Certinia has unveiled its Spring 25 release with updates across the portfolio. This includes all three core solutions. It also announced the renaming of ERP Cloud to Financial Management Cloud, a nod, perhaps, to the days when the company was named FinancialForce.
Certinia, renamed in 2023, is now much more than just the Financial Management solution. Its focus is on professional services organisations. Arguably, its core solution is now its Professional Services Cloud, with the newly launched Customer Success Cloud growing in importance.
Details of the updates came in a briefing to analysts and a blog by Raju Malhotra, Chief Product and Technology Officer. Surprisingly, there is no major product announcement in this release. Instead, Malhotra has focused the team on delivering features to deliver customers “more foresight, flexibility, and intelligence.”
The update includes new AI-powered features, improved usability and new features that make life easier for forecasting and the day-to-day work that professional services teams undertake.
Investments in AI are becoming a reality
Certinia works closely with Salesforce. It is often one of the first ISVs to market that leverages Salesforce’s new AI-powered features. While it has not yet released its first Agentic AI features, they are coming soon. In its Summer release, it plans to provide the first two Agents built on Agentforce, and Certinia is one of the first partners.
The two Agents are a Resource Manager Scheduling Agent and a Customer Success Manager Agent. They will automate many of the mundane and manual tasks that Resource Managers and Customer Success Managers spend time doing.
These agents are due out in the Summer 25 release, and more will follow. Those include enhancements to the existing Agents and a Certinia Central agent. It will help administrators with optimisation, upgrades and provide information about their Certinia instance.
For this release, Certinia has developed two GenAI capabilities: Resource Summaries and Customer Account Summaries. The resource summary helps a resource manager choose the best candidate for a task by providing concise information about each candidate’s experience and skills. This allows them to compare candidates qualitatively to make the best decision. This is available in early adopter mode.
The GenAI-driven Customer Account Summary sits inside the Customer Success Cloud. It brings together all details about the account from across the platform. It gives the customer success manager a quick understanding of the state of a customer account without having to delve into multiple screens. This will save time.
The information included in the summary includes relevant customer details, sentiment signals, potential risks, and suggested next steps.
Skills Suggestions
Certinia has also added Skills suggestions and Smart rescheduling. Both of these leverage AI to help users with challenging processes.
Skill suggestions use historical projects and task information. They suggest skills that may align with new task requests, even if they are not initially an exact match. Enterprise Times asked Certinia to elaborate on how the system calculates which suggestions to surface. Also, whether customers can control and modify the calculation.
Christian Finn, Senior Director of Product Strategy, answered, “A bit of history is needed to explain. In Winter ‘25, we introduced skills recommendations. These were based on the filters of region, practice, group, and role compared to the history of assignments. So, if a skill was used often in assignments, it was weighted as more likely to be a recommendation.
“This works well for customers with the historical data of assignments with skills attached. However, if the customer hadn’t built up that history, then they really couldn’t use skill recommendations.
“Now, in Spring ‘25, we have added the ability for skill recommendations to be made based on the skills existing among the pool of resources instead of/in addition to assignment data. As the customer uses skills on resource requests, they will build up that history.
“At a certain threshold, our recommendation engine will switch over to using the (generally more accurate) historical data. This allows customers who are less advanced in resource management to benefit right from the start.
“The weighting is not modifiable by customers, but you can achieve more targeted results (for your industry). For example, just using practice (similar to industry) and role, they receive recommendations based on that. They can then add Region and Group back when you go to match resources.”
Smart Rescheduling
Smart Rescheduling helps project managers improve the financial KPIs of their projects. When schedules are forced to change, the smart rescheduling feature identifies how scheduling changes impact margins and budgets in different scenarios.
It allows project managers to ask for additional budgets before actually allocating the resources. This improves customer engagement and ultimately maintains profitability on projects.
The feature can be used in flight, where one resource becomes ill and is no longer available, the project manager can identify the optimal alternative. This is an alternative to just filling the role with the first available person.
