Dreamforce 2024 | Raju Malhotra | Certinia

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Raju Malhotra

Chief Product & Technology Officer

Certinia

play_circle_outline Certinia's focus on professional services organizations and bridging the gap between sales and delivery.

play_circle_outline Certinia's partnership with Salesforce on the Agentforce network for AI integration.

play_circle_outline Certinia's native integration with Salesforce platform for simplified and amplified user experience.

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Raju Malhotra | Certinia

Raju Malhotra

Chief Product & Technology Officer Certinia

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Christophe Bertrand

>> Welcome to theCUBE from Dreamforce 2024. We're actually at the New York Stock Exchange here covering the news, and we're talking to a number of customers and partners. And what we're going to do right now is talk to Raju Malhotra, welcome Raju, with Certinia. So tell us about what you do, tell us about Certinia and why you're here, and then we'll go into some news.

Raju Malhotra

>> Yeah. Hi Christophe, thanks for having me here. I'm Chief Product and Technology Officer at Certinia. And I joined earlier this year and I've been in the product and technology area for the last 20 years. Certinia, in case someone doesn't know, is one of the top ISVs on Salesforce platform, and we focus on professional services organizations.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Great. So let's talk about that a little bit. Why do you think that customers, you're in the B2B business. Why do customers use you? What are the benefits of leveraging your platform? Obviously professional services is a very important expenditure, so it has to be optimized. What do you do that is different and sets you apart?

Raju Malhotra

>> Yeah, absolutely. So we have professional services companies that are pure play professional services companies like PWC or IBM, and we have professional services organizations within technology companies like Salesforce, Philips, Siemens, Cisco that use Certinia. And really one of the key reasons where Certinia becomes very helpful for our customers is bridging the gap between what is being sold, or was sold, to the delivery of services. And really all the way from services estimation, contract at the sales time, and then delivering that by having the resource management, resource optimization, all the way to consultants time and entry. We really fill that gap and make our professional services customers be successful.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Got it. So really there's a direct impact on the end customer satisfaction, make sure the projects get done on time, that resources are optimized. Obviously that's very key given the type of processes that get impacted by the platform. But let's talk about the news that we heard on Thursday, and I think you'll have a follow up tomorrow. Tell us more about what was just announced and why is it important?

Raju Malhotra

>> Yeah, so we announced last week, in fact Salesforce announced the Agent Force partnered network, and they announced Certinia as one of the key ISVs, early adopters of the Agent Force partnered network. We worked with Salesforce for a long time. We're native Salesforce platform company, and all the way from the platform usage to Einstein. This is really an evolution and this is very exciting where AI is progressing to and how we can help our customers even more. So the Agent Force partner network, really having Certinia be part of that early innovation is very exciting for ourselves and also for our customers.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, there's been a lot of talk about AI, I would say a lot of buzz about AI, but it sounds like it's becoming very, very real with this announcement. So could you walk us through what you believe the top use cases will be, how you're going to be able to help and participate and really leverage the network?

Raju Malhotra

>> Yeah, so you're absolutely right. I mean, AI is real. I mean, there are a lot of things that are very buzzy and not quite real, but I think AI is definitely having a monumental impact on everything. But particularly for the type of business that we focus on. Professional services is very human business, very workflow intensive business, so we believe this is going to be a huge area of impact for AI. And in many ways this is really an evolution for AI from having AI assistants, chatbots, to AI advisors where you actually get recommendations, to now having AI agents that in fact automate the workflow for you. So one of the key use cases that we're going to be talking more at DreamForce is having a semi-autonomous or autonomous customer service agent, customer success agent that really augments the customer success team and provides a lot of value to the professional services organization in automating a lot of tasks instead of just advising or assisting on those tasks.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, let's talk about that because I think there's also a little bit of... There's been a lot of anticipation about how AI will change the world, etc. And the risk of maybe taking jobs away. But in this case, what I'm hearing is very different. What you are saying is you're looking at incremental value. So let's talk about that. Is the role of the professional service organization changing? Are you going to need more people, less people? Is it taking jobs away or is it on the other hand actually adding incremental value to deliver a very different result that would be better than if you didn't use it?

