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...
This is the way of SugarCRM – a CRMKonvo
In this conversation we had the pleasure of talking to Clint Oram, chief strategy officer and one of the founders of SugarCRM. We discussed 2021 trends to find out which ones Cllint does see and, of course, which path SugarCRM is following on its trajectory to becoming a platform player and participating in the #ClashOfTitans. This couldn’t be covered without discussing the reasons for SugarCRM leaving the initially highly successful path of using Open Source Software (hint: there have been very good reasons) and what it entails to become – and stay – successful. Clint related a very valuable personal story here to make his point: It is not only about having the right idea. There is so much more to it – but watch it in the CRMKonvo. It being the season, we also asked him about which trends he sees and what customers are asking for. Good answers here. The worst word of the year? “New normal”. Well, I cannot but agree here … although … something has changed, hasn’t it? Enjoy this awesome CRMKonvo....
Clouds, Data Models, and Experiences – Three Entities, One Topic
After having covered some press releases about new releases and commenting some interesting organizational changes it is time to have a look at another topic – the need for consistency in a suite of cloud products. Consistency not only in the most obvious part of a family of products and solutions – the user interface – but the more important aspect of consistency, namely the data model. If you wonder how this relates to customer experience I invite you to read on. This post is actually spurred by a brief conversation that I had with Jon Reed of Diginomica about this very topic during one of the recent CRM Playaz episodes. Btw, if you do not yet listen in to the LinkedIn conversations of CRM Playaz Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary, discussing important developments and current events in the world of CRM – then you should. Really! But I digress. Back to the topic. The question is about whether it is necessary to have a unique data model or not. And this question might be answered differently, based upon the definition of ‘data model’. There is no doubt that a unique data model across applications is very helpful, actually a necessity. Where there is doubt, is whether this data model needs to be defined on database level or not in order to be really helpful. My point of view is that it does not need to be defined on database level. This point of view might be contradicting some ‘common sense’ wisdom and the strategy that some very successful companies are pursuing, including Oracle – as it seems –...