Last week Cyara acquired Australian firm CentraCX, and Zendesk completed the acquisition of Tymeshift. Limble raised an impressive $58 million in a Series B round led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
Salesloft further enhanced its AI-powered revenue workflow platform with the launch of Rhythm as part of the Summer ’23 release. Cleo announced the appointment of a new CFO, Sameer Katiyar.
Leapwork, the visual, AI-powered test automation platform, entered a partnership with Microsoft to drive innovation and achieve continuous quality across the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.
Pick of the week
Zuora made a series of announcements at Subscriber Live.
It announced the Zuora Command Center, a central solution for Zuora admins to monitor critical activity, manage multiple environments, and troubleshoot issues with the support of an embedded AI.
Shakir Karim, VP of Product Management at Zuora, commented, “Zuora Admins are really heroes of their companies – they enable the business to quickly react to changing market demands and deploy new solutions. The Zuora Command Center enables Zuora Admins to move faster with their monetization strategies and stay ahead of potential issues.”
Zuora also announced Zephr, the world’s first Subscriber-Led Growth engine. Tien Tzuo, Founder and CEO at Zuora, said, “Modern businesses are built on subscriber-led growth. The best companies create a flywheel by driving product engagement, studying subscriber usage, and then delivering the best next offer based on what each subscriber values. Zephr is the engine that powers this flywheel. We’re excited to expand Zephr beyond the media industry, giving any product or growth team the power to experiment and act on subscriber data in real-time.”
It introduced Zuora for Consumption, a holistic solution enabling product owners and finance teams to launch and scale product offerings with consumption-based pricing models. Kyle Kolich, Vice President & General Manager of Product and Development, commented, “Businesses and consumers love the idea of consumption pricing, but very few companies have really nailed the execution – the approach is too often piecemealed. We took a holistic approach with Zuora for Consumption – giving finance teams the right billing and revenue automation tools, customers the transparency and flexibility to consume what they want, and product owners the right pricing and mediation tools to pivot from pure pay-as-you-go to hybrid models – and everything in between.”
Fourthly, it announced the Zuora Warehouse and BYOW Technology to power large-volume, high-speed data analysis in the Zuora® user interface (UI). Companies can now directly connect their data warehouse to Zuora, helping them better analyze the performance of their business and take action on insights within Zuora. Karim noted, “While today’s warehouses can store large volumes of historical data, performing analysis in a separate business intelligence tool slows companies down when handling extremely time-sensitive billing and revenue operations data. Zuora Warehouse helps businesses query data quickly and efficiently – we’ve already seen an early adopter reduce their month-end close process by up to 80%.”
Acquisitions
Anser Advisory, part of Sterling Portfolio, announced the planned sale of Anser to Accenture and the concurrent spinoff of Markon, Anser’s federal consulting business. Markon will remain a Sterling portfolio company.
Incorta announced the acquisition of Cream Analytics, a leading software company that enables finance teams to improve business performance by bringing context and industry benchmarks to analytics.
Appointments
BlueConic announced two new leadership hires. Hootsuite’s Senior Director of Customer Value, Ifoma Smart, has joined as VP of Global Customer Success. Cait Gorges, formerly Regional Vice President of Sales at ActionIQ, has joined as VP of Sales.
Nitro Software announced the appointment of Cormac Whelan as its new Chief Executive Officer.
Business
Alvaria announced an expanded partnership with Avaya, a leading provider of customer experience solutions, to further strengthen the Avaya cloud portfolio with state-of-the-art outreach capabilities.
Accenture announced three partnership expansions: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Microsoft, notably around Generative AI.
Creatio announced a partnership with Net at Work. The partnership will unlock new potential for customers and help them leverage the power of no-code to the fullest. Creatio also announced a new exclusive partnership with OpenModels, a wholly-owned subsidiary of BlueMeme. Partner agreement grants exclusive rights for OpenModels to work with Creatio’s no-code platform. They will localize and hold training and certification in Japanese and establish partnerships on behalf of Creatio to further develop the market.
Conga announced the sponsorship of PGA TOUR player, Seamus Power, currently ranked 39th in the Official World Golf Ranking.
o9 announced its first collaborative partnership in Brazil with Zamp S.A., which operates and franchises Burger King and Popeyes restaurants in the Brazilian market.
OneStream Software continues to build on its momentum and commitment in France, adding to its base of French customers and opening a new office in Levallois-Perret.
Sagacity has partnered with Medialab to provide personalised, data-driven marketing campaigns that deliver greater return on investment (RoI). The partnership will enable the delivery of joint products while enhancing existing services to help clients meet their strategic marketing goals.
