A wealth of product updates from ERP, PSA and work management companies this week. At SuiteWorld, NetSuite announced several updates, including SuiteBanking and Superpowers. There were also several press releases about recent customers, including Alma lasers.
IFS unveiled its first update of IFS Cloud with a mass of new functionality. Priority Software released the latest version of its ERP platform. At Engage, Smartsheet gave an update about its platform and also opened a new region in Europe. Wrike announced the first update since Citrix acquired it. Asana unveiled platform enhancements to Work Graph that it hopes will lure more enterprise firms. Infor introduced integration with Microsoft Teams. Workday unveiled Workday Everywhere, its next-generation UI for HCM.
There were so many major updates; some received only roundup coverage, including Odoo below. The common theme across most of these updates was enabling employees to work within their collaboration platform of choice. Zoho added more functionality to Zoho One. ProjectManager unveiled the latest version of its solution.
HR Acuity was boosted by a $47 million funding round led by K1 Investment Management. SOFTONE announced a change of ownership structure.
Enterprise Times also hosted Bo Gyldenvang in an interview with the CEO of CPQ vendor Tacton. He revealed his vision for the company and aims to bring sustainability to his own company and its customers.
Pick of the week
Icertis launched a set of vertical solutions for its contract lifecycle management platform. These solutions will initially provide specific requirements across five industries, though it is surprising that the Legal sector is not one of them.
Niranjan Umarane, Executive Vice President of Product Management, Icertis, commented, “Organizations are racing toward digitization to better adapt to supply chain disruptions and ever-changing markets that demand agility as a new normal.
“ICI Industry Vertical Solutions are designed for quick deployment and adoption of a comprehensive orchestration and governance layer that delivers execution agility without any trade-offs on risk and compliance. They reflect the best of our solution expertise, stemming from a trillion dollars of contracts managed by customers on the ICI platform and gleaned from the most complex vertical CLM implementations in the world.”
The five solutions are:
- ICI for CPG & Distribution
- ICI for Healthcare | Payer
- ICI for IT & Professional Services
- ICI for Life Sciences | Medical Technology
- ICI for Technology
Icertis plans to add at least three more solutions early in 2022 for Healthcare providers, Government, Pharmaceutical, and Retail. These add to its departmental solutions of Corporate, Legal, Finance, Procurement and Sales. The website already lists several other sectors that Icertis targets, including Energy and Utilities, Federal, Financial Services, Manufacturing and Transportation. It is not clear whether these will follow with their solutions.
Acquisition
Abas Software GmbH (abas), a leading ERP software provider to German midmarket manufacturing companies, and Forterro company has acquired Abas Systemhaus GmbH. Abas Systemhaus operates as a value-added reseller and serves more than 70 Abas ERP customers throughout northern Germany.
The Access Group acquired SoundbiteLearning UK Ltd (GCSEPod), an award-winning provider of teaching and learning content, assessment and data, to over 1,700 schools and colleges.
Alteryx has acquired Silicon Valley-based Lore IO, a no-code AI-enabled data modelling platform that rapidly deploys analytics that adapts easily within a changing business environment.
CM Group, a portfolio of MarTech companies focused on multichannel digital marketing, announced its merger with Cheetah Digital under the CM Group name.
Microsoft acquired Clear Software. Clear Software provides iPaaS and business process solutions with strong connectivity into SAP and Oracle
Appointments
Celonis appointed former Google Executive Ariel Bardin as Chief Product Officer
Kaseya appointed former FBI Special Agent Jason Manar as Chief Information Security Officer.
Namely appointed Nick Christman as Chief Operating Officer
SalesAgility, the authors and maintainers of the world’s number one open-source CRM software, SuiteCRM, announced the appointment of industry veteran Stuart Dalton to the role of CEO.
Brian Rainboth is SYSPRO Americas CEO. He joined the company as CEO of Canada in February 2020. SYSPRO has also appointed Michael Bennett as Global Channel Executive.
Workday appointed Pete Schlampp to Chief Strategy Officer and Sayan Chakraborty to Executive Vice President of Product and Technology
Business
Asana announced it’s expanding the Asana Partners ecosystem of IT partners to provide complex enterprises with the confidence needed to adapt to the security and scalability challenges of the work from everywhere era.
