aheadCRM

The news On May 27, 2025, Salesforce announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Informatica for about $8bn. According to the press release, “ bringing together Informatica’s cloud-native capabilities — including its extensive data catalog, data integration, governance, quality and privacy, metadata management, and MDM — with the Salesforce platform will unlock new capabilities for Salesforce’s enterprise data stack, delivering a complete solution to the challenges of AI at scale ”. The acquisition is planned to enhance Salesforce’ data foundation which is critical for deploying agentic AI. “ The combination of Informatica’s rich data catalog, data integration, governance, quality and privacy, metadata management, and Master Data Management (MDM) services with the Salesforce platform will establish a unified architecture for agentic AI — enabling AI agents to operate safely, responsibly, and at scale across the modern enterprise ”. The bigger picture For agentic AI...

The news SAP just held its annual Sapphire event in Orlando, FL. It is totally under the theme of uncertainty and how technology, in particular SAP’s technology, can help businesses steer through poorly charted waters, to use a nautical metaphor. Uncertainty is caused by evolving regulatory situations, tariffs and shipping delays with their impact on the supply chain, waning consumer confidence in the light of all of this, and of course, the big gorilla in the room: AI. SAP’s response to this is the “SAP Flywheel”, which consists of three components Applications, of which SAP commands the broadest portfolio amongst all business applications vendors Data, which all these applications create, which in turn gives SAP extensive access to semantically rich business data AI, which analyses all this data, makes it actionable and, in turn feeds it back to the applications, closing the loop to establish the flywheel. SAP demonstrated how this works in a scenario that showed how a C-suite consi...

During the recent ZohoDay 2025, I had the pleasure of talking to Jaroslaw Pietraszko, CIO for IFFCO Group, about what IFFCO is doing with Zoho, why, and what the outcomes of their Zoho implementation are. IFFCO is a privately held multinational company that is active in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector that also has some beauty business and is active in packaging and transportation. The company has its headquarters in Dubai, UAE and has operations in 50+ countries on five continents. The company has more than fifteen thousand employees.  Due to its distributed nature and also multiple ERP systems in the back end, IFFCO – and in particular also IFFCO’s employees – suffered from slow, inconsistent and regularly manual expense management process. This also caused a policy adherence and compliance problem, as reporting was virtually impossible. Only two countries used an Intranet based digital process that still was cumbersome due to the company’s matrix organization. “ It ...

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....