As the COVID-19 pandemic continues businesses are still making announcements. Many would have coincided with events that the organisations have since cancelled. Several companies are announcing updates on their stance on COVID-19. These included work from home policies or a change in the way their services are offered. Some are starting to offer discounts to existing customers to assist them, especially over the next few weeks.

Appointments

Salesforce has appointed Arundhati Bhattacharya as India Chairman, CEO. Bhattacharya will assume the role on April 20. Bhattacharya previously worked for the State Bank of India for 40 years, leading it as chairperson before she left in 2017.

Business

Advanced has announced that 4S Systems Limited has joined the Advanced partner programme – TruePartner. Based in Shepperton, 4S Systems offers several IT services to customers.

Concentra has launched a new brand, TrueCue. TrueCue will house its analytics products, its data platform and services components. James Don-Carolis, Managing Director, TrueCue commented: “We are delighted to be establishing TrueCue as a new name in the data and analytics market. The launch will give us the independence to grow and scale the business in the right way, while enabling us to go to market independently with our unique mix of technology and services.”

QAD published its fiscal 2020 4th quarter and full year results. Total revenue for the 4th quarter was down to $78.6 million from $82.7 million year over year though subscription revenue grew 19% to $28.6 million. Full year revenues were also down from $333 to $310.8 million although subscription revenue grew by 17%. $6.2 million of that figure was due to currency.

SAP has started a new accelerator program in San Francisco with eight new start ups. The focus this time is on travel and expense management. The companies include: Bacarai, Hotailors, Jet-Set Offset, Jojonomic, Lumo, RoadGoatTripgrid, and 30SecondsToFly. It also commenced its accelerator program in Tokyo with six international B2 startups. These are: 3i Inc., GROUND Inc., Hacobu Co. Ltd., HyBird, LiLz Inc. and XTIA Ltd.

SAP is offering a range of educational tools free of charge during the COVID-19 crisis. This includes the OpenSAP platform with MOOCs on a variety of topics. It is also offering four learning journeys in the SAP University alliances program and courses on the SAP Young Thinkers program

EBP is aiming to support customers during the COVID-19 crisis with a triple service offering. A help centre for customer support, An online sales service and support and advice in the form of articles all aimed at helping small businesses.

Customer

Shared Services Canada (SSC) has selected BMC’s Remedy IT Service Management (ITSM). The solution is intended to accelerate the Government of Canada’s adoption of standardized enterprise ITSM processes. In time SSC will migrate its ITSM solution to the cloud based BMC Helix ITSM to support its 300,000 users.

The Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) has chosen Ceridian Dayforce to drive its global HR function. It is implementing payroll, benefits, workforce management, and talent management.

SSP America, a leading operator of food and beverage brands in airports across North America, has selected the Icertis Contract Management (ICM) platform.

American Electric Power (AEP) has selected Oracle Utilities OPower to deliver tailored energy management programs across its portfolio of utilities. This extends the relationship with Oracle as AEP Ohio already uses the solution to deliver 25 million personalised communications.

Phenom has added new features to its talent experience management platform in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. These include email and SMS templates, SMS communication for US customers and support for virtual events. The latter two are free for 90 days.

ReceiptBank has helped the Wirrimanu Aboriginal Corporation (WAC) which represents Balgo residents deliver compliance and oversite for its supermarket following an investigation. The solution it put in place were supported by John Birse, Director of The Institute of Certified Bookkeepers and founder of Jim’s Bookkeeping Franchise. Birse commented: “Moving away from paper-based, single user, single device, manual legacy accounting systems to cloud-based programs such as QuickBooks and ReceiptBank has meant Aboriginal Directors from remote communities are financially informed.”

Tyler Technologies announced that an alliance of its customers is to provide a case management solution to the Veterans Administrations. SBG Technology Solutions Inc., Chainbridge Solutions Inc., Cognosante, and Atlas Research, all members of the MicroPact Global Alliance partner program will deploy 2,500 seats of Tyler Entellitrak as part of wider project.

Product

Aderant now is offering its Expert Sierra solution hosted in Europe on AWS for UK and continental Europe customers. It did not reveal which AWS data centres it will host from though.