BreatheHR launched the #bigforsmall campaign. The aim is to encourage big businesses to empower their employees to shop at small businesses. Breathe HR and its parent company ELMO will give its employees $20 per person per day to spend at small businesses near its offices in Sydney and Melbourne.
Scuderia AlphaTauri announced that it had named Epicor as the Team’s Official ERP Partner. The multi-year agreement builds on an already successful long-term technology relationship. It solidifies Epicor as the powerful driver behind Scuderia AlphaTauri’s operations, enabling the team to focus on continuous performance improvements, both on and off the track.
Ivanti gave a business update in which it shared its ambition to increase its headcount to reach 2000 in two years, a large part of which will be for Hyderabad operations. Ivanti is gearing up to become the largest unified endpoint management, zero-trust security and enterprise service management company.
Propel, developer of the only unified quality management (QMS) and product lifecycle management (PLM) solution built on Salesforce, and Jitterbit, the API transformation company, announced their strategic partnership to standardize and simplify connections between Propel and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
KX, the real-time analytics vendor, has launched the ‘KX Academy’, an online portal for on-demand training.
Nexthink has completed the Service Organization Control (SOC) 2, Type 1 report. The audit was conducted by Ernst & Young Ltd.
Nintex announced the company is hiring more than 50 new team members for its award-winning organization behind the growing market demand for automation.
Sage and Procore announced the launch of the Sage Intacct Construction and Procore Connector. This new integration builds on the existing Sage and Procore partnership, which features widely used existing integrations for Sage 100 Contractor and Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate.
Sage has also partnered with Numeum (a company formed by Syntec Numérique & TECH IN France merging). It will focus on an “Ethical AI ” initiative to operationalize the ethical principles of artificial intelligence and promote trustworthy solutions.
Sage has also joined the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Steve Hare, Sage’s Chief Executive Officer, joins WBCSD as a Council Member.
Money Minx, a US-based net worth and investments tracking platform, has joined forces with Salt Edge to allow its users in the UK, Germany, and Switzerland to connect all bank accounts and monitor investments with ease – all in one place.
SAP announced its Q3 results. Cloud revenue was up 20% to €2.386 bn; total revenue was up 5% to €6.845 bn. Luka Mucic, CFO of, SAP commented, “This has been an excellent quarter across all key financial metrics. We are seeing sustained, strong progress in SAP’s transformation. Our cloud business is growing at an accelerating pace and has led to our improved full-year outlook.”
SirionLabs delivers a business update highlighting that it has nearly doubled revenues over the last 12 months. It also noted recent hires, partnerships and customers.
TechnologyOne has appointed Dr Katie Bell, Chief Marketing Officer of UCAS, the UK’s Universities and Colleges Admissions Service and Professor John Latham CBE, Vice-Chancellor and CEO of the Coventry University Group, to non-executive advisory roles. The appointments come as TechnologyOne targets the Education sector in the UK.
Xero has extended its relationship with Xendoo, a Xero platinum partner and fintech company that offers online accounting and bookkeeping solutions and data-driven insights to small and medium businesses. Xero also partnered with leading ASEAN financial institution, Maybank Singapore (Maybank), to encourage more small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to adopt cloud-based accounting and software services.
Customer
Tokai Rika Co Ltd, a Toyota Group Tier 1 Automotive Supplier, has chosen Domo’s modern business intelligence (BI) platform to integrate its disparate legacy systems and drive its digital transformation (DX) initiative forward.
Ellucian announced that Missouri Valley College (MVC) had selected Ellucian Colleague to modernize its technology operations.
Seattle-based UNIONBAY, one of the most preeminent sportswear brands in the US, has implemented and gone live on the latest version of Jesta IS foundational manufacturing, wholesale and supply chain product Vision Sourcing & Demand (Vision S&D).
NetSuite revealed details of several customer implementations at Suiteworld this week. They included Lovepop, Lovesac, Clickstop, Modsy. Make-A-Wish, Alma Lasers and deliciously ella. Enterprise Times may publish more detailed pieces shortly around these announcements.
