As autumn continues, several companies announced product releases; more are due this week. Updates came from QAD, Accelo, Propel and ProjectManager. Precisely also revealed the latest update for its GIS solution MapInfo.
On the finance side, Sage acquired proposal software vendor GoProposal. Mindee emerged from stealth and raised funding for growth.
Infor revealed several new customers, including Foundation Building Materials and a significant healthcare win in Europe; see below. IFS is ramping up customer announcements for IFS Cloud, win two in the United States and a major one in Europe. Verto revealed how Warwickshire County Council is using its work collaboration solution to manage projects across the organisation.
Enterprise Times published interviews with Antony Elliott of Talend and Brookson and their use of Alteryx. The latter is a follow up to a podcast recorded two years ago.
Pick of the week
At its annual conference, UiPath unveiled product updates that will be available from Oct 25. They include:
- UiPath Integration Service
- Automation services such as Endpoint Protection Integration and the introduction of Robot Auto-healing
- New cloud services for the UiPath Automation Cloud, including Process Mining, Test Manager, and pre-packaged direct buy online services
- A host of other automation features
Ahmed Zaidi, CEO of Accelirate Inc, a UiPath Diamond Partner, commented, “We’re very excited about how UiPath Automation Suite will enable our customers to leverage the power of the entire UiPath platform.
“The ability to install all UiPath offerings in a single go and employ the appropriate solution when the need arises, such as AI Center to bring humans into the loop for validating ML-extracted data, or Insights to create custom alerts and notifications when specific business goals have been met, will dramatically assist the way enterprises get their automations up and running.”
Acquisitions and Funding
6sense announced the acquisition of Slintel, the leading provider of business-driven technographic data, buyer and market insights, and modern business contact data.
Akerna completed the acquisition of 365 Cannabis for $17 million. Built on Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Business Central, 365 Cannabis offers cannabis operators a comprehensive ERP system.
Alteryx has acquired Hyper Anna, a leading cloud platform for generating artificial intelligence (AI)-driven automated insights from data. Hyper Anna is a Sydney, Australia-based company that enables anyone, regardless of technical background, to access AI-driven insights. The acquisition of Hyper Anna will allow Alteryx to automate the end-to-end analytic pipeline from data sources to AI-driven insights.
Genesys has agreed to acquire Pointillist and Exceed.ai to enhance its offerings in the Experience as a Service market and transform customer and employee experiences across marketing, sales and service. Both acquisitions are expected to close before the end of the year.
insightsoftware has acquired Exago, a premier embedded BI solution providing leading companies with seamless integration for customer-facing web applications. This acquisition further establishes Logi Analytics, a division of insightsoftware, and Exago’s common vision of simplifying the process for business professionals to access and manipulate their data, no matter their technical capabilities.
Nintex, the global standard for process management and automation, announced a definitive agreement to sell a majority stake in the company to TPG Capital, the private equity platform of global alternative asset firm TPG. Nintex’s current majority investor, Thoma Bravo, a leading software investment firm, plans to make a new equity investment in the company and maintain a significant minority interest. The transaction is expected to be completed by the end of 2021, subject to customary closing conditions.
Appointments
Digital Workforce appointed Jarkko Tuomolin to its global team in the role of Head of Tax Process Automation.
Ivanti has named Jeff Abbott as the new CEO and to its board, effective October 1, 2021, succeeding Jim Schaper in the role. Ivanti also named new co-Chairpersons Chris Heim and Dan Mayleben, industry leaders with experience driving growth and creating long-term value in software companies.
Prophix announced the appointment of Marcel Korst as Chief Marketing Officer.
Qualtrics has appointed Dr Adrienne Boissy as its first Chief Medical Officer, expanding its ability to help industries, including healthcare institutions, deliver exceptional experiences for patients, customers, and employees.
ServiceNow has appointed finance veteran Kevin McBride will join ServiceNow as senior vice president, corporate controller and chief accounting officer.
SirionLabs appointed Thomas L Hall as Chief Legal Officer.
Sisense appointed Paul Scholey as VP of International Sales and Kristina Agassi as General Counsel. The appointments come amid surging growth for the company, which now has $140 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), 75% attributed to its infusing analytics strategy.
Business
Advanced announced a partnership with Compleat Software throughout the UK, US, and Australia.
Boomi announced a new charitable donation program, led by its Boomiverse user community, that will give a total of $100,000 to nonprofit organizations dedicated to causes such as alleviating homelessness, increasing diversity in STEM, international aid, and more.
Brillio is partnering with Ciena to co-launch the Blue Planet Enterprise Automation Suite (BPE). It includes innovative SaaS-based network automation solutions to help enterprise IT teams achieve operational simplicity, greater visibility, and patent-pending AIOps-driven control over their multi-vendor networks.
