News from the week beginning 10th June 2024

Infor launched Infor Nexus Map and Trace, a new application that offers firms greater transparency for their supply chains. LexisNexis Legal & Professional has announced that Lexis+ AI is now generally available for UK customers. Unit4 launched Success4U, its outcome-based customer success model for customers.

Apply Digital has launched its Composable Accelerator For Enterprises (CAFE). National Retail Solutions (NRS) has launched affordable tools designed to level the playing field in today’s competitive market.

AccountsIQ raised €60 million in a Series C investment from Axiom Equity (Axiom).

At Epicor Insights, the company announced that it would embed Climatiq’s embedded carbin calculators in 2025. And that it had acquired PIM vendor KYKLO.

At the Umbraco Business Summit, Filip Bech-Larsen, CTO gave an action packed keynote on the evolution of digital experience management.

Precisely announced the expansion of its partnership with Databricks. Conjointly, an all-in-one survey research platform announced a new partnership with Cint, a provider of digital insights gathering. J.P. Morgan Payments joined the MACH Alliance, a not-for-profit industry body dedicated to advocating for open, best-of-breed technology ecosystems.

Pipedrive announced the appointment of a new Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Product Officer. Monta appointed a new CTO, Jesper Terkelsen. Hazelcast has announced the appointment of Anthony Griffin as its Chief Architect.

Rimini Street announced that Ricoh Company Ltd had selected its support service to enable it to free up resources and finances to conduct a business transformation program.

Research last week included Pipefy’s 2024 Automation Trends Report. Splunk found that the hidden costs of downtime could be as much as US$400 billion annually for Global 2000 companies. Forescout Technologies published research on the enterprise’s riskiest devices. iplicit published research that reveals accounting software in use by Multi-academy trusts falls short of what is required.

In a podcast published last week, Andrew Cunje, CISO at Appian, talks about the security challenges of LLMs and Gen AI.

Rick Berger, the new CEO of Rootstock, talks about vision, strategy and ambitions for the year ahead and beyond.

Leonardo Tomadon, Executive Director for go-to-market strategy at Pipefy gives some tips about how to ensure a product is ready to go to market.

BICS

Carrefour has partnered with BICS to launch a new ‘travel eSIM’. Before travelling, shoppers can purchase an eSIM that will make it easier and cheaper to use phones abroad.

Jorn Vercamert, VP of Customer Solutions & Products, BICS, commented, “eSIMs are an exciting advancement for global connectivity. Consumers have yet to realise the benefits of eSIMs, but with products like this from Carrefour, that will quickly change. The eSIM digitalizes connectivity, making it available with just a few clicks. BICS is making it easy for enterprise and consumer brands to integrate global connectivity into their offerings to improve the digital experience of their end-users.”

Burendo

Burendo has announced that it has achieved Carbon Neutrality. Achieving carbon neutral status was achieved by reducing emissions by 20% in the last year. Within the last two years, it has saved over 7 tonnes of CO2 from being emitted. Since starting the process in 2018, its Wellington Place office has switched to using traceable energy from 100% renewable sources. It has invested in credible carbon offsetting projects, nominated a Green Ambassador within Burendo, achieved the Green Mark Level 1 certification and attained ISO 14001 accreditation.

Burendo will continue to continue working on reducing its emissions further. It has set ambitious goals and remains committed to continuous improvement, constantly exploring new ways to minimise their environmental impact.

Daniella Preston, Burendo’s Green Ambassador, commented, “It’s been an incredibly rewarding journey, all our sustainability achievements are due to the dedication and innovation of our amazing team. We understand that companies like Burendo, as well as individuals, have a responsibility to the environment and we’re committed to continuous improvement and leading the way to a more sustainable future for everyone.”

Deltek

ALL4 increases efficiency with Deltek Vantagepoint

In an interview with Karen Escobar, Project Management Business Partner and Chester Ney, IT Director at ALL4, the environmental consulting firm. They explain how Deltek Vantagepoint has helped them improve project management, billing, invoicing, and financial management.

Escobar noted, “With Vantagepoint, we get increased visibility. With the data in Vantagepoint, we can see how we are doing overall as an organization, down to the employee level.”

The solution helped support a reconfiguration of security roles and also helped track KPIs for leaders and employees. The dedicated customer success manager has helped them take advantage of Vantagepoint with a greater understanding of their business.

Cost Volume Pro added to ProPricer Contractor Edition

At the 9^th Annual Government Contract Pricing Summit, Deltek + ProPricer announced Cost Volume Pro. This is a pivotal add-on to ProPricer Contractor Edition. This powerful web-based tool is specifically designed to tackle the often-daunting task of preparing complete, accurate cost submissions in response to Requests for Proposals (RFPs).

The new solution has five key benefits:

• Comprehensive Cost Volumes
• Consistent Outputs, Every Time with a standardised proposal process
• Controlled User Access with robust user access controls
• Predefined Document Rules, Sections and Styles making creating consistent, compliant, and professional submissions easy
• Seamless Integration with ProPricer

Other updates to ProPricer included a versatile Material Ad-Hoc Report with customizable timescales, enhanced ROUNDUP and ROUNDDOWN functions for precise calculations. With also the ability to update materials pricing from existing proposals. In addition, ProPricer BOE Pro now includes Smart Sections in BOE Templates.

