Andy Thurai

Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

About Andy Thurai Andy Thurai is an accomplished IT executive, strategist, advisor, enterprise architect and evangelist with more than 25 years of experience in executive, technical, and architectural leadership positions at companies such as IBM, Intel, BMC, Nortel, and Oracle. Andy has written more than 100 articles on emerging technology topics for publications such as Forbes, The New Stack, AI World, VentureBeat, DevOps.com, GigaOm and Wired. Andy’s fields of interest and expertise include AIOps, ITOps, Observability, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Cloud, Edge, and other enterprise software. His strength is selling technology to the CxO audience with a value proposition rather than the usual technology sales pitch. Find more details and samples of Andy’s work on his…...

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What is in the news: ServiceNow acquires Era Software for undisclosed terms. ServiceNow acquired Lightstep last year in May (2021) and it’s strengthening its observability portfolio with this acquisition. I had a briefing from Ben Sigelman, GM, Lightstep division of ServiceNow, and Todd Persen, CEO of Era Software.

What does Era do: Era Software, which started as EraDB, is a centralized log management solution that was co-founded by Todd Persen in 2019 and based in Seattle. They connect with most open-source log collectors such as FluentBit, FluentD, and LogStash, which are predominant in cloud-native applications and offer a way to centralize logs to cheaper storage locations such as Amazon S3. They currently offer an on-premises, self-hosted solution or a SaaS version on the AWS cloud.

Why it matters: ServiceNow realized enterprises are moving to cloud-native at a much faster pace with pandemic-induced digital maturity.

When incidents happen, while metrics and tracing can help isolate the problem, logging generally is used to identify the cause of the incident quickly assuming the developers properly created logs. Especially in the cloud-native architecture, the applications are architected as microservice components. The smaller DevOps teams are responsible for smaller components and are expected to produce code velocity that can release many changes to a (micro)service on a daily basis. Given the lack of total visibility, logs become a critical component to understanding what happened inside a service if it is broken. However, cloud-native architectures also produce a ton of logs. Large enterprises can produce hundreds of terabytes of logs to even petabytes (PB) of logs per day, though PBs of logs are rare. With that volume of logs, searching, storing, analyzing, moving, and generally managing are all very expensive for large enterprises. Logs are also generally retained by enterprises for a lot longer than other observability metrics for later analysis, audit, and forensic evidence as needed. Siloed logs can lead to a different set of problems. Centralized logs, at a cheaper cost, to handle such volume is a dream come true for a lot of enterprises. Most legacy log vendors not only struggle to cope with that volume but also cost overruns can be prohibitive.

Constellation POV:

Era brings the sorely lacked log management capability to the Lightstep observability platform. While the petabyte scale search capabilities, index free, zero schema approach and low-cost object storage options such as Amazon S3 are very appealing to enterprises, Era Software is a dark horse that hasn’t been proven in the enterprise market yet. Based on my conversations with some of the CXO customer executives, and observability practitioners who have evaluated the solution recently:

1. The ServiceNow acquisition takes the issue of financial viability off the table for Era Software prospects. Having a venerable vendor such as ServiceNow behind Era Software’s capability will improve confidence and cross-sell.
2. Large enterprises already have a well-implemented log solution (even for the cloud-native logs) in place. Given how complex enterprise log management systems can get, it will not be viable for those large enterprises to rip and replace an existing solution with a newer one. Those larger log management systems themselves have become observability solutions over the years. It will be much harder for ServiceNow, even with this combined solution set, to break into those enterprises.
3. Existing log management solutions are expanding their observability solution set at a much more rapid pace than ServiceNow. While they may be lacking ServiceNow’s flagship tracing capabilities, most of them have a decent competing solution in place already.
4. Era is not a worthy full observability solution until now. Based on the roadmap plan, it will be mid-to-late 2023 before Lightstep + Era Software + ServiceNow can offer a fully baked-in, combined solution that might appeal to large enterprises for total observability. By then, a lot of them might have been deeply entrenched with other worthy competitors.
5. While Era Software offers a decent log collection capability for cloud-native, it lacks integrations with data center log collection capabilities for the hybrid enterprise.
6. The overall solution set is very narrow and focused on logs; it doesn’t offer a lot of capabilities that mature observability solutions do (when they were just Era Software). But this acquisition adds the right elements such as logs, metrics, and traces to bring the required observability signals to one platform.
7. While Era touts a lower entry point in pricing and much more value addition and much lower TCO than the famous, and very commonly used, log provider Elastic, the evaluators suggested they don’t have the capabilities that are offered by Elastic at the current time. Hence, they decided to pass.
8. Sending logs to an off-location, and cheaper storage can lead to a set of its own problems such as compliance, security, GDPR, and other privacy-based issues. How would that be handled in the combined solution? (ServiceNow stated that privacy and security are important and that Lightstep and Era Software combination will go thru this exercise to offer customers with choice and control of how their data is stored and secure, but that remains to be seen after the integration).
9. The lightweight, can-run-anywhere option is appealing – the solution can run locally and have a hot cash, or run at cloud locations as well if SaaS managed service.
10. S3 compatible storage and federated search options without moving the logs around are very appealing. But competitors, such as Splunk, introduced similar functionalities as well.
11. At the current time cost might be an appealing factor, we don’t really know how the combined pricing will look in the near future when the platform comes into shape.

