BOTTOM LINE UPFRONT
For services businesses, a new platform creates value only when the operating model is ready to support it. Accordion and Certinia leaders share how strong processes, trusted data, and sustained accountability can protect margins and make the investment pay off.
Accordion’s Tarun Sharma and Adam Rosenfield joined Certinia‘s Valmik Shah for the “Beyond the Pivot” webinar to talk through what it takes to move a services business off a legacy platform.
Their conversation kept coming back to operating discipline: where margin quietly erodes, what preparation has to happen before a platform switch pays off, and how to choose a partner that protects that value over time:
1. Margin loss starts in the operating model
Services margins rarely disappear overnight. They erode through small gaps between how work is sold, staffed, delivered, and billed, a little on each engagement until the number no longer matches what was underwritten. Companies that hold their margins can see where profitability is won and lost, and the platform is what gives them that view.
2. Legacy platforms create hidden costs
That view is exactly what a legacy platform takes away, as the team at A5 (a Salesforce consulting firm now part of Accordion) experienced firsthand: an unreliable legacy PSA, real-time capacity that was hard to see, and custom Salesforce integrations that were expensive to maintain. Each new release tended to break one, leaving decisions made without a trusted single view and admin hours spent keeping the lights on. The goal was one platform that gave the business a dependable operational picture.
3. Preparation matters more than implementation
A better platform only delivers that picture if the groundwork is done first, which is where most of the value is won or lost. More than 25 years of Salesforce implementations point to a simple rule: invest in preparation before deployment, meaning defined processes, clean master data, a methodology that’s actually followed, and change management built into the rollout. Customizing beyond the platform’s design tends to create technical debt that surfaces later.
4. AI depends on trusted data
The same preparation that protects margin is what makes AI worth turning on. When the full lifecycle from opportunity to billing runs on one platform, AI has complete and reliable data to work from, and that’s when automation starts to pay off.
Certinia’s Veda staffing agent can find a replacement resource and run the staffing steps that normally eat manual coordination time. Run the same agent on fragmented data and it scales poor decisions faster. Accordion already applies AI internally to automate weekly project status reporting.
5. Choose a partner that can grow with you
None of this is a one-time project, which is why the last decision matters most. Technology choices reach well past go-live, so look for a partner that understands your business and keeps investing as your needs change. The advice for any leader evaluating a stack: define success early, baseline it at go-live, then check the numbers at 12, 18, and 24 months to confirm the value or adjust course.