IFS launched IFS Cloud, it’s next-generation combined solution that delivers Moments of Service to customers. Following on from its rebrand, it signals a major shift for the company as it offers a modular suite of applications. Sage Intacct announced a partnership with Corporate Spending Innovations and will white label an AP and payments solution.
There were more results this week, with Oracle providing good results but warning of a soft Q1. Several companies raised funds: Scoro raising $16 million to fund expansion into the US, and Icertis raised 80 million on a valuation of $2.8 billion, its last before an IPO?
Pick of the week
Asana published its Q4 and full-year 2021 financial results. With work management platforms being acquired every month, Asana showed why there is such interest in the category. Its Q4 revenues were up 57% to $68.4 million, and full-year revenues were up 59% to $227 million. Asana now has 93,000 paying customers and 1.5 million paying users.
That growth is expensive. Asana posted an operating loss of $175.6 million. It can sustain that level of losses as it continues to grow, with cash reserves standing at $405 million at the end of the year. Besides the operating losses, though, the other indicators, such as average deal value and retention, are heading in the right direction. The majority of the costs are in product development and Sales and Marketing. Product development stands at 53% of revenues, sales and marketing 78%, and general administration 34%. The latter especially seems high. It will be interesting if Asana slows its sales and marketing investment slightly during the year.
Dustin Moskovitz – Co-Founder and CEO commented: “This year, as our revenue grew rapidly at 59%, we succeeded in scaling our culture as well and building an environment where our team can thrive as they create value for our customers.” – Source Seeking Alpha
Acquisition and Funding
Akerna is acquiring Viridian Sciences, a vendor whose cannabis business management software system is built on SAP Business One.
Charlesbank Capital Partners, LLC has signed a definitive agreement to make a strategic investment in Ivanti. While Ivanti did not disclose terms, Charlesbank, Clearlake, and TA will have equal representation on the Ivanti Board of Directors.
ThoughtSpot, the leader in search & AI-driven analytics, announced a new investment from Snowflake Ventures, the ventures arm of Snowflake. Terms were not disclosed.
Workday has completed its acquisition of Peakon. Phil Chambers, co-founder, and CEO, Peakon, commented: “Six years ago, we founded Peakon on the belief that an organization’s most valuable assets are its people, and that people do their best work when they feel heard and supported at work. As part of Workday, we’ll accelerate and extend that belief – providing organizations with more of the real-time visibility they need to support their employees and build better businesses.”
Appointments
Alteryx has appointed former Google executive Anjali Joshi to Its Board of Directors.
BlackLine has appointed Lisa Schreiber as Chief Customer Officer. She was previously Chief Customer Success Officer at Forcepoint, the SaaS cybersecurity company.
Conga has appointed Randy Littleson as Chief Marketing Officer.
Demandbase has appointed Heather Zynczak to its Board of Directors. Zynczak is the former CMO of Pluralsight and Domo.
IRIS has appointed Jim Scott as its new Managing Director (MD) for Accountancy. Scott previously worked at Sage. The company has also appointed David Turner as Chief Marketing Officer. Turner was previously CMO at SideTrade, building up the start-up marketing team. He has previously held marketing leadership positions at NetSuite and Unit4.
SD Worx appointed Patricia Molenaar as Senior Vice President for Mid-Market Large Enterprises, Public Sector and International Markets.
Xero has strengthened its leadership team in the US by appointing Latisha Carter as Head of Partner Services and Will Moselle as Head of Partner Growth. Carter joins from Sage, and Moselle joins from Intuit.
Business
Asite launched a referral program. The aim is to get Asite customers, both individuals and companies, to refer Asite to business customers.
IRIS Software Group (IRIS) has achieved the Payroll Assurance Scheme (PAS) accreditation for its Managed Payroll Service Team, which processes around 31,000 payslips each month.
ManageEngine, the enterprise IT management division of Zoho Corporation, announced that it had received PinkVERIFY ITIL 4 certification for four of its solutions. These are ServiceDesk Plus Cloud, Incident Management, Change Enablement, Problem Management, and Service Request Management practices. ServiceDesk Plus is one of only five ITSM solutions in the market to earn PinkVERIFY ITIL 4 certification.
Rimini Street announced a proposed stock offering this week and later revealed that it hopes to raise $60 million from 7,750,000 shares of common stock, priced at $7.75 per share. As of writing, its share price stood at $7.79.
Caledonia Group has selected SugarCRM to deliver a unified cloud-based platform to reimagine its sales and marketing operations.
Due to demand, Tableau has opened a new region in the UK for its SaaS solution, Tableau Online. The new region will host the databases, compute machines, and storage for Tableau online to meet European customers’ demand.
Totalmobile revealed that it had reached the landmark number of 1,000 customers in the UK and Ireland for its Field Service management solution.