Bottomline:

Digital transformation succeeds, or fails, based on observability implementation – whether it is cloud-native or hybrid. Visibility and holistic observability are foundational components of any digital application.

Because of that, the observability market is huge. Yet, when you think of observability, ServiceNow is not the first name that comes to mind. They are hoping to change that. ServiceNow acquired a decent tracing solution in Lightstep in 2021, and now acquired a decent technology that can help them bring logs into the Lightstep observability platform fold. They also promised to continue to build the functionality to appeal to large enterprises.

The competition is also heating up with all APM vendors and log management vendors adding decent wholistic observability solutions over the last few years. Is what ServiceNow doing is enough, and will they be able to build the missing pieces fast enough? Only time can tell. When the integrated Lightstep platform is ready to go, it might be worthy of consideration.

What do you think?

Further Reading:

1. Blog - News Analysis: Major Announcements From Splunk .conf22 Bring Observability and Security to the Forefront
2. Blog - Crisis/Incident Management in the Digital Era
3. Blog - In Digital Economy, You Should Fail Fast, But Must Also Recover Fast
4. Research Report - 2022 Trends in Site Reliability Engineering
5. Research Report - 2022 Trends in Incident Management
6. Research Report - Constellation ShortList™ Observability

Doug Henschen

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

Doug Henschen is former Vice President and Principal Analyst where he focused on data-driven decision making. Henschen’s Data-to-Decisions research examines how organizations employ data analysis to reimagine their business models and gain a deeper understanding of their customers. Henschen's research acknowledges the fact that innovative applications of data analysis requires a multi-disciplinary approach starting with information and orchestration technologies, continuing through business intelligence, data-visualization, and analytics, and moving into NoSQL and big-data analysis, third-party data enrichment, and decision-management technologies. Insight-driven business models are of interest to the entire C-suite, but most particularly chief executive officers, chief digital officers,…...

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Workday executives and customers detailed the evolution of the company’s ‘plan, execute, analyze’ platform at Workday Rising 2022 in Orlando.

In what seems like a wrinkle in time, it has now been four years since Workday acquired Adaptive Insights (since renamed Workday Adaptive Planning). Funny how a pandemic can help to make time fly.

Flash forward to Workday Rising 2022, September 12-14 in Orlando, Fl, and it’s a good time to evaluate progress on the integration of Workday Adaptive Planning (Adaptive) with the rest of Workday, particularly its core Financial Management (ERP) and Human Capital Management (HCM) apps. Indeed, Adaptive has put the “plan” in what Workday now bills as its “plan, execute, analyze” platform.

The headline from Rising where Adaptive was concerned was the announcement of ML Forecaster, a machine-learning-based feature that promises to automatically generate forecasts based on historical as well as third-party data, such as weather data or labor statistics. Workday has been working on this feature for more than a year, according to executives, and it’s co-innovating with a handful of customers in a beta period that’s expected to extend into the first half of next year.

One such beta customer, Team Car Care, a major Jiffy Lube franchisee based in Irvine, TX, is said to be using a blend of historical and weather data with ML Forecaster in order to predict daily oil-change traffic at specific locations as well as related staffing and stocking requirements.

