importance. As I have said and written before, SugarCRM’s messaging...
SAP belittles its CX chops – and why this is dangerous
Cloud Wars’ Bob Evans recently did an excellent and very interesting interview with SAP CEO Christian Klein about SAP’s priorities, which include integrating generative AI with SAP Business AI “to address complex business challenges an drive holistic transformation by optimizing processes like quote to cash”. Klein repeatedly referred to end-to-end (E2E) and SAP’s great library of E2E processes that gives the essence of or at least a standardized framework for the value streams within a business. Not surprisingly, and correctly so, Klein also repeatedly emphasized the value of AI and, in particular, generative AI, to create customer value. This happens via Joule’s ability to orchestrate different agents across the value chain, i.e., different E2E processes. Joule is SAP’s Ai assistant. He also emphasized on the value of the suite and on the importance to “in the core business” not run with “agents of 100s of different tech companies”. This is where “the suite is winning”. Evans writes that SAP had “significant growth in applications, outpacing competitors. Klein attributes this to SAP’s suite approach, which provides a comprehensive solution for core business processes. He talks about the importance of integration and extensibility, allowing customers to choose the best solutions for their needs.” This is technically a correct statement. I am fairly sure that SAP will report another outstanding year on January 28, 2025. In the first three quarters of FY 2024 SAP certainly outpaced the cloud business applications competition, including Salesforce. However, there is a caveat to it. This growth is largely attributable to S/4HANA cloud. Don’t get me wrong, doing this is no mean feat. SAP profitably grows while...
From Hype to ROI: Navigating Generative AI, CRM, and CX in 2025
It is hard to believe but another year just flew by. It was a year that was defined by considerable hope and hype about generative technologies. It also means that another year lies ahead of us, a year that may or may not bring change. It also means that I get asked again for my outlook for CRM, CX and AI, and what are relevant industry trends to observe. As said, last year everything revolved around generative AI and I consequently looked at what’s going to happen on the front of CX and generative AI. Let’s look at how good my glass ball did work before looking at 2025. In summary, I postulated that there will be More success stories (partly right) more sophisticated use cases (partly right, although I didn’t really look at agentic AI) a flurry of more specialized models (yep) more companies starting to look at the ROI of implementations (partly right again, as there is still a lot of experimentation going on) a strong platform play going on (spot on, but this, frankly, wasn’t too hard to postulate) But what will come in 2025? What do some of the big dogs say about gen AI? As a little side note to the adoption and ROI topics, there are two interesting studies, one from the Wharton School and the Forrester Research predictions. The Wharton study basically indicates that 2024 has been a year of experimentation while 2025 will more be a year of adoption and deployment, with rather slowing growth of investment. The study authors suspect that this is a sign that companies are still looking...