Customer
Riverside Community College District (RCCD) has selected the full suite of Anthology’s CampusNexus SaaS solutions and will deploy them across the District and its three colleges.
Capgemini has deployed the SAP Fieldglass Contingent Workforce Management and SAP Fieldglass Services Procurement applications.
APRIL International, a leading global insurance managing general underwriter based in Asia, has selected Ephesoft to automate its claims and hospital invoices processing.
Bordeaux hotel group Acquitaine is expanding deployment of its Infor HMS across its 16 properties.
Sunrise Communications has selected NICE Workforce Management (WFM) and NICE Employee Engagement Manager (EEM) solutions to centralize planning and boost workforce engagement across operations in four countries.
The Chemours Company, a global leader in Titanium Technologies, Thermal & Specialized Solutions, Advanced Performance Materials, and Chemical Solutions, has selected corporate performance management (CPM) vendor OneStream Software to modernize the company’s finance operations.
Russian Telco VimpelCom is rolling out the Qlik analytics platform to over 11K employees to fuel data-driven business processes.
Qualtrics published its Q4 and full-year 2020 results. Full-year revenues were up 29% YoY to $763.5 million. Q4 total revenues increase 24% YoY to $216 million. It is targeting around $950 million for FY21.
Nigeria’s leading aviation and marine logistics player, Caverton Helicopters Limited, has gone live on Ramco Aviation M&E MRO Suite v5.8.
Iguatemi, Brazil’s leading shopping center management company, has now extended its SAP support agreement with Rimini Street to include Application Management Services (AMS) for SAP and Rimini Street Watch for SAP.
Pharmacy295, the largest online pharmacy store in Greece, has chosen Soft1 Cloud ERP Series 5 from SoftOne to support its digital transformation program. CloudOn, a SoftOne certified partner, will implement the solution which will integrate the ERP with their eCommerce platform.
Product
Appogee launched Appogee Time, a standalone Time, Activity & Location Recording SaaS product. It aims to help UK small businesses manage hybrid working, office capacity management, track time & attendance, and record time spent on activities.
Automation Anywhere launched Automation 360, a new brand for its unified, cloud-native, AI-powered enterprise automation platform.
Boomi has enhanced Flow, its low-code workflow automation service. It now supports multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments to enable cloud agility with built-in protection for sensitive data.
Domo announced a new native integration with Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, to help companies future-proof their cloud investments. Describing Domo for Snowflake, Frank Slootman, Snowflake’s CEO, noted: “This deeper integration with Domo allows Snowflake customers to more rapidly deliver value to everyone across the business through Domo’s mobile-first modern BI platform and user-friendly experience.”
FreeAgent has launched a new iOS app for IPads. The application has similar functionality to the mobile application but is designed for the larger screen format. The release introduces new features to allow email and image attachments. There is also the ability to manage bank feeds securely on the device.
Mulesoft has launched MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce. Built on the Anypoint platform, It can connect apps and data to Salesforce quickly and easily. It does so within the Salesforce UI.
NICE released Spring 2021 of CXone. It adds first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence (AI) innovations with Real-Time Interaction Guidance for agents, expands self-service capabilities, extends its digital-first reach, and empowers highly effective work-from-anywhere teams.
Qlik unveiled several new features for its integration with SAP. There is a new SAP connector and the first in a series of SAP focused data and analytics solution accelerators, SAP Order to Cash.
Xant announced a list of product innovations it has added to PlayBooks. It also revealed what it hopes to roll out in the next year. The announcement highlighted the problems sales teams face and the solution that Xant has delivered.
Xero launched Xero verify, an authentication app that enables users, both in small businesses and advisors, to set up multi-factor authentication for Xero accounts. In 2021 Xero will enforce MFA for all users.
Research
Elmo software unveiled findings from a Trans-Tasman survey revealing that businesses believe that the job losses from COVID-19 will not be repeated in 2021. 85% of Australian and New Zealand HR professionals anticipate workforce sizes to remain the same or increase over the next year. The top two challenges faced in 2021 are Upskilling, cross-skilling, or reskilling the workforce (26%) and leadership development (26%). 97% of organisations offered some form of flexible working to employees, but challenges remain.
- 39% reported that getting consistency across all people managers to allow flexible work options within their teams was the top challenge.
- 37% found maintaining adequate communication and collaboration between remote and in-office staff a challenge.
Plex has published the sixth edition of its study, the State of Smart Manufacturing. Conducted by Hanover Research, it highlights that manufacturers are adopting smart manufacturing. 83% of manufacturers say the pandemic has made adopting smart manufacturing technologies and processes a priority. There was also more than 100% growth in adopting technologies such as industrial IoT, smart devices, machine learning, RPA, cobots in the last year.
