Qualtrics, a leading global Voice of Customer (VoC) provider, held its annual X4 conference in May, at the ICC in Sydney. The event included an exclusive media lunch and focused on Qualtrics’ latest announcements and product enhancements, many of which were first unveiled at its US event in March.
The conference combined insights into the company’s technology roadmap with real-world customer success stories, featuring organisations such as KFC, ServiceNow, David Jones, Hilton, and others.
In a world dominated by AI agents, the opportunity lies in building real human connections. The challenge, however, is to do this at scale. Empowering people with AI agents, rather than replacing them, can improve efficiency while also creating space for more empathetic, human-centred interactions, the vendor argues. The theme of building connections and making every connection count came through loud and clear and was weaved through the product announcements.
Here are my key takeaways from attending the conference.
Culture is Key
It was refreshing to see culture take centre stage at a vendor briefing – a critical pillar for CX success that’s too often overlooked in technology conversations.
While technology is critical to enable a successful CX practice and continuously improve customer experience, building a culture of customer centricity must be the foundation for technology to be successful.
It’s critical to break down internal silos to unify data across the organisation and democratise insights. With customer feedback now coming into the organisation through various channels (surveys, calls, emails, social media, etc.), GenAI enables organisations to create a holistic understanding of experiences across all channels and touchpoints. Likewise, that data needs to be shared with the right internal teams to enable continuous improvement opportunities. For that to happen, organisations need to develop a culture of customer centricity and break out of their silo-centric mindset.
Qualtrics Experience Agents
No surprise, Agentic AI has made it into the world of customer feedback with Brad Anderson, President – Products, User Experience, and Engineering, introducing Qualtrics Experience Agents.
Qualtrics has started to develop AI agents and is slowly embedding this capability into the platform. Think about closing the loop with customers, automating small tasks, and proactively identifying issues before we hear about them.
The Experience Agents can respond to customers during the survey process or can be embedded into the digital experience to address problems in real time. Closing the loop with customers, across surveys and other service requests, can be a timely and resource intense undertaking. Qualtrics’ autonomous agents can close the loop with 100% of customers, automatically responding in real time, building empathy and making your customers feel heard.
It’s still early days for Qualtrics’ Experience Agents and I look forward to seeing tangible outcomes of customer implementations. I’m sure we’ll hear more about this over the coming months!
Surveys Just Got Smarter
Qualtrics introduced “agentified” surveys, a new way to respond to verbatim survey feedback, adjust follow up questions accordingly, and turn surveys into conversations.
This is an evolution of what’s referred to as verbatim probing. They represent a new way of getting actionable feedback from customers through AI enabled and adaptive questioning during a survey.
The new technology enhances the insight quality and aims to build empathy with customers. Verbatim responses become richer in value and Qualtrics reports a slight increase in survey completion rates. The aim is to turn surveys into conversations, leaving customers feeling heard and building stronger connections.
Despite the adoption of unsolicited feedback as a source of customer insights, surveys still represent the foundation for any VoC program, and they’re not going to go away any time soon. Enhancing survey capabilities while adding operational and unsolicited feedback to the mix will be key to establishing a deeper understating of customer experience and identifying improvement opportunities.
Show Me the Money
Qualtrics highlights the importance of linking CX initiatives to business outcomes and results to demonstrate ROI and gain buy-in and continued support from key stakeholders.
When VoC programs were first introduced, the main challenge for most organisations was gathering customer feedback. Once that hurdle was overcome – thanks to technology – the next challenge became converting raw data into meaningful insights, especially with the addition of unstructured data sources.
The focus then shifted from insights to identifying and driving action. Mature organisations are now at the stage of tangibly linking CX results to business outcomes and showcasing ROI. Quantifying business impact is an essential step in enabling CX success, yet it is often neglected.
Most organisations are still working on building robust Insights-to-Action frameworks and translating insights into tangible action; efforts often hindered by limited collaboration and a lack of customer-centric culture. For more mature organisations, the challenge now lies in clearly demonstrating the business outcomes and ROI of their CX programs.
Other Announcements
Qualtrics Assist. Alongside other technology giants, Qualtrics’ ‘Assist’ solution is an easy way to query the data in a natural language style, i.e. asking data questions to find insights. This is particularly important for larger data sets that comprise survey and unsolicited feedback, as it significantly speeds up the insight generation process. Analysis that used to take days or weeks, can now be completed in minutes or seconds.
Qualtrics Edge. Qualtrics has started to introduce synthetic data to its Research product suit. It’s a niche market at this stage but certainly growing in popularity as utilising synthetic data, panels and personas not only significantly speeds up the research process but also reduces cost. I’m interested to see market uptake for this. While it’s not new per se, organisations still need to overcome the “trust” hurdle to fully embrace synthetic data and research.
Customer Service and VoC: Boundaries Blur Further
While AI agents have dominated contact centre conversations in recent months, Qualtrics is one of the few VoC vendors now introducing Agentic AI with its Experience Agents.
This is particularly relevant for the digital experience space, where a variety of vendors are offering solutions. Qualtrics’ Experience Agents can detect signs of frustration and rage clicking during digital sessions and proactively engage to close the loop in real time.
