It’s Birthday week for Unit4 which celebrated 40 years of existence on September 26th. It’s not the only company celebrating this week.
MineralTree has raised $50 million in a new funding round. It has now raised $122.7 across four rounds of funding.
- Some interesting research by Workday and Trintech about technology in Finance
- Salesforce announced Virtual Selling solutions and Digital 360
- Signavio brought its process intelligence to Salesforce
Pick of the Week
There was a significant win for Oracle in the courts this week. The Department of Labor Administration Law Judge ruled in favour of Oracle finding no evidence of discrimination at the company. Dorian Daley, Oracle’s General Counsel, stated: “After four years of litigation, we are grateful for Judge Clark’s ruling. In a more than 200-page decision, Judge Clark found no evidence of discrimination. We have been subject to years of harassment by Department of Labor employees with no evidence of discrimination whatsoever. This case never should have been brought in the first place.”
It affirms the Oracle belief that the company is run with equality and opportunity. It is noteworthy that the three people commenting in the press release are all senior executives and all-female. Safra Catz, Oracle’s Chief Executive Officer, commented: “At Oracle, we have 135,000 employees who work every day to help our customers succeed. The Department of Labor complaint bore no resemblance to the Oracle I know.”
Appointment
Alight has promoted Xan Daniels to the newly created role of global inclusion and diversity leader.
CAI Software LLC has appointed Mitch Cain as Chief Technology Officer. Cain was previously VP Software development at Insurity Inc for nearly nine years and was Chief Architect at LexisNexis Insurance Software Solution before that.
Cyara has appointed Dennis Reno as head of customer experience. The role was created following a year of significant growth, including 41% YoY SaaS bookings and 95% customer retention.
Fenergo announced the appointment of Paul Kavanagh as Chief Revenue Officer. Kavanagh previously held Sales Leadership roles at Cisco, Siemens and Nokia Networks. Kavanagh commented: “Fenergo’s pedigree in financial services and extensive client repertoire are testament to its position as a leader in CLM and digital transformation. I’m thrilled to join the company at this exciting juncture. My focus will be on building out a team of domain experts and optimising our entire go-to-market function to accelerate growth and deepen partner relations.”
Business
Akerna Corp published its full-year report. Total revenues were up 16% to $12.6 million. Software revenue increased 21% to $10 million.
Asana revealed strong Q2 results, with revenue growth of 57% with more than 82,000 customers now paying more than $5,000 a year. Total revenues were $52 million. Losses rose though, with a GAAP operating loss of $33.6 million, 64.6% of revenues, Q2 2020 GAAP operating loss was $15.9 million (48.0% of revenues)
AT&T and Microsoft have partnered to provide a means to deploy a secure IoT solution. It will combine the AT&T powered guardian device with Azure sphere.
Automation Anywhere unveiled enhancements to its global partner channel program. The intent? To build skills, drive demand and increase opportunities for the company’s 2,000 worldwide channel partners. It will add new training, enrich sales and marketing initiatives and increase ecosystem support.
Canadian Accountants are now able to gain continuing professional development credits from more than 70 BlackLine webinars and events the company produces.
Exact made its second acquisition in as many weeks. Having acquired Unit4 Bedrijfssoftware it has now bought Belgian firm Officient, an HR software provider.
FreshBooks acquired Facturama, a Mexican E-Invoicing management company as it looks to expand its presence in the country.
Qlik has expanded its strategic partnership with Google announcing optimised support for SAP on Google Cloud using Google BigQuery
SAP.iO has invested in Jina AI, a Berlin-based company that provides an open neural search solution. SAP.iO also launched an accelerator program in New York. The startups involved are led by women and people from diverse backgrounds and focus on retail, manufacturing and Automotive Technology. They include Cogniac, Hero, Ivaldi, LISNR, Rheaply, and Wise Systems.
Customer
Agiloft has revealed in a case study how J. B. Hunt Transport leveraged its CLM solution during the COVID pandemic to keep its services running.
Five more NHS Trusts have selected the Blue Prism platform including Royal Surrey, Gateshead Health, County Durham and Darlington, Alder Hey Children’s Hospital and Blackpool Teaching Hospitals
Ogilvie Construction Ltd has selected the Asite Common Data Environment (CDE) for all future projects to streamline document management and increase collaboration.
Mount Sinai South Nassau (MSSN) selected Infor Cloverleaf to improve interoperability across the healthcare organisation.
Carswell Group has successfully deployed Kerridge Commercial Systems’ (KCS) K8 ERP from KCS during the lockdown.
Mavenlink has published two customer case studies. The first is about RSM US LLP, a leading audit, tax, and consulting firm based in North America. The second is CORE Business Technologies which saw billable utilisation increase by 35% after deploying Mavenlink.
DLM Finance, a Dutch financial services provider, has used the Mendix low-code platform to make Trade Manager, a purpose-built global financial software platform for fund managers making investments in developing countries.
Temperance Distilling Company has selected Process Pro ERP. It makes over 500 alcoholic beverages, including Black Swamp and Davenports.
The American Heart Association selected Qualtrics CoreXM.