Professional Services Cloud
There is a first step towards portfolio management within the Spring release. Certinia has enabled a new portfolio object. It allows users to group projects based on certain criteria, including project manager or customer. It also enables the user to have better visibility across those projects.
Each portfolio creation is very flexible; as Finn explained, “In Spring ‘25, the criteria are chosen by the user creating the portfolio; they hand-select each project they want in the portfolio. Common examples would be: all projects for a given Account, under a given Project Manager, in a given Industry or Practice, etc.
“The user creating the portfolio starts from a list of all projects, refines that list with filters, and then multi-selects the ones they want to be in the portfolio.”
The portfolio view is also leveraged in the delivery tracker. That enables project managers to see the progress of portfolio projects at a glance.
Automating the timesheets is a challenge that many PSA vendors attempt. Certinia has improved its user interface with a new iteration for automating timesheet entry. In this release, a new “Suggest My Timesheet” feature creates an initial draft of the timesheet based on the existing schedule for the time period.
It should streamline the creation of timesheets, which is always a time-consuming task for consultants. They can edit or approve the created timesheet. Is this the ideal solution? Probably not, but it is a sensible step that should save time.
Improving the sales-to-delivery cycle
Certinia solutions help services organisations automate the process from sales through to cash. In Spring, it has added a stronger link between sales and professional services, with the introduction of services estimation.
It enables both sales and delivery teams to plan and have visibility of what a delivery will look like before it is sold. This visibility helps ensure profitability for each project and can also help the sales teams close deals.
In addition, the new Estimate Financial Summary feature will provide a monthly breakdown of the revenue and costs of an estimate. It will enable finance teams to better anticipate the margin risk and costs of projects before they start.
It has also enhanced the guided scoping feature, which was first introduced a year ago. Users can now use dynamic and conditional questions to assist users through the scoping process. Dynamic questions enable subsequent questions to adjust based on the previous answers.
Customer Success Cloud
One of Certinia’s key advantages over its rivals is the ability to leverage functionality from within the Professional Services Cloud to power the Customer Success Cloud.
DJ Paoni, CEO of Certinia, commented, “I think we’re in a really good position to provide complete visibility on one platform, from opportunity all the way through renewal and expansion.”
One example in this release is the new Resource Pooling feature. The solution enables an organisation to consider resources in a pool for each task. This is based on who the best person is, allocation on a round robin basis, who is available and other criteria.
A welcome enhancement will be the feature that enables CMS to track value for customers. A new dashboard will track objectives and KPIs. It enables CSM to identify whether a KPI is trending in the right direction, and the system can be configured to automatically trigger the creation of a playbook if, for example, adoption rates fall too far.
The release also delivers greater visibility of how CSMs spend time with customers. Enhanced time-tracking capabilities support the updated dashboards, another feature that benefits from investment in the Professional Services Cloud.
Financial Management
Certinia continues to invest in its finance platform by automating cash matching across accounts receivable and bank reconciliation. The automation will help finance teams reduce manual effort. There is also an enhancement to the UI for revenue recognition.
Enterprise Times asked Certinia what other enhancements, especially around localisation for international clients and eInvoicing, are included in this release.
Malhotra replied, “There are a number of changes that international markets that we operate in require from us for Financial Management Cloud. We are not calling them out as highlights, but we are working to make sure they’re relevant based on the regulation changes, based on the international needs in the markets.”
Certinia also revealed that it has chosen to partner with Storecove to develop its eInvoice capability rather than develop it within its product. With the rapidly evolving legislation in Europe and elsewhere, this is a sensible approach.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
While there are no major product releases in Spring 25, this release has substantive updates, especially around AI. The emergence of the Agentic AI features in Summer 25 could be a game changer for Certinia as it looks to press its advantage over competitors in the services industry.
If it can demonstrate that Agentic AI Agents can help organisations to scale at a price point that makes it a better offering than hiring people
There are many more features and enhancements with this release. To find out more, Certinia is holding a Customer Webinar on April 22. Customers can also access the Release Hub on Certinia Community today.