It will be interesting to see how the growing number of agents from different vendors ultimately work together in a coordinated way to enhance experiences, rather than introduce new points of friction.
The contact centre has long been a goldmine for customer experience data and insights. Today, tapping into conversational data has become an open field for vendors across VoC, contact centre, and conversational intelligence categories. While this brings innovation, it also complicates decision-making for technology buyers. With vendors from different backgrounds offering overlapping capabilities, often to different internal stakeholders, organisations risk ending up with complex, costly tech stacks.
That said, it’s encouraging to see Qualtrics continue to develop and embed GenAI and Agentic AI into its platform. As a leader in the CX space, it’s setting a high bar for the rest of the market.
At the Agentforce World Tour in Singapore, Salesforce presented their vision for Agentic AI – showcasing how they’re helping customers stay ahead of rapid technological change and unlock stronger business outcomes with speed, trust, and agility.
Ecosystm Advisors, Ullrich Loeffler, Sash Mukherjee, Achim Granzen, and Manish Goenka share their take on Salesforce’s announcements, demos, and messaging, highlighting what resonated, what stood out, and what it means for the future.
Click here to download “Agentforce World Tour: Highlights from Singapore” as a PDF.
What truly stood out in Salesforce’s messaging?
ULLRICH LOEFFLER, CEO & Co-Founder
What stood out at the Salesforce event was their pragmatic, integrated approach to scaling AI. They made it clear AI isn’t plug-and-play, emphasising the complexity and cost involved in what they call ‘self-plumbing’ AI – spanning infrastructure, data management, model development, governance, and application integration. Their answer is a unified platform that lowers costs, accelerates time to market, and reduces risk by removing the need to manage multiple disconnected tools. This seamless environment tackles the real challenge of building and running a layered AI stack.
Equally notable is their view of Agentic AI as a capability refined through iteration, not a sudden overhaul. By urging businesses to start with the right use cases for faster adoption, less disruption, and tangible impact, they show a realistic grasp of enterprise change.
Salesforce offers a clear, practical path to AI: simplifying complexity through integration and driving adoption with measured, value-focused steps.
SASH MUKHERJEE, VP Industry Insights
What truly stood out at the Salesforce event was their unwavering commitment to Trust. They understand that AI agents are only as reliable as the data they use, and they’ve built their platform to address this head-on. Salesforce emphasises that building trusted AI means more than just powerful models; it requires a secure and well-governed data foundation. They highlighted how their platform, with 25 years of embedded security, ensures data resilience, protects sensitive information during development and testing, and provides robust visibility into how AI interacts with your data.
A key assurance is their Trust Layer, a unique innovation that safeguards your data when interacting with AI models. This layer automatically masks sensitive data, ensures zero data retention by LLM providers, and detects harmful language. This means organisations can leverage GenAI’s power without compromising sensitive information.
Ultimately, Salesforce is empowering organisations to confidently deploy AI by making trust non-negotiable, ensuring organisational data is used responsibly and securely to drive real business value.
How does Salesforce differentiate their approach to Agentic AI?
ACHIM GRANZEN, Principal Advisor
Salesforce’s focus on Agentic AI focus stands out for its clarity and depth. The Agentforce platform takes centre stage, demonstrating how clients can now build Agentic AI with little or no code and deploy agents seamlessly across the Salesforce environment.
But beyond the polished demos and compelling customer stories, the most critical takeaway risked being overlooked: Agentforce is not a standalone capability. It’s tightly integrated with Data Cloud and the broader Salesforce platform. That layered architecture is more than just a technical decision; it’s what ensures every AI agent is governed, auditable, and constrained to what’s been provisioned in Data Cloud. It’s the foundational safeguard that makes Agentic AI viable in the enterprise.
And that’s the message that needs greater emphasis. As organisations move from experimentation to real-world deployment, trust and control become just as vital as ease of use. Salesforce’s architecture delivers both – and that balance is a key differentiator in the crowded enterprise AI space.
MANISH GOENKA, Principal Advisor
Salesforce has moved beyond passive AI assistance to autonomous agents that can take meaningful action within trusted boundaries. Rather than focusing solely on chat-based copilots, Salesforce emphasises intelligent agents embedded into business workflows, capable of executing tasks like claims processing or personalised service without human intervention.
What sets Salesforce apart is how deeply this vision is integrated into their platform. With Einstein Copilot and Copilot Studio, customers can build their own cross-system agents, not just those limited to Salesforce apps. And by enabling partners to create and monetise agents via AppExchange, Salesforce is building a full-fledged AI ecosystem, positioning themselves as a platform for enterprise AI, not just a CRM.
Trust is a cornerstone of this approach. Salesforce’s focus on governance, auditability, and ethical AI ensures that Agentic AI is not only powerful, but also secure and accountable – key concerns as agents become more autonomous.
In a crowded AI space, Salesforce stands out by offering a grounded, scalable vision of Agentic AI, anchored in real use cases, platform extensibility, and responsible innovation.
Where are Salesforce’s biggest growth opportunities in APAC?