Mountain Sky Landscaping

Melinda Nichols, CFO and Co-Owner of Mountain Landscaping, explained how they transformed financial operations by switching from Quickbooks to ComputerEase. ComputerEase has helped to streamline the Payroll process. The cloud-based solution has helped foster a culture of collaboration and accountability within Mountain Sky Landscaping.

Supporting Fisher House

Deltek announced that ProPricer, a veteran-founded company, champions support for veterans through its partnership with Fisher House. Fisher House provides critical assistance to wounded veterans and their families. They do this by alleviating the financial burden of travel and lodging expenses. This collaboration underscores ProPricer’s unwavering commitment to its military-connected clientele. It magnifies Fisher House’s indispensable role in supporting those who have served.

TSIA

TSIA published a Survey insight from the 2024 Managed Services AI Operations Survey (Registration required). It identifies that a minority of organisations are leveraging AI to support service delivery in managed services. Only 22% are offering enhanced delivery SLA enabled by AI technologies. This lack of adoption represents a missed opportunity for managed services organizations. The insight highlights four ways that AI can help SLAs:

1. Implementing proactive issue detection, which could prevent SLA breaches before they occur.
2. Analyzing historical data to identify usage patterns and customize user experiences could help meet requirements set out in the XLA.
3. Automating incident management can triage more common problems to automated resolution and free up human resources to tackle more complex SLAs. Companies like Logicalis have already observed success in this area.
4. Monitoring performance on a continual basis, based on usage data as well as user feedback (e.g., from sentiment analyses). This could help identify areas for improvement. It could further refine how SLAs and XLAs are constructed with future customers, even as the industry changes.

Other articles and research reports published last week by the TSIA included:

• Article: How CROs Are Organizing for Revenue Growth (Subscription required)
• Article: Real-World Applications of AI for Technology Companies (Subscription required)
• Article: Real-World AI Applications for Technology Companies (Subscription required)
• Article: A Success-Centric Organizational Structure (Subscription required)
• Research Report: The LAER-Based Approach To Customer Growth (Subscription required)

Workday

Workday announced that Clemson University selected Workday Financial Management, Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), and Workday Strategic Sourcing to enable operational excellence, drive digital transformation, and deliver enhanced experiences for its faculty, staff, and student workers. Clemson has partnered with Deloitte to help replace its legacy ERP solution.

Tony Wagner, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Clemson,  commented, “Our partnership with Workday represents a significant milestone in our transformation journey to modernize campus systems and improve experiences for our faculty, staff, and students – all to support the university’s mission of teaching, research, and service. We look forward to further engaging with the campus community and delivering on our transformation promise as our effort progresses toward design, testing, training, and adoption.”

Michael Hofherr, General Manager of State and Local Government and Higher Education at Workday, added, “Campus leaders are seeking flexible solutions that deliver accurate and timely insights to help drive institutional excellence and support their evolving needs. At Workday, we are honoured to partner with Clemson University to deliver solutions that are vital to their success, and we look forward to our partnership, now and in the future.”

Yooz

Yooz published a new survey, Leaders vs Ledger, which identifies a significant perception gap between C-suite leaders and their finance teams when it comes to priorities, strategic impact, and overcoming operational barriers. Pollfish conducted a survey of 600 US business professionals over the age of 18 of C Suite leaders and finance professionals. The key findings included:

• While C-suite executives expect finance teams to dedicate a significant portion of their time to strategic initiatives, only 33% of finance teams reported being able to meet this expectation, underscoring a major gap between leadership’s expectations and the operational reality.
• 77% of finance teams report frustration at their leader’s lack of operational awareness, leading to a hindrance in their efforts to provide strategic value.
• There’s a discrepancy in the perceived primary role of finance teams; business leaders voiced the expectation of receiving strategic guidance from finance, whereas finance teams believe they are primarily tasked with transaction processing.
• Chasing down documents and approvals takes, over half of respondents, at least 4 hours a week, with a quarter taking up 7 hours a week.
• 64% of C-suite executives believe finance teams are effective in influencing strategic decisions. However, only 50% of finance professionals feel that their strategic input has a real impact.
• Both C-suite and finance teams see automation as a critical solution. They believe automation will enhance the strategic capabilities of finance teams.

Yooz’s CEO Laurent Charpentier commented, “Our study illuminates the harsh truth that misalignment between executives and finance teams is standing in the way of organizational success. By embracing automation, teams can finally move beyond manual busywork and leverage technology to enable strategic decision-making and direction that executives expect and need to drive the business forward.”

Zoho

Zoho Revealed details of Zoho Apptics, a new app analytics tool that can collect, process, visualize, and analyze large sets of app data within minutes. Analyzing in-app behaviour and monitoring app usage is a time-tested, effective method for stakeholders to optimize its performance and experience according to user requirements.

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