In the week where the UK left the EU, acquisition news seemed to dry up a little. Several companies put out announcements about results and progress in growth from the previous year, some with more figures than others.
Acquisition
ServiceNow announced that intends to acquire Passage AI, a conversational AI platform company. This will help accelerate development of major language support across the Now Platform including ServiceNow Virtual Agent, Service Portal and Workspaces. The deal should close before the end of 2020. Terms were not disclosed.
Appointments
Wavemaker has appointed Ajay Gupte as Chief Executive Officer, Wavemaker South Asia. He takes over the role from Kartik Sharma. It is recognition of his success in his previous role as MD Indonesia at Wavemaker.
Business News
ADP delivered its Q2 2020 results, increasing revenue by 5% to $3.7 billion. Carlos Rodriguez, President and Chief Executive Officer, ADP commented: “We are continuing to execute well as we balance near-term transformation initiatives with long-term growth investments.”
Centage, the cloud financial software vendor took a look back at 2019. It raised $8.5 million at the beginning of the year and continued to improve Planning Maestro. Also, for the fourth year in a row it achieved double digit growth,
Cornerstone OnDemand Inc has become a founding member of the Velocity Network Foundation. VNF is a non-profit organization committed to supporting research and development of applications for transformational blockchain technology and promoting global adoption of a network for verified career credentials. It joins Aon’s Assessment Solutions, Cisive, HireRight, Korn Ferry, National Student Clearinghouse, Randstad, SAP, SumTotal Systems, SHL, Ultimate Software, Unit4, Upwork, Velocity Career Labs and ZipRecruiter in the organisation.
DocuSign announced the launched of DocuSign University Expertise Recognition program. It allows people to earn badges in recognition of their expertise.
UK startup e-days reviewed its success in 2019. It now has 50 employees and increased customer numbers by 300 during 2019. It added major brands such as ASOS, Campari and John Clark Motor Group as some of the 300 new customers during the year.
Danish PPM vendor Forecast took a look back at 2019. A year in which it received new funding and attained triple digit growth. Product enhancements included integrations to JIRA, Azure Active Directory, Google, Outlook and Apple Calendar as well as QuickBooks. There was also a major UI facelift, numerous UX improvements as well as a new Budget and Financial Portfolio Report.
Ivanti unveiled a new go to market strategy. It will focus on its unified endpoint management and enterprise service management products. It is now looking to deliver long term customer value rather than just shipping products. To deliver this vision it has switched from a distribution based partner system to a focused channel model.
JDA announced its full year results and took a look back at 2019. Over the year it achieved 51% SaaS bookings growth, 82% SaaS revenue growth, and 83% SaaS annual recurring revenue. It now has more than 600 customers using JDA cloud.
Namely announced its full year results showing a 29% growth between 2018 and 2019. The release also took a look back at recent product launches and new hires.
NTT Ltd has earned the SAP on Microsoft Azure advanced specialisation. The Microsoft award demonstrates the NTT Ltd ability to deliver SAP solutions on the Azure cloud.
Priority Software Ltd has signed an agreement with PRODAC Systems in a strategic partnership. This will provide customers with a complete end-to-end manufacturing system with Priority ERP and PRODAC MES solutions. The two solutions are already integrated and should help PRODAC break into the US.
QAD has signed up Aliter Business Solutions as a distributor and partner in India for QAD Adaptive ERP. Jan Biezepol, QAD managing director, South Asia noted: “We are confident that their expertise will help to accelerate our business growth in India. 2020 is a year of opportunities for us to leverage and with this partnership, we hope to expand our footprint across the country and help manufacturers compete and thrive.”
Ramco Systems posted its Q3 results with revenue of US$20.81 million. It now has 80% of its revenues outside of India and saw growth in Greater China and Mexico. Quarterly order bookings were up by 15% from the previous quarter at US$ 29.8 million.
SAP announced its Q4 and full year results this week. Total revenue was up 12% to US$27.553 billion. It had strong growth in cloud bookings and also saw a rise in software license and support revenue.
ServiceNow has announced a strategy targeted at industry verticals. It will initially focus on banking and telecommunications developing new solutions specifically for those industries. Deloitte will become the lead partner for banking and Accenture the lead partner for telecommunications.
Scoro reviewed its progress in 2019. It focused on product and platform enhancements including moving to AWS. It now has offices in 7 countries and more than 100 employees. Looking ahead it promises more features during 2020. These include customer portal functionality, improved work and resource planning capabilities, email integration and improvements to dashboards and reporting.
Customer news
Preston North End Football Club is implementing a new ticketing engine from Advanced. The TALENT solution is going live at the end of the current season (2019/2020)
RSA insurance has saved an estimated 3,700 hours effort per year within its call centres after the implementation of Aptean Respond. While this seems a lot, an average worker completes 2,080 hours in a typical year. This therefore equates to a saving of 1.78 employees.
Ellucian announced that Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary selected the Ellucian managed cloud solution including Ellucian Colleague, Ellucian Ethos, and Ellucian Analytics.
Asia Pacific Telecom has increased customer satisfaction after completing an implementation of NICE Nexidia Analytics. CSAT rose by 3% to 90% after the analytics engine enabled them to perform targeted evaluations on important customer satisfaction (CSAT) drivers.