MANISH GOENKA
Salesforce has significant growth opportunities across Asia Pacific, with Singapore playing a pivotal role in its regional strategy. The company’s USD 1 billion investment and the launch of their first overseas AI research hub firmly position Singapore as more than just a sales market. It becomes a core engine for product innovation and a key driver of Salesforce’s long-term AI leadership.
Across the region, public sector transformation and SME digitisation represent major areas of opportunity. Salesforce’s secure and compliant Government Cloud is well suited to support Smart Nation goals and modernise public digital services. At the same time, governments are actively pushing SME digitisation, creating demand for scalable, modular platforms that can grow from basic CRM solutions to AI-enabled automation.
Sustainability is also emerging as a strong growth vector. As ESG reporting becomes commonplace in more markets, tools like Net Zero Cloud are well positioned to help businesses meet compliance requirements and improve data transparency.
Finally, the rapidly expanding ecosystem of certified professionals and ISV partners across Asia Pacific is enabling faster, more localised implementations. This grounds Salesforce’s capabilities in local context, accelerating time to value and delivering business outcomes that are tailored to the region’s diverse needs.
What does the Informatica acquisition mean for Salesforce’s AI strategy?
ACHIM GRANZEN
The planned acquisition of Informatica is a strategically important move that completes Salesforce’s Agentforce narrative. At the World Tour, Agentforce was positioned as the future of enterprise AI, allowing organisations to build and deploy autonomous agents across the Salesforce ecosystem. But some lingering concerns remained around how deeply Data Cloud could handle governance, especially as AI agents begin making decisions and executing tasks without human oversight.
Informatica answers that question. With proven tools for data quality, lineage, and policy enforcement, Informatica brings a level of governance maturity that complements Salesforce’s ambition. Its integration into Data Cloud strengthens the trust layer that underpins Agentforce and reinforces Salesforce’s positioning as an enterprise-grade AI platform.
Of course, there are broader implications too. Salesforce will gain access to Informatica’s installed base, potentially opening up cross-sell opportunities. And there are questions to resolve, such as how Informatica will operate as a product line within the larger Salesforce ecosystem.
But the core value of the deal is clear: by bringing Informatica’s governance expertise into the fold, Salesforce can significantly accelerate its ability to deliver trusted, production-ready AI at scale. From a risk and compliance standpoint, that governance capability may prove to be the most valuable part of the acquisition.
What will define Salesforce’s next chapter of growth in APAC?
SASH MUKHERJEE
Just as Salesforce is driving an integrated enterprise platform from the CRM and customer experience lens, competitors (and partners) are taking a similar platform-centric approach from other functional vantage points – whether it’s HR (like Workday), Finance (like Oracle), or IT (like ServiceNow). In fast-growing, cost-sensitive markets across APAC, competing on price alone won’t be sustainable, especially with strong regional players offering leaner, localised alternatives.
To win, Salesforce must adopt a nuanced strategy that goes beyond product breadth. This means addressing local economic realities – offering right-sized solutions for businesses at different stages of digital maturity – while consistently reinforcing the long-term value, resilience, and global standards that set Salesforce apart. Their differentiators in data security, compliance, and ecosystem depth must be positioned not as add-ons, but as essential foundations for future-ready growth.
More flexible entry points – whether modular offerings, usage-based pricing, or vertical-specific bundles – can reduce friction and make the platform more accessible. At the same time, strengthening local partnerships with ISVs, system integrators, and government bodies can help tailor offerings to market-specific needs, ensuring relevance and faster implementation.
Ultimately, Salesforce’s growth across APAC will depend on their ability to balance global strengths with local agility.
ULLRICH LOEFFLER
Salesforce is well positioned to lead in AI-driven transformation, but doing so will require evolving their sales approach to match the complexity and expectations of today’s enterprise buyers. With a strong foundation selling to marketing and customer leaders, the company now has an opportunity to deepen engagement with CIOs and CTOs, reframing themselves not just as a CRM provider, but as a full-spectrum enterprise platform.
Traditional sales reps who excel at pitching features to business users are no longer enough. Selling AI – particularly agentic, autonomous AI – demands sales professionals who can link technical capabilities to strategic outcomes and lead conversations around risk, compliance, and long-term value.
To sustain their leadership, Salesforce will need to invest in a new generation of sales talent: domain-fluent, consultative, and able to navigate complex, cross-functional buying journeys.
GenAI AI has truly transformed content creation by automating text, image, and video generation from simple prompts, slashing the time and skills once needed. Canva leads this shift, blending an intuitive interface with expansive templates and cutting-edge AI tools. This empowers anyone – individuals or businesses – to produce professional-quality visuals with ease, breaking down barriers and making design truly accessible.
Canva’s “Create 2025” event in Los Angeles showcased its evolution from a simple design tool into a full enterprise platform for productivity, content creation, collaboration, and brand management – embedding visual communication across the modern workplace. For tech teams, marketers, and leaders, this shift brings opportunity but also demands careful strategy, integration, and governance to unlock Canva’s full potential in enterprise settings.
