Welcome to The Margin, a newsletter designed to keep you on the leading edge of monetization.
In business, the difference between being ahead of the curve or slow to adapt is anything but marginal. The Margin aims to be the most useful, timely, and incisive ping that hits your inbox all week. It includes critical research and analyst insights to inform short and long-term decision making.
Here’s what you need to know:
Research Spotlight | Workday Acquires Evisort
Workday’s acquisition of Evisort, an AI-driven CLM and document intelligence firm, signals a strategic move to enhance its financial and HCM applications.
- The deal provides stability for Evisort’s customers; however, Workday’s long-term commitment to a broader CLM product suite is uncertain.
- Competitors like Agiloft, Ironclad, and Sirion may see this as an opportunity to poach customers, but migrations are far from simple.
A Story You Can’t Afford to Miss | Key Takeaways from Dreamforce, Workday Rising, and SuiteWorld
At 2024’s major tech user conferences – namely, Dreamforce, Workday Rising, and SuiteWorld – AI announcements headlined, though the details varied across companies. Salesforce’s unveiling of Agentforce was particularly vague, while Workday offered a more focused AI strategy with Workday Illuminate. The Oracle NetSuite event showcased incremental enhancements largely leveraging existing investments made by Oracle and modest AI-related news.
Industry Bits and Bytes:
- Three startups in the contract management space announced funding
- Better late than never: Mastercard enters the subscription billing market
On the Horizon | CPQ Buyer’s Guide Coming this December
MGI Research’s forthcoming Configure Price Quote Top 25 Buyer’s Guide will shed light on the highly fragmented CPQ market, offering insights on the growing demand for tools that streamline sales quoting, price optimization, and product/services configuration. CPQ adoption is accelerating, but no vendor excels equally across all three pillars. MGI will be issuing a separate report uniquely focused on price optimization strategies and tools.
Now let’s dive a bit deeper.
Research Spotlight
Workday Acquires Evisort
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On September 17, Workday announced its acquisition of Evisort, an AI-driven contract lifecycle management (CLM) and document intelligence company.
Founded in 2016, Evisort quickly established itself as a pioneer in applying AI/ML to contract analysis. The acquisition, estimated by MGI Research to be valued between $250-$300 million, comes as Evisort faces challenges in scaling its operations amid a push to maintain growth while aiming for profitability in a tightening venture capital environment. Workday aims to integrate Evisort’s AI tools into its financial and human capital management applications. The deal is expected to close in the coming months.
Between the lines | The deal, announced during Workday’s annual conference, Workday Rising, reflects the company’s growing interest in leveraging artificial intelligence across its offerings.
Why it matters | For Evisort customers, the acquisition brings a sense of stability, but questions remain about how long Workday will support Evisort’s broader product portfolio.
Read more about Workday’s acquisition of Evisort here. |
A Story You Can't Afford to Miss
Key Takeaways from Dreamforce, Workday Rising, and SuiteWorld
The 2024 Dreamforce, Workday Rising, and SuiteWorld industry conferences showcased the rapidly evolving role of AI in enterprise software, with a wide spectrum of marketing approaches. The overall tenor among attendees was very upbeat and positive. Attendance at all three events was very strong, with many organizations sending large delegations. Partner investment was noticeably up, with packed exhibition halls and overflowing evening celebrations. Oracle, Salesforce, and Workday are clearly investment priorities for customers. Going into 2025, customers should closely monitor the fine print behind each vendor’s announcements, particularly those relating to AI, as questions regarding product availability, pricing, and strategic intent abound.
Dreamforce | The event with 45,000+ attendees centered on Agentforce, a new platform designed to blend human agents with AI to enhance customer interactions.
- Details on Agentforce’s production readiness, differentiation from other “agentic” AI platforms (like Microsoft and ServiceNow), and pricing were notably sparse.
- The pricing model – $2 per AI “conversation” – is surprisingly unrealistic.
- After negotiating, discounting, and bundling, volume street pricing will likely amount to pennies per conversation.
While announcements about Data Cloud 2.0 and Slack enhancements sounded impressive, the overall messaging was fragmented and vague about how Salesforce plans to deliver real value to its clients.
- Salesforce’s repositioning and reintroduction of CPQ and revenue lifecycle management/revenue cloud, like all other product areas, took a back seat to Agentforce.
- For the 6,000+ Salesforce CPQ customers, the migration/re-implementation required to adopt the new revenue cloud is a major challenge looming on the horizon.
