Revenue generation isn’t solely the purview of our friends in sales, marketing, and customer success. Top-line gains can also be found in nontraditional revenue-producing departments. For high-end gym Equinox, it was the technology department that ensured money wasn’t being left on the table.

Revenue Brew spoke with the fitness brand, and the fintech it partnered with, about how centralizing payments helped enable a swifter global expansion.

Margins matter

According to Holly Worst, VP of retail and unified commerce at fintech company Adyen (a single-stack platform that unites various financial tools), Equinox’s CTO Eswar Veluri and his team were originally operating with three to four payment system providers during the brand’s international expansion. (Its first London club opened in 2012, followed by Toronto in 2013.) This fragmented approach led to the dreaded customer friction—most notably at one of the brand’s London locations, where certain payments were not translating from US-based financial systems.

“As with any company, there is always a certain scaling point where things don’t scale right,” Veluri told Revenue Brew.

Equinox decided to use Adyen to centralize its payment systems. Veluri outlined some of the benefits: First, it allowed for a deeper understanding of different kinds of payment rails—ranging from the automated clearing house (ACH), card networks like Mastercard or Visa, or real-time payments (RTP)—as well as interbank transactions. “Figuring out which one to run on, and charge us less money, whereby we make more money, was one of the simplest kinds of concepts,” Veluri said.

Keep reading here for expert insight into payment systems.—BS

So there’s plenty of food for thought if you’re looking to avoid some of the common missteps in tech stack deployment. But let’s say you’re up and running and hitting some inevitable roadblocks. Then what?

Pain management

Tech stack pain is part of the territory for revenue organizations in the age of AI hyperscalers and agentic AI overload. With a plethora of tools available and AI integration at an all-time high, issues are bound to arise. No revenue organization is immune but there are ways to minimize the impact: Identifying the pain points early is one.

According to Revenue Brew’s survey on the state of sales tech, 23% of respondents said if they were able to turn back time and onboard their tech tools again, they would spend more time testing integrations before any rollout. Additionally, 37% said they would also simplify their workflows.

The perils of misalignment

The proliferation of SaaS tools means an entire suite of agentic verticals now exists to address hyperspecific issues, but getting different tools to mesh seamlessly with each other is another challenge altogether.

Miller says a problem that arises is not understanding how these platforms connect with each other and serve the overall goals of a business. She’s hitting on something that crops up regularly in our coverage of the tech stack space: Tools can sometimes create friction rather than working with existing functions.

This is something that Irina Soriano, vice president of strategic enablement services at sales engagement platform Seismic sees, especially when AI tools are added into the mix. “If things are positioned as a standalone, particularly for the sales teams, that is then starting to create some of the scenarios where we have the change fatigue, the overwhelm,” she said.

Soriano says it’s a different story when there is alignment with existing workflows.

Read on for the full State of the Industry report on sales tech.—BS, LI

I’m sorry, the old, non AI-focused brand identity can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, because it’s dead.

As AI startups flood the market with catchy “.ai” domains and flashy product offerings, older tech companies that were once critical to the rise of cloud computing and the internet are also entering the space through rebrands and more AI-focused business propositions. But can that strategy translate into new glory days?

You’ve changed. At Western Digital’s 2026 Innovation Day event in New York City, CEO Irving Tan said the company’s rebrand to WD, along with its new logo, were steps in its transition to become a more “data-centric company” critical to AI projects.

“That’s who we are: a data center company that’s at the heart of AI and cloud today and going forward,” Tan said of the company once largely known as a storage device manufacturer. In its succeeding Q2 2026 earnings call, Tan said that WD, which reported $3 billion in revenue in the quarter, had already sold out of its hard disk drives for the 2026 calendar year thanks to hefty storage demands from AI companies.

WD isn’t the only company turning a new identity leaf. Rackspace Technology, once a pioneer in the cloud hosting industry, has also repositioned itself for the AI boom. In 2023, it launched a new global practice called Foundry by AI by Rackspace (FAIR) dedicated to helping businesses with their AI strategy. In its first year, FAIR—now known as Rackspace AI Solutions—completed more than 40 global AI implementations for companies across industries like real estate and education.

Keep reading here for the importance of utilizing your existing consumer base.—BM

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