Canva Create 2025: Key Announcements
Visual Suite 2.0: A Unified Workspace & Single Design Canvas. Canva unveiled Visual Suite 2.0, a seamless platform combining presentations, documents, whiteboards, spreadsheets, and video editing into one design canvas. This unified workspace helps organisations streamline workflows, eliminate tool fragmentation, and ensure consistent visual communication across teams.
Canva Sheets: Where Data Meets Design. Canva Sheets reimagines the spreadsheet by focusing on visualising data with rich charts, colour-coded cells, smart templates, automation, and AI-powered insights. Designed for teams that share data rather than just analyse it, Sheets empowers every user – including the “data shy” – to become a confident data analyst.
Canva AI: GenAI for the Creative Enterprise. The enhanced Magic Studio integrates AI-driven writing, image editing, template creation, and video animation into one toolset. Features like Magic Write, Magic Design, and Magic Animate enable teams to create branded, engaging content at scale – quickly and cost-effectively – across the entire Canva platform.
Canva Code: Low/No-Code Interactive Content. Canva Code enables users to build interactive content such as calculators, quizzes, websites, apps, and chatbots without complex coding. Combining this with Canva’s design and brand management tools lets teams create on-brand digital experiences and publish them to customers in minutes – transforming everyone into a coder and accelerating customer-facing innovation.
Why Enterprises Should Adopt Canva
Canva’s evolution into an enterprise platform offers several key advantages for larger organisations:
- Streamlined Workflows. A unified workspace and single design canvas cuts the need to switch between tools, boosting efficiency and team collaboration.
- Brand Consistency at Scale. Centralised brand controls and template governance ensure all content – from marketing to regional sales – stays on-brand. For example, eXp Realty’s central design team creates assets that agents nationwide confidently use, maintaining brand integrity.
- Scalable Content Creation. GenAI accelerates content creation and localisation, while Canva Sheets lets designers update assets at scale, reducing days of work to a single click.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration. By making design accessible, Canva empowers marketing, operations, sales, and finance teams to collaborate seamlessly on visuals, cutting bottlenecks.
- Lower Barriers to Creativity. With an easy-to-learn platform, more employees can contribute to visual storytelling without needing design expertise.
Beyond Licensing: Strategic Enterprise Adoption
Successful enterprise adoption of tools such as Canva goes beyond licensing – it requires organisational change. Here’s how enterprises can prepare:
1. Integration with the Digital Workplace Ecosystem
Enterprises must integrate new platforms with the broader toolset employees use daily. Without this, they risk becoming just another siloed app, limiting adoption and ROI.
- Enable SSO and identity management (e.g. via Azure AD or Okta).
- Integrate with storage platforms like SharePoint, Google Drive, or Box.
- Connect to collaboration and productivity tools such as Slack, Teams, Trello, and Salesforce.
2. Structured Training and Enablement
Though intuitive, enterprise features require tailored training to boost adoption and build a self-sustaining user community. Customers benefit from dedicated support – including brand kit setup, onboarding, billing, SSO configuration, and company-wide training with a dedicated Customer Success Manager.
- Deliver role-based training for marketers, HR, sales, and support.
- Establish champions in each business unit to drive adoption.
- Provide regular updates and tips as new features launch.
3. Design Governance and Brand Control
Enterprises must address concerns around brand fragmentation. This ensures that the platform acts as brand enabler – not a brand risk.
- Set up Brand Kits to enforce logos, fonts, and colours.
- Use locked templates for consistency while enabling localisation.
- Create layered permission structures to reflect organisational hierarchy.
4. Data Security, Compliance and Governance
As with any enterprise SaaS platform, security and compliance must be foundational and built into the rollout plan from day one.
- Understand data residency and privacy policies.
- Use admin controls, usage analytics, and audit logs to maintain oversight.
- Define clear policies for external sharing and publishing.
5. Defining Success Metrics
Adoption should be measured by capturing metrics that enable IT and marketing leaders to demonstrate value to the C-suite.
- Benchmark operations before and after rollout.
- Track usage, asset creation, and publishing speed.
- Monitor template use versus freeform content to gauge brand adherence.
- Survey users on productivity improvements and satisfaction.
Driving Adoption and Innovation: The Tech Team’s Mandate
For the success of tools such as Canva in enterprise settings, technology teams must move beyond gatekeeping and become proactive enablers of adoption and innovation. This involves integrating them smoothly with identity management, storage, productivity, and collaboration tools to deliver a seamless user experience. At the same time, they must enforce strict security and access controls, manage user provisioning, and monitor usage to ensure compliance and safeguard sensitive data.
But technology’s role doesn’t stop at governance. Teams need to set clear internal service standards, build strong vendor relationships, and drive consistent rollout across the organisation. Crucially, they should partner with business units to co-develop templates, embed these tools into daily workflows, and experiment with new features like AI-powered design, localisation, and self-service content creation.
Ecosystm Opinion
Canva is no longer just a tool for simple social posts or pitch decks; with its latest updates at Create 2025, it has evolved into a core platform for modern, visual-first enterprise communication. To fully realise this potential, organisations must approach Canva like any other critical enterprise platform – implementing the right structure, strategy, security, and support. For companies aiming to empower teams, speed up content creation, and maintain brand consistency at scale, Canva is now poised to take centre stage.