NICE powered the efficient governance and accelerated CX transformation of Globe Telecom’s Workforce Management (WFM) Operational Command Center, covering their voice and digital lines of business, all of which was enabled by NICE’s Value Realization Services (VRS) team. Charleston County Sheriff’s Office selected the NICE Investigate Digital Evidence Management solution to improve agency efficiency and justice outcomes by digitally transforming how its investigators collect, analyze and share evidence.
Petroleum Service Corporation (PSC), the North American leader in product handling, site logistics and sustainability services for the petrochemical and refining industries, has selected corporate performance management (CPM) vendor OneStream Software to streamline and unify the company’s finance operations.
Panda Restaurant Group has selected Infor Expense Management (XM) to automate expenses, realize greater efficiencies, and streamline how the organization tracks travel and entertainment (T&E) spend for its multiple brands.
French wine company Sieur d’Arques has chosen to deploy Infor M3. The integration of this enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is part of a project to transform the information systems of Sieur d’Arques. CGR Products, a leading manufacturer of high-quality components for industrial applications, is moving to Infor CloudSuite Distribution Enterprise to help grow its business.
Sembo, Sweden’s largest tour operator and part of the Stena Line Travel & Retail Group, is using Qlik Cloud analytics to improve operational efficiencies across its business.
ENEX, a leading furniture manufacturer in South Korea, has switched to Rimini Street Support for its mission-critical SAP system.
TechnologyOne, quietly upgraded all its NZ Software as a Service (SaaS) Platform customers to the latest version of its SaaS Platform, which has been engineered to meet the stringent Australian Federal Government IRAP PROTECTED security classification level. The customers updated include numerous NZ universities and polytechs, central govt agencies councils and health care providers
Product
Automation Anywhere has launched, Automation Anywhere for Contact Centers, a cloud-native, AI-driven automation solution that empowers enterprises to deliver better customer service faster.
BluePrism announced a new integration with open-source data analytics company and Premier partner KNIME. The integration features KNIME’s embedded Amazon Web Services (AWS) SDK for Python (Boto3). It gives AWS customers low-code/no-code access to more than 175 AWS Global Accelerator (GA) services through Blue Prism digital robots. It also expands Blue Prism’s growing solutions catalogue on AWS.
Celigo announced the availability of the first and only business process automation products that can integrate multiple cloud-based applications to a central hub application.
DronaHQ launched a new UI Editor.
ODOO unveiled version 15 of its platform. Odoo Discuss now supports video conferences, message reactions and animated GIFs to enhance collaboration. A new AI engine helps to build websites 35% faster than the previous version. There are other improvements to POS, inventory management, manufacturing, and accounting, as well.
Genesis, the low-code/no-code platform built for financial markets, announced the beta launch of Genesis Studio, a full-stack no-code builder tool, along with the Genesis Academy pilot education program, as part of its newest platform updates.
ServiceNow announced ServiceNow Messaging Service to help organizations drive better service experiences from issue to resolution. Leveraging the Twilio platform, ServiceNow Messaging Service allows organizations to purchase SMS and WhatsApp directly from ServiceNow, making it easier to integrate popular messaging platforms with ServiceNow workflows quickly.
Silversoft is pleased to announce the launch of Magnetic Private Label, a product designed specifically to shape and adapt to custom workflow requirements of internal marketing teams and agencies. It worked with Pernod Ricard’s Global Agency, The Mix, to create a single platform to run all marketing processes internally and with external agencies across 17 countries.
Intuit announced Money by QuickBooks, the latest addition to a comprehensive and ever-expanding suite of QuickBooks offerings that power small businesses with the ability to get paid and manage their cash flow. The Money by QuickBooks mobile app, available for free on iOS and Android, is designed to give entrepreneurs, freelancers and sole proprietors just starting their business journey complete control over their money with the ability to accept payments and manage expenses with features including debit card and bill payment capabilities.
Prophix Software’s Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software is now “Fulfilled by Acumatica.” By integrating with Acumatica’s cloud-based ERP, Prophix will enable finance leaders to improve profitability and minimize risk by automating budgeting, forecasting, and reporting.
Ramco Systems has achieved Workday Global Payroll Certified status. Ramco provides customers with a seamless integration that connects Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) with Ramco Global Payroll.
Sage added support for multi-currency banking Sage Accounting.