Raju Malhotra

>> Yeah, so it seems that it would be very complimentary and it would add a lot of incremental value, probably a lot of step value on top of what we as humans have been able to do in the personas that Certinia serves. So for professional services, for resource managers, project managers, and also for customer success, for customer success managers, we really look at the role of AI as supporting the CSM team, supporting the resource manager team, and amplifying the impact that they would not be able to have otherwise. So there is this old kind of paradox that what's easy for humans is difficult for AI, and what's difficult for AI is actually easy for humans. I think this works very well when we have the agents actually in service of humans and effectively provide the level of impact to amplify what they're trying to do. Be it to engage with many, many accounts that you may not be able to reach yourself because you only have so much time in the day, and use the AI agent to support that, flag some issues for you, call out some areas of improvements. And then really enable the human CSM, the customer success manager to be very effective when that time comes to meet face-to-face or through video call with that customer.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Got it. So let's break this down a little more in terms of workflow improvements and maybe some metrics or expected metrics. What does that translate into? If I'm either a professional services organization within a large organization or just an actual service provider, what does that mean? What can I expect?

Raju Malhotra

>> The metrics are very much what our customers care about. They care about growing their revenue, retaining their customers, keeping their customers satisfied and happy so they keep having that renewal opportunity and discussions. And be able to do all that in a very profitable, margin-positive way. I think that's really the beauty of applying AI and really applying Agentforce platform to provide that bazooka to the human team in a way that puts all those achievement of those metrics much more of a reality than it might be able to do by hiring more humans and actually training them and onboarding them. Now you can actually have the CSM team, the professional services team, your financial team, really focus on the creative discussions, having the value discussions, the specific discussions for that context for their customer, and really automate the workflow that is in service of those conversations.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So workflow automation, obviously it's been one of these hard-to-achieve objectives because of the complications that sometimes it brings about the need for integrations, lots of code, and of course that breaks all the time. We've heard that from others today. Do you see that the use of Agentforce and your platform in combination will actually simplify the use of the platform overall and amplify it? And then I'd love to talk about best practices after that.

Raju Malhotra

>> Yeah, so first of all, you're absolutely right. It would simplify and it would amplify. If I could make one distinction, and it may actually... A little bit of a nuance, but I think it's a very important nuance. On the Salesforce ecosystem, we have a ton of integrations. In the enterprise world, we have a lot of integrations and oftentimes they work well. I would love the integrations to be way more prolific, et cetera. Where Certinia distinguishes itself is that we are native on the Salesforce platform. So by using Agentforce, really in conjunction with our PS Cloud and CS Cloud, we are effectively providing our customers and opportunity to have a very native experience. So there is no other integrations, there are no other sort of APIs here involved. We are effectively on the platform, really making that experience shine up for our customers. So I think that nuance actually plays out very well in terms of productivity, in terms of automation, in terms of the innovation we can deliver to the customers on Salesforce platform by being a native ISV, one of the largest native ISVs on the platform. So I would say that itself is going to be a big driver for amplifying and simplifying the impact that our customers can expect.

Christophe Bertrand

>> It has to be a top differentiator, obviously, and clearly it's resonating with your customer base. Tell me a little bit more about your customers. Maybe give me a quick example of how you've helped them and what do you think the future looks like based on this new innovation and this new announcement?

Raju Malhotra

>> Yeah, so Certinia has over 1,400 customers, enterprise customers, B2B, that are using our products. About 10% of those customers are really large customers. They have over a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue. So we're talking about our customers using Certinia in a highly scalable, highly extensive way. So we really kind of push the boundaries of what the Salesforce platform can do for you, and effectively provide a level of performance and scale that is unlike most of the companies really for the target industry that we serve, which is professional services. So within the professional services we have customers like PWC or IBM, they are consulting-based, advisory, pure play, professional services organizations. And then we also have a large number of technology companies that have professional services as a big part of their overall charter. So that's where Philips, Siemens, Cisco and Salesforce would be in that sort of category. And how we help them is effectively by A, I think bridging the gap between the sales opportunity, so services automation to service delivery. We have services CPQ, resource management, project management, time and materials, et cetera features. And in fact, one of the recent announcements we also made last week is we went general availability for CS Cloud, Customer Success Cloud, which is adjacent product to our PS Cloud, the Professional Services Cloud, and really extends the value of a project-based delivery to an ongoing relationship that we can help our customers. Pretty much in the same kind of value proposition, which is still about helping professional services organizations deliver their projects and deliver their services on an ongoing basis through PS Cloud and CS Cloud.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Got it. Well, so in closing, I'm curious, can you reveal a little bit more about your roadmap? What do you have coming up next? To the extent that you can tell us.