As AI adoption continues to surge, the tech infrastructure market is undergoing a significant transformation. Traditional IT infrastructure providers are facing increasing pressure to innovate and adapt to the evolving demands of AI-powered applications. This shift is driving the development of new technologies and solutions that can support the intensive computational requirements and data-intensive nature of AI workloads.
At Lenovo’s recently held Asia Pacific summit in Shanghai they detailed their ‘AI for All’ strategy as they prepare for the next computing era. Building on their history as a major force in the hardware market, new AI-ready offerings will be prominent in their enhanced portfolio.
At the same time, Lenovo is adding software and services, both homegrown and with partners, to leverage their already well-established relationships with client IT teams. Sustainability is also a crucial message as it seeks to address the need for power efficiency and zero waste lifecycle management in their products.
Ecosystm Advisor Darian Bird comment on Lenovo’s recent announcements and messaging.
Click here to download Lenovo’s Innovation Roadmap: Takeaways from the APAC Analyst Summit as a PDF
1. Lenovo’s AI Strategy
Lenovo’s AI strategy focuses on launching AI PCs that leverage their computing legacy.
As the adoption of GenAI increases, there’s a growing need for edge processing to enhance privacy and performance. Lenovo, along with Microsoft, is introducing AI PCs with specialised components like CPUs, GPUs, and AI accelerators (NPUs) optimised for AI workloads.
Energy efficiency is vital for AI applications, opening doors for mobile-chip makers like Qualcomm. Lenovo’s latest ThinkPads, featuring Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processors, support Microsoft’s Copilot+ features while maximising battery life during AI tasks.
Lenovo is also investing in small language models (SLMs) that run directly on laptops, offering GenAI capabilities with lower resource demands. This allows users to interact with PCs using natural language for tasks like file searches, tech support, and personal management.
2. Lenovo’s Computer Vision Solutions
Lenovo stands out as one of the few computing hardware vendors that manufactures its own systems.
Leveraging precision engineering, Lenovo has developed solutions to automate production lines. By embedding computer vision in processes like quality inspection, equipment monitoring, and safety supervision, Lenovo customises ML algorithms using customer-specific data. Clients like McLaren Automotive use this technology to detect flaws beyond human capability, enhancing product quality and speeding up production.
Lenovo extends their computer vision expertise to retail, partnering with Sensormatic and Everseen to digitise branch operations. By analysing camera feeds, Lenovo’s solutions optimise merchandising, staffing, and design, while their checkout monitoring system detects theft and scanning errors in real-time. Australian customers have seen significant reductions in retail shrinkage after implementation.
3. AI in Action: Autonomous Robots
Like other hardware companies, Lenovo is experimenting with new devices to futureproof their portfolio.
Earlier this year, Lenovo unveiled the Daystar Bot GS, a six-legged robotic dog and an upgrade from their previous wheeled model. Resembling Boston Dynamics’ Spot but with added legs inspired by insects for enhanced stability, the bot is designed for challenging environments. Lenovo is positioning it as an automated monitoring assistant for equipment inspection and surveillance, reducing the need for additional staff. Power stations in China are already using the robot to read meters, detect temperature anomalies, and identify defective equipment.
Although it is likely to remain a niche product in the short term, the robot is an avenue for Lenovo to showcase their AI wares on a physical device, incorporating computer vision and self-guided movement.
Considerations for Lenovo’s Future Growth
Lenovo outlined an AI vision leveraging their expertise in end user computing, manufacturing, and retail. While the strategy aligns with Lenovo’s background, they should consider the following:
Hybrid AI. Initially, AI on PCs will address performance and privacy issues, but hybrid AI – integrating data across devices, clouds, and APIs – will eventually dominate.
Data Transparency & Control. The balance between convenience and privacy in AI is still unclear. Evolving transparency and control will be crucial as users adapt to new AI tools.
AI Ecosystem. AI’s value lies in data, applications, and integration, not just hardware. Hardware vendors must form deeper partnerships in these areas, as Lenovo’s focus on industry-specific solutions demonstrates.
Enhanced Experience. AI enhances operational efficiency and customer experience. Offloading level one support to AI not only cuts costs but also resolves issues faster than live agents.
The increasing alignment between IT and business functions, while crucial for organisational success, complicates the management of enterprise systems. Tech leaders must balance rapidly evolving business needs with maintaining system stability and efficiency. This dynamic adds pressure to deliver agility while ensuring long-term ERP health, making management increasingly complex.
As tech providers such as SAP enhance their capabilities and products, they will impact business processes, technology skills, and the tech landscape.
At SAP NOW Southeast Asia in Singapore, SAP presented their future roadmap, with a focus on empowering their customers to transform with agility. Ecosystm Advisors Sash Mukherjee and Tim Sheedy provide insights on SAP’s recent announcements and messaging.
Click here to download SAP NOW Southeast Asia: Highlights
What was your key takeaway from the event?