Clear Books has partnered with Capitalise to allow small businesses to eliminate the panic and stress often involved in obtaining business finance.
Conga announced accelerated growth in revenue and customers and increased investment in its market-leading Configure Price Quote (CPQ) products. Conga’s CPQ business has experienced a 78% year-over-year growth rate in 2020. Conga has experienced high customer retention at greater than 90%.
Delphix, the industry-leading data company for DevOps, announced crossing the 100 employee mark in India just two years after launching a state-of-the-art R&D Centre in NCR. The company continues to hire aggressively. It currently has more than 30 immediate openings at the Director and Senior levels in Engineering, Marketing, and IT.
Exact is using 3D avatars developed by Phunk as part of a recruitment campaign. Florien de Nijs, Chief HR Officer at Exact, said: “Like other companies, we’ve noticed that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find new colleagues, which is why we’re linking this campaign to who we are. Exact is about delivering software, but also about people and diversity among our staff, which makes us a strong team.
“This campaign celebrates our current colleagues (characters) as well as future colleagues who will make us even more complete. We want to emphasise that we have a very diverse workforce – our colleagues work in 13 countries and cover 50 nationalities – and we give everyone the opportunity to develop and be the best version of themselves. Through this campaign, we want to show what it’s like to work at Exact from a personal perspective.”
Fuse announced a strategic partnership with Go1. The new partnership will see every piece of content within the Go1 platform become hyper-searchable and hyper-accessible to Fuse users in the flow of work. It will unlock greater value from content investment.
Aurea Software, Inc announced a major branding update that will return the recently acquired XANT to its widely recognized and respected original name: InsideSales.
Intuit QuickBooks has donated US$5,000 to Boise’s City of Good to provide 1,500 meals for kids.
Magnetic from Silversoft has updated its website brand as part of a new marketing campaign for its Agency Management platform.
Nintex announced an independent, exception-free SOC 2 Type 2 report on security controls for its next-generation cloud automation platform Nintex Workflow Cloud. It has also announced exception-free SOC 2 Type 2 reports on security controls for Nintex Promapp and Nintex Drawloop DocGen.
Oracle, TIM (Telecom Italia) and Noovle, TIM Group’s cloud company, announced that they signed a collaboration agreement as part of a plan to offer multi-cloud services for enterprises and public sector organizations in Italy.
Procore announced a partnership with the National Association of Minority Contractors (NAMC), the oldest minority construction trade association in the United States. Procore’s social impact arm, Procore.org, will provide free Procore product training to NAMC National Members, NAMC Regional Chapter Members, and NAMC historically Black colleges and universities partners.
Qlik has partnered with The Blacks In Technology (BIT) Foundation to support efforts to increase representation of people of African descent in the greater Philadelphia technology industry.
Sage has launched a Sustainability Hub for small businesses in the UK and Ireland. The hub will provide owners of small businesses with expertise and actionable advice on reducing the carbon impact of their operations, play a key part in creating a more sustainable future, and positively impacting their communities.
ServiceNow and Celonis announced a strategic partnership to help companies maximize the impact and return on their digital transformation investments. The partnership will combine ServiceNow’s leading low‑code workflow platform with the real‑time process execution capabilities of the Celonis Execution Management System (EMS). ServiceNow also intends to make a financial investment in Celonis.
Upland Software published its Q2 2021 results. Total revenue was $76.3 million, an increase of 7% from $71.3 million in the second quarter of 2020. Jack McDonald, Upland’s chairman and CEO, commented, “In Q2, we closed the strategic and accretive acquisition of Panviva. In addition, we posted strong free cash flow while continuing to invest in our go-to-market growth initiatives. Our acquisition pipeline remains robust, and we are active in the market for additional opportunities.”
Xactly announced its further expansion into the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region with the upcoming launch of Xactly Forecasting in Japan. The company’s entry into Japan builds on the company’s sales momentum and 71% year on year growth.
Zywave announced a game-changing integration between its quoting and proposals solution, Zywave CPQ – Benefits, and benefits and HR software company, Employee Navigator.
Customer
Atlas Technical Consultants has chosen Deltek Vantagepoint as its ERP solution. Deltek will support Atlas with its mission to be the nation’s most sought-after infrastructure and environmental solutions company.
Freshworks has helped Radisson Hotel Group improve IT efficiencies and increase response time within its distributed workforce by using the IT service management (ITSM) solution Freshservice.
Elvia, the largest electricity distribution company in Norway, has decided to implement IFS Cloud to support its mission-critical enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes.
Together with system integrator Apex Systems, Infor will deliver an Infor CloudSuite Healthcare ERP platform to Amsterdam UMC, one of the largest hospitals in Europe. Fanalca (Fábrica Nacional de Carrocerías) in Colombia has selected Infor CloudSuite WMS warehouse management system.
