8Squad Executive Director Andrew Henderson has stepped back into services for the first time since 2015. In his own words, here is what has changed in products, customers and the market, and what it means for how organisations now buy.
At 8Squad’s recent Go-To-Market workshop in Melbourne, the team suggested I share how the industry looks to me after a decade away.
Some things remain familiar. Three things have changed materially: products, customers and the market.
Products
Vendors once did fewer things. Today, Salesforce has assembled an increasingly connected technology stack spanning systems of record, industry clouds, integration through MuleSoft, analytics through Tableau, data, automation and AI through Agentforce.
That creates a credible end-to-end platform proposition. It also frames an emerging tension with AI-native vendors promising that replacement applications can be built quickly, cheaply and at scale.
They may be technically capable of recreating a particular workflow. But the harder question is not simply whether an AI tool can answer a customer query.
It is whether it can safely interrogate production data, apply the correct permissions, preserve auditability and resilience, satisfy ISO, SOC 2, AI and privacy obligations, and provide dependable support when something goes wrong.
Once AI acts on production data, it becomes another front door into the organisation.
Capability is therefore only one part of the buying equation. Subscription cost must be compared with the full cost of building, governing, supporting and insuring the alternative.
Customers
Customers are considerably more sophisticated than I remember.
Procurement remains procurement, but business requirements are more targeted, commercial expectations are more granular and success measures are articulated far more clearly.
One tension remains: agile delivery and fixed total-cost certainty do not naturally coexist. Better-defined requirements do not make delivery less agile. They make pricing, accountability and risk allocation more accurate.
The enormous, continuous “transformations” of the early 2000s have increasingly given way to discrete projects seeking defined improvements in efficiency, control and process.
As a services partner, I find that helpful. Clear outcomes create stronger alignment, and a much better point of qualification.
Market
The market is in genuine flux.
AI brochureware is challenging incumbents with promises of speed, control and scalability. But the conversation often understates the surrounding enterprise requirements: APIs, security, governance, compliance, support and trust in how AI operates on production data.
Ultimately, organisations need enterprise-level platforms to deliver enterprise-grade outcomes.
Meanwhile, budgets increasingly favour smaller, targeted projects with lower implementation risk and greater customer control.
Progressive customers are watching the technical horizon before making major commitments. But waiting also carries risk. The underlying business problem remains, while the technology is moving so quickly that products can be superseded by their next iteration within a month.
I have not witnessed that rate of change in any previous services cycle.
The labour market has changed with it. Broader product stacks now require deeper specialists. A services company could once certify across fewer products and maintain broader reach. Today, credible delivery increasingly depends on targeted product capability and genuine industry expertise.
That is where we are taking 8Squad: purposeful product coverage, clearly defined markets and deep industry knowledge.
We want to operate as a commercially invested partner.
Not simply delivering good projects, but helping customers achieve the business outcomes those projects were intended to create.
Bring it on.
