Certinia Winter 2025 Release: New enhancements drive predictability & profitability
Raju Malhotra is Chief Product and Technology Officer at Certinia. His focus is to shape the company’s product vision, drive the technology roadmap, and ensure exceptional user experiences across the vast customer base. Read his blog here on the Winter 2025 Release and what it will deliver to the market.
In any services organization, certainty is the ultimate advantage—total confidence in the outcomes, resources, and customer experiences you’re delivering. Our purpose at Certinia is to help technology and services organizations orchestrate their people and work, so they can deliver customer value with certainty.
Every release brings us closer to this vision, shaped by the insights and feedback from our customers. The Winter 2025 release is no exception. Packed with enhancements like improved skill insights, smart rescheduling, activity tracking, and advanced AI and automation capabilities, this release is designed to help you run a more predictable, efficient, and profitable services business.
Let’s dive in and explore what’s new!
Expanding best-in-class Professional Services Cloud
For modern services organizations, skills are essential drivers of success, evolving rapidly and growing more complex. In Winter ‘25, advancements in the scalable skills capabilities deliver skill insights and recommendations. When creating a resource request, relevant skills and related competencies are automatically presented. This helps resource and project managers select from system-recommended skills options, making it easier to assign the right resources without the need to navigate through extensive skills inventories.
Whether projects run over or under their allocated hours, calculating the necessary adjustments can be challenging. With the Winter ‘25 release, smart rescheduling gives project managers unparalleled clarity into required hours and budget changes. This capability is embedded in the New Project Work Planner where schedule changes can be made directly. If the project is running over hours, project managers can proactively invoke a change request for the recommended additional budget. Smart rescheduling ensures accurate schedules, setting clear customer expectations and enhancing forecasts for revenue, resource capacity, and demand.
In the Winter ‘25 release, Services CPQ has been renamed Services Estimator to more accurately reflect its core function: producing better services estimates with greater speed. Services Estimator maintains its integration with Salesforce CPQ, and now Salesforce Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM) as well, enabling customers to configure, price, and quote both products and related services together.
Services organizations are increasingly shifting to subscription-based businesses and adopting services credits models, which allows them to receive upfront revenue while providing their customers with a more straightforward and simplified buying process. This release marks a significant advancement in services financials with the introduction of services credits to effectively manage and utilize service credits for fixed-price or packaged services. With this new capability, project managers, sales, and finance teams will gain clear visibility into service credit balances, redemptions, expiration dates, and associated revenue. Stay tuned for future updates, where we’ll expand this feature in Services Estimator to allow credit use for new or existing projects.
“Certinia’s Winter 2025 Release is a reflection of the company’s ability to keenly listen to the voice of their customers and addresses key operational challenges at Siemens, particularly in project and resource management. The unified Work Planner and smart scheduling will enable our teams to collaborate effectively and make data-driven staffing decisions on a global scale, which is crucial given the scope of our operations. Reliance on offline tools like spreadsheets is reduced, allowing us to optimize utilization, enhance predictability, and deliver greater value to our customers. These innovations align seamlessly with our objectives of driving efficiency and achieving year-over-year margin expansion.”
– Yvan Marceau, Worldwide Services Operations Director, Siemens
Elevating the Customer Journey with Customer Success
Recurring revenue has become essential not just for growth, but for valuation. As a result, Customer Success teams now play a pivotal role as revenue drivers. Tools that enhance visibility, streamline engagements, and unify the customer journey have never been more critical.
With Winter ’25, we’ve introduced updates to ensure Customer Success functions are not only efficient but resilient. The Activity Tracker now offers a refined account overview, allowing teams to quickly create activities linked to success data, boosting efficiency and accuracy. The updated Health Score dashboard provides an actionable view of customer data and trends, with new capabilities to manage large data volumes, improving both performance and adoption.
A major focus of this release is demonstrating value across the customer journey by addressing operational silos. Enhanced capabilities now allow organizations to capture and track customer value throughout their lifecycle, supporting the creation of objectives and KPIs tied to success plans.
Additionally, we’ve brought Skills Management expertise from PS Cloud to our CS offering, enhancing resource placement and team efficiency. For teams using a pooled CSM model, our new CS Pooling capabilities identify the best-fit resources for incoming work based on role, capacity, and skills, ensuring the CS team can scale impact effectively.
“Certinia’s commitment to understanding and addressing the complexities of an organization of PwC’s scale has been evident throughout our collaboration. Their team’s ability to listen, adapt, and deliver solutions aligned with our focus on skills-based staffing and operational efficiency has helped to support our transformation efforts. By understanding our needs, Certinia has incorporated input into their product enhancements, helping to advance our strategy. We value the thoughtful insights they’ve provided over the course of our collaboration.”
– Amy Richmond, Managing Director, PwC
– Amy Richmond, Managing Director, PwC
Advancing AI and Analytics Innovation
As an initial launch partner of the Agentforce Partner Network, Certinia remains at the forefront of AI and analytics innovation within the Salesforce ecosystem. Many new features in the Winter ’25 release for PS Cloud and CS Cloud leverage the analytic data sets available in our Core and Advanced Analytics offerings—Smart Rescheduling, Skills Suggestions, Customer Heath Scores, and more.
The Winter ’25 release expands the real-time reporting capabilities currently available with our ERP Cloud to our PS Cloud and CS Cloud offerings, blending real-time operational data with historical and trend data, offering customers the most accurate, moment-in-time view of their service and success operations. Additional Agentforce functionality will be delivered for PS Cloud and CS Cloud after the Winter ’25 release.
Achieving financial excellence through greater automation
Winter ‘25 accelerates the period close process for finance teams with highly-requested automation enhancements. Improved bank reconciliation now automatically matches transactions and generates cash entries, eliminating manual entry and reducing time spent on reconciliations. Additionally, upgraded fixed asset depreciation capabilities automate the scheduling and posting of depreciation journals, creating a truly hands-off experience.
Ready to explore the full power of the Winter ’25 release? Join our Customer Webinar today, and catch the recording and find detailed updates in the Release Hub on Certinia Community.
