In the week when the US celebrated Presidents day there was still plenty of news. Coronovirus impacted another conference, with Infor Inspire in London cancelled this week. Meanwhile Oracle achieved FedRAMP for several applications and SAP has a restructure with new appointments and several senior people leaving. Research included Zendesk Annual State of Messaging and Starmind looking at corporate intelligence.
Acquisitions
Accenture has acquired Icon Integrations a specialist consultancy focusing on SAP digital supply chain solutions and services as well as specialised business intelligence (BI) solutions. It will add around 70 professionals to its employee base across Australia and New Zealand.
Betterworks has acquired Hyphen a leading continuous employee listening and engagement platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
BMC announced its intention to acquire RSM partner, a global provider of unique services, software and expertise with a 100% focus on IBM Z mainframes. The acquisition will strengthen the BMC mainframe offering.
Insightsoftware has acquired Longview along with its financial planning and tax software. This extends the Insightsoftware capabilities into the corporate tax market. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Appointments
Billtrust has appointed Mark Shifke as CFO. Shifke commented: “I am pleased to join Billtrust’s leadership team and look forward to guiding Billtrust’s financial operations as they continue to transform the accounts receivables landscape for the world’s leading brands. I’m excited, not only that Billtrust’s market-leading order-to-cash platform continues to be the industry standard, but that our Business Payments Network is revolutionizing B2B payments.”
Deltek has appointed Caleb Merriman as its Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). Merriman joins from Guidewire software and has more than 20 years of experience working in security roles.
Qlik has announced the appointment of Poornima Ramaswamy as Executive Vice President, Strategic Clients. Ramaswamy previously spent nearly nineteen years at Cognizant Technology Solution leaving as VP AI & Analytics. It also announced the promotions of James Fisher to Chief Product Officer, Joe DosSantos to Chief Data Officer and Ruthann Wry to Chief People Officer.
SAP has announced changes to its leadership team. Adaire Fox-Martin will head up an enlarged Customer Success organisation. Thomas Saueressig will head up product management, development and product support. Juergen Mueller will be responsible for a single seamlessly integrated data management solution. The changes also see Stefan Ries and Michael Kleinemeier leave SAP in the coming months. These are the first significant changes by Christian Klein and Jennifer Morgan, Co-CEO’s to refresh their team.
Upland has made three senior appointments to its leadership team. Jim Rudden has joined Upland as executive vice president and chief marketing officer (CMO). Later this quarter, Virginia Miracle will join Upland as executive vice president and chief customer officer (CCO) along with Joseph Rodriguez, who will join Upland as senior vice president of global account sales.
Business
Delphix, a leader in Data Ops has partnered with Fujitsu Limited. Fujitsu will resell the Delphix DataOps platform and offer installation support services to customers. The combination of solution and services will assist companies in their migration to SAP HANA.
Jitterbit has announced a partnership with Fortmize. Fortimize is a Salesforce Platinum Consulting Partner focused on the financial services market. It will leverage the Jitterbit enterprise API integration platform to integrate core banking systems to Salesforce.
NICE welcomed the addition of new partner solutions to its X-Sight Marketplace. Acuris Risk Intelligence is a provider of data intelligence for anti-money laundering, anti-corruption and cybersecurity. Sayari Graph from Sayari Labs is the first purpose-built platform for navigating the complexity of global commercial relationships. It allows for a complete picture of customers, vendors, and third parties, all while maintaining provenance back to primary source documents.
SAP.io has started its second accelerator in Munich. The six startups are focused on the marketing and commerce sectors. Particpants include: StorifyMe, nyris, squarelovin Frontastic, Velou and Alcméon.
Solarwinds has launched a Head Nerds Program. It has appointed four individuals to help educate its MSP clients as partner advocates. They will be supported by its other three customer success programs. The MSP Institute (a comprehensive learning platform), MSP Advice Project (with peer-to-peer content), and MSP Pulse (an industry benchmarking tool). The Head Nerds team is split into four parts. The four leaders are: Marc-Andre Tanguay, Head Automation Nerd, Gill Langston, Head Security Nerd, Eric Harless, Head Backup Nerd and Eric Anthony, Head Operations Nerd.
Tipalti celebrated $10 Billion in annual transactions on its global payables automation platform. During the year it also doubling the number of customers to more than 900. Chen Amit, CEO and Co-founder of Tipalti commented: “2019 was a landmark year for Tipalti’s growth, and further solidifies us as the choice payables solution for fast-growing and mid-sized businesses seeking to scale and future-proof financial operations. 2020 promises to be a continuation as we expand operations and bring even greater innovation to the payables automation space.”
UiPath has announced its full year results for the financial year ending December 2019. It achieved $360 million in ARR with net new ARR in its 4th quarter exceeding $60 million. Daniel Dines, UiPath co-founder and CEO commented: “I am thrilled about the acceleration we witnessed in this past quarter. We are now adding over 10 new enterprise customers per day, we are also encouraged by the speed at which customers are scaling, evidenced by a three-fold increase in million-dollar-plus customer contracts in 2019. We are squarely focused on maintaining strong growth alongside smart, efficient operations so that we can invest confidently and deliver with quality to continue to earn our customers’ trust for the long-term.”
Workiva announced its 4th quarter and full year results this week. Q4 Total Revenue of $80.3 Million, up 24.6% from Q4 2018. Full Year 2019 Total Revenue of $297.9 Million, up 21.9% from 2018. Marty Vanderploeg, Chief Executive Officer of Workiva commented: “We are pleased with our fourth quarter and full year 2019 results that beat guidance for revenue, operating loss and loss per share.”
