Enterprise Workflows Wars

By Chamara Somaratne | Anthosa

“They come as saviours of productivity, champions of change. But in the race to ‘liberate’ you from legacy tech, who’s really setting you free… and who’s rewriting the rules of control?”

Introduction: The Rise of New Empires

A quiet revolution is unfolding within enterprise IT departments. It’s not about cloud versus on-premises, or even AI versus manual workflows. It’s about who gets to orchestrate the modern enterprise,  and what power looks like in a post-ERP world.

The old empires of enterprise software were built on the logic of control: SAP ECC, Oracle E-Business Suite, and Microsoft Dynamics NAV promised predictability through deeply integrated, monolithic suites. They were expensive, rigid, and difficult to evolve,  but they were dependable. In the enterprise tech equivalent of empires, these were the Roman roads: paved, centralised, and intended to last forever.

But permanence is no longer a virtue. Agility, adaptability, and orchestration now define strategic advantage. And three new players, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Dynamics 365, are capitalising on this shift, not by replacing legacy ERP outright, but by surrounding it with layers of workflow automation, low-code development, and intelligent orchestration.

They promise freedom from silos, from legacy codebases, from transformation fatigue. However, that freedom often comes at the cost of a new kind of dependence: not on outdated systems, but on cloud-native platforms that evolve faster than your governance can keep up with.

This article unpacks the war being waged for enterprise workflows and how these platforms are not just disrupting legacy giants,  they’re building empires of their own.

Legacy Blockers: The Systems That Time Forgot (But You Didn’t)

Talk to any enterprise CIO today, and you’ll hear the same quiet confession: they’re still running critical operations on 15–20-year-old systems. These systems, such as SAP ECC, Oracle EBS, Dynamics AX, or even older, homegrown monoliths, are the invisible scaffolding that supports entire industries.

They’re not sexy. They’re not cloud-native. But they work. Or rather, they’ve worked long enough that untangling them now feels like trying to rebuild an aircraft mid-flight.

The Legacy Landscape:

• SAP ECC remains one of the most widely deployed ERP systems in the world,  despite SAP’s push towards S/4HANA; adoption has lagged, primarily due to high migration costs and risk (Deloitte, 2024).
• Oracle E-Business Suite is still entrenched in large financial institutions and public sector bodies, where change is measured in decades, not quarters.
• Microsoft Dynamics NAV / AX users face their own upgrade path dilemmas: migrate to Dynamics 365 or risk falling behind, unsupported and increasingly incompatible with modern tools.

These systems aren’t just technical artefacts; they’re operational memory. Customisations, business logic, and decades of process nuance are baked into them. And while modern SaaS platforms can replicate features, they often can’t replicate understanding.

Why They Persist:

• Technical inertia: Upgrading would mean rewriting custom code, rethinking processes, and retraining teams, a significant cost centre.
• Regulatory & audit dependencies: Many legacy systems support highly regulated industries with long-tail compliance needs.
• Integration fatigue: Years of patchwork middleware have created fragile ecosystems, making complete replacement risky.

That’s the blocker. Not just the technology, but the organisational anxiety wrapped around it.

The irony? These blockers have created the perfect market opening for Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Dynamics 365. Instead of dismantling the core, they wrap around it,  enabling transformation without needing complete extraction. But this workaround brings its own complexities, as we’ll see in the battles that follow.

The New Cloud Titans: Salesforce, ServiceNow, Dynamics 365

The enterprise software landscape is undergoing a tectonic shift.

For decades, enterprise operations were dominated by legacy ERP giants like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft’s Dynamics NAV and AX. These systems, while powerful, were often rigid, expensive to customise, and deeply resented by users for their complexity. They defined the age of transactional software, systems optimised for bookkeeping, not agility.

But the future now belongs to a different class of vendor. In the vacuum left by stagnating ERPs, a new trio of cloud-native giants has risen: Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Dynamics 365. These are the new workflow titans, not just replacing ERP systems, but disaggregating and re-orchestrating them through platforms designed for speed, automation, and experience.

Together, they are rewriting the playbook for digital transformation, not with monoliths, but with modular ecosystems. And while they promise to liberate organisations from the legacy shackles of the past, they often introduce a subtler trap: platform dependency masquerading as freedom.

From ERP Giants to Workflow Wars

Where legacy ERPs were systems of record, the new titans are systems of engagement and orchestration. They sit atop your existing stack and promise to make everything flow, data, decisions, tasks, and outcomes.

They don’t try to replace your core ERP outright (at least not yet). Instead, they wrap around it, gradually displacing it by controlling more of the user experience, the automation layers, and the customer journey. They are not just workflow engines. They are becoming the operating systems of modern enterprises.

