Again a week with several companies changing hands. ECI Software changed PE ownership and OSAS was bought by Aptean (see below). iCIMS extended its footprint in EMEA buying EASYRECRUE. More results emerged with Workday beating expectations again. There was also some product news, including a major release for Ninja RMM.
Pick of the week
ADP published the 2021 Workforce Trends report. It surveyed more than 1,000 people and identified five key trends:
- Focus on resilience: The report found that 39% of employers reported that employees’ health fear was a top concern.
- Drive for diversity: Employers increasingly sought data insights on the racial and cultural demographics of their workforce, accounting for a 74% increase in searches. Employers increased searches for gender-based demographics by 42%.
- Fuel for flexibility: A recent ADP Research Institute study found that 44% of employers now have official flexible working policies in place, up from 24% pre-COVID-19. The study revealed most workers (65%) are upbeat about the flexibility of opportunities they will have in the future.
- Spotlight on compliance: ADP found that 68% said they needed guidance on government relief programs. These included direct monetary assistance, low-interest business loans, enhanced unemployment assistance and tax relief and deferral.
- Agility in action: ADP found that half of small businesses and 84% of larger businesses are making adjustments to their business model. The most significant shift is seen in the way they are delivering their products or services to market.
Acquisition
Aptean has acquired Open Systems Adaptable Solutions adding a long list of solutions to its portfolio. The solutions include Traverse, ProcessPro, Master, Impress, Flex-Pack, Traverse Global Service and SouthWare.
Oracle announced that it has agreed to acquire Nor1. The acquisition extends Oracle Hospitality’s OPERA Cloud Suite by adding Nor1’s Merchandising platform that enables hotels to provide personalized offers throughout the guest journey using AI & machine learning, thereby improving guest engagement, and driving incremental revenue and improved loyalty for hotels.
Visma has acquired Ditmer, Danish software and consulting house. One of the Ditmer solutions is a meeting management solution which will supplement Visma’s First Agenda meeting software,
Appointments
Copado has lured three execs from Salesforce to strengthen its leadership team. Rip Gerber joins as President and Chief Business Officer. Pat McQueen as Senior Vice President of Sales Engineering and Operations. Ram Reddy as Vice President of Engineering and Managing Director, India. Gerber and Reddy were previously at Vlocity, now Salesforce Industries. Bob DeSantis was also appointed as an independent director on the Copado board.
Following a new investment, Rik Thorbecke was named Chief Financial Officer at Jitterbit.
Procore has appointed Pat Wadors as Chief People Officer
Showpad has appointed Marissa Aydlett as chief growth officer, and Hendrik Isebaert is promoted to chief operating officer. Former CEO of Conga and Docusiign Matt Schitz joins the board of directors.
SYSPRO has appointed Sandra Fraga as Chief Sales and Marketing Officer. Fraga spent nine years at Dell and two at Microsoft as Product Category Lead in South Africa before her appointment.
Business
ABBYY and Bizagi have formed a strategic alliance stemming from challenges organizations face to maintain business continuity and meet customers’ needs as they pivot operations in a new socially distant and virtual environment.
Cyara announced new support services to support its Customer Experience Assurance platform. Premium support extends the standard support offered with all subscriptions. Expert Services provides consulting services to help companies assess and improve test automation processes in their organisation.
ECI announced a new EDI wholesaler integration partnership with Aster Technology UK Ltd. Aster Technology UK’s ever-growing product catalogue is now available to access directly via ECI’s Horizon software. Katun Corporation, one of the worlds leading suppliers to the office equipment industry, has joined the ECI PO Processor platform.
Intuit published its Q1 2021 results. Total revenue was up to $1.3 billion, a rise of 14%. QuickBooks online accounting revenue 28 % in the quarter, driven primarily by customer growth and mix-shift. Sasan Goodarzi, Intuit’s CEO, commented: “We had a strong start to the year as we continue to accelerate innovation on our A.I.-driven expert platform. We delivered double-digit revenue growth in the quarter and are excited by the velocity of our innovation.”
KeyedIn announced a new partnership with Changefirst. KeyedIn is now offering Roadmap Pro, Changefirst’s SaaS-based platform for planning, delivering and tracking the people aspects of change.
Klient is rumoured to have been sold and after a few months of quiet has launched a series of webinars across ten themes starting December 2nd.
iCIMS announced a partnership with Visier at its INSPIRE conference.
Audax Private Equity (“Audax”) has invested in Jitterbit, Inc. Neither party disclosed terms. Existing investors KKR, Samsung Ventures and other existing investors will continue to hold stakes.