Clancy, one of the UK’s largest privately-owned construction firms, is implementing the Totalmobile cloud-based job management solution, Connect.
Oracle announced several implementations of Oracle Fusion Cloud applications at K-12 schools across the US. Customers include Allegheny Intermediate Unit, Bucks County Intermediate Unit, Cherry Creek School District, Montgomery County Intermediate Unit and Wichita Public Schools.
Northern Star Energy Corporation, a Philippine convenience retailer with a network of 70 Caltex service stations and a supplier of energy products and related services to various critical industries across the country, has chosen PDI Logistics Cloud to transform, innovate, and automate its fuel distribution operations.
Burger King has turned to Qlik to support its data and analytics business needs by consolidating data from different systems and improving the decision-making process at all levels within the business across all its restaurants.
Korean Airlines Co Ltd has extended its support agreement with Rimini Street to cover the airlines’ entire Oracle enterprise software portfolio.
Sage Intacct revealed how its ERP solution has benefited nonprofit Canine Companion to the turn of $500 k annual savings. The California-based service dog provider improved efficiency 50% and shortened its audit process 25% by moving to a cloud-based financial system
Teradata and Volkswagen have developed a smart factory solution for greater efficiency in vehicle body construction. “Spot Welding Analytics”, the smart analysis of machine data in production, is already helping turn the Volkswagen plant in Emden into a digital factory. Volkswagen, AWS and Teradata want to make data analytics technologies accessible and scalable for the Industrial Cloud community.
UKG revealed that customers worldwide are leveraging the UKG Dimensions workforce management suite. Auchan Retail France, Baptist Community Services, Biltmore, The City of Oklahoma City, Eclipse Advantage, NJ Transit, and Vancity are also transforming their workforces with Dimensions by empowering their people and unburdening their managers. UKG also revealed several significant though unnamed customers.
Utah’s state capital, Salt Lake City, announced its partnership with Avaap, a management consulting and Workday services partner, to implement Workday.
Product
4D, a division of Silverbullet, introduced 4D Outcomes, the first contextual solution that surfaces insights and recommendations through real-time data. Using the most advanced data science algorithms and machine learning, marketers can identify and target the right audience at the optimal time, all in a privacy-first, post-cookie era.
ActiveCampaign announced the availability of custom objects. Businesses of all sizes can trigger automations from unique data specific to their business model with custom objects.
Celigo announced the availability of the Celigo iPaaS on Microsoft AppSource, an online cloud marketplace providing tailored line-of-business solutions.
Ceridian made a series of significant product announcements. It launched Dayforce Talent Intelligence to enable fair, equitable, and efficient talent decision-making while measuring the effectiveness of its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. It added streaming pay to Dayforce Wallet. Streaming pay will automatically deliver earned wages to workers’ wallets at the end of each work day, eliminating the need to request earnings on-demand.
Ceridian also announced plans to deliver Dayforce HR Service Delivery, an end-to-end employee solution that provides instant, always-on HR and compliance support. Finally, it will deliver Dayforce Payroll to nine new markets: Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand.
Cezanne announced the latest update to their innovative Cloud HR platform. The update includes extended support for personal pronouns. There are also improvements to performance management with goals and check-in events. There are also new compliance features specific to financial services compliance.
Cleo unveiled its new library of ecosystem Accelerators in a bid to revolutionize supply chain integration. Accelerators are out-of-the-box B2B integrations between a system of record, such as an ERP, TMS or WMS, and an application or trading partner, such as Amazon Marketplace, Shopify, a retailer, or a customer.
Concord previewed what will be available in its Fall and Winter releases. There is a new drag and drop feature to create smart documents. It is adding the ability to build signature blocks within documents and the ability to pre-sign documents. There will also be a new integration with Zapier. There is a new side panel within document creation, tasks list to help navigate through documents, and better commenting and tracking.
Esker has launched Esker Pay, an extensive set of integrated payment capabilities and strategic Fintech partnerships to help businesses unlock cash flow. It is fully integrated with Esker’s Procure-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash solution suites. Payment providers supported include Stripe, Corpay, Wind River Financial, Jack Henry, SisID, Pytheas Capital Advisors, Payroc and SlimPay.
NICE introduced Customer Experience Interactions (CXi), a new framework delivered through a unified suite of applications on the CXone platform. CXi empowers organizations to meet their customers wherever their journey begins intelligently, enables resolution through AI and data-driven self-service, and successfully prepares agents to resolve any customer needs event.
Procore announced platform enhancements that will deliver added flexibility and deeper insights for project teams. These innovations bring cross-platform insights with a new reports builder and a new global workflow engine, which will improve the efficiency of estimating and bidding processes.
