success Archives - Epikonic

Flipping the math: How AI changes Build vs. Buy

by Thomas Wieberneit | Dec 18, 2025 | Blog |

For the longest time, companies have been trapped by enterprise software vendors. First by shrink-wrapped software packages. Then by SaaS offerings. Both situations led to what one even in a SaaS world can call shelfware – although these days the shelf is a virtual one instead of a physical one. Buyers still get enticed to purchase more capabilities than they need, which leads to them paying more than necessary while often using software packages that offer overlapping capabilities. One of the promises that SaaS started with, was to end this. Sadly, it looks like this promise was not kept. And this is no wonder; after all vendors want to be sticky. And they need to have increasing revenues. This means that they need to offer an ever-increasing number of capabilities, aka features, to warrant their pricing and eventually regular price increases. Combined with the frequently used strategy of offering related capabilities, i.e., seats for an adjacent software that is not yet needed by a customer, this led to two things: bloat and shelfware. Both go at the expense of the enterprise buyer. Since the dawn of packaged software, the argument to buy, i.e., to voluntarily step into this trap, is the same: Buying is cheaper than building. Which probably was correct. Buying from a specialist was the logical choice. Engineering talent was, and still is, scarce. Building software includes a lengthy process of requirements engineering, years of development and ultimately never-ending maintenance. Just that most of this is true for most implementations of purchased enterprise software, too. And the buying process is arguably broken. Need identification is often done...

Beyond the Hype: Unlocking GenAI ROI in the Enterprise

by Thomas Wieberneit | Aug 22, 2025 | Blog |

My past two column articles on CustomerThink dealt with how to determine the return of agentic investments and whether agentic AI delivers at all. The question of ability to deliver is particularly interesting for me, as I am researching measurable results other than cost savings in contained business areas for some months now, and regularly find a very strong focus on customer service and marketing, with customer service functions being best able to report measurable results. This is evidenced by the number of success stories I find, supported by the publication of a recent TEI of Zendesk customer service study. However, most of this is anecdotal evidence, or vendor sponsored/commissioned. And which vendor likes to speak about failures? Similar for buyers who understandably do not like to be in the spotlight with investments that turned out to be less than successful. There hasn’t been too much in depth research on whether generative and/or agentic AI deliver to promise or not. Luckily, there has been at least some research evaluating the capabilities of LLM based AI agents in business environments published this year. CRMArena-Pro by Salesforce Research naturally has a focus on CRM tasks across B2B and B2C scenarios. The authors identified nineteen tasks commonly executed in CRM systems and categorize these tasks in the four business skill categories database querying and numerical computation, information retrieval and reasoning, workflow execution, and policy compliance and includes a confidentiality awareness evaluation. TheAgentCompany on one hand covers a wider area along the business value chain but on the other hand has a narrower focus on software engineering companies. One other main difference between...

Ecosystem Play – One Game at a Time

by Thomas Wieberneit | Apr 30, 2021 | Blog, Sponsored |

It is not that uncommon that a software company creates new software based upon customer requirements. Actually, this is the way things should be done; not exclusively, but to quite an extent. Now, there are few software vendors who are truly independent. Most vendors are, and need to be, part of one or more other vendor ecosystems. This is simply a matter of scale, as there are only a few vendors who have the size and market power that are necessary to surround themselves with a good number of customers, ISVs, system integrators and other partners. And the number of these ecosystems is rather shrinking than growing. What this means is not that these few companies can implement and deliver what they want, but that the other ones need to carefully check two things. First, which ecosystem(s) to belong to, be it one or more than one. And as the CEO of 3CLogic, Denis Seynhaeve in a recent CRMKonvo said: It is important to choose wisely, which ecosystem to commit to. One of the fundamental consequences of this decision is the degree of dependency on other vendors that the smaller vendor has. This degree naturally decreases with the number of ecosystems it participates in, although they can never be truly independent – which is also not wanted when playing the ecosystem game. Conversely, participating in more than one ecosystem increases options and the potential reach. On the other hand, there are some other factors that come into play. The software architecture and the software itself will become more complicated when different vendors’ systems shall get augmented. Deep knowledge in...