Telecom Fiji is leveraging Oracle technology for its digital transformation. It will deploy Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management, Oracle Communications Order and Service Management, Oracle Communications Network Charging and Control, Oracle Field Service Cloud, Oracle Live Experience Cloud, and Oracle Marketing Cloud as part of the Oracle Digital Experience for Communications suite.
Alkem Laboratories, an Indian Pharmaceutical company has selected SAP Ariba to transform its procurement operation. It will integrate the solution to its S/4HANA ERP implmentation.
Product
Accelo recapped the releases of 2020 to date. They included a new auto time rounding feature, click through metrics for the user dashboard and several others.
Accenture has achieved SAP-Certified Integration with SAP Model Company. It has achieved this through using the Accenture myConcerto platform. It will allow Accenture to deploy SAP S/4HANA faster by as much as 30%.
Arcoro announced a new Compensation management Module. The new module works alongside Arcoco Core HR or Performance Management. It can also integrate with third-party HR and payroll systems. The module allows users to benchmark the market and assess the impact of pay changes against budgets. It also automates the process of executing compensation decisions.
DocuSign launched two new products on the Salesforce cloud. DocuSign Negotiate for Salesforce, helps companies accelerate the process of generating and negotiating agreements. DocuSign CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management) is the next generation of SpringCM, the company it bought last year.
ECI unveiled integration between Macola ERP and NET1 Payment processing. It enables Macola to process credit card and ACH payment online in a secure way. NET1 already integrates with other ECI products including: Advantage, DDMS, DDMSPLUS, e-automate, M1, Red Falcon, RockSolid POS, RockSolid MAX, Spruce, JobBOSS and TeamDesign.
KBMax released the latest version of its CPQ solution, 3.4.8.0. It introduces a new Layouts features. This enables companies to creates innovative pricing solutions that give alternatives methods for configurating complex solutions. This enables different pricing solutions to be displayed for different buying personas. Other improvements include a new text file output, with the ability to have custom file extensions on the exports.
Marg ERP has launched a new feature. It leverages Google Maps to display the location of retailers that enables distributors to find potential customers faster.
NICE Value Realization Services (VRS) is now available for solutions in the cloud. The solution enables customers to unlock the full value of NICE’s cloud solutions when implemented individually and as a full integration of products across the NICE cloud platform.
NICE has strengthened CXONE through combining Nexidia’s AI driven Sentiment Analysis to its own Predictive Behavioral Routing. CXOne will now factor in customer preferences, in addition to personality, when connecting employees and customers in real-time.
Oracle has added supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) capabilities to Oracle Utilities Network Management System (NMS). Grid operators will gain real-time intelligence and control over all types of field devices and DERs without having to rely on distribution SCADA additions or upgrades.
Pipeline has release v2.8.0 of Pipeliner CRM Cloud. The new release has several enhancements including collapsible dynamic forms, improved support for mass emails and extensions to user permission setting. It has also improved the mobile application.
SherpaDesk has added a new improved SherpaDesk Knowledge Base feature. It supports multiple permission levels given extensive publishing flexibility for each article.
simPRO unveiled the latest update to simPRO Mobile. Version 4.1 includes improvements to the Square integration, time scheduling and job management status. There are also several bug fixes.
Thompson Reuters ONESOURCE has achieved certification for SAP S/4HANA Cloud. The ONESOURCE Determination engine automates the entire transactional tax lifecycle from rate calculation to compliance.
Trintech released version 8.0 of Cadency its System of Financial Controls solution. It offers improvements in support for transaction and account reconciliation, journal entry, audit preparation. It also integrates with the office of finance’s software ecosystem.
Research
BrightHR published its Staff Absence Trend Report. It is a lighter look at some interesting statistics into sickness. It looks at sickness, vacation and lateness from around the world.
Bullhorn published the Bullhorn’s 2020 Global Recruitment Insights and Data report. It found that 77% of global recruitment firms believe that firms must accelerate worker pay increases in order to compete for qualified candidates in 2020. It also looked at impacts of diversity, digital transformation, skills shortages and technology spending.
Fenergo published its findings into institutional fines. It shows a total of $36 billion for non-compliance with Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Know your Customer (KYC) and sanctions regulations were levied. The report delivers further details including a break down by sector and country. It highlighted that 12 of the top 50 banks incured fines.
iCIMS, Inc., released the results of an independent survey of 500 IT and HR Operations leaders’ perceptions, priorities and challenges supporting HR and Talent Acquisition. The survey found that 70% plan to increase investment in recruitment technology in 2020. However, there is resistance as HR technology is low on the priority of IT Leaders.
A study by Nintex has found that Gen Z are having an impact on technology purchasing decision. The findings are published in a series of report titled “The Gen Z Effect”. The studies look at the impact of Gen Z employees on the workplace today and also how they operate as employees.
Forrester Consulting has completed a study commissioned by UiPath entitled: “The Future of Work Is Still Being Written, But Who Is Holding the Pen?” (registration required). It assessed the impact that automation technologies like AI and RPA are having on businesses and their employees. It also looked at how businesses are preparing for this new work paradigm.
