Certinia bakes AI into its latest professional services updates

Visualization is a key part of the new release, according to Certinia’s briefing. There, the company showed off a series of dashboards that enable users to perform tasks such as synchronize employee schedules in response to customer requests, track whether billable elements of a project have been sitting idle or not, and keep a running comparison of a project’s current revenue compared to earlier estimates.

The company’s core offerings are designed to provide tracking, metrics, and a host of other administrative functionality to companies too large to offer services like IT contracting or marketing projects on a purely ad hoc basis, but too small to contract with global systems integrators like PwC or Accenture, according to ISG research director Stephen Hurrell. Certinia has been largely successful at that, as building its platform on top of Salesforce offered several key advantages that have helped sharpen the company’s focus.

“They’ve done a good job utilizing the Salesforce capabilities,” Hurrell said. “Rather than building from scratch with a database, where you have to build all the administration capability, they can piggyback and leverage what Salesforce has built.”

The considerations for providing streamlined professional software to a services-based company are very different than those involved in a more product-based company, he noted. Resource allocation is a more complicated task for service providers, and order management and supply chains are less of an issue.

“If you’re selling one-time goods, then you’re taking an order and that order might have a complication, or maybe a fulfillment issue,” Hurrell said. “But that’s it, you know?”

The key advantage in Certinia’s newest release, he said, is mainly its use of AI to gain a deeper understanding of a given project and avoid risk.