TIM SHEEDY. SAP is making a strong comeback in Asia Pacific, ramping up their RISE with SAP program after years of incremental progress. The focus is on transitioning customers from complex, highly customised legacy systems to cloud ERP, aligning with the region’s appetite for simplifying core processes, reducing customisations, and leveraging cloud benefits. Many on-prem SAP users have fallen behind on updates due to over-customisation, turning even minor upgrades into major projects – and SAP’s offerings aim to solve for these challenges.
SASH MUKHERJEE. A standout feature of the session was the compelling customer case studies. Unlike many industry events where customer stories can be generic, the stories shared were examples of SAP’s impact. From Mitr Phol’s use of SAP RISE to enhance farm-to-table transparency to CP Group’s ambitious sustainability goals aligned with the SBTi, and Standard Chartered Bank’s focus on empowering data analytics teams, these testimonials offered concrete illustrations of SAP’s value proposition.
How is SAP integrating AI into their offerings?
TIM SHEEDY. SAP, like other tech platforms, is ramping up their AI capabilities – but with a twist.
They are not only highlighting GenAI but also emphasising their predictive AI features. SAP’s approach focuses on embedded AI, integrating it directly into systems and processes to offer low-risk, user-friendly solutions.
Joule, their AI copilot, is enterprise-ready, providing seamless integration with SAP backend systems and meeting strict compliance standards like GDPR and SOC-II. By also integrating with Microsoft 365, Joule extends its reach to daily tools like Outlook, Teams, Word, and Excel.
While SAP AI may lack the flash of other platforms, it is designed for SAP users – managers and board members – who prioritise consistency, reliability, and auditability alongside business value.
What is the value proposition of SAP’s Clean Core?
SASH MUKHERJEE. SAP’s Clean Core marks a strategic shift in ERP management.
Traditionally, businesses heavily customised SAP to meet specific needs, resulting in complex and costly IT landscapes. Clean Core advocates for a standardised system with minimal customisations, offering benefits like increased agility, lower costs, and reduced risk during upgrades. However, necessary customisations can still be achieved using SAP’s BTP.
The move to the Clean Core is often driven by CEO mandates, as legacy SAP solutions have become too complex to fully leverage data. For example, an Australian mining company reduced customisations from 27,000 to 200, and Standard Chartered Bank used Clean Core data to launch a carbon program within four months.
However, the transition can be challenging and will require enhanced developer productivity, expansion of tooling, and clear migration paths.
How is SAP shifting their partner strategy?
As SAP customers face significant transformations, tech partners – cloud hyperscalers, systems integrators, consulting firms and managed services providers – will play a crucial role in executing these changes before SAP ECC loses support in 2027.
TIM SHEEDY. SAP has always relied on partners for implementations, but with fewer large-scale upgrade projects in recent years, many partner teams have shrunk. Recognising this, SAP is working to upskill partners on RISE with SAP. This effort aims to ensure they can effectively manage and optimise the modern Cloud ERP platform, utilise assets, templates, accelerators, and tools for rapid migration, and foster continuous innovation post-migration. The availability of these skills in the market will be essential for SAP customers to ensure successful transitions to the Cloud ERP platform.
SASH MUKHERJEE. SAP’s partner strategy emphasises business transformation over technology migration. This shift requires partners to focus on delivering measurable business outcomes rather than solely selling technology. Given the prevalence of partner-led sales in Southeast Asia, there is a need to empower partners with tools and resources to effectively communicate the value proposition to business decision-makers. While RISE certifications will be beneficial for larger partners, a significant portion of the market comprises SMEs that rely on smaller, local partners – and they will need support mechanisms too.
What strategies should SAP prioritise to maintain market leadership?
TIM SHEEDY. Any major platform change gives customers an opportunity to explore alternatives.
Established players like Oracle, Microsoft, and Salesforce are aggressively pursuing the ERP market. Meanwhile, industry-specific solutions, third-party support providers, and even emerging technologies like those offered by ServiceNow are challenging the traditional ERP landscape.
However, SAP has made significant strides in easing the transition from legacy platforms and is expected to continue innovating around RISE with SAP. By offering incentives and simplifying migration, SAP aims to retain their customer base. While SAP’s focus on renewal and migration could pose challenges for growth, the company’s commitment to execution suggests they will retain most of their customers. GROW with SAP is likely to be a key driver of new business, particularly in mid-sized organisations, especially if SAP can tailor offerings for the cost-sensitive markets in the region.
As AI evolves, the supporting infrastructure has become a crucial consideration for organisations and technology companies alike. AI demands massive processing power and efficient data handling, making high-performance computing clusters and advanced data management systems essential. Scalability, efficiency, security, and reliability are key to ensuring AI systems handle increasing demands and sensitive data responsibly.
Data centres must evolve to meet the increasing demands of AI and growing data requirements.
Equinix recently hosted technology analysts at their offices and data centre facilities in Singapore and Sydney to showcase how they are evolving to maintain their leadership in the colocation and interconnection space.
Equinix is expanding in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific. In Asia Pacific, they recently opened data centres in Kuala Lumpur and Johor Bahru, with capacity additions in Mumbai, Sydney, Melbourne, Tokyo, and Seoul. Plans for the next 12 months include expanding in existing cities and entering new ones, such as Chennai and Jakarta.