It's early days for ML Forecaster, which isn’t expected to be generally available until next year. The feature will cover a broad set of use cases across finance, in contrast to the single use case supported by Intelligent Demand Forecasting, introduced in 2021. Other ML/time-series-based capabilities supported by Adaptive include Outlier Reporting, introduced in 2020, and Anomaly Detection, added in 2018 before Workday’s acquisition.   

Workday isn’t the only vendor in the planning space adding ML-based features. We’ve seen ML-based “augmented” features added by Planful and Anaplan, among others. The theme is invariably around enabling and empowering operational and financial planners to get more work done and to be more predictive. In Workday’s case, common, platform-based ML capabilities are also being developed and applied to the vendor’s ERP and HCM apps (which are covered by my colleagues R “Ray” Wang and Holger Mueller, respectively).

Workday Integration and Adoption

According to Workday Co-CEO Chano Fernandez, 75% of Workday Financial Management customers have embraced Workday Adaptive Planning.

As for the progress in Adaptive’s integration with the rest of Workday and Workday customer adoption, executives were (predictably) upbeat. During an analyst  Q&A session, co-CEO Aneel Bhusri told me that the number of Workday Adaptive Planning customers now stands at about 6,000, up from around 3,800 at the time of the acquisition. He didn’t say how many of those are Workday customers that have added Adaptive, but Co-CEO Chano Fernendez noted that nearly 75% of Workday Financial Management customers have Workday Adaptive Planning. What’s more, he noted that the ability to support workforce planning and financial planning with Adaptive has provided a “halo effect” that’s increasing Workday’s win rate in competitive deals for new customers.

In conversations with customers, there were some complaints that a few basic aspects of integration between Adaptive and the Workday core are still in progress. User setup and administration, for example, still happens separately between Adaptive and other Workday apps, and in some cases, duplicate data entries are required. Bhusri acknowledged that integration work continues, but larger initiatives, such as Workday’s move into public clouds from Workday own data centers, may have to happen first. Workday Adaptive Planning continues to run on Amazon Web Services rather than on Workday’s cloud.

On future app ties, Sayan Chakraborty, Executive Vice President, Product and Technology, said that work is underway to integrate Adaptive with the Workday Skills Cloud. “We see interesting synergies for skills planning and learning planning [with Adaptive] as well as staffing of projects,” Chakraborty said.

As for the continuing appeal of Adaptive as a stand-alone offering, Bhusri noted ExxonMobil as recent major customer win for Workday Adaptive Planning (without the use of any other Workday apps). Before the acquisition, Adaptive Insights was popular mostly with midsized companies, but ExxonMobil’s selection validates scale and performance improvements that Workday has brought to the platform since the acquisition to better serve its large enterprise customers.

Doug’s take: I’m seeing good progress overall for Adaptive under Workday, though the pace of integration has been, in some regards, methodical. Are emerging ML-based features moving the needle for customers? I’d say it’s still early days -- across the industry and all planning/performance management vendors -- on how heavily financial and operational leaders are counting on ML-based features and forecasts. You hear about good use cases, but I haven’t read or had an opportunity to write case studies (nor have I seen SuperNova Awards nominations) featuring computer-augmented planning capabilities. I welcome vendors and practitioners alike to share their ML success stories.     

Liz Miller

Vice President & Principal Analyst Constellation Research

About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform…...

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R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation…...

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Disintermediate Or Be Disintermediated!

On September 15, 2022, Adobe announced the largest acquisition of a private software company and the largest acquisition in Adobe’s history. In a half cash, half stock deal for approximately $20 billion, San Francisco-based Figma would be acquired by San Jose-headquartered Adobe. Adobe is paying a 50 times annualized recurring revenue (“ARR”) multiple for Figma which is expected to surpass $400 million in ARR exiting 2022.

Figma, the creative and collaboration tool darling, expects to maintain independent operations under the leadership of co-founder and CEO, Dylan Field. Figma, and Field, will slot under the Digital Media line of business led by Adobe’s illustrious David Wadhwani.

Why Now, Why So Much?

