Certinia co-founder discusses generative AI for ERP, Salesforce

Salesforce users aren't the only ones who get agents to automate work in the wake of this year's Dreamforce: customers who use partners' cloud services do, too.

Certinia Senior Vice President Deb Ashton has seen the company she co-founded in 2009 evolve into Salesforce's largest partner. Certinia, known as FinancialForce until it changed its name in May 2023, has specialized in ERP, including accounting, project management, professional services automation (PSA) and HCM for Salesforce customers.

Last month at Dreamforce, the company rolled out CS Cloud, a customer success suite for its professional services users. In this Q&A, Ashton discusses the yearlong transition from pure financials to amore, as well as generative AI's role in Certinia's future as it competes with the likes of NetSuite, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics and Workday.

Editor's note: this Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Salesforce was a lot smaller in 2009. How has Certinia evolved along with Salesforce?

Deb Ashton

Deb Ashton: Salesforce does look a lot different. When we first started partnering with Salesforce, they would rent a theater in San Francisco for Dreamforce. Now they completely take over the city, with tens of thousands of people. The breadth of the portfolio evolved from CRM to a platform. Then, Marketing Cloud was a huge extension to the portfolio. They then went more into analytics and now AI into agents, with the Agentforce pivot at Dreamforce.

We work really hard to maintain a deep partnership with Salesforce at all levels: at the senior leadership and executive team level, with the product organization, the support organization and the customer success team, so that we are navigating products they're deploying and the platform features that they're deploying. We're continually looking at how we can improve the experiences our customers have from those enhancements.

What changes led to end of the strong FinancialForce brand and renaming yourselves Certinia?

Ashton: We had built a brand around FinancialForce; that name was pervasive throughout the products. We were financials to begin with. We expanded into ERP. We expanded into professional services automation -- we increased investment quite significantly in PSA over the years, while maintaining investment in ERP. With the FinancialForce name came an obstacle: If you're called FinancialForce, then why are you selling us a professional services automation tool? Getting into the [sales] conversation was becoming more and more challenging over time, so we decided to rebrand the organization.

We did a research exercise into the new name and landed on Certinia as a take on certainty based on feedback from customers and the market. We saw Customer Success Cloud as a logical extension to help our customers manage more of the customer lifecycle. We wanted to provide support for the end-to-end customer engagement, not just the professional services but all the way through to renewal.

There are a lot of ERP vendors that target professional services firms. Which ones, size-wise, do you target, and who are you competing with?

Ashton: We target PS Cloud predominantly to either consulting organizations or technology companies with a large professional services part of their organization that could be software or hardware businesses. That's where we see the majority of our customers, and that's where I'll say we have a sweet spot.

We also have customers in clinical research, healthcare, advertising and media. But overall, I'd say that among technology or services type organizations, we've been very successful with our PS cloud solution in the midmarket space -- 200 to 1,000 employees, as well as the enterprise.

We see PS Cloud work as a standalone that we offer integrated with other ERP systems such as Oracle Fusion, SAP S/4HANA, Workday.

You're built on Salesforce. A couple of months ago, they announced a partnership with Workday to create a common data foundation for AI. How does that affect what Certinia is doing?

Ashton: That didn't give us any great cause for concern; it was very much focused around how you bring the data together and was sort of built all around the Data Cloud scenario. And we're also, as a partner of Salesforce, able to leverage Data Cloud and the capabilities there with our own solutions.

Workday and Salesforce have been close over the years and have made various partnership announcements. The big difference is Workday's on its own platform. Salesforce has its own platform, and we're built natively on the Salesforce platform. So, where Workday has to put a partnership together so they can then position "with Salesforce," we've got that all prebuilt effectively, because we take advantage of everything Salesforce does.

What did Salesforce's release of Agentforce mean for Certinia?

Ashton: It is an evolution of their AI strategy -- Salesforce went from predictive AI to generative AI, which we leveraged as well. We used Einstein Discovery -- the predictive AI tool, and we built predictive AI capabilities for particular use cases across financials and PS cloud.

Then Salesforce deployed Einstein Copilots to help you assimilate data, and we adapted to that. The "agent" is the evolution of the copilot, which takes you from just being able to summarize and pull data more easily out of the system to actually take action based on that data. Not just to propose the action to the human, but based on guardrails that you define, for the system to actually take actions based on the data that you pulled out of the system.

We were excited about it. We've been following this AI journey with Salesforce. We've been building useful functionality for our customers based on the tools that they're giving us. When they pivoted to agents just before Dreamforce and we were already building out copilots, we jumped on that and were really keen and excited to look at how we could leverage it to deliver value for the Customer Success Cloud module that we were just going [generally available] with, as well as the PS Cloud module.

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him. Jim O'Donnell is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial who covers ERP and other enterprise applications.