Green Cargo has extended its support agreement with Rimini Street for its SAP ECC6.0 platform.
Terumo Americas Holding (TAH), a subsidiary of Japan-based medical device manufacturer Terumo Corp, successfully implemented on the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud:
- SAP S/4HANA
- SAP Master Data Governance application
- SAP Ariba solutions
- SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain solution
- SAP Extended Warehouse Management application
- SAP SuccessFactors solutions
- SAP Concur solutions
Macaw, a full-service digital agency with offices in The Netherlands, Germany and Lithuania has selected Unit4 ERP and will deploy the solution in the cloud.
Rollins Inc will deploy UltiPro across its 13,000 employees. The pest control company looked for a solution that would enable it better to manage its field workforce with an active acquisition strategy.
Products
Blue Prism launched Blue Prism Interact, a human-to-digital worker collaboration capability.
Centage has added additional regions in Canada on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for planning Maestro to support customer growth.
ECI Software launched a Dashboard and Analytics platform for Field Service Division customers powered by ECI Cognytics. The latest functionality to be released is a Strategic Business Review Dashboard for the e-automate software.
elastic.io announced that the Universal Integration Adapter for SAP ByDesign is now available for purchase on SAP® App Center.
Gatekeeper, a leading contract and vendor management software solution, today announced that its new SuiteApp has achieved ‘Built for NetSuite’ status.
Qualtrics launched Delighted AI, an artificial intelligence and machine learning engine built directly into Delighted’s customer experience platform. It targets three benefits:
- Ensure the highest customer response rate
- Receiving quality customer feedback
- Surfacing feedback themes and insights with Smart Trends
ServiceNow announced the addition of new native workflows for Microsoft Teams at Ignite 2020.
Suite CRM celebrated 1 million downloads and released Suite Analytics 1.1. Both components SuiteCRM Data Integration and SuiteCRM Web Analytics see improvements.
TalentQuest has added another 100 new microlearning modules across a wide range of topics to its TQ Leadership Series.
ThoughtSpot released ThoughtSpot Cloud, one of the first fully-managed SaaS offerings providing business users with the flexibility to glean instant insights from data in the cloud.
Vic.AI, a platform for accounting productivity, is now available through the Sage Intacct Marketplace. Vic.AI automatically syncs vendors, general ledger accounts, and dimensions from an organisation’s Sage Intacct account. As invoices arrive in Vic.ai, the AI interprets data, makes coding decisions, and loops users in for review only if needed. Invoices are then posted to Sage Intacct’s Accounts Payable module.
Research
Brightpearl published research that looked at the latest trends for fashion retailers as they look to increase sales lost through stores. They include free delivery, 38% are planning to offer free delivery by early next year, and 22% will offer free returns. The survey also looked at preparations or lack thereof that UK and US retailers have made for a second wave of COVID-19.
Icertis published a study looking at the importance of contract lifecycle management software is to business decision making. The Forrester Consulting study noted: “Among the firms surveyed, CLM has universally gone from a nice-to-have to a critical-to-have in a post-COVID world. Firms who involve coalitions of C-suite stakeholders in CLM decision-making and have more fully integrated solutions are better prepared and more confident in managing rapid change.”
Jitterbit published “The Future State of Higher Education” report. The report examines how institutions are preparing for the future with 92% saying that COVID-19 is the greatest challenge the organisations have faced. Education is changing forever. Key findings include:
- 72% of respondents are continuing to invest in tools that support remote learning.
- 46% are considering enabling Virtual Reality for the academic year.
- 67% of institutions have six or more applications they need to integrate to offer an engaging online learning experience.
- 79% agree that it is important to use integration technology to connect all of their systems seamlessly.
Kofax published part 2 of its Kofax 2020 Intelligent Automation Benchmark Study by Forrester Consulting. It was based on a survey carried out in January. It examines the specific requirements for the automation platform from the perspectives of IT and “citizen developers” – business users increasingly driving and implementing automation strategies. How relevant it is now, post-COVID is probably more interesting.
Kronos has released a study about the impact of COVID on attitudes of employees to organisations. The survey was based on 4,000 responses from leaders and employees in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S. Key findings included:
- 20% felt their organisation met their needs during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic
- 33% say they trust their employer more now than before the pandemic began because of how organisations reacted
- 57% of U.K. workers believe that their organisation will be prepared to manage through another potential spike in cases of COVID-19.
The survey also looks and causes for employee concern in the workplace and the growing issue of mental health in the workplace
ThoughtSpot and TDWI published a report entitled, “The Modern Analyst: Meeting Tomorrow’s Challenge” based on responses from 430 data and analytics professionals. Three key findings include
- Why data projects are failing
- How technology and training is needed
- The barriers within organisations which include data infrastructure and data literacy
Xero research has uncovered what policy decisions Australian small businesses are hoping for in the October 6th budget in Australia. The top three are:
- Incentives to start new businesses (29%)
- Support for young entrepreneurs to grow their networks and experience (28%)
- Research and development tax incentives for small business (22%)
The report also looked at how businesses intend to leverage the measures in the budget with more technology top of the list (30%).