Each titan brings a unique posture to the battlefield:

• Salesforce started as a CRM but has evolved into a full-stack customer experience and automation platform. With tools like Flow Orchestration, MuleSoft, Agentforce, Tableau, and Einstein GPT, Salesforce has become a force in workflow intelligence, process automation, and customer-centric orchestration (Cyntexa, 2025a).
• ServiceNow, once known for IT service management (ITSM), has expanded its domain to encompass enterprise-wide workflow automation, encompassing HR and finance, as well as customer service and field operations. Its Now Platform, Flow Designer, and App Engine Studio allow enterprises to digitise virtually any process (Cyntexa, 2025b).
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 leverages the gravitational pull of the broader Microsoft ecosystem, Azure, Office 365, Teams, and Power Platform, to offer a tightly integrated environment for business operations. With Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power BI, Microsoft offers continuity and control within familiar environments, particularly attractive to IT-led organisations.

Vendor Gravity: Escaping One Lock-In, Entering Another

Ironically, the value propositions of these platforms are built on liberating enterprises from legacy blockers. Yet, they simultaneously create new forms of vendor lock-in that are arguably more subtle and sophisticated than their predecessors.

Here’s how each platform “frees” you, only to then entrench itself:

• Salesforce achieves lock-in through a proprietary metadata model, cross-cloud dependencies, and its increasingly centralised role in front-office experience. The more you automate with Flow or embed with Agentforce, the harder it is to decouple later.
• ServiceNow creates stickiness through deep process embedding and its scripting ecosystem. Apps built on Flow Designer or App Engine Studio are tailored to the Now Platform. Replatforming them is a massive cost.
• Dynamics 365 is the most subtle. By leveraging Power Platform tools, it enables business-led app creation and automation, fueling a low-code proliferation that’s often unmanaged. Before long, entire departments are running workflows in Power Automate with little visibility from IT. It’s governance by diffusion.

What makes these ecosystems so sticky is not just the technology, it’s the behavioural and operational dependency they foster. Once embedded in day-to-day workflows, they become hard to uproot, not because you can’t leave, but because everything would need to be rebuilt elsewhere.

Market Clout and Growth Trajectories

Their dominance isn’t speculative; it’s measurable:

• Salesforce maintains a commanding lead in the CRM market, with over 150,000 customers and a year-over-year revenue growth rate exceeding 17% (Cyntexa, 2025a).
• ServiceNow serves over 8,000 enterprises globally, with a revenue run rate topping $10 billion, signalling its broad adoption beyond ITSM into every major business function (Cyntexa, 2025b).
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 benefits from its seamless integration across the Microsoft stack, with widespread adoption among enterprises already invested in Azure, Office 365, and Power BI (Cyntexa, 2025c).

In effect, each platform is vying to be the new default, the hub around which all enterprise workflows orbit.

What They Promise (And What They Don’t Tell You)

The central narrative these cloud titans sell is one of agility: the ability to move fast, automate more, and scale seamlessly. But beneath that narrative is a quieter reality:

• They shift control from custom-built systems to proprietary cloud platforms
• They reduce flexibility in favour of speed and convenience
• They mask complexity through UX improvements, while centralising platform governance

Put simply, they make it easy to build, but hard to leave.

They don’t just integrate with your enterprise, they become your enterprise.

Why This Battle Matters

This battle between Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Dynamics 365 is about more than features or pricing models. It’s about who gets to define the digital operating model for the next decade.

Choosing a platform isn’t just a tech decision; it’s a strategic act that shapes:

• The architecture of your organisation
• The agility of your teams
• The governance of your data and workflows
• The future of your vendor relationships

And most critically, it determines whether your digital transformation is truly yours, or just a more elegant form of outsourcing.

Part 1: Workflow Automation,  Orchestrating Modern Value Chains

For decades, workflow automation was the unsung hero of enterprise productivity. Hidden behind screens and approval buttons, it stitched together processes in HR, finance, IT, and operations, keeping the wheels turning without much fanfare. But today, workflow automation has stepped out of the shadows. It is no longer just about automating tasks; it’s about orchestrating value.

The modern enterprise no longer runs on neatly segmented departments and linear processes. Instead, it thrives, or struggles, on how well its workflows traverse systems, bridge data silos, and adapt to the shifting sands of customer expectations, compliance demands, and internal bottlenecks. This is the battlefield where Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Dynamics 365 are clashing most aggressively.

Why Workflow Automation Is Now a Strategic Weapon

• Legacy systems were built for control, not adaptability. They excelled at enforcing rules but struggled to evolve. Change cycles often took months or years, and cross-functional coordination was an afterthought. Modern enterprises, however, demand adaptability in days, not quarters.
• The rise of “composable enterprises” means workflows must be assembled dynamically across people, systems, and partners. Static processes are liabilities. What matters now is how quickly organisations can design, deploy, and iterate on digital workflows.
• Human + machine collaboration is the new normal. Agentic AI, intelligent co-pilots, and decision automation now require workflows to support not just people, but autonomous agents and context-aware systems.

Against this backdrop, the cloud titans each bring their own orchestration engine to the table, along with their own underlying assumptions and traps.