MHR has completed the latest phase of its headquarters expansion, a new multi-storey car-park which cost £4.5 million
NICE partnered with Symphony, a Sykes company, to expand deployment of robotic process automation, and in particular attended automation, globally.
QAD Adaptive ERP 2020.1 has achieved Veracode Verified Standard Status, validating it’s secure software development processes
Salesforce has chosen to become an early member of GAIA-X, the initiative jointly launched by the French and the German governments in June 2020. GAIA-X is a cloud-based data ecosystem that promotes both innovation and the highest standards of data protection and security.
SD Worx and MobileXpense announced the expansion of their partnership across Europe to help businesses in their day-to-day payroll and expense management.
Signavio process intelligence for RPA is now integrated with Blue Prisms Digital Workforce and is available on the Blue Prism Digital Exchange.
SYSPRO has formed a strategic regional relationship with Draycir Ltd, a global provider of intelligent document management and credit control solutions. SYSPRO USA customers can now access Draycir’s Spindle Document Distribution software for advanced rule-based one-click document delivery for individual or batch processing of SYSPRO documents.
Trintech has enlarged its data centre in Australia and a larger team to meet increased demand in the region.
AT UKG WORKS, UKG issued a business update following the merger of Kronos Incorporated and Ultimate Software. Total revenue for the combined organization grew 9%, approaching $3 billion. It also announced the formation of UKG Delivery Services consisting of more than 2,000 services professionals around the world with decades of deep technical and domain expertise.
Customer
Struto, a Diamond HubSpot partner, solutions agency and systems integrator, has recently adopted Codeless Platforms BPA Platform as its integration and business process automation solution of choice.
Athabasca University has partnered with D2L and Ellucian to innovate and improve the learner experience, in an approach that is a first among post-secondary institutions in Canada. It will combine D2L’s Brightspace platform with Ellucian Banner.
Groupe Beneteau will implement IFS ERP at 17 production sites worldwide including France, Poland, the United States and Italy. BearingPoint will help implement the solution at the leading boat manufacturer.
One Brooklyn Health selected Infor Healthcare to create a clinically connected health system. It will use a cloud-enabled version of Infor® Cloverleaf Integration Suite.
Daron Group, a family-owned group, specializing in logistics and ship chandling in Africa, has deployed Infor CloudSuite Distribution Enterprise across its operations. The Authentic Group, an Infor partner, carried out the project.
Southway Housing is to deploy MHR iTrent and should go live in April 2021.
Dairy Farm Group is using MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform to unify its customer loyalty experience across over ten household brands in more than 2,000 stores in Hong Kong and Macau. The solution connects applications, including MuleSoft, Salesforce, and Tableau.
Ewals Cargo Care, a Dutch transport and logistics company, has used Qlik and Snowflake to improve data delivery by 400%.
Wodonga TAFE has signed a new 5-year agreement with TechnologyOne which will future-proof critical IT systems, moving them off-campus and on to SaaS. Murray River Council in the Riverina region of New South Wales also signed a five year deal with TechnologyOne. It will migrate from its on-premise deployment to TechnologyOne’s OneCouncil SaaS solution.
Europcar Mobility Group UK, a global leader in car and van hire, will roll out a customised mobile application by Totalmobile across the UK to give customers confidence in damage reporting.
Product
Accelo revealed that seven new list screens are available in beta, the screens include more columns and filters as well as the ability to customise them.
Bill.com has made available a new solution for wealth management firms. The solution enables firms to shift from a cumbersome and time-intensive approach to an automated and secure bill payment process.
BlackLine revealed several new products and an update to its cloud platform at its annual user conference BeyondTheBlack, this time held virtually. They included:
- BlackLine Cash Application to simplify the Order-to-Cash process
- BlackLine Account Analysis to mitigate Risk in high-volume accounts
- A new user interface to Help Drive Finance Performance Management
- Improved integration with SAP
The Blue Prism Automation Lifecycle Suite is generally available. The new suite includes Automation Lifecycle Management (ALM), Process Assessment Tool (PAT), and Capture: Process Modeller. David Moore, SVP of Product Strategy and Management at Blue Prism, commented: “These offerings are all about improving operational agility. These tools will help new and existing Blue Prism customers determine the best step forward in their intelligent automation journey and ensure sustainable and efficient management of their automation process.”
Clear Books launched an enhanced dashboard for its online accounting software to help customers to manage cash flow better.
DBSync announced and integration that connects Intuit QuickBooks Enterprise Diamond with CRMs such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales CRM.
ECI Software launched a new mobile application for ThermoGrid targeted at residential services companies. The app will assist field service engineers across several tasks. ECI will add functionality will roll out in 2021.