To close out Adobe Summit 2022, Adobe asked the experience community, “Are you metaverse-ready?” Adobe’s intent to acquire Figma is a signal that Adobe intends to reshape how brands get the hard work of being metaverse-ready done. Founded in 2012, Figma has quickly emerged as a favorite design and collaboration tool for digital product creators, app designers, developers and digital teams. With web-based creative tools ideal for the creation and management of vector graphics and digital product collaboration and prototyping, Figma has built a reputation as being a bridge between modern creative and developer communities.

Constellation’s POV

Figma has been growing…efficiently and fast. Within four years of founding, Figma introduced its first public release (September 2016) and by late June 2021 had hit a valuation of $10 billion. While their vision has been lofty — to unleash creativity for anyone who wants to create with web-based tools, that vision has been paying off: $400 million in total annualized recurring revenue expected exiting this year, positive operating cash flows and gross margins of approximately 90%.

Figma’s success has not gone unnoticed by Adobe and potential competitors of Adobe who wish to enter the lucrative design and collaboration space. In fact, Adobe’s effort in this space, Adobe XD, did not achieve the wild success Figma was able to generate. Constellation believes that Adobe felt that it was better to pay the 50 times multiple now than risk having a scenario where an upstart massively dislodges an existing market leader. Some examples of this include Oracle acquiring BEA for middleware and SAP failing to acquire Salesforce.com in the early days.

Figma for the Creative Cloud is analogous to Workfront and Frame.io for digital experiences in providing the collaboration environment and ability to improve content velocity. Figma’s model enables creatives to use any design tool and allows collaboration for a mix of hybrid work environments. These tools provide a higher value layer on top of Adobe’s existing Creative Cloud products such as Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere Pro and others. Figma’s successful business strategy, if allowed to carry out, would disintermediate account control and the customer relationship as designers, creatives, and agencies utilize Figma the same way ServiceNow relegates ERP and CRM systems to the lower value transactional layer. 

What does this mean for customers?

Figma has a strong community of loyal users that love the lightweight, flexible and easy-to-use solution. Others love that Figma represented the young upstart David waging digital battle with Goliath, Adobe. Those users have expressed initial trepidation and fear when news of the acquisition was announced. While many are thrilled for the co-founders, some question where this new road leads.

Constellation’s POV:

There is, as with any acquisition, the risk of clashing cultures and ruffling the feathers of change-averse customers. But in the case of Figma and Adobe, there may be more opportunities than drawbacks for any user.

All early signals point to Adobe’s intention to leave Figma to run independently while simultaneously identifying opportunities to enhance functionality across both Figma and Adobe products. For Figma, this means addressing a key gripe users have: issues with complex asset types, videos and a lack of 3D support and rendering. Adobe has advanced capabilities in both video and 3D file types in recent years and Figma users will likely see this as a massive upgrade in their digital prototyping and product advancements.  

The real winners here could very well be Figma’s Professional, Organization and Enterprise clients who will likely enjoy enhancements drawn from Adobe’s cloud-native composable application model across Creative Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud. We expect to see early integrations and API connections into tools like Document Cloud, AEM Assets and, of course, Creative Cloud tools. The new and well-received Adobe Express and AEM Assets Essentials feel like ideal candidates for bundling.

Adobe has been investing heavily in collaboration and connection in the last several years. From Workfront to Frame.io, collaboration and connecting the dots that lead from ideation to iteration to impact for any form of creativity. Adobe has also been tracking the growth of what they dub the creator economy, noting that today one in four people is contributing to online spaces, amplifying the need for tools and solutions that meet the needs of this growing pool of creators. Figma fits this bill perfectly allowing anyone with a creative idea to work, creative collaborate and design digital products from mobile to web.

For Adobe, this pick up opens up new markets and prospects for the entire digital media portfolio in the near term, and an opportunity to sell other Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Experience Cloud solutions into the organizations and enterprises enjoying Figma. While Adobe solutions may never be the right fit for the Figma Starter users, it is easy to imagine a world where pro users hungry to expand and grow capabilities get excited for a raft of new tools and toys that Adobe can provide.

So What About the Metaverse?