Salesforce: Flow Orchestration Meets Intelligent CRM

• Positioning: Salesforce Flow is pitched as a no-code orchestration layer that connects data, decisions, and actions across the Salesforce ecosystem. It works seamlessly with Einstein GPT to enable decision logic, with MuleSoft for system integration, and with Experience Cloud to route actions to customers or employees.
• Strength: Native integration across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Experience Cloud means Salesforce workflows feel “invisible” to the user, but powerful behind the scenes.
• Limitation: True cross-enterprise orchestration often depends on MuleSoft or custom Apex logic, adding technical overhead. It’s great for Salesforce-heavy enterprises, but gets clunky at the edges.
• Vendor lock-in concern: Workflows built in Flow Orchestration are tightly coupled to Salesforce’s object model, metadata, and event architecture. Moving away in future is not just a platform change, it’s a re-architecture.

ServiceNow: The Operating System of Work

• Positioning: ServiceNow sells itself as the de facto platform for enterprise workflow automation. Born in ITSM, it has expanded into HR, finance, legal, and customer service, powered by its Now Platform and Flow Designer.
• Strength: Deeply process-centric, ServiceNow’s platform is ideal for automating structured workflows with approvals, SLAs, routing, and complex hand-offs. Its App Engine and Integration Hub allow for rapid application creation and flow integration.
• Limitation: While highly customisable, it comes with a steep learning curve. Flow Designer is powerful but requires deep understanding of ServiceNow’s data model and scripting tools.
• Vendor lock-in concern: Workflows become embedded within the Now Platform’s scripting logic and proprietary data structure. The more workflows you automate, the harder it is to disentangle later.

Microsoft Dynamics 365: Power Platform and Citizen Developers

• Positioning: Microsoft approaches workflow orchestration through Power Automate (formerly Flow), a low-code tool tightly integrated with Office 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure.
• Strength: Familiarity. Users already working in Excel, Outlook, and Teams find Power Automate intuitive. It enables “citizen development” by allowing business users to automate their own processes with minimal IT involvement.
• Limitation: Power Automate is best for tactical automation and simple workflows. For complex orchestration involving deep business rules or integrations, it often requires connectors and custom code that can introduce fragility.
• Vendor lock-in concern: Automations built using Power Platform are deeply embedded in Microsoft’s Azure ecosystem. You’re not just building workflows, you’re baking your business logic into Microsoft’s cloud-native services.

Comparative Landscape: Who Leads Where?

So What? Strategic Implications

• Automation is no longer neutral. Every automation embeds your business logic inside someone else’s platform. What seems like “workflow enablement” today may become your next set of legacy blockers in five years.
• Speed vs Sovereignty. ServiceNow and Salesforce offer speed through integrated ecosystems. Microsoft offers familiarity. But all extract sovereignty, you gain function at the cost of control.
• Think orchestration, not just automation. Automating a task is easy. Orchestrating an end-to-end business process across departments, partners, and AI agents is a different challenge entirely. Choose tools that support flow logic, not just buttons and triggers.

Anthosa’s View: Human-Centred Automation Is Strategic Automation

Through Anthosa’s Legacy Modernisation Framework and Human-Centred Digital Transformation playbook, we encourage clients to ask deeper questions before jumping into automation platforms:

• Does this automation serve a real human need, or just tick a transformation KPI?
• Who owns the logic, the flow, and the decisions behind this workflow?
• Is this platform a partner in orchestration, or the new source of control?

For teams looking to develop their own cross-functional, cross-platform orchestration models, our Service Management Design Strategy Accelerator and Operating Model Design Strategy Accelerator provide structured approaches to break down silos, design sustainable workflows, and integrate human judgment at key decision points.

And for enterprises already entangled in multiple platforms, KaikaFlow acts as an orchestration wrapper, helping you deploy and govern automation across silos, without defaulting to vendor gravity.

Part 2: App Creation,  Bespoke is Back, But Not Quite

Once upon a time, bespoke applications were a hallmark of innovation. Enterprises would invest resources in building tailored solutions to match their specific processes. Then came the SaaS era, standardised, scalable, and “good enough” platforms replaced handcrafted apps. But now, the pendulum is swinging back. Sort of.

Today’s cloud titans, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft, are leading a new wave of custom app creation, but this time under the polished veneer of low-code/no-code platforms. These tools promise speed, simplicity, and flexibility. And while they lower the barrier to app development, they also subtly pull enterprises deeper into proprietary ecosystems.

Salesforce: Agentforce, Flow Builder, and the Rise of Metadata-Driven Apps

• Salesforce champions a metadata-first model, where app logic, UI, and integrations are all abstracted from code and stored as platform metadata.
• With Flow Builder and App Builder, business users can create applications using drag-and-drop interfaces, while Agentforce allows automation and digital worker orchestration across touchpoints.
• But this abstraction is a double-edged sword. While it reduces development complexity, it entrenches organisations in the Salesforce data model, limiting portability and increasing switching costs.
• The use of proprietary DSLs (domain-specific languages), such as Apex and Lightning Web Components, means that while apps are “easy to build,” they’re also deeply embedded into Salesforce’s logic and upgrade paths.

