Despite the Thanksgiving break there was still a wide range of news from across the world. Salesforce reported record breaking sales during cyber week which bodes well as the rest of the world prepares or Christmas giving.
AppointmentsAll Posts
Alteryx has appointed Scott Davidson as its first chief operating officer. Davidson was previously COO and CFO at Hortonworks. He will have responsibility for departments including: Corporate Development, Information Technology, Enterprise Applications and Human Resources.
Engagio has appointed Megan Heuer as VP of Marketing. Heuer was previously leader of research and advisory services at SiriusDecisions for the account-based marketing practice.
QAD has appointed Kathy Crusco to the Board of Directors where she will serve on QAD’s Audit and Governance Committees.
Unit4 has added Hervé Couturier as a Non-Executive Director to its board. Couturier will have a focus on product and technology. This was a role he was involved in at Amadeus, SAP, Business Objects, and IBM historically. He is also an experienced non-exec.
Business News
Ascender, a leading HR and Payroll provider in APAC has partnered Curo Compensation Limited a leader in remuneration technology. The agreement will see Curo technology embedded in the Ascender Payroll and HCM suite.
Fenergo celebrated a 21% growth in its year end figures to March 31st 2019, including a EUR 70.1 million in revenue. However, the company also made an operating loss of EUR 5.4 million and expanded its headcount by 44% across its 14 offices.
IFS is partnering with Zebra Technologies and innovating with new technologies such as smart glasses for Field Service Management.
Namely announced the locations and dates of Namely Connections. Each two day event is will be hosted in seven different cities across the US. They are: Austin TX, Boston MA, Washington DC, Chicago IL, Los Angeles CA, New York NY and Atlanta GA. The events take place between February and November.
Salesforce revealed digital sales in US Cyberweek broke $31 billion. eCommerce was up on Thanksgiving by 16%, Black Friday by 14% and Cyber Monday by 11%. It believes that AI helped to drive up sales by 9%.
Salesforce formally opened its Ohana floor in London. It also announced a total of $1.25 million pledges in grants to non-profit organisations, education charity Ark and the National College for digital skills Ada. It will also open up its Pathfinder Training Program in the UK for the first time.
Customer News
McLaren Racing will leverage Automation Anywhere artificially intelligent software robots (bots) into the team’s race operations. They will deploy the technology for the start of the 2020 Formula 1 season. Automation Anywhere also saw a 35 increase in Service Cloud cases during the period.
Neumann University has added Ellucian CRM Advance to its Ellucian suite of products. CrM Advance will support its alumni relationships and fundraising.
IFS has added Texas based oil and gas producer Endeavour Energy Resources LP to its customer base. Endeavour will implement IFS within the Azure cloud and is a significant win for the resurgent Swedish ERP firm. A year ago Endeavour was the target of an $8 billion bid by Shell. This is a significant sized company for IFS to add to its portfolio.
Fransen Gerrits has upgraded its Infor M3 ERP installation with the assistance of Infor Alfa-Beta. The Dutch Animal feed producer rejected a shift to SAP or Microsoft.
Guatamalan supermarket chain Unisuper SA has extended its investment in JDA software. It has purchased and deployed JDA Portfolio Merchandise Management. The company made the commitment after it saw significant benefits from the other JDA applications it has deployed.
Angel Trains is leveraging K2 low code process automation software to develop and deploy applicatios across its IT landscape. An authorisation process was implemented in 25 days amd reduced processing time by 75%.
Automotive parts reseller Rimmer Bros has selected QAD Precision’s Transportation Execution and Transportation Analytics solutions to support its global retail operations.
Ultimate Software has announced that Arc Broward, which deployed UltiPro in May 2017, is now using the UltiPro Recruitment Platform and Onboarding to increase efficiency.
Product News
Ivanti Service Manager has achieved FedRAMP authorized designation. The announcement allows Ivanti to sell the product to more government agencies in the US.
iVend Retail, the integrated omnichannel platform, is now certified for Sage 300cloud in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. CitiXsys has announced the iVend Retail solution suite is now fully integrated with Sage 300cloud allowing it to pass relevant data between the two.
In a blog by Juan Loaiza, Executive Vice President, Mission-Critical Database Technologies, Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Database as a cloud service on Exadata inside customers’ data centers. In 2020 the Autonomous Database will also be available for customers in their own data centres. It has also added Oracle Cloud Free Tier. This is a full instance of the autonomous database for students, startups and developers with limited storage and compute power.
Pegasystems has announced support for Kubernetes on the current version of Pega Infinity. It enables customers to self manage their cloud environment. Customers will also be able to host their Pega instances in any major cloud vendor including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Pivotal, and Red Hat.
Pipeliner has announced the release of v2.7.0. Improvements include strengthened email functionality with personalisation, new templates and the ability to track emails.
TigerGraph has released new functionality and better performance for its TigerGraph Cloud offering. New features include configuration for distributed graphs and replica instances for high availability, as well as the ability to leverage EFS for backup and restore.
Upland has announced updates to its enterprise knowledge management solution RightAnswers. It has improved the user experience both visually and through improved automation. It has also added new chatbot features to the tool.
Zendesk announced a strategic, go-to-market solution package based upon an enhanced integration between Amazon Connect and Zendesk Talk Partner Edition. The solution will be generally available from late January 2020.
Pulseway announced version 7.0 of its mobile app supporting new motherboard chipsets, new AMD processors and AMD / NVIDIA Graphics Card monitoring.
Research
Xero has published a report entitled Business Rewired, which investigated the concerns of SME’s for the future. Major concerns include late payments, cyber attacks, tax rates and Brexit that all threaten their future existence.
ASC606 and other new accounting regulations are driving up the costs of auditing according to research by FloQast. The report looks at how and why they are doing doing and what mitigating action some companies are taking.