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 limits) adapt the system to their needs.
The bigger picture
The increasing popularity of no-code and low-code development environments combined with the advance of AI has the potential to dramatically change the world of business software. For several decades now the make or buy decision is in favor of buy because buying a prepackaged software is strongly supported by economies of scale.
Of course, the downside of this is that software regularly needs to be configured (i.e., adapted using tools that require no coding) or customized (including tools that require coding) to fully support business needs. Depending on functional gaps, this causes considerable implementation time and cost after buying or subscribing to the software. Configuring or customizing tasks regularly need to be performed by specialized people, external consultants or dedicated in-house personnel. This often causes slower than desired progress. None of this did really change in times of SaaS. Consequently, the time to value for customers is often still quite long. A positive side effect for vendors is that this tends to create a buyer lock-in while systems integrators can make tidy time and material revenues.
In come no-code and low-code development environments and business applications that are built and delivered on top of these platforms. This has two effects. First, it becomes fast to develop new business applications as limited or no technical knowledge at all are required. This leads to removing above mentioned bottleneck by broadening the pool of people that are able to build or adapt applications for business needs – the so-called citizen developer has been born. The impact of a no-code platform is even bigger if it gets delivered as a part of a business application, i.e., if the application itself is already built on it.
Lastly, generative AI services can boost this effect a lot. Vibe coding is in everybody’s mind and some business leaders already predict a 100x productivity increase. Whether these predictions are spot-on or optimistic, a significant productivity increase will not only be seen in developing new applications but also in their adaptation to customer needs – the configuration and customizing process.
My analysis and point of view
Whoever I talked to during the event spoke about three things.
Fast time to value
Low TCO
High user acceptance rate
So, Creatio is certainly up to something. One thing that contributes to this on the user side is the strong emphasis on making the interaction with the system follow human communication patterns, i.e., conversational, while being available where the user is instead of forcing users to work within the application frame. The other part is terminology. While every vendor, including Creatio positions its AI agents as helpers that take away onerous tasks, employees often see them as a threat rather than as helpers. Creatio addresses this by going a smart step further. The company names its agents “Twins”. This is a term that has far more positive connotations. A twin is not a threat but instead one’s best friend.
The second point is that we actually might be at a tipping point that flips the business applications playbook. For years vendors have made the point that it is far more efficient to deliver prebuilt software that works around “best practices” and is adapted to industry and customer needs when needed. Especially with cloud software, customizing capabilities were drastically reduced, compared to on premise solutions. One thought behind this is the avoidance of changes where a company is unlikely to have a differentiator. A mostly unacknowledged one is that maintenance is far easier for the vendors if customizability is limited.
As a result, the implementation of business applications became cumbersome, lengthy, and expensive. The combination of powerful no-code environments and generative AI has the potential to flip this calculation. If this flip happens, Creatio and a few select other vendors are uniquely positioned to take advantage of it. Evidence for this are a focus on the midmarket and the lower end of the enterprise market, an ecosystem that already now has understood that systems integrators need to offer high value services and turn into consultants and customers praising fast implementations and low TCO. Another indicator is the genuine care that Creatio exhibits for its customers. CEO Katherine Kosterova says that she wants to continuously “delight customers, no matter what”, but what Creatio really is doing is having its customers backs. This is effectively even better as it does not create the same vicious circle that the objective of “continuously delighting” customers does.
What remains is getting more attention. With events like the NoCode Days, working with analysts and showing successes, Creatio is on a good way here, too. The challenge remains to continue to send signal in an ocean of noise.
And maybe the signal that the age of packages software is past its zenith is just that signal.
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