Ecosystm analysts comment on Equinix’s growth potential and opportunities in Asia Pacific.
Small Details, Big Impact
TIM SHEEDY. The tour of the new Equinix data centre in Sydney revealed the complexity of modern facilities. For instance, the liquid cooling system, essential for new Nvidia chipsets, includes backup cold water tanks for redundancy. Every system and process is designed with built-in redundancy.
As power needs grow, so do operational and capital costs. The diesel generators at the data centre, comparable to a small power plant, are supported by multiple fuel suppliers from several regions in Sydney to ensure reliability during disasters.
Security is critical, with some areas surrounded by concrete walls extending from the ceiling to the floor, even restricting access to Equinix staff.
By focusing on these details, Equinix enables customers to quickly set up and manage their environments through a self-service portal, delivering a cloud-like experience for on-premises solutions.
Equinix’s Commitment to the Environment
ACHIM GRANZEN. Compute-intensive AI applications challenge data centres’ “100% green energy” pledges, prompting providers to seek additional green measures. Equinix addresses this through sustainable design and green energy investments, including liquid cooling and improved traditional cooling. In Singapore, one of Equinix’s top 3 hubs, the company partnered with the government and Sembcorp to procure solar power from panels on public buildings. This improves Equinix’s power mix and supports Singapore’s renewable energy sector.
TIM SHEEDY Building and operating data centres sustainably is challenging. While the basics – real estate, cooling, and communications – remain, adding proximity to clients, affordability, and 100% renewable energy complicates matters. In Australia, reliant on a mixed-energy grid, Equinix has secured 151 MW of renewable energy from Victoria’s Golden Plains Wind Farm, aiming for 100% renewable by 2029.
Equinix leads with AIA-rated data centres that operate in warmer conditions, reducing cooling needs and boosting energy efficiency. Focusing on efficient buildings, sustainable water management, and a circular economy, Equinix aims for climate neutrality by 2030, demonstrating strong environmental responsibility.
Equinix’s Private AI Value Proposition
ACHIM GRANZEN. Most AI efforts, especially GenAI, have occurred in the public cloud, but there’s rising demand for Private AI due to concerns about data availability, privacy, governance, cost, and location. Technology providers in a position to offer alternative AI stacks (usually built on top of a GPU-as-a-service model) to the hyperscalers find themselves in high interest. Equinix, in partnership with providers such as Nvidia, offers Private AI solutions on a global turnkey AI infrastructure. These solutions are ideal for industries with large-scale operations and connectivity challenges, such as Manufacturing, or those slow to adopt public cloud.
SASH MUKHERJEE. Equinix’s Private AI value proposition will appeal to many organisations, especially as discussions on AI cost efficiency and ROI evolve. AI unites IT and business teams, and Equinix understands the need for conversations at multiple levels. Infrastructure leaders focus on data strategy capacity planning; CISOs on networking and security; business lines on application performance, and the C-suite on revenue, risk, and cost considerations. Each has a stake in the AI strategy. For success, Equinix must reshape its go-to-market message to be industry-specific (that’s how AI conversations are shaping) and reskill its salesforce for broader conversations beyond infrastructure.
Equinix’s Growth Potential
ACHIM GRANZEN. In Southeast Asia, Malaysia and Indonesia provide growth opportunities for Equinix. Indonesia holds massive potential as a digital-savvy G20 country. In Malaysia, the company’s data centres can play a vital part in the ongoing Mydigital initiative, having a presence in the country before the hyperscalers. Also, the proximity of the Johor Bahru data centre to Singapore opens additional business opportunities.
TIM SHEEDY. Equinix is evolving beyond being just a data centre real estate provider. By developing their own platforms and services, along with partner-provided solutions, they enable customers to optimise application placement, manage smaller points of presence, enhance cloud interconnectivity, move data closer to hyperscalers for backup and performance, and provide multi-cloud networking. Composable services – such as cloud routers, load balancers, internet access, bare metal, virtual machines, and virtual routing and forwarding – allow seamless integration with partner solutions.
Equinix’s focus over the last 12 months on automating and simplifying the data centre management and interconnection services is certainly paying dividends, and revenue is expected to grow above tech market growth rates.
As tech providers such as Microsoft enhance their capabilities and products, they will impact business processes and technology skills, and influence other tech providers to reshape their product and service offerings. Microsoft recently organised briefing sessions in Sydney and Singapore, to present their future roadmap, with a focus on their AI capabilities.
Ecosystm Advisors Achim Granzen, Peter Carr, and Tim Sheedy provide insights on Microsoft’s recent announcements and messaging.
Click here to download Ecosystm VendorSphere: Microsoft’s AI Vision – Initiatives & Impact
Ecosystm Question: What are your thoughts on Microsoft Copilot?