Talentia has worked UBPartner to build a simple solution for ESEF reporting. It combines leading XBRL expertise with one of the best financial consolidation systems. The result was three words ‘ESEF made simple’.
TigerGraph is collaborating with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Xilinx, Inc on a solution to make graph analytics capabilities more accessible for enterprises to accelerate insight while reducing costs and resources.
Xero announced a reimagined version of Xero Me, its employee self-service app, which comes with integrated Expenses technology. Simona Turin, Executive General Manager of Business Products at Xero, said, “With the new Xero Me app functionality, business owners will be able to get the data and information they need to manage employee expenses, leave, pay and timesheets while creating an enhanced employee experience.
“We’re bringing together our award-winning Expenses and popular Payroll used to pay more than 2.4 million employees each month, as part of our commitment to help make lives better for small businesses and their advisors, empower employees and help businesses thrive.”
Research
Nearly half of UK workers think they’re being paid less than they should be, according to new research by CIPHR. The story looks at the influence of how long it has been since wages were increased and how long since one was last requested.
Jenzabar published an independent survey that finds 47% of U.S. adults believe they are underemployed and underpaid. The survey also showed that 32% of respondents with college degrees believe their college education did not prepare them for their current jobs and the jobs they want to have.
The Kofax 2022 Intelligent Automation Benchmark Study looks at when virtually any business workflow can be automated. Which workflows do enterprise executives say are the most important and deliver the greatest value? Key findings include:
- 90% of executives believe automating business workflows post-COVID will ensure business continuity
- 89% of executives believe digitally transformed companies have a competitive advantage
- 88% of executives believe they need to fast track end-to-end digital transformation
Kathleen Delaney, Chief Marketing Officer at Kofax, commented, “This year, as companies navigate a drastically altered business landscape, they face myriad new challenges, from supply chain disruptions to workforce shortages. Yet the “New Normal” is old news—customers, prospects, and other constituents are not accepting excuses for falling short of objectives.
“At a moment when virtually all companies agree digital workflow transformation is key, we wanted to understand where they’re focusing their priorities and what types of automation yield the greatest benefit. Having these insights will help executives apply their limited time and resources more intelligently.”
Nitro released its 2022 Productivity Report, which explores how the pandemic has transformed productivity, workflows and digital initiatives, as well as the trends and technologies shaping work in 2022 and beyond.
A new Oracle Retail consumer research study shows that shoppers are worried that supply chain and delivery delays will wreak havoc on the holidays. Key findings include:
- 52% of Americans have already started holiday shopping or plan to shop earlier than usual
- 20% plan to order more gifts in case some are delayed or cancelled, with that number jumping to 44% for Millennials
- 34% of people (especially Baby Boomers* at 58%) note they will buy more gift cards this year
New survey data released from Intuit QuickBooks reveals that 93% of U.S. shoppers say supporting small businesses this upcoming holiday season is more important than ever because of the pandemic. Furthermore, nearly half of consumers (48%) are more likely to try new businesses than they were pre-pandemic, presenting a big opportunity for retail-based small businesses looking to maximize their holiday sales.
Procore released new industry research revealing low rates of safety training and mental health initiatives within Australian construction organisations. The survey also showed that larger businesses (100+ employees) are more likely to be using specialist Software, data and leading indicators to manage safety, with room for smaller companies to increase technology use.
Xero has found that Kiwi small business owners are working unsustainable hours, negatively impacting their wellbeing and productivity. Out of a thousand respondents, one in three small business owners feel they’re working too many hours a week, while more than a quarter of them believe the number of hours they work per week is unsustainable.
In another survey of 1,000 Australian businesses, Xero found that late payments are a major stressor for Australian small businesses and sole traders. Due to cash flow challenges, almost one in four are delaying payments to themselves (24%), creditors or suppliers (23%).
According to research by Zellis, Chief Finance Officers (CFOs) across the UK and Ireland have no clear plan as to where they should be focusing on financial investment for 2022. 49% said ‘reviewing supplier relationships’, and pursuing ‘operational efficiency’ had required more personal attention from them since the outset of the pandemic. Looking forward:
- 26% will focus on investing in increasing digitisation (26%)
- 25% will focus on improving remote working options
- 18% will focus on talent management
- 17% on cost control
- 14% on automation