Salesforce announced a partnership with Tent.org to upskill 1,500 refugees and support hiring 600 refugees through the Salesforce Talent Alliance.
Trinet announced a new partnership with the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO), featuring collaborative thought leadership, outreach resources, and educational support through the NAWBO Institute for Entrepreneurial Development.
Customer
11:11 Systems published a new case study with the City of Encinitas around the deployment of 11:11 DRaaS for Zerto, 11:11 Cloud Backup for Veeam Cloud Connect with Insider Protection and 11:11 Cloud Backup for Microsoft 365 for additional protection.
Palace Resorts, an all-inclusive vacation provider with properties in Mexico and Jamaica, announced it selected Amperity, the leading enterprise customer data platform (CDP) for consumer brands, to integrate its first-party data strategy to enhance end-to-end guest experiences.
Yazaki-Torres Manufacturing has chosen the Boomi platform to modernize its legacy systems. Using Boomi will allow Yazaki-Torres to integrate with the Bureau of Internal Revenue’s (BIR) new Electronic Invoicing/Receipting System (EIS) as part of the Philippines government’s move towards digitizing tax and administrative systems.
Infosys announced that as part of its strategic collaboration with the ATP, the governing body of men’s professional tennis, it is launching a new digital Carbon Tracker to make tennis more environmentally responsible.
Netcompany and Copenhagen Airport have joined forces to revolutionise the aviation industry by creating Smarter Airports – the company behind AIRHART. Copenhagen Airport has become one of the world’s most digitised airports with the successful launch of AIRHART, an innovative real-time data platform. AIRHART will drastically improve the operation and effectiveness of the airport across the ecosystem.
RAKBANK, a leading financial institution in the UAE market, has selected Newgen’s Trade and Supply Chain Finance (SCF) solution for digitizing and optimizing its end-to-end business finance processes.
NTT DATA announced it would bring computer vision techniques and artificial intelligence models to the BMW International Open 2023, creating the most immersive fan experience to date at Germany’s largest and most important golf tournament.
RoboMQ announced another string of customers leveraging Hire2Retire: Ocular Therapeutix, RTI Surgicals and Veregy.
Sidetrade has signed an initial 5-year contract worldwide with a Fortune 500 German life sciences company to deploy the Sidetrade AI Cash Application module.
IT consulting firm Infogain has selected SymphonyAI Summit to improve its internal IT service management (ITSM) infrastructure.
Selecta Group has signed a multi-year contract with Zycus, the cognitive procurement software suite pioneer, to accelerate its sourcing-to-contract landscape with Zycus’ AI-enabled solutions.
Financial Reports
Prophix
Prophix announced it had achieved several notable milestones in the first half of 2023, positioning the company for continued impressive growth in the year’s second half. It added 100 new customers, added Advisor and predictive Forecasting to its platform and made a couple of senior appointments. Geoffrey Ng becomes Chief Platform Officer, and Anurag Yagnik joins as the new Chief Technology Officer.
Alok Ajmera, Chief Executive Officer of Prophix, commented, “The finance department has developed into a strategic hub for many organizations. It’s never been more imperative for finance executives to plan for the unexpected, collaborate on budgets and easily consolidate data in order to effectively guide their businesses with the speed and flexibility required today. That’s what we’re all about at Prophix: helping finance professionals become the leaders they’ve always wanted to be.
“With our expanded platform and unwavering focus on finance, Prophix elevates the talents of finance teams to become mission-critical leaders in achieving their companies’ success. We’re incredibly bullish about both our corporate growth and our ability to play an important role in our customers’ success in 2023, and are excited about the progress we’ve already made on those important fronts.”
Funding
6sense, the leading platform to revolutionize how B2B organizations create, manage and convert pipeline to revenue, secured new debt financing totalling $100 million comprising a senior secured revolving credit facility from Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a division of First Citizens Bank.
SD Worx, the leading European HR and Payroll solutions provider, is delighted to welcome CVC Strategic Opportunities II has invested in SD Worx, becoming a minority shareholder. WorxInvest, the current shareholder of SD Worx, remains the majority shareholder and will keep 77.5 % of SD Worx. The additional capital generated by the transaction will be invested to accelerate the execution of SD Worx’s European growth plans.
Accenture has made a strategic investment through Accenture Ventures in Parfin, a leading provider of responsible, compliant Web3 infrastructure services to financial institutions in Latin America.
Product
Aderant introduced MADDI. MADDI is a revolutionary new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual associate being applied across the company’s applications. It is intuitively designed to automate routine, repeatable tasks and enable actionable insights and behavioural prompts to optimize complex activities across the firm.
