Certinia has announced its Summer 2024 release, the first release under the guidance of Raju Malhotra, Chief Product & Technology Officer, who joined in June. DJ Paoni, CEO, has now gathered an almost completely new leadership team since his arrival a year ago.
The update doesn’t disappoint, and Malhotra has continued to iterate the priorities that have been evolving since Paoni joined the firm. Malhotra has identified five key product priorities:
- Best-in-Class Professional Services: The firm already has a leading PSA solution and aims to strengthen its capabilities, especially in Resource Management, Project Management services Estimation*, and Skills Taxonomy.
*The firm is to rename its CPQ solution to Services Estimation to better reflect what the solution does and how customers think about the offering.
- Enterprise Scale: Certinia continue to better leverage the Salesforce platform capabilities that are available as it moves to meet the requirements of larger and larger customers
- Customer Success: Its new Customer Success solution is about to launch, having completed a very successful beta program with some major brands as customers, including Salesforce
- AI Innovation: Certinia continues to develop AI solutions that deliver business benefits to customers
- Financial Excellence: It is enhancing its mainly mid-market financial management solution to help firms deliver predictable and profitable outcomes efficiently.
Certinia grows
Certinia shared a few statistics about the company’s growth. From one angle, these may seem small. In December 2022, the company had 1,400 customers and now has over 1,450. Importantly, the average size of current customers has increased. One hundred and thirty have more than $1 billion in revenue. There are also over 1 million active users (MAU) every month.
The firm has seen a 20% growth in MAU over the last year. Customers, including Salesforce Dell, PwC, and Cisco, bring large numbers of professional services consultants to the platform. Financial growth details were not shared, and Certinia would be advised to share more trending information about the company’s growth.
The imminent launch of its Customer Success Cloud demonstrates why it has become the top ISV on Salesforce. After further growth, it could possibly fill in some of Salesforce’s gaps if they consider an acquisition in the future.
The summer release contains updates across the Certinia Suite of products. The full details of the release are available to customers on the Summer 2024 Release Hub (subscription required).
Summer 2024 Release
Under Malhotra, Certinia has already iterated some of the messaging the company has been using. The breadth of its product encompasses the Excellence from Opportunity to Renewal cycle. This release was aligned with the customer engagement model LAER (Land, Adopt, Expand, Renew). Key to this is the new Customer Success solution, which, whilst not quite in general availability has seen further development.
Malhotra believes that many organisations understand and use the LAER framework themselves. By framing it this way, customers need less education to understand how Certinia is building its suite of solutions.
Professional Services Cloud
Certinia has updated several components that will help larger professional services organisations become more efficient. Resource Management has become more intelligent, saving time and making life easier for those who allocate resources.
The update has not confined these improvements to just resource managers. It has introduced what it calls collaborative resourcing, which makes it easier for people to allocate resources.
Users can create shortlists to involve more parties in the decision-making process on the right resource for a project or task. These enable stakeholders to have their say and create notes or other information about whether a resource is accepted or rejected, such as vacation or other commitments.
For resource managers working on larger projects, there are enhancements that enable mass actions to assign multiple resources for larger projects with a single click. While the collaborative piece may have reduced the shortlist to viable candidates, the project manager can resource their project far faster than when they had to trawl through emails.
CPQ is becoming Services Estimation
As mentioned above, Certinia is changing the name of CPQ to Services Estimation. Lori Ellsworth, Vice President, Project Management, Certinia, commented, “We are changing the name to focus much more closely on what we do, which is around the exercise of estimating services.
“We don’t handle products. We partner very closely with Salesforce. Their CPQ is in play on the product side of the business. What we bring is the services piece, what is the work to be done? What resources are we pulling in? We are driving towards not just a view of the work and the resources and the scheduling and the early demand, but the financial view of the estimate.”
This is not just the financial view at the start of the project but across its entire lifecycle. Certinia can track project costs and profits before, during, and after execution. During the sales stage, it can estimate all of these financial metrics.
With this release, service estimation has been simplified. It is now easier for users and delivered through an Excel-like interface that most professional services teams use to create estimates.
Customer Success Cloud
Customer Success is getting ever closer to release. The fact that so many larger enterprises have implemented the solution is a testament to its existing strength. These organisations will have given significant feedback, and Certinia will continue to invest heavily in developing the product further.
Certinia has introduced greater flexibility into health scores. Users can now segment customer health scores. For example, they could split health scores by industry, customer size or region. It enables Customer Success Managers to identify trends.
Each segment’s components are also configurable. This enables a CSM to create a segment for customers due for renewal and add KPIs and their weightings specific to that segment. Customers can be members of more than one segment, and the system can extract information from across the Salesforce platform to achieve an accurate health score.
Also highlighted is the new success tracker, which can help CSMs create action plans to improve customer health. The system will also support pooled CSM resources, enabling teams that cover larger sets of customers to allocate tasks to CSMs easily. The ability to create pools of CSMs and relate them to specific customer segments enables organisations to allocate work appropriately.
ERP Cloud
Certinia continues to develop its Financial Management solution. The Summer 24 release introduced proactive budget management and improved efficiency for year-end processes.
Proactive budget management ensures that Certinia proactively alerts project managers when budget limits are approached. Certinia has also introduced billing caps, ensuring that any work done is not automatically raised against the client. This ensures that project managers stay on top of all their project budgets without spending time reviewing them constantly, saving huge amounts of time.
The budget caps also ensure that while the project manager is alerted to the issue, the customer is not faced with a bill that lowers customer satisfaction.
Finance teams also receive several new features to aid them in the often onerous year-end process. Updates include:
- A new year-end playbook with templates to help organisations close their year-end processes.
- Automated currency revaluation for foreign currency bank accounts. Adjustments are created automatically, reflecting the current exchange rates. For organisations working across multiple countries, this saves considerable time.
- Automated cash matching of accounts receivable intercompany cash transactions. Where multiple companies exist, the cash is automatically matched as values are known and approved.
- Certinia has simplified the generation of 1099-NEC and 1099-MISC reports, updating them to comply with the latest regulations, including changes like the increased reporting dollar amount threshold. This simplifies the preparation of 1099 forms.
AI Cloud
Certinia continues to embed AI into its platform, leveraging the underlying Salesforce platform. With Summer 24, Certinia has announced Einstein GenAi functionality. These features are available for early adopter customers within PS Cloud and CS Cloud. The new features bring AI-generated suggested actions across PS Cloud and CS Cloud.
Malhotra commented, “AI remains a big focus for us, and we are thinking long and hard about how we work with Gen AI and the capabilities that are coming fast and furious. In terms of putting that as part of workspaces and actions that customers are trying to take, and how do we actually make that better with AI, financial excellence, account table automation and forecasting? “
Expect to hear and see more from Certinia as it continues to invest in its AI capabilities over the coming months. It will be interesting to see what Salesforce announces at Dreamforce in a few weeks and what new capabilities Certinia is looking to build into its platform for customers.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This is another comprehensive update from Certinia that seems to indicate its increasing focus on larger Enterprise customers. The benefit for its mid-market customers is that they get some powerful PSA and Customer Service functionality built into the platform that smaller startup solutions are unlikely to get.
Where Certinia differentiates is that it sits on the Salesforce platform. As it’s No 1 ISV (Certinia claims), it is also likely to have early access to many of the new features that Salesforce is working on. This means that its effective R&D team is much larger than that within the company itself, and the latest updates, especially around AI, are an indication of that.
Summer 2024 seems to have struck the right balance between improving functionality and simplifying the user experience. It will be interesting to hear the feedback from customers about the new AI and automation capabilities.
