News from Week beginning 30th August

After a year where few of us made poolside in sunnier climes, the news seemed to continue. TechnologyOne acquired Scientia, and ET revealed its latest wins at local councils in Wales and England. Unit4 also won a major deal at North Sea Port for its ERP solution.

Salesforce was also busy with Tableau publishing information about its upcoming release, and Salesforce unveiled the latest update to Sales Cloud ahead of Dreamforce. Rimini Street extended its database support to four open-source databases. The week also saw the acquisition of Deacom by ECI Software Solutions and Asana launching an App Marketplace

Enterprise Times also published two conversations, one with Pierre-Dominique Luciani of Symtrax. The second was with Anwen Robinson of Infor.

Pick of the Week

Accounting Seed has ambitions for growth. After raising funds for the first time last month, it has announced three significant hires to strengthen its leadership team. Ryan Sieve joins the company as Chief Technical Officer from Salesforce. Before his four-year stint at Salesforce, he worked for ERP vendors Kenandy and ProCore. Sieve commented, “Having worked in the Salesforce space for much of my career, I’m thrilled to be joining the Accounting Seed team. Accounting Seed is one of the most impactful applications on the Salesforce AppExchange that is continually taking on new technology as it becomes available. I’m excited to be part of the journey and advocate for Accounting Seed’s technical growth.”

The accounting software vendor has also appointed Barry Thompson as the new Partner Relationship Manager. His focus is to build a world-class partner program at Accounting Seed. He has previously worked in South Africa and the US, building and managing partner relations in the IBM, Oracle and SAP ecosystems. At Oracle, he was the Global Program/Partner manager for both IBM and Accenture. Can he bring Accounting Seed to the notice of GSIs?

Accounting Seed also appointed Brian Wai as Vice President of Finance & Accounting. Wei was previously Head of Financial Planning and Analysis at Pendrick Healthcare Partners, a private equity-backed, data-driven financial services firm that provided revenue cycle cash optimization solutions for healthcare providers.

Acquisitions

Bill.com has completed its acquisition of Invoice2go, a leading mobile-first accounts receivable (AR) software provider.

PDI has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Orbis Technologies Ltd (Orbis Tech), a global provider of cloud-based point of sale (POS), back-office, and home-office business solutions.

Salesforce has completed its acquisition of Servicetrace. Servicetrace is now a part of MuleSoft, a Salesforce company.

The Access Group has acquired Servelec to create an integrated Health and Social Care offering.

UKG has acquired Great Place to Work Institute, Inc., the world’s most trusted authority on workplace culture, with a mission to help organizations become great workplaces For All

Appointments

Anne Raimondi will succeed Chris Farinacci as Asana’s Chief Operating Officer. The latter is retiring at the end of the year.

Automation Anywhere has appointed channel executive Ben Yerushalmi as its senior vice president of Global Alliances and Channels.

CIPHR has appointed Ray Berry as its new chief financial officer.

ConnectWise appointed Amy Lucia as Chief Marketing Officer. Lucia brings over two decades of marketing leadership, delivering exceptional outcomes in the Fortune 100 enterprise and SMB spaces.

Cora Systems has appointed Karl Reilly as head of design & innovation. He will be responsible for the R&D team developing a new Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) product and the existing PPM product. Cora joins from PwC, where he was the global lead for PPM Methods and Tools.

MineralTree has appointed Ram Purohit as Managing Director and Head of Engineering, India. Purohit will expand MineralTree’s software engineering operations in Bangalore to complement the work of its engineering team in the US.

Newgen has appointed Virender Jeet as CEO, Tarun Nandwani as COO

Onna has appointed Darin Bartik as its new Vice President of Marketing.

Business

ActiveCampaign announced a new Access pillar as part of its customer’s success commitment. It promises to give customers as much access as possible across all business areas, ranging from customer success teams and cross-channel services to advanced platform features and content in multiple languages. It will also introduce the industry’s first anti-“no-reply” policy. ActiveCampaign promises that every communication it sends will come from a monitored inbox, social account, or phone call to ensure every piece of feedback and question will be received and read by an ActiveCampaign employee.

