Skip to main content

CPQ, Meet Price Optimization: Your Revenue Lifecycle Just Got Serious

Conga + PROS B2B. But what about the rest? Picture by TW with some help of ChatGPT

The news

On October 1, 2025, Conga announced its intent to acquire the B2B business of PROS, following PRO’s acquisition by Thomas Bravo. At the same time, ThomaBravo and PROS announced that PRO’s travel business segment will be run as a standalone business.

The bigger picture

Revenue operations, revenue management and revenue lifecycle management have become a thing in the past years, as evidenced by the number of specialized companies that solve parts of the overall problem of optimizing revenue. It also got abused to some extent (e.g., surge pricing models) when the users of the corresponding capabilities consider optimizing being the same as maximizing.

Reality check: It is not.

While optimizing involves a bit of identifying how much a customer is willing to pay, it also involves the thought of repeat business, or in other words customer loyalty, even without a formal loyalty program. And that involves the customer experience, part of which the speed of creating a quote with matching scope and a price that is acceptable for both parties is an important element in B2B. So, the combination of CPQ and price optimization makes perfect sense. As an example, already in 2019, I was involved in a project that in part targeted at combining CPQ and price optimization to get to a good quote, fast. And it worked, although the solution looked different in the end than anticipated at the start of the project. 

My analysis and point of view

Already when the original news of Thoma Bravo acquiring PROS broke I have seen quite some synergies with Conga but also some other players in the Thoma Bravo portfolio.

This merger certainly elevates the CPQ game and brings Conga closer to do revenue lifecycle management. At the bare minimum, it enables Conga to not only do configure – price – quote but configure – optimize price – quote. It certainly removes fragmentation in the revenue optimization lifecycle by combining Conga’s strengths in CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote), contract lifecycle management (CLM), and document automation with PROS’ advanced B2B pricing, quoting, and revenue management capabilities. Including PROS’ algorithms for elasticity, segmentation, and willingness-to-pay (WTP) into Conga capabilities extends them models that are proven at enterprise scale. PRO’s AI capabilities are something that is very hard to replicate using generic LLM’s. Embedding PROS into Conga workflows promises to lift win-rates and margins simultaneously. This is a value proposition that should make Heads of Sales, CFOs’ and not in the least CEOs’ eyes glaze over. At the same time, there is a considerable cross-sell opportunity for Conga/PROS as probably not many businesses rung both solutions, although 

From a competition point of view, I am sure that all of enterprise CRM vendors, business suite vendors and vendors of price optimization software now do some homework.

Many CRM vendors offer CLM and CPQ, also with AI support. None of them offers the same level of pricing science that is offered by PROS. This includes the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft. Business Suite vendors like Oracle or SAP have the access to the ERP but also lack the power of PRO’s price optimization engine although they have powerful pricing engines.

Pricing specialists like Vendavo or PriceFx all of the sudden seem a bit sidelined, as they are bolt-on solutions as opposed to being a core part of the revenue lifecycle management solution.

So, I’d expect a bit of roadmap realignment, strategic partnering and perhaps some M&A activity. Let’s wait for the corresponding announcements.

The good news for all these vendors is that this type of merger that Conga and PROS go through now takes some time, too. There is some functional overlap that should get resolved, the combined GTM needs to be set up and last, but not least the systems need to be deeply integrated, particularly on the data level as pricing optimization works best on clean, harmonized transactional data – as any other analytics and AI software.

But what about the “rest” of PROS business?

As per the second announcement about the PROS travel business – let’s wait and see. It shall be run as an own platform. However, there is no notion about the retail part of PROS business. Not only airlines run price optimization. And that business just got serious competition e.g., from Fetcherr. So, I would be quite surprised if this part stays confined to the travel business, which it isn’t now as per my best knowledge. And looking at the Thoma Bravo portfolio, there are a couple of companies outside the airline and travel sectors that could benefit from PROS B2C magic. Correct me when I am wrong.

If you want to improve your customer facing processes and systems or, being a vendor of business solutions, your product portfolio, I might be able to help you. Get in touch.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Last Year's Top 5 Popular Posts

You are only as good as your customer remembers

As you know, I am very interested in how organizations are using business applications, which problems they do address, and how they review their success. In a next instance of these customer interviews, I had the opportunity to talk with Melissa Gordon , Executive Vice President, Enterprise Solutions at Tidal Basin about their journey with Zoho. You can watch the full interview on YouTube. Tidal Basin is a government contractor that provides various services throughout the government space, including disaster response, technology and financial services, and contact centers. Tidal Basin started with Zoho CRM and was searching for a project management tool in 2019. This was prompted by mainly two drivers. First, employees were asking for tools to help them running their projects. Second, with a focus on organizational growth and bigger projects that involved more people, Tidal Basin wanted to reduce its risk exposure and increase the efficiency of project delivery. This way, the compa...
Post a Comment
Read more

SAP Draws a Perimeter around Agentic AI and What That Means for the Rest of US

The most consequential enterprise AI governance document published this year arrived in late April with surprisingly little fanfare. SAP's updated API Policy, version 4/2026 , is a short document in plain English. The clause that is most interesting is Section 2.2.2. It restricts how autonomous and generative AI systems are permitted to interact with SAP APIs. Read literally, it has the potential to change the architecture of agentic AI projects across every SAP customer landscape. Read carefully, it is also more interesting than the lock-in headlines suggest. The policy targets a specific category of AI behavior, not AI as such. It connects to commercial mechanics that go well beyond API stability. And the literal text, in its current form, will probably not survive the next two policy revisions intact. There is a lot to unpack. I will walk through what the policy actually says, how the SAP-watching community is reading it, what the rest of the major enterprise vendors are doin...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Illusion of Value: Why Salesforce’s Agentic Work Unit is the New "Bad Query" of the AI Era

The News On February. 25, 2026, Salesforce announced a pricing and metrics update . During the company’s Q4 FY2026 earnings call, CEO Marc Benio ff, together with CMO Patrick Stokes , unveiled the Agentic Work Unit (AWU). Positioned as a metric to quantify the labor performed by autonomous digital systems, Salesforce defines an AWU as one discrete task accomplished by an AI agent. According to Salesforce, this discrete task represents the exact moment " raw intelligence is converted into real work ". It is not a fixed unit but measured as a processed prompt, a completed reasoning chain, or an invoked tool. Salesforce explicitly designed the AWU to move the industry conversation away from the raw consumption of Large Language Model (LLM) tokens. As Benioff noted, tokens only measure "how much an AI talks," whereas the AWU is intended to measure actual business execution. The scale of this rollout is massive. Salesforce reported that its platform has already processe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Data Wars: SAP Vs. Salesforce In The AI-Driven Enterprise Future

The past weeks certainly brought a lot of news, with SAP Sapphire and Salesforce's surely strategically timed announcement of acquiring Informatica , ranging at the top. I have covered both in recent articles. The enterprise software landscape is crackling with energy, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is certainly the star of the show. It isn't anymore about AI as a mere feature; it's about AI as the strategic core of enterprise software. Two recent announcements underscored this shift: SAP's ambitious AI-centric vision that was unveiled at its Sapphire 2025 conference, and, arriving hot on its heels, Salesforce's agreement to acquire data management titan Informatica for $8 billion. Both signal an intensified battle for AI supremacy, where trusted, enterprise-wide data is the undisputed new monarch. Of course, SAP and Salesforce are not the only ones duking this one out. SAP's Sapphire Vision: An AI-Powered, Integrated Enterprise At its Sapphire 2025 event in ...
Post a Comment
Read more