Customer
Infor announced that Cotonificio Albini has selected Infor CloudSuite EAM. Italian partner Know-How will implement the solution across 6 plants in Italy in the first phase. It will deploy the solution to the four remaning plants in two more phases.
TONIK, a leading Southeast Asia pure-play licensed digital bank has selected the Essentials Anti-Money Laundering solution, AML Essential from NICE Actimize.
Rheem, Australia’s leading hot water manufacturer is deploying Nintex Promapp to increase the efficiency of business processes across the organisation. In the first phase it is mapping the processes in its SAP CRM and field service management applications across the Rheem call centre and service business.
Prophix has published a case study about Dime Community Bank. It achieved 71% return on investment (ROI), reaching 100% in 18 months following the installation of Prophix CPM software for financial planning and reporting in the cloud,
Rimini Street has established a whole-of-government volume sourcing agreement with the Australian Government. This will make it easier for Government agencies to reduce maintenance costs by switching to Rimini Street Support for Oracle and/or SAP products.
Product
Automation Anywhere has automated the creation of bots to automate processes. The Automation Anywhere Discovery Bot uses AI and machine learning to automatically capture and analyze user actions. Where these are repetitive it provides an analysis of the process and likely savings. This allows the user to decide whether to create a bot to automate the process. Prince Kohli, Chief Technology Officer, Automation Anywhere commented: “With Discovery Bot, they gain a comprehensive understanding of all business processes, can prioritize their automation backlog, and with a single click, create and deploy new bots for repeatable processes, five times faster than with traditional approaches.”
Centage has introduced Maestro Help Hub. This is a customer portal with access to the support ticketing system and educations and collaboration features.
The latest release of Cezanne HR is now generally available. It includes major new functionality for the integrated Time module. This includes the ability to track attendance and public holidays are recognised for most geographies through 2020. It has also improved compliance for Senior Managers and Certification Regime (SMCR).
Cornerstone is offering free public access to several courses free between February 24 2020 to March 31. The courses include some of communication, stress management, conflict management, emotional intelligence, unconscious bias, and personal growth.
MyApps announced the 2020 version of Kerchie, its ERP solution. New features include:
- Enhanced Role-Based Access and Security
- Unlimited Pricing Structures and Quantity Price Break Capabilities
- Upsell Features and Contract Management
- One-click Visibility to In-Process, On-Hand and Allocated Inventories
- Single screen inventory views for one or more Warehouses
- Multiple Packaging Configurations for Products
- Lot Tracing and Tracking
- Customizable Report Configurations
Kryon 19.5 is now generally available. The intelligent RPA solution has enhanced Kryon Process Discovery enabling users to generate a personalized Discovered Process Report. The provides a snapshot of a business prior to automation, helping to identify processes that can benefit most from automation.
Oracle Cloud applications have achieved FedRAMP Moderate Authorisation. This applies to Oracle Cloud applications ERP, HCM and CX. Tamara Greenspan, group vice president, Oracle Public Sector commented: “FedRAMP Authorization for Oracle Cloud Applications is a critical step in meeting the growing demands and compliance requirements of our public sector customers. By achieving this authorization, we are able to help the Federal Government tap into our complete and innovative cloud applications suite to not just keep pace, but stay ahead of the evolving business and technology landscape.”
Pandle has introduced some enhancements to its product. It is now possible to automatically link payments to customer invoices in date order. Where invoices are under query the user must revert to the manual process. It also promises future improvements to bank reconciliation as well.
SAP and SwissRe have added more features to their co-innovation sub-ledger project which forms part of SAP S/4HANA. It has now added additional functionality and report content for accountants and actuaries. It has also expanded financial reporting options to bank, insurance companies and financial technology (fintech) companies.
ThinkHR has updated its learning management system. It has added new courses and this seems to be as a result of the merger between ThinkHR and Mammoth.
Trintech has achieved SAP certifications for two of its products. Trintech Cadency for SAP ERP and SAP S/4HANA in addittion to Trintech RPA and Journal Management V8.0 for SAP ERP and SAP S/4HANA.
Research
Starmind, a next generation intranet that leverages artificial intelligence with neural science to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration in organisations, has published a study. It looks at how the lack of an ability to share intelligence is hindering organisations. Statistics include:
- Employees use just 38% of their knowledge and expertise at work meaning organizations are failing to adequately unlock even half of the intellectual capital and brainpower of their people
- 61% of workers can’t find the information they need to do their job effectively
- 90% of employees want more opportunities to share knowledge and expertise
Oliver Muhr, CEO of Starmind. Commented: “Not being able to quickly and efficiently access organizational intelligence is a huge burden on productivity. Failing to find, unlock and share knowledge effectively not only leads to a duplication of work and time wasted but makes brain drain a real threat. As the war for talent, expertise and skills heats up, organizations need to do more to make use of their collective brainpower and skills. Giving employees on-demand access to the information they need can plug productivity holes, enable them to excel in their job and solve problems quickly.”
Precursive has launched a third survey into the state of onboarding. The survey takes five minutes to complete and is available here.
Zendesk has released its Annual Atate of Messaging 2020 Report. It examines key aspects of evolving and emerging conversational business trends and tracks the top stories to watch in 2020. These include feedback from companies such as Google, Twitter, Hootsuite, Birchbox.