Intuit has launched HubSpot for QuickBooks, an integrated CRM and financial management solution to help growing businesses speed up sales cycles and to allow sales and finance teams to work together more efficiently.
Keap has launched Infusionsoft Analytics. It will deliver marketers a hands-on approach to analyzing and editing their campaigns and drive ROI.
Pega introduced Pega RPA Auto-balancing – the industry’s first Robotic Process Automation feature that automatically provisions workloads between an organization’s available bots.
Salesforce launched Customer 360 Truth. The solution includes best-in-class data management, consumer identity access management, and privacy tools. Its components are Customer 360 Data Manager, Customer 360 Audiences, Customer 360 Identity and the Customer 360 Privacy Center.
The latest release from Scoro sees improvements to purchase orders and the management of a sales pipeline. There are also improvements to Zapier integrations.
Seismic Fall 2020 was released, the new version better content analytics capabilities to boost marketers and seller effectiveness. There are also new role-based dashboards, the ability to set up alerts and share dashboards. It has also added integrated to Snowflake to access larger data sets.
Signavio launched the Signavio Business Transformation Suite CEX Edition and the Signavio Academy. Signavio’s CEX Edition leverages analytics to identify critical customer interactions and the interdependencies between customer sentiment, moments of truth and underlying process operations. Signavio Academy provides courses to help employees skill up process managers to help them transform customer experience processes.
Solarwinds launched a new automation cookbook for MSPs that included more than 380 custom scripts to help automated processes across the SolarWinds product set.
UKG introduced analytics enhancements for UKG Pro and UKG Ready to help organizations keep people at the centre of decisions while rapidly adapting to fast-changing business conditions.
Research
Aptean published its “Global Food & Beverage Industry Trends Report” co-authored with Reuters Events (registration required). The report found that more than 75% of food and beverage industry respondents are currently increasing or maintaining their investments in digitalization. 64% reported seeing good or advanced progress in the move to digital. There are still barriers, with a lack of knowledge (51%) and budget (50%) the two biggest.
A new Ceridian Pulse of Talent report has found that the new majority of the North American workforce could move role. 64% of US and 58% of Canadian employees are either looking to change or would consider an offer from another company. Younger workers are the most likely to move (US: 75%, CAN: 87%).
Oracle published two research reports this week. The first based on a survey of grocery shoppers. The Grocery Retail survey shows that 53% of respondents in the U.S. have shopped online for groceries during the pandemic, with 37% stocking up more frequently online than in-store. Most (93%) intend to continue shopping online. The second looked at the changing nature of clinical trials and was conducted by Informa Pharma Intelligence. COVID-19 has sped up the decentralisation of clinical trials, with 76% of respondents now performing some trials are decentralised. However, the pandemic has caused issues with longer enrolment times (49%), amended protocols (45%), and paused protocols (41%).
Salesforce published the 3rd edition of its non-profits Trends report in collaboration with the Urban Institute. The report is based on responses from 867 non-profit companies. It looks at three strategic areas: Digital Experience, Managing through change and planning for the future. Key findings include:
- Nearly half (48%) of high digital maturity non-profits said they were “Likely” to gain support for their cause over the next six months, versus nearly one in five low digital maturity organizations.
- For high digital maturity organizations, 85% were more likely to have met or exceeded their fundraising goals, compared to 66% of low digital maturity non-profits.
- 30% of high digital maturity (leading) non-profits were much more confident that they can better to handle fluctuations in revenue, compared to 24% of non-profits overall.
Tray.io published research entitled ‘The state of Automation’. The result of a survey of 200 professionals across 13 industries, it revealed how business software had impacted productivity. Key findings included:
- 62% of respondents said that they spend more than 3 hours a week manually moving data between applications.
- 80% of respondents agreed that automating more of their work would increase productivity.
- 20% of respondents indicated that automation was an IT-led function.
- 90% of companies implement some workflow automation, but less than 20% have full-scale programs in place.
UKG published a report entitled “The State of Workplace Disability Inclusion & Digital Accessibility.” It identifies how an increase in remote work caused by COVID-19 has affected companies’ efforts to improve digital accessibility for employees with disabilities. A large majority of managers (85%) think their company’s efforts to address disability inclusion are “above average.” However, there is still room for improvement. 23% of managers were unsure if they have had the proper training to respond or provide insight on potential accommodations when direct reports disclosed details about their disability. There has been progress though. Over three quarters (78%) expect their company’s accommodation of employees with disabilities to be somewhat or much better in a post-COVID-19 world.