Raju Malhotra

>> Yeah, no, absolutely. I will be happy to share some of the highlights. Given a lot of folks here are at Dreamforce, I would encourage them to go to Certinia.com/dreamforce. We have a number of sessions where we go through our product roadmap this week in more detail. We'll also put it online after this week is over. So we will be very much more detailed and available for answering any questions that folks may have about roadmap, but we really have some of the major priorities for us. Number one is to stay best-in-class on professional services and provide the performance and scale for the enterprise-level growth. That may work for mid-market customers, that may work for other customers too, but really it provides a level of support, level of performance for really, really large customers, so it can actually scale down very easily. We also have focus on customer success and we provide a financial excellence, which really provides the profitability and reporting, predictability and availability for our tools. And I would say one of the most recent ones and one of the more exciting parts of our roadmap, which we'll get into more detail, is about Agentforce. It's really about thinking how we can apply what the power of AI is available to us, all the way from predictive AI to generative AI, to now agent AI. Where we don't just provide assistance or advice about, hey, this would be nice for you to do, or this is a summary of your proposal, or this is helpful for your workflow. We effectively provide our customers an ability to actually get some tasks done by engaging with their end users directly. So that's very exciting. At the end of the day, I think it's really about using AI in service of the use cases that we have and staying focused on what our customers care about. That's really how we think about roadmap.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, with these great words of wisdom, I'm going to thank you so much Raju for joining us, and I'm going to thank you for joining theCUBE. My name is Christophe Bertrand, I'm a principal analyst here at theCUBE Research. We are covering Dreamforce 2024 here in San Francisco at the New York Stock Exchange Office. Thank you very much. See you the next one.

Raju Malhotra

>> Thank you.

Raju Malhotra | Certinia

search

Christophe Bertrand

>> Welcome to theCUBE from Dreamforce 2024. We're actually at the New York Stock Exchange here covering the news, and we're talking to a number of customers and partners. And what we're going to do right now is talk to Raju Malhotra, welcome Raju, with Certinia. So tell us about what you do, tell us about Certinia and why you're here, and then we'll go into some news.

Raju Malhotra

>> Yeah. Hi Christophe, thanks for having me here. I'm Chief Product and Technology Officer at Certinia. And I joined earlier this year and I've been in the product and technology area for the last 20 years. Certinia, in case someone doesn't know, is one of the top ISVs on Salesforce platform, and we focus on professional services organizations.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Great. So let's talk about that a little bit. Why do you think that customers, you're in the B2B business. Why do customers use you? What are the benefits of leveraging your platform? Obviously professional services is a very important expenditure, so it has to be optimized. What do you do that is different and sets you apart?

Raju Malhotra

>> Yeah, absolutely. So we have professional services companies that are pure play professional services companies like PWC or IBM, and we have professional services organizations within technology companies like Salesforce, Philips, Siemens, Cisco that use Certinia. And really one of the key reasons where Certinia becomes very helpful for our customers is bridging the gap between what is being sold, or was sold, to the delivery of services. And really all the way from services estimation, contract at the sales time, and then delivering that by having the resource management, resource optimization, all the way to consultants time and entry. We really fill that gap and make our professional services customers be successful.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Got it. So really there's a direct impact on the end customer satisfaction, make sure the projects get done on time, that resources are optimized. Obviously that's very key given the type of processes that get impacted by the platform. But let's talk about the news that we heard on Thursday, and I think you'll have a follow up tomorrow. Tell us more about what was just announced and why is it important?

