aheadCRM

Fresh from the 2025 SugarCRM Analyst Summit, waiting for my plane home, it is time to sort my thoughts. From Monday, 1/27 evening to Wednesday 1/29 in the morning we had some time jam packed with information and good conversations with SugarCRM execs, customers, and in between analysts. The main summit started with a bang, namely the announcement that industry icon Bob Stutz joins the SugarCRM board of directors , which is something that few of us, if any, had foreseen. This is exciting news.  With David Roberts , who succeeded Craig Charlton in September 2024, SugarCRM itself has a new CEO with a long time CRM pedigree.  As with every leadership change, this promises some change. Every new CEO evaluates what they see vs. where they want their company to go and then, together with the team, establishes and executes a plan to get there. Usually, this involves some change in the structure of the executive leadership team, too.  This is what happened and happens with SugarCR...

Cloud Wars’ Bob Evans recently did an excellent and very interesting interview with SAP CEO Christian Klein about SAP ’s priorities, which include integrating generative AI with SAP Business AI “ to address complex business challenges an drive holistic transformation by optimizing processes like quote to cash ”. Klein repeatedly referred to end-to-end (E2E) and SAP’s great library of E2E processes that gives the essence of or at least a standardized framework for the value streams within a business. Not surprisingly, and correctly so, Klein also repeatedly emphasized the value of AI and, in particular, generative AI, to create customer value. This happens via Joule’s ability to orchestrate different agents across the value chain, i.e., different E2E processes. Joule is SAP’s Ai assistant. He also emphasized on the value of the suite and on the importance to “ in the core business ” not run with “ agents of 100s of different tech companies ”. This is where “ the suite is winning ”. E...

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...

The News On December 17, 2024, Salesforce announced Agentforce 2.0 after introducing Agentforce 1.0 during the company’s Dreamforce event. With it, it repositions Agentforce as a “Digital Labor Platform” that is capable of supplying businesses with an infinite workforce. This way, they shall be able to address internal challenges like labor shortages, fixed capacity, stalled productivity, or burnout. In addition, they increase their ability to work with increasing customer demands like no patience, their wish for personalization and empathy and with a knowledgeable expert, etc.  “ Agentforce 2.0 is the newest version of Agentforce and the first digital labor platform for enterprises — a complete AI system for augmenting teams with trusted, autonomous AI agents in the flow of work. This new release introduces a new library of pre-built skills and workflow integrations for rapid customization, the ability to deploy AI agents in Slack, and advancements in agentic reasoning and retrie...

It is hard to believe, but another year just flew by. It was a year that was defined by considerable hope and hype about generative technologies. It also means that another year lies ahead of us, a year that may or may not bring change. It also means that I get asked again for my outlook for CRM, CX and AI, and what are relevant industry trends to observe. As said, last year everything revolved around generative AI and I consequently looked at what’s going to happen on the front of CX and generative AI. Let’s look at how good my glass ball did work before looking at 2025. In summary, I postulated that there will be  More success stories (partly right) more sophisticated use cases (partly right, although I didn’t really look at agentic AI) a flurry of more specialized models (yep) more companies starting to look at the ROI of implementations (partly right again, as there is still a lot of experimentation going on) a strong platform play going on (spot on, but this, frankly, wasn’t ...