ServiceNow: App Engine, Flow Designer, and Vertical Velocity

• ServiceNow’s App Engine Studio positions itself as a unified environment for building workflow apps at scale, with reusable components, flow orchestration, and process mining all integrated.
• Using Flow Designer, non-technical users can orchestrate multi-step workflows, while developers can extend functionality using JavaScript and custom APIs.
• Its industry-specific vertical solutions (for financial services, healthcare, etc.) provide ready-made modules that seem customisable but lock users into specific templates and data schemas.
• The result? Apps that can be rapidly deployed, but only if you’re willing to accept ServiceNow’s way of working.

Microsoft Power Platform: Power Apps and the Mirage of Freedom

• Microsoft’s Power Apps arguably offers the widest accessibility, allowing users to connect data from Excel, SharePoint, Dynamics 365, and third-party APIs into app experiences.
• Combined with Power Automate and Dataverse, it forms a powerful toolkit for rapidly building business apps that can live inside Teams or run independently.
• But freedom is illusory. Most Power Apps rely heavily on Microsoft 365 authentication, Azure connectors, and Dataverse schema, making them tightly coupled to the Microsoft stack.
• Governance remains a challenge. “Shadow IT” apps often proliferate across departments, creating fragmented and unmanageable app landscapes without enterprise-wide control or visibility.

The Real Trend: Bespoke Within a Box

• This new wave of app development feels “bespoke” on the surface, but it is bespoke within the bounds defined by the vendor.
• Enterprises can create apps quickly, but only using predefined building blocks, integration logic, and UI paradigms approved by the platform.
• Innovation becomes bounded. You can go fast, but only where the roads are already paved.

Strategic Risks: Customisation or Conformity?

• While low-code platforms accelerate delivery, they don’t encourage architectural thinking. Apps become siloed, inconsistent, and sometimes redundant.
• Over time, as workflows evolve and business needs change, many of these apps reach a ceiling in terms of flexibility and maintainability.
• Worse still, because they’re deeply embedded in proprietary systems, re-platforming becomes prohibitively expensive, reinforcing lock-in.

Opportunity: Orchestrating Custom with Core

This is where platforms like KaikaFlow can be of assistance. By abstracting orchestration away from vendor tools and enabling multi-platform logic layers, KaikaFlow empowers enterprises to:

• Design “thin apps” that use Salesforce, ServiceNow, or Power Platform only for what they’re good at, while keeping orchestration, rules, and business logic decoupled.
• Avoid vendor-native over-customisation, allowing more agility when migrating or integrating tools in the future.
• Enable hybrid product teams to co-design experiences across technology boundaries, using Anthosa’s Operating Model Design Accelerator and KaikaFlow blueprints.

Where to From Here?

The ability to create apps quickly is powerful, but not if it comes at the cost of long-term flexibility. Enterprises must be strategic in how they embrace low-code tools:

• Build what matters, but don’t build everything on one vendor.
• Use low-code platforms to prototype, not to define your platform architecture.
• Ensure data, logic, and experience layers are separable, and that your people are trained to think beyond what the vendor UI allows.

In the end, bespoke is back, but it must be bespoke by design, not bespoke by dependency.

Part 3: Analytics,  Dashboards or Depth?

In today’s enterprise landscape, data isn’t just a by-product of operations; it is the currency of insight, agility, and differentiation. The shift from legacy ERP systems to cloud-native platforms, such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Dynamics 365, has brought a new wave of analytics capabilities. But the question remains: are these new dashboards truly offering strategic depth, or are they just prettier charts built on the same shallow assumptions?

Salesforce: Tableau for the Topline, Einstein for the Edge

• Salesforce’s acquisition of Tableau in 2019 was a clear statement of intent: analytics would be core to its vision of “Customer 360” (Salesforce, 2025).
• Tableau excels in visual storytelling and interactivity, enabling business users to quickly derive insights from customer and operational data.
• For predictive intelligence, Salesforce relies on Einstein Analytics (now known as CRM Analytics). When paired with generative AI through Einstein GPT, it enables forecasting, churn prediction, and opportunity scoring, which is particularly potent in sales and service workflows.
• However, critics argue that Salesforce’s analytics are often siloed to customer data. Integration with financial, operational, or external datasets still requires heavy lifting via MuleSoft or third-party tools, making end-to-end decision-making difficult to scale.

ServiceNow: Insights Embedded in Workflows

• ServiceNow takes a slightly different approach. Rather than separate dashboards, it embeds analytics natively within workflows.
• The Now Intelligence suite provides prebuilt KPIs, anomaly detection, and trend forecasting,  all contextualised within the task or ticket in question.
• Its strength lies in operational analytics, which involves understanding service health, turnaround times, bottlenecks, and resource utilisation.
• However, ServiceNow lacks the visual firepower and cross-functional integration that platforms like Tableau or Power BI offer. For executives seeking holistic, cross-enterprise insights, it can feel overly operational.

