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

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.

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