Asana released record figures for Q2 2022, with revenue growth an astonishing 72% year over year to $89.5 million for the quarter. Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder and chief executive officer of Asana, commented, “In the second quarter we accelerated total revenue growth, continued to report strong customer growth and increased dollar-based net retention rates across the board. Customers are adopting Asana everywhere: across our major geographies and across all sizes of teams. We saw particular strength in the enterprise, with the number of customers spending over $50,000 up 111 percent. Stay tuned for more enterprise announcements in October.”

Cyara published a business updated for H1 2021. It achieved 25% growth in SaaS bookings, a 90% customer retention rate and 8.5+ billion seconds of synthetic CX testing traffic annually.

Demandbase announced its continued forward momentum, with a string of achievements and industry award wins. It added B2B customers, including Denodo, Labster and Evolve IP over recent months.

DocuSign announced results for its fiscal second quarter ended July 31, 2021. Total revenue was $511.8 million, an increase of 50% year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $492.8 million, an increase of 52% year-over-year. Professional services and other revenue was $19.1 million, an increase of 3% year-over-year.

Coursedog, the only integrated academic operations solution for colleges and universities, and Ellucian, the leading higher education technology solutions provider, announced Coursedog had joined the Ellucian community of Ethos connected partners.

Ephesoft announced a global alliance partnership with Speridian Technologies. This strategic alignment will help mutual clients across many industries to automate document-centric processes and significantly increase operational efficiency while improving data accuracy.

Genesys gave a business update on H1 2021. It revealed that Genesys Multicloud CX and Genesys Cloud CX platform achieved more than 100% year-over-year growth in new cloud bookings

Vital Edge Solutions, a specialist in systems integration for government and commercial organisations, has entered a strategic partnership with Mendix, a Siemens business. It aims to bring the Mendix low-code platform to the Federal market.

Plex has commissioned and published a Total Economic Impact report from Forrester Consulting. Key findings include Plex demonstrating a 412% return on investment. Rockwell Automation has completed its acquisition of the company. Blake Moret, Chairman and CEO of Rockwell Automation, commented, “Plex Systems joins Rockwell at the perfect time, as more customers are starting to move their industrial applications to the cloud. Plex’s software capabilities will be further differentiated by Rockwell’s global market access, complimentary industry expertise, and ability to turn real-time data into actionable insights. This will allow us to better serve our customers with cloud-native solutions that are easy to implement, use, and maintain. We are excited to complete this acquisition and welcome Plex and its employees into Rockwell.”

Sage has launched its ambitious new global sustainability and society strategy, Knocking Down Barriers, to the South African market.

Switcho, an Italian digital fintech platform that brings innovations in expenses management, has upgraded its services by teaming up with Salt Edge, a pioneer in open banking.

Zumzum has updated its logo and unveiled the latest release of Zumzum Financials. The logo change recognises the adoption of the Salesforce Design Systems within the product.

Customer

A year after its rebrand, Anthology has completed nearly 400 customer go-lives and launched anthology academy to elevate higher education student success

Pandora Jewelry LLC, the global jewellery brand, uses the Appian Workforce Safety solution to support workplace health and safety across its US operations.

Cleo revealed that having implemented Cleo Integration Cloud in 2019 it could cope with a 40% increase in B2B transactions without issues. CIC replaced four solutions: Cleo LexiCom for AS2 connectivity and file transfers with large retailers; IBM Gentran for on-premise EDI transactions; SPS Commerce to accommodate a few speciality retail customer requirements; and Edict Systems for a handful of partners that came through previous company acquisition.

GAP Group, the leading independent equipment hire company in the UK, is deploying Infor CloudSuite Equipment, a multi-tenant cloud ERP system specifically designed for equipment manufacturers, dealers and rental companies. Alabama based Mobile Area Water and Sewer (MAWSS) has chosen to upgrade from Lawson S3 to Infor Financials & Supply Management.

The city of Seattle is leveraging Ivanti Neurons to improve its service & asset management experience, achieving greater efficiency, accuracy and asset optimization

Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS) has selected Qualtrics CustomerXM for its customer experience programme. It will continually refine and optimise the customer experience on the HealthHub portal and mobile app in response to the ever-evolving health journeys of the public of Singapore.