Raju Malhotra

>> Yeah, so we announced last week, in fact Salesforce announced the Agent Force partnered network, and they announced Certinia as one of the key ISVs, early adopters of the Agent Force partnered network. We worked with Salesforce for a long time. We're native Salesforce platform company, and all the way from the platform usage to Einstein. This is really an evolution and this is very exciting where AI is progressing to and how we can help our customers even more. So the Agent Force partner network, really having Certinia be part of that early innovation is very exciting for ourselves and also for our customers.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, there's been a lot of talk about AI, I would say a lot of buzz about AI, but it sounds like it's becoming very, very real with this announcement. So could you walk us through what you believe the top use cases will be, how you're going to be able to help and participate and really leverage the network?

Raju Malhotra

>> Yeah, so you're absolutely right. I mean, AI is real. I mean, there are a lot of things that are very buzzy and not quite real, but I think AI is definitely having a monumental impact on everything. But particularly for the type of business that we focus on. Professional services is very human business, very workflow intensive business, so we believe this is going to be a huge area of impact for AI. And in many ways this is really an evolution for AI from having AI assistants, chatbots, to AI advisors where you actually get recommendations, to now having AI agents that in fact automate the workflow for you. So one of the key use cases that we're going to be talking more at DreamForce is having a semi-autonomous or autonomous customer service agent, customer success agent that really augments the customer success team and provides a lot of value to the professional services organization in automating a lot of tasks instead of just advising or assisting on those tasks.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, let's talk about that because I think there's also a little bit of... There's been a lot of anticipation about how AI will change the world, etc. And the risk of maybe taking jobs away. But in this case, what I'm hearing is very different. What you are saying is you're looking at incremental value. So let's talk about that. Is the role of the professional service organization changing? Are you going to need more people, less people? Is it taking jobs away or is it on the other hand actually adding incremental value to deliver a very different result that would be better than if you didn't use it?

Raju Malhotra

>> Yeah, so it seems that it would be very complimentary and it would add a lot of incremental value, probably a lot of step value on top of what we as humans have been able to do in the personas that Certinia serves. So for professional services, for resource managers, project managers, and also for customer success, for customer success managers, we really look at the role of AI as supporting the CSM team, supporting the resource manager team, and amplifying the impact that they would not be able to have otherwise. So there is this old kind of paradox that what's easy for humans is difficult for AI, and what's difficult for AI is actually easy for humans. I think this works very well when we have the agents actually in service of humans and effectively provide the level of impact to amplify what they're trying to do. Be it to engage with many, many accounts that you may not be able to reach yourself because you only have so much time in the day, and use the AI agent to support that, flag some issues for you, call out some areas of improvements. And then really enable the human CSM, the customer success manager to be very effective when that time comes to meet face-to-face or through video call with that customer.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Got it. So let's break this down a little more in terms of workflow improvements and maybe some metrics or expected metrics. What does that translate into? If I'm either a professional services organization within a large organization or just an actual service provider, what does that mean? What can I expect?

Raju Malhotra

>> The metrics are very much what our customers care about. They care about growing their revenue, retaining their customers, keeping their customers satisfied and happy so they keep having that renewal opportunity and discussions. And be able to do all that in a very profitable, margin-positive way. I think that's really the beauty of applying AI and really applying Agentforce platform to provide that bazooka to the human team in a way that puts all those achievement of those metrics much more of a reality than it might be able to do by hiring more humans and actually training them and onboarding them. Now you can actually have the CSM team, the professional services team, your financial team, really focus on the creative discussions, having the value discussions, the specific discussions for that context for their customer, and really automate the workflow that is in service of those conversations.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So workflow automation, obviously it's been one of these hard-to-achieve objectives because of the complications that sometimes it brings about the need for integrations, lots of code, and of course that breaks all the time. We've heard that from others today. Do you see that the use of Agentforce and your platform in combination will actually simplify the use of the platform overall and amplify it? And then I'd love to talk about best practices after that.