Oracle has added new AI governance capabilities to its Oracle Financial Services Compliance Studio application. A new visualisation canvas fosters a more inclusive machine learning model creation and alerts for potentially sensitive issues. Oracle has also added new in-memory sandboxes to more easily create and refine models; banks can help weed out bias and uncertainty in applying the power of AI to fight money laundering and other financial crimes.
Qualtrics announced Experience ID, a single, unified view of everything customers and employees have shared with a company—things they want a company to know about them––including their preferences, beliefs and feelings about their experiences with their product or brand.
Trintech announced the latest release of CadencyDirect, which now integrates into ServiceNow’s GRC solution to help customers strengthen their compliance frameworks and drive better risk-informed decisions across the enterprise.
VAI unveiled its communications and messaging application, S2K Business Alerts powered by Twilio. It is now available through its S2K Enterprise Management software solutions for the hard goods, food, and pharmaceutical industries.
Research
The Access Group has published a new report entitled, Emotionally Charged: The Power of Human Emotions at Work. It argues that employers should nurture positive feelings of joy, empowerment and freedom to build and strengthen their teams.
Anthology announced the results of its Recent Alumni: Interest, Involvement and Opportunity Survey. Overall findings showed that engaged and connected students become active alumni, with nearly 8 in 10 respondents who indicated involvement as a student also reporting participation in an alumni activity in the last 12 months.
A new IDC study sponsored by Aptean shows a material correlation between investments in digital transformation and increased revenues. Food and beverage companies that implemented digital transformation saw both revenue and profit increase 5.6% over the past 12 months. Companies that had not invested in digital transformation saw much lower levels at only 1.2% and 1.6% revenue and profit growth, respectively.
Calabrio published a study entitled “Health of the Contact Center 2021: Agent Wellbeing and the Great Resignation.” It surveyed U.S. and UK contact centre agents to uncover transformational opportunities for the contact centre from their perspective.
Calabrio previously surveyed agents on the same topic in 2017. This time 65% of this study’s respondents were speaking from experience in a hybrid or remote role. This year’s findings reveal that contact centres must prioritize agent retention and engagement or face a dangerous cycle of attrition.
The ELMO Employee Sentiment Index for the September Quarter has found the proportion of Australian workers who rate economic security as ‘not secure’ has spiked to 30 per cent. This is an 11% rise from the June quarter (19%) and the March quarter (20%), representing the greatest recorded this year. Key findings include:
- More Australian workers rate the economy as ‘not secure’ than at any point this year
- Perceptions of job security are at the lowest point this year, with less than half of Australian workers rating their jobs as secure
- Support for employers mandating COVID-19 vaccinations soars eight points to 70% of workers backing the initiative
- Employers knowing employees’ COVID-19 vaccination status is supported by 88% of workers, test status knowledge supported by 90%
- 79% of Australian workers have also welcomed vaccination passports
Ivanti announced the results of a survey that found a resounding majority (71%) of IT and security professionals found patching to be overly complex, cumbersome, and time-consuming. 57% of respondents stated that remote work had increased the complexity and scale of patch management.
PegaSystems published its third annual healthcare survey. It revealed healthcare consumers have grown more tolerant of missteps from their providers during the pandemic. Most tellingly, the number of patients who said they would switch doctors due to poor communication and engagement dropped a full 23% (from 86% to 63%) compared to last year–despite persistent issues that continue to plague the healthcare industry.
The UKG second annual holiday season trend report revealed retailers’ concerns and confidence for the upcoming peak-selling season. Findings included:
- 26% expect holiday season staff shortages and unplanned absences to result in daily understaffing
- 88% worried about employee burnout — and argue that what job seekers want from an employer is greater flexibility
- 63% of retailers say they’ve raised pay for holiday hires — an average increase of $3.90 per hour, year over year
Seven in ten retailers are making long term investments in staff. This includes:
- 75% cross-train associates to thrive in multiple roles
- 56% provide professional development to help people advance within their company
- 54% engage in labour sharing and allow employees to work across multiple store locations
- 54% guarantee associates a minimum number of scheduled hours per week
- 40% accommodate employees’ availability and preferences when building staff schedules
Unanet released the first annual AEC Inspire Report, which surveyed more than 175 leaders from AEC companies ranging from $1M – $250M+ in annual revenue. With more than 86% of data-driven firms expecting a revenue or profit increase in 2021, the results show an overwhelming sense of optimism driven by the COVID-19 rebound, as well as the potential for significant new infrastructure spending.
Research by Zendesk Inc, in partnership with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), found companies that have continued to invest in their customer experience (CX) over the past year are ten times more likely to have maximized their resiliency during the pandemic. They are also three times more likely to have grown their customer base year over year.
The 2021 State of CX Maturity Report surveyed more than 3,000 CX decision-makers, with more than 15% of these from North America, to understand the characteristics and benefits of customer experience leadership.