Alation Inc., the data intelligence company, announced that Alation is now available through Databricks Partner Connect.
Dynatrace announced the availability of the Dynatrace® platform on Microsoft Azure in Switzerland. This represents the first observability solution available to Microsoft customers as a Switzerland-based SaaS deployment.
Experian announced the launch of Ascend Ops™. Experian’s first-of-its-kind solution empowers lenders to deploy new features and models in days or weeks instead of months. While optimized for financial services, Ascend Ops can be used to build, deploy and manage models across industries.
Freshworks announced Freddy Self Service, Freddy Copilot and Freddy Insights to make artificial intelligence more accessible to every workplace.
Genesis Global, the low-code application development platform purpose-built for financial markets organizations, announced it had been certified as SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and adhered to the highest industry standards for data security.
GEODIS in Americas, a leading third-party logistics (3PL) company, announced the launch of a new supply chain analytics tool, Analytics Interactive, in collaboration with Yellowfin BI as part of the GEODIS Visibility platform.
Jotform released Digest Emails, delivering a summary of your form submissions in one email. It also released a new Calendly widget enabling users to schedule meetings and appointments on your form with Calendly. The event will automatically appear in your synced calendar.
Kensu announced support for Databricks Unity Catalog, the unified data, analytics, and AI governance solution.
Konsolidator announced the release of its new mapping module, powered by OpenAI. With AI auto-map, Konsolidator makes it easier for customers to map local accounts to group accounts which is an important and time-consuming task during onboarding.
Laiye unveiled several product enhancements around Intelligent Automation technology. Magic Hat, an innovative and groundbreaking solution that seamlessly integrates Large Language Models’ capabilities throughout the entire Work Execution Platform. Magic Hat for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Magic Hat for Intelligent Document Processing (IDP).
Nexthink announced enhancements to its Sustainable IT solution, aimed at making sustainable IT and carbon reduction efforts more accessible to its global enterprise customers.
Outreach Data Sharing with Snowflake is now generally available. This new feature helps sales teams increase seller efficiency and effectiveness by extracting the raw data created by seller activities and interactions in Outreach for use in Snowflake.
OutSystems announced new AI features – including the general availability of its new connector for Azure OpenAI, built jointly with Microsoft – and its roadmap for a new suite of generative AI capabilities, codenamed “Project Morpheus.”
Qlik introduced a suite of OpenAI connectors that will help customers seamlessly and securely bring Generative AI content into Qlik to support a wide range of cloud analytics and automation use cases.
Salesforce announced Consumer Goods Cloud for Service, Trade Promotion Effectiveness dashboards, and Mulesoft Direct for Consumer Goods. These innovations help drive top and bottom-line growth, increase customer satisfaction, and more effectively manage the billions of dollars brands spend on trade promotion with Einstein AI and automation.
Serviceaide announced that ChangeGear Service Manager now includes Luma Virtual Agent 3.0, a breakthrough in delivering a digital Tier One agent as an integral part of the ChangeGear experience. ChangeGear, an award-winning ITSM solution, now uses Generative AI to take a giant next step in AI-powered service delivery, wait-time reduction, and cost efficiency.
Skedulo released three new and enhanced solutions to better serve the public sector, field sales and services and healthcare industries: Scheduling for Public Sector Solutions, Scheduling for Healthcare Therapy and Scheduling for Field Sales and Service.
SourceDay is now available in the Infor Marketplace for users of Infor LN, Infor CloudSuite Industrial / Syteline, and Infor VISUAL ERP.
Striim, Inc. announced Striim for Databricks, the first streaming SaaS solution to integrate database change streams using change data capture (CDC) technologies from enterprise-grade databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and other sources to the Databricks Lakehouse.
UserGems published a review of the quarter’s product updates. It includes Account Tracking, a meeting assistant for Outlook, Custom email and Slack notifications, Salesloft integration and customer relationship types.
Vena announced the general availability of Vena Insights, an intelligent reporting and analytics solution purpose-built to enhance an organization’s complete business planning processes. Vena Insights places the power to generate business intelligence with advanced self-service analytics in the hands of everyday users. It does this through leading AI capabilities and centrally managed permissions that leverage Microsoft’s world-class AI technology, including Power BI.
Visier announced “Vee”, a new powerful artificial intelligence-based digital assistant for people analytics. It will become VisierPeople, the world’s most widely used people analytics solution, adding a simple communication interface. Visier also launched Smart Compensation, a new tool that simplifies companies’ complex compensation planning process through a new, easy-to-use, data-driven approach.