Raju Malhotra

>> Yeah, so first of all, you're absolutely right. It would simplify and it would amplify. If I could make one distinction, and it may actually... A little bit of a nuance, but I think it's a very important nuance. On the Salesforce ecosystem, we have a ton of integrations. In the enterprise world, we have a lot of integrations and oftentimes they work well. I would love the integrations to be way more prolific, et cetera. Where Certinia distinguishes itself is that we are native on the Salesforce platform. So by using Agentforce, really in conjunction with our PS Cloud and CS Cloud, we are effectively providing our customers and opportunity to have a very native experience. So there is no other integrations, there are no other sort of APIs here involved. We are effectively on the platform, really making that experience shine up for our customers. So I think that nuance actually plays out very well in terms of productivity, in terms of automation, in terms of the innovation we can deliver to the customers on Salesforce platform by being a native ISV, one of the largest native ISVs on the platform. So I would say that itself is going to be a big driver for amplifying and simplifying the impact that our customers can expect.

Christophe Bertrand

>> It has to be a top differentiator, obviously, and clearly it's resonating with your customer base. Tell me a little bit more about your customers. Maybe give me a quick example of how you've helped them and what do you think the future looks like based on this new innovation and this new announcement?

Raju Malhotra

>> Yeah, so Certinia has over 1,400 customers, enterprise customers, B2B, that are using our products. About 10% of those customers are really large customers. They have over a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue. So we're talking about our customers using Certinia in a highly scalable, highly extensive way. So we really kind of push the boundaries of what the Salesforce platform can do for you, and effectively provide a level of performance and scale that is unlike most of the companies really for the target industry that we serve, which is professional services. So within the professional services we have customers like PWC or IBM, they are consulting-based, advisory, pure play, professional services organizations. And then we also have a large number of technology companies that have professional services as a big part of their overall charter. So that's where Philips, Siemens, Cisco and Salesforce would be in that sort of category. And how we help them is effectively by A, I think bridging the gap between the sales opportunity, so services automation to service delivery. We have services CPQ, resource management, project management, time and materials, et cetera features. And in fact, one of the recent announcements we also made last week is we went general availability for CS Cloud, Customer Success Cloud, which is adjacent product to our PS Cloud, the Professional Services Cloud, and really extends the value of a project-based delivery to an ongoing relationship that we can help our customers. Pretty much in the same kind of value proposition, which is still about helping professional services organizations deliver their projects and deliver their services on an ongoing basis through PS Cloud and CS Cloud.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Got it. Well, so in closing, I'm curious, can you reveal a little bit more about your roadmap? What do you have coming up next? To the extent that you can tell us.

Raju Malhotra

>> Yeah, no, absolutely. I will be happy to share some of the highlights. Given a lot of folks here are at Dreamforce, I would encourage them to go to Certinia.com/dreamforce. We have a number of sessions where we go through our product roadmap this week in more detail. We'll also put it online after this week is over. So we will be very much more detailed and available for answering any questions that folks may have about roadmap, but we really have some of the major priorities for us. Number one is to stay best-in-class on professional services and provide the performance and scale for the enterprise-level growth. That may work for mid-market customers, that may work for other customers too, but really it provides a level of support, level of performance for really, really large customers, so it can actually scale down very easily. We also have focus on customer success and we provide a financial excellence, which really provides the profitability and reporting, predictability and availability for our tools. And I would say one of the most recent ones and one of the more exciting parts of our roadmap, which we'll get into more detail, is about Agentforce. It's really about thinking how we can apply what the power of AI is available to us, all the way from predictive AI to generative AI, to now agent AI. Where we don't just provide assistance or advice about, hey, this would be nice for you to do, or this is a summary of your proposal, or this is helpful for your workflow. We effectively provide our customers an ability to actually get some tasks done by engaging with their end users directly. So that's very exciting. At the end of the day, I think it's really about using AI in service of the use cases that we have and staying focused on what our customers care about. That's really how we think about roadmap.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, with these great words of wisdom, I'm going to thank you so much Raju for joining us, and I'm going to thank you for joining theCUBE. My name is Christophe Bertrand, I'm a principal analyst here at theCUBE Research. We are covering Dreamforce 2024 here in San Francisco at the New York Stock Exchange Office. Thank you very much. See you the next one.

Raju Malhotra

>> Thank you.