Enterprise tech stacks have become intricate tapestries of interconnected systems, including CRM, CPQ, billing, ERP, analytics, and other related systems. Each integration creates a dependency: updating one tool requires dozens more to keep pace. Otherwise, organizations must face cascading failures.
Amid the current wave of migrations from legacy CPQ to Salesforce Revenue Cloud, this growing technical debt is a looming threat, especially to revenue continuity.
The Cost of Fixing the Old vs. Building the New
Technical debt isn’t just code rot. It’s a budget line item. According to Accenture, executives now allocate approximately 24% of their IT budgets to debt remediation, up from 17% in 2020-22 and trending toward a recommended cap of around 15%. The Wall Street Journal estimates the global technical debt mountain to be $1.52 trillion, with 91% of CIOs identifying it as a top challenge. Even elite organizations earmark 7% more of their budgets to remediation than for digital innovation.
Deep-rooted technical debt manifests in brittle integrations, including custom APIs, legacy adapters, hard-coded endpoints, and undocumented workflows. Every vendor upgrade, API change, or even new AI prompt can shatter dependent systems, turning a planned CPQ transformation into a multi-quarter derailment.
Revenue Cloud: A Reset with New Risks
Salesforce CPQ, acquired in 2015 via Steelbrick, is now in End-of-Sale (EOS). While support continues, the product no longer caters to new customers and won’t release new features. The replacement, Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA), is built on the core Salesforce platform. Native objects replace packages, enabling API-first integrations, built-in billing, and renewal flows.
But this isn’t a plug-and-play. It is a replatforming.
The switch may promise streamlined revenue ops, and the benefit is real. A 2024 Deloitte survey noted that successful cloud-driven digital transformations delivered strong ROI, even amid cost overruns. Still, almost 66% of enterprise projects exceed their budgets, often by 30-50%, and CPQ runs the risk of directly impacting revenue quoting.
Integration Chaos: The Unseen Threat
Breaking an endpoint or changing a data model doesn’t always show up in budgets. But it breaks pipelines, slowing quoting, derailing renewals, and introducing compliance risk. Financial institutions have learned this the hard way: 33 Barclays outages, 32 each at HSBC, Allied Irish Bank, and Santander, have occurred since 2023 due to legacy debts and fragmented systems. Even a trillion-dollar mis-transfer at Citi occurred over a faulty backup system.
These risks are not abstract. In a 2025 report, CPQ experts warned that RCA’s immature architecture and integration changes could lead to “broken workflows, pricing errors, and longer sales cycles.” Max Rudman, Steelbrick’s founder, refers to it as a new system launch, not an upgrade.
Technical Debt: Hidden in Plain Sight
McKinsey highlights that 20-40% of a CIO’s tech estate is tied up in unsupported or outdated systems. Meanwhile, a 2024 vFunction analysis found that over 50% of companies allocate more than 25% of their IT spend to technical debt, often stalling innovation.
And it is not new. A 2015 study by Carnegie Mellon University found that much of the technical debt in today’s enterprise stacks has existed for over a decade.
In the CPQ ecosystem, hidden costs often exceed platform fees. Accenture warns that exceeding 15% in debt remediation spend delivers diminishing returns and leads to long-term architectural fragility.
For most enterprise architects, the debt isn’t hidden. It’s known. It’s tolerated because there’s no political capital or time to address it. But Revenue Cloud migration brings it to the surface and thus forces the issue.
Beyond RCA: Smarter CPQ Options for Complex Revenue Operations
Most CPQ tools were not designed for today’s ecosystem fragility. Legacy vendors rely on brittle package architectures. Newer platforms, while more API-friendly, often require replatforming entire revenue operations to achieve promised benefits. Few offer a middle path.
DealHub: A Proactive, Debt-Smart Alternative
DealHub is one of the only CPQ platforms architected specifically for adaptability, enabling the evolution of your business model without wholesale system rewrites.
- Adapt without disruption: Update incrementally without disrupting quoting flows.
- Fast time-to-value: Unlike traditional approaches that take quarters, DealHub’s phased implementation delivers measurable improvements within weeks, providing immediate relief.
- Integration-first architecture: Designed to handle connector versioning, schema changes, and custom logic with observability, rollback, and refactorability built in before code is committed.
- Lower total cost of ownership: Early adopters report faster ROI, reduced consulting burnout, and fewer unplanned expenditures tied to reactive remediations.
Where RCA demands reinvention, DealHub supports evolution, delivering architectural stability without sacrificing velocity.
Conga: The Enterprise-Grade CPQ for Complex Deal Cycles
Conga has long positioned itself as a robust option for organizations with intricate approval flows, global operations, and contract lifecycle management needs. Built for high-stakes enterprise quoting, Conga’s suite integrates CPQ with CLM, eSignature, and document automation to streamline B2B sales motions.
- Purpose-built for complexity: Ideal for organizations with multi-tiered product catalogs, global pricing rules, and compliance-heavy workflows.
- CLM + CPQ convergence: Combines quoting with downstream contracting for full lifecycle visibility and enforcement.
- Flexible deployment: Supports Salesforce-native and hybrid architectures, giving IT teams optionality during transitions.
- Proven in regulated environments: Financial services and healthcare enterprises leverage Conga for auditability and policy enforcement.
Conga’s CPQ works best for companies that treat quoting as a legal and financial touchpoint, not just a sales task, making it a strong contender for those needing compliance-grade traceability.
Logik.io: The Headless Configuration Engine for Composable Commerce
Logik.io takes a next-generation approach by decoupling the configuration logic from traditional CPQ suites. As a “headless” engine, it allows teams to embed product logic into custom front ends, marketplaces, or even self-service portals, without rewriting pricing rules.
- Designed for composability: Plug into any frontend experience, CRM, or eCommerce flow with flexible APIs and SDKs.
- Rules-as-a-service model: Manage configuration logic centrally while deploying across different channels or regions.
- Built by CPQ veterans: Created by the original team behind Steelbrick, Logik.io was purpose-built to address the rigidities of legacy CPQ architectures.
- Ideal for hybrid sales: Supports guided selling, self-serve quoting, and rep-led flows without duplicating product logic.
Logik.io is a compelling option for digital-first companies building modular commerce systems that require both scalable and channel-agnostic product logic.
Don’t Let Debt Domino Your Revenue Ops
We’re past the days when CPQ was a self-contained puzzle. Today, it serves as the foundation for quoting, billing, renewals, and compliance. Replace it incorrectly and you risk ripple failure across your revenue stack.
Technical debt is not theoretical. It’s misfired invoices, stalled renewals, and missed deals.
If you’re facing a forced Revenue Cloud migration, take a moment to pause. Map your dependencies, budget for remediation, and treat integrations like first-class citizens. You can protect revenue flow, or be forced to rebuild it.