Workday Rising | Workday, on the other hand, took a more structured approach to its AI ambitions. The company’s latest AI strategy, Workday Illuminate, focuses on human capital management (HCM) and financials and the practical application of various forms of AI. With Workday Assistant offering AI-powered search and new AI agents integrated into core applications (recruiting, expense management, succession planning, and business optimization), the company is infusing AI into its business in a measured approach.
- Much of its AI-related enhancements are in sexy areas like linking invoice lines to PO lines, automating accruals, bank reconciliations, and generating collections letters.
- Workday is pricing AI on a case by case basis.
- For the most part, it is introducing AI into its suite of applications, and not charging for it as customers are already paying for innovation as part of annual license fees.
- Workday may price new AI-based applications with clear ROI separately in the future.
Beyond AI, the company is pushing deeper into vertical industry functionality – both within its current verticals and business units like professional services, as well as into industries that are adjacent to its core. With overall attendance above 17,000, this was the largest Rising in the company’s history.
SuiteWorld | By contrast, Oracle NetSuite’s SuiteWorld conference was a quieter affair, highlighting incremental improvements across the product. NetSuite announced passing 40,000 customers worldwide, expansion into India and Brazil, and new AI-driven tools like the SuiteAnalytics Assistant and Oracle’s natural language assistant.
- No earth-shattering innovations were on the table.
- Rather, the unstated message that came through was increased leverage of Oracle technologies into the NetSuite applications.
- NetSuite will be adopting Oracle’s AI capabilities as well as taking advantage of the Oracle Redwood UX.
- Based on the number of partner product and services announcements, NetSuite is embracing the investments made by its ecosystem partners.
The bottom line | AI will figure in many enterprise investment conversations in 2025, but customers should tread carefully.
- Questions around the pricing of AI-related services, the readiness of platforms like Agentforce, and the broader implications of AI-driven contract management remain unanswered.
- Organizations must ensure the potential benefits of AI are grounded in a clear business case, with a focus on ROI, data privacy, and incremental adoption.
- The MGI mantra of “Try everything, trust nothing” remains the recommended approach.
To dive deeper into analyst takeaways from Dreamforce, Workday Rising, and SuiteWorld, watch MGI Research’s latest webinar on-demand here.
Industry Bits and Bytes | Three companies in the contract management space announced recent funding events.
- Formality, a French provider of intelligent contract solutions raised €8 million.
- DocJuris, an AI-contract review vendor based in Houston, banked $8 million.
- Fynk, an Austrian provider of legal workflow tools for the business users (non-lawyers), pulled in $3.5 million. (See the highlights from MGI’s CLM Buyers Guide here, or watch the webcast.)
In a sleeper announcement on October 1st, Mastercard announced it is joining the subscription economy via the acquisition of Minna Technology. The deal is subject to regulatory approval. MGI expects Visa to follow suit in the not-too-distant future. Mastercard’s foray into subscription management comes at a time when Zuora, the company that coined the term “Subscription Economy,” is shifting away from subscriptions toward Total Monetization. Better late than never.
Place your bets – Upcoming events: Las Vegas hosts Money 20/20 on Oct. 27-30th and AWS re:Invent takes place Dec. 2-6, also in Sin City.
On the Horizon
CPQ Buyer’s Guide Coming this December |
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MGI Research will publish the Configure Price Quote (CPQ) Top 25 Buyer’s Guide this December. MGI Buyer’s Guides evaluate and score the leading providers in a given market, alongside analysis of the market opportunity, emerging vendor requirements, headwinds and tailwinds, best practices for solution adoption and implementation, and more. Early insights | The growing complexity of products and services, coupled with a shortage of experienced sales talent, is fueling the adoption of CPQ solutions. Organizations are looking for creative approaches to scale the efficiency and efficacy of sales channels. CPQ (especially sales quoting) offers an attractive ROI, and is driving the replacement of legacy tools and Excel. Under competitive pressure, sales teams are in search of faster, error-free quoting capabilities with the ability to optimize margins. However, the market for configure, price, quote tools is highly fragmented, and no vendor is equally strong at C, P, and Q. Get caught up | Explore MGI Research’s latest research in CPQ, as well as recent Buyer’s Guides in related Agile Monetization disciplines, here: |
So What Have I Missed?
The Topical 20 | Our most recent and relevant research that will help you keep your finger on the pulse of AMP disciplines.
| The Evergreen Archives | Curated past research that is still pertinent today. |
That’s it for this issue of The Margin. If you’ve made it this far, we’ll certainly see you next time.
Warm wishes,
MGI Research