Ramco Systems will implement its Aviation M&E MRO Suite V5.9 at Draken International, a leading provider of tactical fighter aircraft for contract adversary air (ADAIR) services to the defence industry, across its global operations in both CONUS and OCONUS locations.

Origin Energy, a leading energy provider in Australia, has switched to Rimini Street Support for its Oracle software, including e-Business Suite, Oracle Database, Fusion Middleware and Hyperion.

Helping Hand for Relief and Development, Inc is a non-profit that serves those impacted by disasters and poverty in 85 countries. Since implementing Xledger in 2017, it has saved an average of more than 80 person-hours of accounting work every month.

Product

Accelo unveiled its latest updates, including the release of Task Prioritisation and the ability to attach more than one image on its mobile app. It also revealed it is enhancing its Google Contact API.

Drona has added new database connectors to Redis and Cloud Datastore as well as API connectors for Amazon AWS Lambda and Amazon AWS S3

Esker Accounts Payable Automation and Order Management Automation solutions are now available on SAP Store, the digital marketplace for SAP offerings and complementary solutions from SAP partners.

NICE announced its latest robotic process automation (RPA) solution with advanced AI capabilities that fast-track achieving organizational and employee goals. NICE RPA version 7.5 extends support across all phases of the automation lifecycle – from discovery to deployment and driving continuous improvements beyond.

Pipeliner unveiled its next major release, Kepler v4.0.0. New features include a project management module and Account Plans. There are several other improvements.

Qualtrics launched EX25, a new framework designed to help employers listen to their employees regularly, featuring 25 key drivers impacting every employee’s workplace experience. EX25 is built into Qualtrics EmployeeXM. It helps employers adapt to their employees’ evolving needs and priorities and improve employee engagement and retention.

SAP has launched SAP Fioneer, a joint venture for the financial services industry (FSI) between SAP and Dediq GmbH.

Showpad launched Showpad Video, a new video messaging product feature that enables asynchronous communication for revenue teams, all within the Showpad platform.

CarbonLink Oy, founded by software company Visma Finland and atmospheric scientists at the University of Helsinki, is building the first real-time carbon footprint calculator for organisations. Visma is a minority shareholder in the business and will launch the service under ‘Visma Green’ next year.

Research

The Achievers Workforce Institute 2021 Culture Report on belonging at work found that 26% of respondents have a strong sense of belonging in the workplace. There was a difference between genders though, with 31% of men and only 22% of women having a sense of belonging. The survey of 3,582 employees found that women lagged behind men in most of the metrics. However, diversity, equity and inclusion foster belonging. Where leadership is diverse, employees are 2.4 times more likely to feel a sense of belonging.

Bizagi published the 2021 State of Process Innovation Report. Key findings included:

• 67% of respondents said they were frustrated with the amount of repetitive manual tasks in their jobs.
• 23% of respondents said broken processes were a barrier to their overall productivity.
• 70% of employees said they wish their company offered tools like artificial intelligence (AI), digital bots, and business process management (BPM) and business process automation (BPA) tools.
• 59% of respondents said their company does not offer low-code/no-code workflow tools.

CIPHR published detailed findings from a report on stress. It found that British adults feel stressed eight days each month and average. 79% feel stressed at least once a month. The report looks at factors such as gender, age and location. The most common stressors are:

1. Not getting enough sleep (39%)
2. Financial anxieties (39%)
3. Health (35%)
4. Family (31%)
5. Weight worries (28%)
6. news (24%)
7. work in general (23%)
8. workload (18%)
9. cleaning (16%)
10. social media (14%)
11. working hours (14%)

Based on a study of 2000 adults, this is a fascinating study. More details are found here.

Logi Analytics published a report titled 2021 State of Analytics: How Data Literacy Improves Decision-Making. The report analyses the state of data literacy and the gap between perception and reality.

Brett Hansen, CMO at Logi Analytics, commented, “With billions spent on stand-alone data discovery tools, many organizations assume their employees and applications are placed farther along the data literacy continuum than they actually are. This research uncovers the inadequacies of how end-users and applications perceive and understand data. When analytics are widely available, user-friendly, customizable, and easy to navigate, it leads to more accurate decision making.”