The big story of the week was the departure of Jennifer Morgan from SAP, leaving it with a sole CEO again. COVID-19 again influenced many of the customer announcements and customer stories. Thoughts are now turning to the likely recession and ultimate recovery ahead.
Organisations are now starting to get used to working remotely, and there must be some sectors concerned with the longer-term impact. The property sector is a notable one. If people continue to work at home in numbers, companies are going to look to make savings on property and office costs. They are unlikely to eliminate them, but smaller footprints with hot-desking and meeting spaces could become the norm.
Acquisitions
insightsoftware has acquired Mekko Graphics. Mekko Graphics provides data visualization and financial presentation software for enterprises. It has not disclosed terms.
Appointments
Tangoe has appointed Arun Shivdasani as Chief Financial Officer. Shivdasani was previously at Geller & Co where he was CFO of Bloomberg Government and CFO of Bloomberg Global Data. Tangoe CEO Bob Irwin commented: “Our focus continues to be on expanding our market leadership to pursue additional growth. Arun is a proven, innovative leader who has demonstrated success in leading finance to help drive revenue growth, operational efficiencies and cross-functional collaboration.”
Business
Conga has achieved certification for both ISO 27001 and 27701. Its annual audit now includes compliance checks for HIPAA, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, SOC 1 Type 2, and SOC 2 Type 2.
Cornerstone has completed its acquisition of Saba. However, it is paying less than originally stated due to the impact of the COVID-19 on business. It will now pay $1.295 billion on closing. It had originally agreed on a price of $1.395 billion at the time of announcement as stated in the original announcement.
DSI has partnered with DocuSign and integrated the DocuSign Agreement Cloud as part of its supply chain solution. Mark Goode, President and CEO, DSI commented: “This partnership with DocuSign aligns with our core digital transformation strategy on many fronts and can help provide greater productivity, inventory optimization, compliance and revenue generation for our customers. By removing the errors inherent in paper-based processes, combined with our mobile supply chain expertise, we are collectively able to help organizations reduce risk and make informed business decisions across numerous industries.”
Gatekeeper, the contract and vendor management software company, has announced a partnership with Vendor Centric. Vendor Centric helps drive the most value form vendor relationships, contractors and other third parties. It also works with Vendor Risk and Argos Risk Solutions.
Icertis has donated $100,000 to the UW Medicine Emergency Response Fund to help provide care for vulnerable populations during the current pandemic. Icertis’ gift was made possible by voluntary reductions in pay to CEO and Co-founder Samir Bodas, CTO and Co-founder Monish Darda. It also reduced contributions to members of the Board of Directors.
SAP announced its Q1 results this week. They were in line with the preannouncement it made earlier in the month. It also announced that Jennifer Morgan, Co-CEO will depart from the company on 30th April. Christian Klein will continue as sole CEO after her departure.
In a significant move, Trintech has partnered with The Hackett Group. It will add an alternative to BlackLine for the Hackett Group when it works with customers.
UiPath has partnered with Swiftqueue to provide an unattended automation solution to bridge Swiftqueue’s patient engagement system with the multiple data storing systems each hospital uses. The new solution will bring benefits both during and after the COVID-19 crisis.
Customer
Aptean announces that its ERP solutions have helped a long-standing medical device customer to increase the production of respiratory equipment. Part of the solution was to increase the headcount of employees accessing the system. It did not disclose the name of the customer.
Automation Anywhere has revealed that bots created on its platform have helped airlines and hotels cope with the mass of cancellations the travel industry has had to cope with. The Airline Call Center Bot has helped airlines such as American, United, Delta, Lufthansa, Air France, Air China deal with the challenge. The bots reduced processing time from 20 minutes down to three minutes.
The UK arm of VolkerWessels Group will use the Asite platform as its Common Data Environment Solution for all future projects. The contract is initially for three years. Lewis Osborne, IT Project Manager for VolkerWessels UK, commented: “Asite has demonstrated that they are a very capable partner. They have provided us with excellent consultancy and a brilliant piece of software that has helped us to digitize many of our workflows and document-related processes within a truly collaborative environment. We’re in the infancy of our journey with Asite but expect this partnership to continue to bear fruit far into the future as we look to roll out more of what Asite has to offer on its platform.”
Both the State of Nebraska and the State of Iowa have deployed the Domo COVID-19 Crisis Command Center. First deployed in Utah, the solution analyses multiple data sets across the state to respond faster to the crisis.
Kofax, in partnership with ImageTech Systems, Inc. has produced a loan processing solution. It will assist financial institutions with cognitive capture, software robots and process orchestration capabilities to expedite loan applications submitted under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).
OutSystems has partnered with The Lisbon Metropolitan Area, the Lisbon City Council, Deloitte and Hi Interactive to roll out a solution to facilitate resource sharing between 18 municipalities in Portugal.
The State of Iowa will leverage the Qualtrics COVID-19 Assessment, Testing, and Case Management Solution. Governor Kim Reynolds, State of Iowa, commented: “It is essential that we move with speed and accuracy as we fight the spread of COVID-19. By partnering with Qualtrics, we will be able to provide a statewide assessment to every resident and have a comprehensive way to manage the virus. In addition, the Qualtrics solution will allow us to monitor symptomatic individuals on a daily basis, helping us save lives. Automating the aggregation of this data will inform crucial decisions such as the location of testing centers and the deployment of PPE. This statewide solution will help Iowans fight the spread of this disease and get us back to work and our normal way of life.”