Tim Sheedy. The future of GenAI will not be about single LLMs getting bigger and better – it will be about the use of multiple large and small language models working together to solve specific challenges. It is wasteful to use a large and complex LLM to solve a problem that is simpler. Getting these models to work together will be key to solving industry and use case specific business and customer challenges in the future. Microsoft is already doing this with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Achim Granzen. Microsoft’s Copilot – a shrink-wrapped GenAI tool based on OpenAI – has become a mainstream product. Microsoft has made it available to their enterprise clients in multiple ways: for personal productivity in Microsoft 365, for enterprise applications in Dynamics 365, for developers in Github and Copilot Studio, and to partners to integrate Copilot into their applications suites (E.g. Amdocs’ Customer Engagement Platform).
Ecosystm Question: How, in your opinion, is the Microsoft Copilot a game changer?
Microsoft’s Customer Copyright Commitment, initially launched as Copilot Copyright Commitment, is the true game changer.
Achim Granzen. It safeguards Copilot users from potential copyright infringement lawsuits related to data used for algorithm training or output results. In November 2023, Microsoft expanded its scope to cover commercial usage of their OpenAI interface as well.
This move not only protects commercial clients using Microsoft’s GenAI products but also extends to any GenAI solutions built by their clients. This initiative significantly reduces a key risk associated with GenAI adoption, outlined in the product terms and conditions.
However, compliance with a set of Required Mitigations and Codes of Conduct is necessary for clients to benefit from this commitment, aligning with responsible AI guidelines and best practices.
Ecosystm Question: Where will organisations need most help on their AI journeys?
Peter Carr. Unfortunately, there is no playbook for AI.
- The path to integrating AI into business strategies and operations lacks a one-size-fits-all guide. Organisations will have to navigate uncharted territories for the time being. This means experimenting with AI applications and learning from successes and failures. This exploratory approach is crucial for leveraging AI’s potential while adapting to unique organisational challenges and opportunities. So, companies that are better at agile innovation will do better in the short term.
- The effectiveness of AI is deeply tied to the availability and quality of connected data. AI systems require extensive datasets to learn and make informed decisions. Ensuring data is accessible, clean, and integrated is fundamental for AI to accurately analyse trends, predict outcomes, and drive intelligent automation across various applications.
Ecosystm Question: What advice would you give organisations adopting AI?
Tim Sheedy. It is all about opportunities and responsibility.
- There is a strong need for responsible AI – at a global level, at a country level, at an industry level and at an organisational level. Microsoft (and other AI leaders) are helping to create responsible AI systems that are fair, reliable, safe, private, secure, and inclusive. There is still a long way to go, but these capabilities do not completely indemnify users of AI. They still have a responsibility to set guardrails in their own businesses about the use and opportunities for AI.
- AI and hybrid work are often discussed as different trends in the market, with different solution sets. But in reality, they are deeply linked. AI can help enhance and improve hybrid work in businesses – and is a great opportunity to demonstrate the value of AI and tools such as Copilot.
Ecosystm Question: What should Microsoft focus on?
Tim Sheedy. Microsoft faces a challenge in educating the market about adopting AI, especially Copilot. They need to educate business, IT, and AI users on embracing AI effectively. Additionally, they must educate existing partners and find new AI partners to drive change in their client base. Success in the race for knowledge workers requires not only being first but also helping users maximise solutions. Customers have limited visibility of Copilot’s capabilities, today. Improving customer upskilling and enhancing tools to prompt users to leverage capabilities will contribute to Microsoft’s (or their competitors’) success in dominating the AI tool market.
Peter Carr. Grassroots businesses form the economic foundation of the Asia Pacific economies. Typically, these businesses do not engage with global SIs (GSIs), which drive Microsoft’s new service offerings. This leads to an adoption gap in the sector that could benefit most from operational efficiencies. To bridge this gap, Microsoft must empower non-GSI partners and managed service providers (MSPs) at the local and regional levels. They won’t achieve their goal of democratising AI, unless they do. Microsoft has the potential to advance AI technology while ensuring fair and widespread adoption.
IBM has made several significant announcements in the last year and are clearly pivoting fast for continued success.
In October, IBM held a series of analyst briefings to highlight their future strategies. This included a view into the “New IBM”, the re-branding of IBM Global Business Services as IBM Consulting, and the future roadmap for Kyndryl.
Going forward IBM is betting big on the dual capabilities of the Hybrid Cloud and Data & AI. Their strategy keeps a firm eye on the evolving needs of the enterprise with offerings such as the IBM Cloud Satellite, IBM Garage, and industry clouds.
Ecosystm Analysts, Tim Sheedy, Ullrich Loeffler, Matt Walker, Venu Reddy and Sash Mukherjee comment on IBM’s strategy going forward and the associated opportunities.
Two years ago at Discover, HP Enterprise’s President and CEO, Antonio Neri promised that all of HPE’s portfolio would be available ‘as a service’ within three years.
At the current Discover virtual events, HPE made a series of announcements to showcase that GreenLake is on its way to meet that ambitious goal in 2022. HPE continues to evolve their enterprise capabilities, as is demonstrated by their acquisitions of Determined AI and Zerto.
Ecosystm Advisors, Alan Hesketh, Darian Bird, and Niloy Mukherjee comment on how HPE is preparing for the Hybrid world and the key announcements at HPE Discover, 2021 including GreenLake, Lighthouse, and Aurora.