Microsoft: Power BI as the Default Intelligence Layer

• Microsoft’s Power BI is arguably the most widely adopted analytics platform in the enterprise, thanks to its seamless integration with Excel, Azure, and Teams.
• With Dynamics 365 as its operational backbone and Power Platform feeding data from a wide array of sources, Microsoft enables full-stack business intelligence,  from customer interactions to financial performance.
• Its tight integration with Azure Synapse and Fabric allows for enterprise-grade data lake integration, advanced analytics, and AI model training,  capabilities that Salesforce and ServiceNow are still catching up to.
• That said, Power BI’s flexibility can be a double-edged sword. Without clear governance, organisations often face dashboard sprawl, duplicated metrics, and conflicting versions of truth.

Dashboards or Depth? The Real Analytics Challenge

The battle isn’t just about who has the flashiest dashboards. It’s about whether analytics are delivering real depth,  insights that are:

• Connected across functions, not just siloed by platform
• Contextual, embedded into the actual decisions being made
• Composable, able to evolve with business questions over time
• Governed, so insights are trusted and auditable

Too often, analytics within these platforms are either too shallow (pretty but disconnected) or too narrow (powerful but limited to a single function). The real frontier lies in closing this gap, bringing analytics to where decisions are made, across business boundaries.

And in this space, enterprises must ask: are we seeing the full picture, or just the parts our platform wants us to see?

Part 4: Integration,  The Middleware Wars

If analytics is the brain of enterprise modernisation, then integration is the nervous system,  connecting disparate limbs, senses, and functions into a coordinated whole. As organisations move away from monolithic ERP cores and towards a more composable architecture, integration becomes the battleground where complexity either collapses or compounds.

Salesforce + MuleSoft: The API-First Empire

• Salesforce’s 2018 acquisition of MuleSoft turned it from a CRM company into an integration powerhouse (Salesforce, 2025).
• MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform provides an API-led architecture for connecting SaaS, on-premises, legacy, and modern systems, enabling organisations to create reusable data and service layers across the enterprise.
• Its strength lies in mature tooling for API management, event-driven architectures, and governance,  particularly valuable for regulated industries.
• However, this capability comes at a cost, both financially and in terms of implementation complexity. Many customers report steep learning curves and a heavy reliance on skilled integration specialists, resulting in a slower time-to-value than promised.

ServiceNow’s Integration Hub: Simplified But Shallow

• ServiceNow’s Integration Hub provides low-code connectors (“Spokes”) for common enterprise systems like SAP, Workday, and Azure.
• Its Flow Designer allows citizen developers to automate multi-step processes without needing deep coding knowledge, which is useful for bridging gaps within ServiceNow-centric workflows.
• But the challenge lies in depth. For complex integrations, particularly those involving legacy systems or multiple business rules, Integration Hub struggles. Its proprietary scripting languages and limited external orchestration mean enterprises often have to augment with external tools or build workarounds.

Microsoft Power Platform: Integration via Familiarity

• Microsoft’s integration play revolves around the Power Platform: Power Automate, Power Apps, Dataverse, and Azure Logic Apps.
• These tools work seamlessly with the Microsoft ecosystem ,  Teams, Outlook, Excel, Dynamics, and even legacy systems via Azure connectors.
• Its strength is approachability. Business users can build simple integrations and flows using familiar interfaces, lowering the barrier to entry.
• However, governance is a persistent issue. Shadow IT, uncontrolled proliferation of connectors, and inconsistent performance across workloads can create long-term technical debt if not carefully managed.

The Middleware War: Customisation vs Composability

The underlying tension in this integration battle is philosophical:

• Salesforce believes in robust, API-first composability ,  but at the cost of complexity and cost.
• ServiceNow prioritises internal cohesion and workflow-centric integrations,  but limits flexibility.
• Microsoft bets on usability and ecosystem breadth,  but risks sprawl and inconsistent governance.

For enterprise leaders, the real question isn’t “Can it integrate?”; it’s “Who owns the integration logic?” Is it centralised and reusable? Or is it locked in platform-specific connectors and flows? Is it flexible enough to change with business priorities, or hardcoded into vendor-specific paradigms?

As Anthosa’s Legacy Modernisation Framework warns, integration should never become a new form of coupling disguised as convenience. Instead, the integration strategy should be designed for resilience, reuse, and vendor portability,  not just for platform loyalty.

Part 5: Security & Governance,  From Trust to Trap?

In the age of platform consolidation, security and governance have become not only selling points but strategic battlegrounds. Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 all promise enterprise-grade security, compliance alignment, and governance at scale. However, as their platforms become more pervasive and integrate with business-critical workflows, we must ask: Does their “trust” model truly empower the enterprise, or merely disguise a new kind of dependency?

Trust is the New Brand Currency

All three cloud titans now sell “trust” as a product, not just a principle.