Cosmo Oil Co. Ltd has rolled out SAP Ariba to improve the efficiency of its procurement of indirect materials. Murphy Oil Corp also renewed and expanded its use of the SAP Ariba platform.
Product
Accelo took a look back on the feature updates from the first quarter of 2020. It also revealed what is working on to release next, and what its roadmap looks like.
ActiveCampaign is launching a digital version of its in-person CXA Study Hall series. The in-person series, which launched in 2018, has been attended by over 5000 businesses in 74 cities across 16 countries. It is now launching a digital of its Customer Experience Automation (CXA) which all clients can access regardless of location.
Alight has partnered with Mobile Health to create a wellbeing solution, Alight Well, for customer employees. The solution is fully integrated with UPoint, the Alight benefits portal. Brannon Lacey, president of benefits solutions at Alight commented: “Alight believes that improving health outcomes and maximizing benefits dollars starts with empowering people to take charge of their total wellbeing with on-demand support from their employers. Alight Well underscores our continued effort to offer more holistic benefits options and deliver stronger total rewards strategies to our clients and their people.”
Aphix Software announced that its PocketShop app is now available on the SAP App Center. The Aphix Software application integrates with SAP Business One and delivers real-time digital ordering to customers.
Codeless has released the latest version of its BPA Platform. BPA Platform 2020 includes a new HTML Pro Tool that enables users to edit email templates, portals and dashboards. It also includes improvements to email and SMS tools.
ID Agent has added Passly a full-featured, integrated secure identity and access management solution, to its Digital Risk Protection (DRP) Platform.
In Cloud Solutions Ltd, CUB (Contract and Utilities Billing) solution is now available on SAP App Center. The solution integrates with SAP Business ByDesign and enables companies to handle bespoke contract and complex billing scenarios.
Monday.com has launched several new features in its work management platform. They include:
- Cumulative Charts & Benchmark Line
- Rich avatar card, with a hover popup that reveals an individuals information
- Duplicating parent item will now duplicate their subitems
- Location column now supported in forms
- Working status added to the profile menu for better visibility
Namely has introduced Managed Benefits Pro. The new service helps mid-sized companies to manage their employee benefits program. It combines Carrier Invoice Reconciliation Services, ACA Consulting, and a Healthcare Concierge that is powered by TouchCare.
Oracle has achieved FedRAMP High Authorisation for its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure-Government Cloud Offering. It is a significant step for Oracle as it seeks to move Federal and agencies to its cloud solutions.
Amazon Prime business customers can now take advantage of a new, free, customer feedback mechanism powered by Delighted, a Qualtrics company. Organisations can access the Delighted customer experience platform and discover customer insights
Pandle added several features in recent days. It has enhanced its quick currency conversion tool, prepopulating data from the bank feed. It now allows users to format text in an invoice or quote, supporting simple features such as bold, underline and italic. There are additional tabs in Pandle Projects that filters out completed projects. It has also improved how file imports work, giving greater visibility of progress.
Xero announced several updates. It is now possible to use the turnover calculator report to determine if the organisation qualifies for Job Keeper payment in Australia. It had already revealed the improvements to Payroll last week to cope with the new legislation. In the UK, it now applies CIS to invoices created on the Xero accounting mobile apps. Finally, it has redesigned the custom date range for in applicable reports.
Research
Kofax has unveiled the findings from its 2020 Intelligent Automation Benchmark Report. There is progress. 58% of organizations have deployed automation technologies to digitize information. Chris Huff, Kofax’s Chief Strategy Officer, commented: “The 2020 Benchmark data clearly tells a story of enterprises moving beyond siloed, ad hoc automation and toward integrated, single-vendor Intelligent Automation platforms. Boards and executives understand the value of a single platform that can digitally transform a multitude of processes while providing an open architecture capable of easily connecting to third-party applications. Our aggressive R&D has been aimed at cloud-enablement, embedding AI to handle unstructured data, and orchestrating downstream workflows – allowing customers to rapidly drive increased capacity, productivity, employee satisfaction and customer success.”
Nexthink has published research entitled “The Experience 2020 Report: Digital Employee Experience Today”. It found that employees lose 28 minutes of work time for every IT issue they experience. According to IT leaders that responded to the survey, each employee experienced two such incidents every week. It leads to a loss of nearly 50 hours of work a year. Key findings included:
- When IT issues go unnoticed, things get worse: 79% of respondents agree that when IT issues are not reported, it always leads to bigger issues
- Digital employee experience is highly important across organizations: 82% view it as ‘very important’ to ‘critical.’
- Inability to measure new IT rollouts: On average, IT departments only have approximately 56% visibility into the success of new technology rollouts. 58% visibility into the adoption of the rollout. Finally, 45% visibility into the issues impacting employees’ experiences
- IT issues at work are commonplace: 61% of respondents agree that IT downtime is an accepted norm in their organizations