Adobe quickly and boldly stepped into the metaverse conversation, pushing brands to start thinking about immersive content today instead of being caught off guard and far behind as the metaverse took shape into a viable business opportunity. The business use cases in the Metaverse are already taking shape—Constellation has already started mapping these cases and we are up to 80+ viable applications, many already in play.

Constellation’s POV:

Content will be co-innovated and co-created between customer and brand in fully immersive, 3D, shared experiences. The old processes and workflows for creation are already obsolete. Metaverses will demand a new framework for how the work of experience creation gets done. And that is the opportunity that sits in front of Adobe and Figma…to ask if work, collaboration and creativity is metaverse-ready.

The question will be, is Adobe’s culture ready to welcome these new product developers and dreamers to the table? Or will the siloed businesses of Creative, Document and Experience Clouds overwhelm the opportunity that seems to be made for Adobe?

What should customers and prospects do now?

Adobe has had a good track record of integration with a fairly neutral track of record of reinvesting in products post-merger. For example, the Adobe – Magento merger has resulted in a much better Commerce Cloud offering while the Adobe – Marketo merger has customers complaining about lack of investment into the offering, sometimes unaware of the significant work being done behind the scenes to ensure platform-wide integrations.

With Marketo, the shift to the unified Experience Data Model (XDM) was hardly the big sexy feature announcement customers craved, but made the account level intelligence possible in the customer data platform. More recently with the acquisition of Workfront, integrations have purposefully connected key tools between Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud for true end-to-end work.

Constellation recommends that existing Figma customers and prospects reach out to their account teams and obtain commitments on product direction and release roadmaps. Those enjoying the starter level freemium model should not see much disturbance in offering, but expect to see more offers for those bundled adjacent solutions in Creative Cloud.

Where possible, Enterprise level customers should negotiate longer term contracts with Figma’s existing pricing models as Adobe’s pricing models post-acquisition often cost more. Existing Adobe customers who own Figma should begin the process of understanding potential pricing changes and potential bundled discounts before the deal is expected to close in 2023. And existing Adobe XD customers should start to inquire about integrations across the whiteboarding and product prototyping features in Figma and more specifically FigJam to understand where and how these offerings will be integrated to collaboration flows.

The Bottom Line

While investors will remain cautious on Adobe’s bold move in the market, Adobe’s acquisition in hindsight will most likely prove to be strategic and bold in bringing a competitor into the fold before it completely disrupts Adobe’s business model. As creative and design tools become commoditized, and collaboration tools once seen as innovators stall or grow stale, customers seek more value in brainstorming, collaboration and prototyping tools that improve both creativity and productivity across an expanding portfolio of digital products.

Adobe’s experience in integrating Workfront to bring greater meaning and synergy across Experience Cloud will serve the leadership team well and be a good model in bringing Adobe’s Creative Cloud assets together with Figma. In fact, Figma could emerge as the catalyst to bring better orchestration of the Creative, Document, and Experience Clouds in the Adobe lineup which could benefit customers and prospects seeking to harmonize the creative and CX landscape at the start of strategy whiteboarding and digital product design iteration. In the end, all this might just take clients one step closer to realizing the Metaverse and better answering Adobe’s original question of who is truly Metaverse-Ready.

Service businesses must keep finding new ways to add value to existing clients while removing barriers that slow growth. Overcoming the challenges of outdated HR planning and human resource management (HRM), contract management, and CRM systems are table stakes for staying competitive.

FinancialForce's Summer 22 release aims to turn those weaknesses into strengths with one of the most comprehensive releases they've had lately. "Organizations continue to be buffeted by market disruptions, from spiraling inflation to new COVID variants and unanticipated supply chain issues," said Scott Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer of FinancialForce. "Our new Services-as-a-Business approach delivers the automation, intelligence, and innovation that services organizations need to become more agile so they can expertly turn disruption into opportunity."

Improving Opportunity-to-Renewal Is Key

FinancialForce's Summer 2022 release reflects how services businesses need to gain greater visibility and control across to their opportunity-to-renewal process while growing more resilient to spiraling costs, uncertain supply chains, and chronic labor shortages. They need to take on these challenges and keep growing. FinancialForce believes its Business-as-a-Service unified platform can strengthen services' traditionally weak areas (integrated HR, CRM, & contract management) without giving up on how fast they can react to new opportunities.