• Salesforce touts its “Trust Site” as a real-time transparency dashboard, showcasing uptime, security bulletins, and compliance certifications. The company positions its multi-tenant model as both resilient and secure, yet this same architecture means that customers must accept limitations around platform-level access and depend on Salesforce to handle all underlying security controls (Salesforce, 2025).
• ServiceNow operates with a similar tone of transparency, offering compliance with ISO 27001, SOC 2, FedRAMP, and other relevant standards. However, its proprietary scripting language (used in App Engine and Flow Designer) and tightly coupled integration model mean that the governance of custom logic often resides within the platform’s own walls, rather than within the client’s architecture. This can hinder proper DevSecOps integration.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 benefits from its integration into the broader Microsoft ecosystem, leveraging Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Defender, and Purview for identity, threat protection, and compliance tooling. However, this bundling also reinforces lock-in: governance capabilities are most effective only if you’re “all in” on Microsoft (Microsoft, 2024).

While each platform assures customers of their security “out of the box,” the governance of custom apps, API integrations, and AI agents is far more nuanced. And the complexity only multiplies in multi-cloud or hybrid environments.

Governance Gets Complicated in Composable Architectures

Modern workflows are no longer linear. They span multiple apps, connect internal and external APIs, and increasingly rely on low-code automations and embedded AI. This makes governance a dynamic problem, one that can’t be solved with static policies or IT-only gatekeeping.

Consider this:

• ServiceNow promotes “citizen development” through its App Engine Studio, allowing business users to build apps. But without tight platform governance models and usage boundaries, this can create shadow systems that evade central oversight.
• Salesforce Flow Orchestration allows complex automation chains across multiple clouds (Sales, Service, Experience, Marketing), yet often lacks uniform observability unless additional monitoring layers (like MuleSoft’s Anypoint Monitoring) are deployed.
• Microsoft Power Platform makes it easy to spin up automations and apps, but without the Power Platform Centre of Excellence (CoE) in place, businesses can find themselves flooded with poorly secured, unmanaged workflows (Microsoft, 2024).

Without embedded guardrails, these platforms can foster “accidental complexity” and “platform sprawl” masquerading as agility.

Security Promises Can Obscure Governance Trade-Offs

At first glance, platform security certifications and dashboards may suggest robust oversight. But many governance risks stem not from the platform itself, but from how it is used, extended, and configured over time.

• AI agents integrated into workflows can generate outputs that are not reviewable by traditional access control tools. As Salesforce, Microsoft, and ServiceNow embed GenAI capabilities deeper into their stacks, data lineage, explainability, and auditability become harder to enforce, especially when outputs affect customers directly.
• Custom scripts and low-code logic often bypass traditional change management workflows. While these enable speed, they also pose governance challenges around versioning, approval, rollback, and security testing.
• Integration hubs (like MuleSoft, Azure Logic Apps, or ServiceNow IntegrationHub) can become single points of failure or exploitation if not governed with clarity on data movement, protocol exposure, and API access layers.

As these platforms embed themselves into mission-critical systems, the line between security boundary and business boundary becomes blurred. The real question becomes: who controls the controllers?

Implications for the Enterprise

For IT leaders, security is no longer just about patching vulnerabilities. It is about governing value creation without suffocating innovation.

Key questions to ask:

• Who defines the guardrails for citizen developers and automation builders?
• Can we trace and explain AI-influenced decisions made through our workflow platforms?
• Are our integration layers auditable, and are roles/permissions federated across platforms?
• Do we have the right governance rituals in place to safely scale platform use?

In many organisations, these questions go unanswered, not out of neglect, but out of structural invisibility. When platforms “just work,” their hidden complexity often grows unchecked until a failure, breach, or audit reveals the blind spots.

From Trust to Trap: The Strategic Cost of Over-Reliance

While platform governance may initially be viewed as a technical exercise, its strategic implications are substantial.

• The more you delegate core governance responsibilities to platform vendors, the more your organisation becomes a consumer of someone else’s control plane.
• The more you build on proprietary toolsets, the harder it becomes to migrate or pivot.
• The more your security and compliance rituals are dictated by platform defaults, the more brittle your resilience to ecosystem change becomes.

In other words, trust can become a trap, especially if it is not accompanied by internal capability uplift, effective governance design, and multi-platform visibility.

Anthosa’s View: Embed Governance in Operating Model Design

At Anthosa, we advocate for an embedded approach to governance, one that doesn’t rely on platform defaults, but instead grows from the organisation’s own operating model. This includes:

• Designing governance into platform onboarding processes (e.g. using Anthosa’s Service Management Design Accelerator).
• Establishing cross-functional ownership models for workflow governance, not just IT security (see our Operating Model Design Strategy Accelerator).
• Integrating human-centred security practices from the outset, grounded in Anthosa’s Human-Centred Digital Transformation playbook.
• Leveraging tools like KaikaFlow to unify workflow governance, version control, and traceability across platforms without reinforcing vendor dependency.

Security and governance should not be reactive guardrails. They must be strategic enablers of sustainable scale, giving your people the confidence to create, knowing the organisation is protected.

Part 6: Data Sprawl and Lock-in Economics

Data is often hailed as the “new oil,” but for many organisations, it increasingly feels like quicksand. As enterprises embrace multiple cloud platforms, often with enthusiasm but little integration discipline, the result is a fragmented landscape where data lives everywhere and nowhere at once.

