AI killed the Platform Star – or didn’t it?
Do you remember the uproar that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently created about the death of SaaS? Although this is obviously some hyperbolic BS, there is a grain of truth in there. Not the death of a business model, but something that is hidden somewhat deeper. It is about the eternal struggle between suites and best of breed software, which is in its third iteration – at least – since I am in the CRM world. The grain of truth lies in the potential change of the way that business and other applications actually are built. When I look at ERP and CRM systems, I see software stacks that often are twenty years old, or even older. Look at S/4HANA. It still has a lot of R/3 inside although there are many new parts. Or Salesforce, which essentially dates back to the early noughts. SugarCRM has a fairly old core, too, even posterchild Zoho has software that dates back twenty years. The list goes on and on. Essentially, all these systems have morphed from fairly specialized solutions into monolithic giants. Mind you, this is not all bad, as these systems are often incredibly powerful. However, there are some challenges with it. I admit that, although I am a suite guy myself. These challenges are often around speed of innovation and, by definition, a degree of incompleteness. Requirements change faster than any software product vendor can implement them. And even if they successfully implement them, the software stack becomes increasingly more complex and harder to enhance and to maintain. Harder to maintain not only for the vendor but also for...
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...
How to create winning industry solutions
One of the terms du jour is „industry cloud“. We hear it even more often than even platform or CX at this time. Why is that? Why do we speak about them only now and not for a longer time? After all, we have seen industry solutions forever, albeit on premise. Yes, the concept of vertical solutions is that old. What is the value of an industry cloud? How does “industry cloud” differ from “industry solution”? And does this term really describe what industries need? These are only some of the questions that we wanted to discuss with Vinnie Mirchandani as part of aCRMKonvo. Hurricane Ian intervened and Vinnie had more important things to do than a CRMKonvo. Luckily, everything turned out well for him. Good for the CRMKonvos team, that friend and Enterprise Irregular Jon Reed could jump in to what turned out to be an even more interesting topic than we hoped for. We will continue this discussion with Vinnie on a later occasion. He has quite something to say about industry clouds, and comes from another angle than Jon. The problem with industry clouds Most business applications have started their life as horizontal applications. This makes a lot of sense, as a good deal of the functionality that a business needs, and the application offers, is not exactly industry specific. Instead, it is applicable across a range of industries. Therefore, business software vendors at first concentrated on developing horizontal functionality, as this functionality is reusable across and customized for numerous industries. Often with only little effort. This applies to SaaS software as well as it did apply to on premise...