CEOs and COOs running several leading professional services firms spoken with recently say that tight labor markets, rising prices, and blind spots in the opportunity-to-renewal cycles are hurting revenue. As a result, they're seeing a drain in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and Customer Lifetime Value at risk. They also see that the blind spots in Contract Management, Configure, Price & Quote (CPQ), Resource Management, and Financial Planning & Analysis (FPA) across opportunity-to-renewal grow wider the more diverse their client bases become. What's needed is a 360-degree view of the opportunity-to-renewal process that encompasses every aspect of service operations, from sales to delivery to customer success management, financial management, and planning.

FinancialForce's Summer 22 release introduces Business-as-a-Service to bridge the gaps in the opportunity-to-renewal process, improving customer experiences, and driving faster growth by enabling greater real-time collaboration and visibility organization-wide.

Skills Matching & Scheduling Speed Is A Services Killer App

In the Summer 22 Release, FinancialForce strikes at the heart of what challenges services businesses face the most regarding getting staffing right. Skills matching is new in the release, providing Resource Managers with the insights they need to identify skills related to open roles as either Essential or Desirable. The goal is to bring greater accuracy and speed into the assignment process to control for costs, usage rates, and margin impacts while assigning associates to one project versus another.

Optimizing project schedules and seeing potential scheduling conflicts in real-time helps improve scheduling efficiency by identifying potential project conflicts early and alleviating them by balancing available hours.

A New Streamlined UX Pays Off For Services CPQ

The Summer 22 release marks the first time FinancialForce ERP Cloud and Professional Services (PS) Cloud run entirely on the Salesforce Lightning Experience (LEX). During the FinancialForce analyst briefing, Heidi Minzner, Vice President, Product Management (ERP Cloud) at FinancialForce, demonstrated how users could create, manage and update line-level data on requisitions and purchase orders in a single view. Additionally, LEX is evident across the entire platform.

Of the many improvements announced in the Summer 22 release, updates to Services CPQ are noteworthy. The updated Services CPQ interface built on LEX has streamlined estimates creation and provides options for defining date-driven rates. Reflecting how services businesses need more role management capabilities, the Summer 22 release can enable role requests from templates and also supports pass-through of needed skills.

Services' CPQ improvements are based partly on the platform's flexibility LEX provides.

William Spice, Senior Director of Product Management, says that Services CPQ and Customer Success Cloud are born in LEX, providing FinancialForce with the flexibility of using the latest Salesforce visual UI to deliver greater simplicity of workflows.

"Services CPQ shows us extending the footprint across the whole services lifecycle, allowing our customers to build up a range of different estimates for professional services work, widen the selling and opportunity phase, and then seamlessly be able to transition these into a delivery model," William said.

"Customer Success Cloud is really focused on making it simple and automatic to create playbooks, which are means for anyone across the organization to help ensure that we're treating our customers with all the respect and impact they would expect from us. And finally, performance to scale sees us continuing to invest and make sure that our applications scale faster than any of our customers can, and focusing on enterprise-level integrations like linking out of the box with JIRA and Concur, for example," William concluded.

Improving Opportunity-to-Renewal With More Intelligence

Services CPQ's improvements reflect revenue managers' need for greater visibility into their sales pipelines and more insights into the propensity to close by clients. FinancialForce takes that a step further by providing insights into which factors are most and least affecting opportunity-to-renewal performance. Current FinancialForce customers have access to dashboards that deliver utilization performance and staffing efficiency and can be configured to provide revenue forecasting. Also announced is a project burn-up dashboard that visualizes work completed and enables teams to be more cost-efficient during project delivery.

Improving Services Revenue With Real-time Visibility And Control

Business-as-a-Service is predicated on the design goal of enabling any business to migrate into providing services profitably. As a result, product-centric companies' transition to services is commonplace. Nearly every major equipment manufacturer is now selling the value delivered by their machinery as a service.

The many improvements FinancialForce has made in their platform's Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) areas reflect how this area is core to getting service revenue right. Of the many announcements made in this area of their platform, highlights include providing FP&A teams with the option of performing headcount planning at the resource level to understand better how compensation adjustments will impact future budgets. In addition, flexible budget templates for improving headcount planning alignment with company goals and objectives are now included.