In the world of the new cloud titans, this data sprawl is not a bug; it’s a feature.

Data Everywhere, Intelligence Nowhere

Each platform, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Dynamics 365, has engineered its own data gravity well:

• Salesforce thrives on the richness of customer interactions. Its CRM data model is extensible but tightly bound to its ecosystem. Add-ins like Tableau and integrations with MuleSoft increase visibility but often create shadow data flows and parallel truths.
• ServiceNow collects operational data across IT, HR, customer service, and more. With its Common Service Data Model (CSDM), it attempts to bring structure, but most organisations still struggle with reconciliation, duplication, and lifecycle governance.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 benefits from the underlying Dataverse and Azure ecosystem; however, integrating across PowerApps, Teams, and Excel often results in overlapping datasets, inconsistent schemas, and significant duplication.

In short, each titan promotes a proprietary data model, and while they provide connectors to each other, these are often superficial, read-only, or prohibitively complex to maintain at scale.

The Cost of “Freedom”

Each vendor markets itself as a liberator from legacy data bottlenecks. But here’s the catch: their business models increasingly rely on making that “freedom” costly to sustain without them.

• Storage costs in cloud platforms are escalating, particularly when retaining audit logs, AI training data, and large-volume engagement data (e.g., call transcripts, case histories) over the long term.
• Analytics layers (e.g. Tableau, Power BI) often require additional licensing tiers or capacity pricing.
• Extraction or migration of data between platforms is discouraged through performance throttling, complex APIs, or legal/contractual friction.

These aren’t technical limits; they are economic moats.

AI Is Making It Worse

With the rise of agentic and generative AI features in all three platforms, more data is being generated and retained than ever before:

• Salesforce Einstein GPT creates summaries, next-best actions, and insight feeds.
• ServiceNow’s GenAI capabilities surface decision support and workflow automation suggestions.
• Dynamics 365 Copilot integrates into CRM, ERP, and Office, creating layers of metadata, logs, and context trails.

This “AI exhaust” compounds the sprawl, making it harder for enterprises to know what they know, let alone govern it.

The Hidden Risk: Vendor-Led Modernisation is Still Vendor-Lock-In

The phrase “vendor lock-in” used to conjure images of on-premise software contracts, painful upgrade cycles, and proprietary database schemas. But in the cloud-native era, lock-in has become more sophisticated and harder to spot.

Today, lock-in looks like:

• Process builders that can’t be exported or re-used outside the platform
• Metadata models that only make sense in one ecosystem
• Low-code apps that rely on proprietary connectors
• AI models trained on your prompts and workflows, but whose outputs are commercially owned by the vendor
• Custom logic scripted in a vendor’s own dialect (e.g. Apex for Salesforce, Flow Designer for ServiceNow, PowerFx for Power Platform)

The “Free You From Legacy” Trap

Ironically, the most significant selling point of the new titans, freeing you from legacy systems, is also their most effective lock-in strategy.

• Salesforce positions itself as the CRM of the future but makes switching cost-prohibitive due to deep interdependencies between Sales, Service, Marketing, and custom objects.
• ServiceNow offers composability but only within the bounds of its studio. Try moving workflows to another platform and you’re left untangling a web of deeply embedded configurations.
• Dynamics 365 integrates beautifully with Microsoft’s ecosystem. Still, that seamlessness becomes a trap: once your data, logic, and team habits are embedded across Azure, Teams, and PowerApps, exit becomes an organisational trauma.

It’s not that these platforms are malicious. Their stickiness is by design, driven by recurring revenue models, ecosystem expansion, and AI lock-in strategies.

Lock-In Is No Longer a Side Effect, It’s a Feature

Modern platform vendors don’t just sell features. They sell futures. And in doing so, they create “gravitational fields” that shape how your organisation thinks, builds, and grows.

In this model, switching platforms is like changing the laws of physics for your internal teams.

Without clear architectural intent, governance principles, and capability uplift across teams, vendor-led modernisation simply replaces one dependency with another.

This makes the case for a more thoughtful, human-centred, and composable approach to digital transformation, one that doesn’t just chase tools but designs for agility, resilience, and reusability from the start.

Strategy Recommendations,  Escaping the Next Lock-in

The seduction of SaaS convenience and agentic AI flexibility has led many organisations into a paradox: chasing modernisation by swapping one form of control for another. As we’ve explored, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Dynamics 365 offer immense potential, but also carry structural risks of vendor dependency, platform entrenchment, and capability hollowing.

To avoid replacing old blockers with new ones, enterprises must lead their modernisation with strategy, not software. Below are Anthosa’s field-tested strategic interventions to navigate this new terrain with clarity, capability, and control.

Lead with People, Not Platforms: Human-Centred Digital Transformation

Anthosa’s Human-Centred Digital Transformation (HCDT) Playbook turns the traditional approach on its head. Instead of beginning with tech selection, it starts with the lived experience of the people who must use, adopt, and evolve the solution over time.

Why it matters:

• Adoption is not about training. It’s about designing systems people want to use.
• Resistance is often a proxy for misalignment between work as lived and work as designed.

