Executive Intelligence podcast - Certinia founder Deb Ashton on the changing services business, learning from customers, and seizing opportunities as they come

Deb Ashton is no stranger to change in the technology industry. Two decades ago, she was a key member of the team at Coda, a client-server software vendor with a market-leading enterprise financials product, when it launched a cloud-native financials offering built on the Salesforce platform — one of eight pioneer AppExchange ISVs. That product span out into its own independent venture, known then as FinancialForce. Now renamed Certinia and still running on the Salesforce platform, it has become a leading vendor of professional services automation, financials and customer success management for services businesses. Ashton remains on board as its Founder and SVP, Strategic Customer Experience.

Today, the services industry faces similar challenges to those that the software industry experienced in the shift to SaaS during those heady days when FinancialForce first launched. In this Executive Intelligence podcast, which we recorded last month, she tells me:

I think it was a pivotal moment, and a huge transformation happened then back then, similar perhaps to the transformations that we're starting to go through today...

Traditionally, concepts like customer success and net revenue retention were very much the focused KPIs of a SaaS company. That's changing. They are now metrics as we look at the services organizations. They are starting to transition from time-and-materials and fixed-price to more recurring revenue streams.

I think that we will continue to see that shift from services organizations delivering these one-off projects to providing continuous value — driving different approaches to pricing, revenue models, revenue recognition.

Advances in AI are accelerating the pace of change, with many in the services industry anticipating that much of the routine work previously charged by the hour will now be done by autonomous agents. This has repercussions for existing services business models. She explains:

One of the challenges that we're going to have as we deploy agents alongside humans, is how you price for that work, because you're no longer governed by hours on a time card... When you've got technology delivering things, the way you price has to be different because you've got zero hours effectively, and then that has ramifications on how you manage revenue recognition, which is typically driven through hours and time.

So there's a lot of things that we need to consider in how Certinia delivers their solutions, to ensure that our customers have got the flexibility to manage these new engagements that bring together the agentic workforce alongside the human workforce.

At times of change, there's also opportunity — particularly for up-and-coming newcomers, who can often adapt more quickly than the established market incumbents. That was certainly the case in the early days of SaaS and cloud, which enabled the likes of Salesforce and Workday to challenge the established enterprise application leaders of the time, while the pureplay cloud services providers that helped implement their solutions also grew rapidly. Does the shift in the services industry and the advent of AI create a similar opportunity today? Ashton believes it does, but it will be seized by those organizations whose operations are ready to move fast. She says:

In order for those midmarket organizations to compete and for AI to level the playing field, there are certain things that need to be done in order they can be successful — such as having a unified data platform, rather than disconnected silo solutions; focusing on practical AI applications that solve real problems; and having the agility and ability within the organization to implement and iterate quickly, to move quickly and change and evolve as you go, as you take on new learnings.

Keeping in touch with customers and listening to their feedback has been a big part of Ashton's various roles throughout her career. When everything is in so much flux it's even more important to hear your customers' perspectives on how they're adapting. Speaking about her recent interactions with executives on Certinia's customer advisory board, she tells me:

What was interesting is almost every organization is going through some form of digital transformation. Learning that fixed-price contracts, time-and-materials contracts, are going to be replaced over time with managed services type contracts, and our customers' customers are looking for them to deliver outcomes and to deliver value — that's driving changes to how you plan services engagements and how you price for those services engagements. I do think we're in a very transformational period right now, and partly about that is influenced by AI and the changing dynamics of the customer requirements, and what's important to customers right now and the value that they want to see from their vendors.

Looking back, it's clear that listening to customers has been a constant theme throughout her career — including the origins of Certinia. She elaborates:

Blending that customer interaction, the customer requirements and business strategy, and then helping understand the themes and what we can do as an organization to improve the experiences our customers have, ultimately led me to co-found Certinia with [Coda's then CEO] Jeremy [Roche] ...

Building a solution to manage services, delivery, customer success and financials around the sales and service element was just completely unique when we did it. It remains a key differentiator for our solutions today, and something that we continue to innovate and iterate on. I think it continues to be a core part of who I am and what I'm passionate about.

And that's not something that can be replaced by AI and automation, she adds:

An executive hearing about a customer who had a poor support experience or a handoff didn't go well between sales and service, you can't deliver that information through a spreadsheet. Hearing that and having the opportunity to hear that directly from customers is really important for our organization.

Listen to the full podcast or click the embedded player at the top of this story to hear more about the changes coming to services businesses today and the parallels with the emergence of SaaS, the impact of AI, and Ashton's own experiences navigating change and opportunity in the technology industry.

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