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Thomas is an internationally renowned analyst and consultant with more than 25 years of proven track record of leadership experience in the CRM and CX industry. Being an experienced practitioner with a unique combination of development, quality management and consulting experience, he effectively translates business needs into technology solutions, bringing strong value to software vendors and their customers.

Short Bio (188 words)

Thomas is an executive, entrepreneur, analyst and consultant with more than 25 years of leadership experience in the software industry, business and IT consulting. Being an experienced CRM and CX practitioner with a unique combination of development-, quality management, and consulting skills, who effectively translates business needs into technology solutions, he brings strong value to organizations.

His achievements over the years include, but are not limited to, building the CIBER ANZ CRM consulting practice from scratch and making it a profitable division from year one, leading the development of the Epikonic solution, a mobile-social engagement platform, as a bootstrapped SaaS start-up. 

Thomas reorganized and drove strategic development of SAP's Montreal-based CRM development center, built a test competence center in India, shaped QM departments as well as his own boutique consulting companies.

His goal-oriented outlook allows him to initiate, design, and implement transformational change and deliver mission-critical systems and complex enterprise-scale projects in time and on budget. He is an innate strategist with an intuitive ability to precisely interpret technical information, construct reports for various stakeholders and drive discussions with top management requiring a deep understanding of business drivers.

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Last Year's Top 5 Popular Posts

Sweet Transformation: Inside SugarCRM’s New Direction

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...

SaaS or the Rise of the Undead

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...

SAP CRM and SAP Jam - News from CRM evolution

During CRM Evolution 2017 I had the chance of talking with Volker Hildebrand and Anthony Leaper from SAP. Volker is SAP’s Global Vice President SAP Hybris and Anthony is Senior Vice President and Sales GM - Enterprise Social Software at SAP. Topics that we covered were things CRM and collaboration, how and where SAP’s solutions are moving and, of course, the impact that the recent reshuffling in the executive board has. Starting with the latter, there is common agreement, that if at all it is positive as likely to streamline reporting lines and hence decision processes. First things first – after all I am a CRM guy. Having the distinct impression that the SAP Hybris set of solutions is going a good way I was most interested in learning from Volker about how there is going to be a CRM for S4/HANA. SAP’s new generation ERP system is growing at a good clip, and according to the Q1/2017 earnings call, now has 5,800 customers with 400 new customers in the last quarter alone. Many...

Zoho - A True Unicorn

End of January Zoho held its 2020 Zoho Days, an analyst summit, which I was happy to attend, along with more than 60 colleagues, as the only analyst from Germany, as it seems. Sadly, it took me quite a while to complete this – Zoho deserves a faster commentare. But hey, let’s look forward and get rolling. Zoho is a privately owned enterprise software company that has quietly evolved from a small software company in 1996 to an ambitious global player that serves the SMB- and enterprise CRM market with cloud applications. The company has a set of 45+ business apps with more than 50 million users, 10 data centres and counting, and is available in 180 countries. The company is profitable and maintained a CAGR of more than 30 percent over the past five years. But why quietly? Because Zoho managed its growth pretty unusually (almost) fully organically with only very minor acquisitions. Crunchbase lists one. Following this unique approach, which defies the tradit...

The CDP is dead – long live the CDP!

In the past few years, I have written about CDPs, what they are and what their value is – or rather can be. My definition of a CDP that I laid out in one of my column articles on CustomerThink is:  A Customer Data Platform is a software that creates persistent, unified customer records that enable business processes that have the customers’ interests and objectives in mind. It is a good thing that CDPs evolved from its origins of being a packaged software owned by marketers, serving marketers. Having looked at CDP’s as a band aid that fixes the proliferation of data silos that emerged for a number of reasons, I have ultimately come to the conclusion and am here to say that the customer data platform as an entity is increasingly becoming irrelevant – or in the typical marketing hyperbole – dead.  Why is that? There are mainly four reasons for it.  For one, many an application has its own CDP variant already embedded as part of enabling its core functionality. Any engageme...