Referenced in the HCDT White Paper, this playbook focuses on:

• Shadow workflows and lived constraints
• Human-system interaction pain points
• Continuous feedback loops post-deployment

This approach reduces customisation waste, accelerates trust, and ensures that the chosen SaaS or automation platform amplifies, rather than rewrites, productive human routines.

Avoid Point-Fixes: Use the Legacy Modernisation Framework

Many digital transformation projects fail not because of poor tools, but because they apply a surface fix to deep system issues. Anthosa’s Legacy Modernisation Framework helps organisations:

• Assess the entangled layers of legacy systems (from process to policy to architecture)
• Design multi-path migration journeys (not just “lift and shift”)
• Create transitional hybrid states to manage risk

What makes it powerful:

• It doesn’t advocate for complete replacement unless justified.
• It emphasises business continuity and capability evolution over big bang go-lives.

Refer to the Legacy Modernisation Framework for Enterprise Transformation for visual architecture maturity models and capability gap maps.

Result: Your enterprise escapes legacy blockers without falling for a shiny new one.

Redesign the Operating Model: Service Management & Product Teams

Modern platforms are composable. But most organisations are still structured like waterfall-era dinosaurs.

Anthosa’s Operating Model Design Strategy Accelerator help change that.

Service Management Design Strategy Accelerator

Instead of managing services by ticket queues and ITIL dreams alone, this accelerator helps reframe service delivery as:

• Value-stream aligned
• AI-augmented
• Embedded with real-time feedback signals

Refer to the Service Management Design Strategy Accelerator for personas, service journey maps, and replatforming guides.

Operating Model Design Strategy Accelerator

This accelerator reorients organisations from siloed functions to multidisciplinary product and tech teams. It defines:

• Product boundaries for business-led platforms
• Decision rights and rituals (e.g. service reviews, operating rhythms)
• Dual-speed execution for legacy + greenfield coexistence

Refer to the Operating Model Design Strategy Accelerator for role archetypes and collaboration blueprints.

Combined result: Your organisation becomes capable of continuously evolving its digital estate without dependency on monolithic programme structures or vendor timelines.

Orchestrate, Don’t Just Integrate: KaikaFlow

In the battle to avoid replacing one form of platform entrenchment with another, KaikaFlow offers a radical departure from conventional SaaS thinking. It’s not another SaaS product. Instead, KaikaFlow is a platform orchestration engine that empowers enterprises to build bespoke digital experiences, bridging the gaps between SaaS products while maintaining control over their own architecture, partners, and product evolution.

KaikaFlow: A Strategic Enabler, Not Another System

Unlike typical SaaS tools, which package functionality in a one-size-fits-all model, KaikaFlow provides an adaptive digital product development framework. It enables enterprises to:

• Create purpose-built digital products tailored to specific business needs.
• Select from their preferred tech stack, integrating partner technologies from Anthosa’s ecosystem (e.g. WSO2, Harness, Cursor (incl. Resourcely), MongoDB, Databricks, Snowflake, AWS, GCP, Zededa, and others).
• Engage delivery partners strategically, using KaikaFlow to coordinate their contributions, track metrics, and refine delivery.

At its core, KaikaFlow powers a build–measure–learn lifecycle, ensuring digital products evolve iteratively, not just with business feedback, but with real-time data to guide their next version.

How It Works

• Design Bespoke Overlays: Custom UIs and workflow engines can sit on top of SaaS systems like Salesforce or ServiceNow, without hacking the core.
• Bridge Gaps with Lightweight Services: Rather than bloating your SaaS footprint, use microservices or cloud functions to plug gaps with precision.
• Orchestrate with Agents: Run cross-app, agent-driven workflows to unify fragmented customer or operational journeys.
• Drive Product Thinking: Every SaaS gap becomes a product opportunity, KaikaFlow provides the scaffolding for ideation, prioritisation, building partner onboarding, and ongoing measurement.

Why KaikaFlow Beats the SaaS Trap

With KaikaFlow, enterprises don’t have to choose between agility and governance, or between buying off-the-shelf and building from scratch. It enables intentional orchestration, giving business and technology leaders a shared cockpit for their digital transformation journey.

Iterative Planning. Iterative Execution. Real-time Feedback.

That’s how KaikaFlow transforms digital product delivery from a roadmap wish-list into an adaptive operating system.

Final Thought: Modernisation Without Surrender

Transformation is no longer about whether you leave your legacy blockers. It’s about how you avoid the next set.

Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Dynamics 365 will continue to dominate the enterprise SaaS landscape, each bringing tremendous value while also shaping your future operating model around their own agendas.

Your job isn’t to reject them.

It’s to adopt them intelligently, augment them intentionally, and architect your own operating advantage on top of their capabilities.

With Anthosa’s frameworks, accelerators, and orchestration approaches like KaikaFlow, you don’t just modernise, you strategise.

Because the real competitive edge in digital transformation isn’t choosing the “right” platform.

It’s designing a system your people can evolve, your business can own, and your strategy can control.