Celigo is now available from a German data centre, located in Hanover to support its growth in EMEA.

Clear Books is to freeze pricing as it has decided to pause its April price review as its small business customers deal with the impact of Coronavirus. It will reassess the situation in October.

DBSync has added support for Snowflake. Customers can now replicate and manage Salesforce or OData sources across multiple Snowflake, AWS S3 or RedShift accounts.

Domo made three product announcements this week. Domo Business Cloud now supports Amazon Sagemaker Autopilot. It added new features to Domo Business Cloud including more powerful, high-bandwidth connectors for cloud and on-premises data repositories. There is also more intelligence, automation and better visualisations. Additionally, it launched the Domo Data Experience Framework (DDX), the industry’s first no-code, drag-and-drop development environment designed to support data-driven alerts to the explosion of citizen apps.

Users of DronaHQ are now able to use a new Custom code block within Workflow Designer that allows them to generate custom code for use on the no-code platform.

Gekkobrain, a solution that simplifies migration for SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA is now available on the SAP Appcentre.

Igloo is offering a free business continuity bundle to customers worldwide until July 6th. The bundle includes a Communication and Incident Planning Zone solution. This includes a news hub, leadership corner and incident planning hub.

Kofax has integrated Kofax TotalAgility into Kofax ControlSuite. It provides more comprehensive cognitive capture, transformation and process automation capabilities to ControlSuite users.

NICE launched CXone@home, a cloud native offering designed to enable contact centers that are using CXone to respond to COVID-19 and transition their workforce to work-from-home in 48 hours or less. In the past week it has transferred 10’s of thousands of customers from call centres to home working.

Pulseway has added the ability to launch remote control of any user session from its web application. It also now supports more triggers for its automation workflow including Low Memory, Service Stopped and Low Hard Disk Space and more actions including Start, Stop and Restart Windows Services, Add and Remove Tags.

RoboMQ has announced a solution to connect Workday employee data with Active Directory to speed up onboarding.

ServiceNow announced a new care plan to help companies during the COVID-19 crisis. It also launched four new community applications to assist customers. They included:

  • Emergency Response Operations app for government agencies.
  • Emergency Outreach.
  • Emergency Self Report.
  • Emergency Exposure Management.

SAP and Accenture have launched an SAP S/4HANA solution they co-developed for upstream oil and gas companies. Jan van den Bremen, a senior managing director and lead for Accenture Intelligent Platform Services in Europe commented: “SAP and Accenture are delivering a solution that brings in innovative technologies like AI to deliver real-time insights, greater visibility and better decision-making. We are proud to be the only SAP co-development partner working side by side to deliver leading oil and gas industry solutions. We’ve worked with SAP and leaders in the oil and gas industry to co-develop a solution that helps enable faster adoption of new technologies to better manage changing market conditions.”

SAP and Goldman Sachs has made its Global Payments capabilities available in SAP Ariba. The intent is to make it simple for buyers to pay foreign suppliers in local currencies.

TigerGraph announced TigerGrapth 3.0 its next generation Graph database. It delivers no-code analytics for its graph database. Users will be able to ingest data from a relational DB and apply analytics using a visual query builder without a line of code. It will be available in a limited release in March 2020.

Trintech has invested in a data centre in Germany in partnership with Amazon and Rackspace. It will strengthen its support of the German and wider EMEA and North African market for its financial software.

Research

Coupa published findings from its Q1 2020 Coupa Business spend Index. Focused on the US and it found organisations spent: 33% more on sanitizing products for the same quarter year over year, 75% more on protective equipment. Furthermore travel and accommodation spend dropped by 46% and other areas also showed a significant drop.

Rob Bernshteyn, chairman and chief executive officer at Coupa noted: “The Q1 2020 Coupa BSI clearly illustrates the degree to which economic, health, and political implications continue to weigh on businesses as they evaluate their corporate spending over the next three-to-six months. Not surprisingly, we also started to see distinct purchasing patterns emerge at a category level – in areas such as business travel and protective equipment – that are indicative of the potential impact the Coronavirus will have on the economy.” Bearing in mind that this was prior to the main impact of the COVID-19 virus it seems likely that Q2 spend will show even greater changes.

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