Also announced is a new Planning Workspace where FP&A teams can collaborate and analyze budget information and potential scenarios. The value of having the entire platform on LEX is evident in how FP&A managers can immediately use financial data to accelerate planning cycles which also drives more accurate forecasting within the Planning Workspace. Also introduced is a new machine-learning-based component to the ERP product suite. Its Intelligent bank reconciliation solution provides accounting teams the agility to match a single bank statement transaction to multiple accounting transactions. It's also supporting a more extensive end-to-end intelligent transaction matching that streamlines reconciliation procedures. That's welcome news for accounting teams that need the time for more intensive tasks and would like to be free from the repetitive nature of reconciliation work.

Conclusion

FinancialForce’s decision to change its cadence from four to three releases a year shows its product strategy is delving further into where the gaps are in the opportunity-to-renewal process. Concentrating on three significant releases gives their DevOps and engineering teams the time they need to develop new features while revamping the entire platform to the Salesforce Lightning Experience (LEX). Leading with usability on Services CPQ and Customer Success Cloud makes sense as services businesses need to excel in each area to grow and retain customers. Additionally, a new UX will help accelerate the ramp-up times of new users. FinancialForce enters a new era with the Summer 22 Release, closing gaps in platform strategy while helping customers do the same.

Hannah Mason

Marketing Director Constellation Research

Hannah Mason is a marketing director at Constellation Research. She oversees brand positioning, creative direction, and content development across digital platforms, events, and campaigns. Her work spans branding and design—including graphics, sales collateral, and event presentations—along with website content management, newsletters, and Constellation Insights. Mason also manages surveys and produces Constellation’s video collateral, including ConstellationTV. Her role ensures that the Constellation brand is communicated with clarity, creativity, and consistency across all channels.     Contact Hannah at [email protected]. ...

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We are thrilled to reveal the latest updates to the Constellation ShortList™ portfolio.

The Constellation ShortList™ portfolio highlights the key players when considering investments across all of our coverage areas, including HR tech, healthcare, AI, marketing, customer experience, analytics, machine learning, and more. We update the lists once per year to every six months depending on the category. Our goal is to match the rapidly changing requirements with customer needs and demands.

Today, we released these 35 new and updated lists:

• MLOps
• Incident Management
• Enterprise File Sharing and Cloud Content Management
• OKR Tracking and Management Tools
• Robotic Process Automation
• Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAO) Platforms - NEW
• Cloud-Based BI & Analytics Platforms
• Self-Service Data Science & Machine Learning
• Compensation Management
• Global HCM Suites
• No Code / Low Code for SAP Systems
• North American Talent Acquisition
• Payroll for North American SMBs
• Public Cloud Transformation Services: Global
• Project Ready Metaverse Vendors – NEW
• Metaverse Development Platforms - NEW
• B2C Marketing Automation for Enterprise
• B2C Marketing Automation for Small to Mid-Sized Business
• Content Management Systems (CMS) - Hybrid
• Digital Asset Management (DAM) for High Volume Commerce
• Marketing Analytics Solutions
• PIM
• Digital Experience (DX) Platforms
• Virtual Events: Webcasts and Meetings
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Cloud Platforms
• Augmented Reality Platforms
• Campaign to Commerce: All-In-One-Commerce Clouds
• Digital Transformation Services (DTX): Global
• Healthcare Clinical Communication
• Partner & Alliance Relationship Management (PARM)
• Travel Management Platforms
• Healthcare IT Security
• Customer Experience (CX) Operations Services: Global
• Data Protection Infostructure - NEW
• Cloud Identity & Access Management

Each offering meets the threshold criteria as determined by our analysts through client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, vendor selection projects, market share, and internal research. These reports are part of Constellation’s open research library and are free to download. For more information, visit https://www.constellationr.com/shortlist.

We know the ShortList^TM are starting points in your vendor selection process. If you would like to take advantage of our expertise with software vendor selection, contract negotiations, and partner selection, please reach out to [email protected]

If there’s a coverage area we are missing that you think we should start coverage, please let us know with a short note to ([email protected])

Be sure to check back next Wednesday for the final updates for the quarter.