By Steve Brooks – May 03, 2021
Last week SD Worx made a strategic acquisition in the Nordics, buying Aditro. IFS announced its Q1 results with significant growth in its service management business. Sage announced a partnership with Limitless and offered up a next-generation peer-to-peer customer support offering. Recently rebranded Profi launched its software for professional services, Several customer announcements were covered, including Topia, Infor and NetSuite
Two interviews were published last week, one with Scott Brown, CEO of FinancialForce, who offers a different leadership style for an incoming CEO. The second was a conversation with Andrew Kinder about industry trends and the Infor focus in the EMEA region.
Pick of the week
UKG introduced Life-work Technology to its customers at its virtual Connections conference. Cecile Alper-Leroux, vice president of products and innovation at UKG, explained it, saying: “This is an entirely new vision for designing enterprise HCM solutions, factoring in people’s emotions and preferences, allowing them to work in a way that supports their lives and empowers them to thrive both at work and in life.”
It also announced several products it hopes would fulfil that vision, including:
- UKG Pro Candidate Cultivation – to help build relationships between recruiters and candidates
- UKG Pro Workforce Continuity to enable organisations to plan for unforeseen events
- UKG Pro Gig Explorer aims to help organisations find applications for short term gig engagements
- UKG Pro’s performance feedback insights to assist with coaching
Acquisitions and Funding
Ceridian is to acquire Ideal, a market leader in Talent Intelligence software, and integrate the solution into the Dayforce platform.
Prismatic, the embedded integration platform for B2B software companies, has raised $3.25 million in seed funding. Investors include Falls Angel Fund II and executives from across the tech sector.
Siemens is to acquire TimeSeries, a leading Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and Mendix partner.
Vena has raised $300 million in Series C funding led by Vista Equity Partners (“Vista”).
Appointments
ActiveCampaign has hired mechatronic engineer Tatiana Piloto as Regional Vice President, Latin America. It sees the company invest in Brazil as part of its expansion following funding.
Asite appointed Kyle Hamer as Chief Marketing Officer.
Celigo has appointed John Bruggeman as Chief Marketing Officer.
Zendesk appointed Shelagh Glaser as Chief Financial Officer and she will join on May 28, 2021.
Business
ActiveCampaign, the leader in Customer Experience Automation (CXA), has reached a milestone of 100 employees in Dublin, more than doubling headcount in 2020. It will triple its headcount again there by 2023, adding 200 further jobs.
Corcentric announced a strategic partnership with industry-leading supplier risk and compliance provider, Beroe.
Deltek gave a momentum update for its Vantagepoint solution. The software launched version 4.0 in 2021 and now has more than 400 customers.
FloQast has completed service organization control (SOC) 2 Type 1 certification, which is in addition to its SOC 1 Type 2 certification, which it has achieved annually since 2016.
Microsoft announced its results for the third quarter ended March 31, 2021. Compared to the third quarter of 2020, revenue was up 19% to $41.7 billion. Net income was up 44% to $15.5 billion (GAAP).
After it signed a new strategic partnership, Refinitiv will resell NICE Actimize’s industry-leading SURVEIL-X Holistic Surveillance Suite. It will do so for cloud or on-premises environments throughout the Asia-Pacific region.
OneStream Software and PwC Belgium announced today they have entered into a strategic alliance for the Belgian market.
Pipedrive has joined the Green Tiger initiative, an Estonian Collaboration Platform designed to boost environmental awareness and create a basis for a green economy.
Salesforce announced the inclusion of the Sustainability Exhibit as part of its procurement contracts moving forward. The Sustainability Exhibit will help its suppliers reduce their carbon footprint while also further integrating sustainability into every aspect of the Salesforce supply chain.
ServiceNow published Q1 2021 results. Subscription revenues were up 30% year over year to $1.293 million.
Syniti announced the best Q1 results in company history. It introduced real-time replication for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the expansion of its global climate initiative, Syniti Forest.
Visma announced Q1 2021 earnings. Total revenue increased to €491 million, up 18% with all regions growing.
Zendesk published Q1 2021 results. Q1 revenue increased 26% year over year to $298 million.
Customer
Austria based fintech Bitpanda has selected Anaplan’s scalable platform to support its hypergrowth.
Plaksha University, in Mohali, Punjab, has selected Anthology’s enterprise applications and solution suite, including Anthology Student International, Anthology Reach, Anthology Finance & HCM, Anthology Payroll and a host of enterprise-level applications.
Booz Allen Hamilton has completed the implementation of Deltek Costpoint as its next-generation financial solution.
Martell Mumm Perrier-Jouët, the Cognac and Champagne prestige subsidiary of Pernod Ricard, is launching a supply chain planning project with FuturMaster’s Demand and Supply Planning solutions Cloud mode to improve its customer service rate while optimising stocks.
Alva Industries has chosen Infor CloudSuite Aerospace & Defense as its ERP system. Midport Scandinavia will help deploy the solution. French Clothing manufacturer will deploy a multi-tenant version of Infor CloudSuite Fashion.
Hellenic Life has selected Oracle Financial Services solutions to help improve operational efficiency and customer experience.
Kaiser Permanente has implemented Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) to deliver intuitive employee experiences, simplify complex HR processes, and meet its workforce’s health and safety needs.
The Higher Education Systems & Services (HESS) Consortium Collective has selected Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite as the group’s single enterprise resource planning (ERP), human capital management (HCM), and student information system platform. It will roll out the solution to more than 50 institutions. Oracle beat both Unit4 and Workday in a competitive situation.
Borealis, a leading provider of advanced and circular polyolefin solutions, has implemented Qlik Sense.
Stanford Healthcare will leverage Qualtrics to deliver Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) surveys and assessments on a single platform.
Sigma Computing has provided Cowen Inc. (“Cowen”), a leading financial services firm, with a platform where business teams, analysts and IT can collaborate on data validation, exploration and analyses via a user-friendly spreadsheet interface.
Dioptra Publications, one of the largest publishers in Greece, has chosen SoftOne and its cloud-based solution EINVOICING to embark on its digital transformation.
Vyaire Medical has leveraged Talend Data Fabric to help successfully meet the unprecedented spike in demand for ventilator equipment in 2020 and beyond.
Miami Marlins, a US professional baseball team and a member club of Major League Baseball, is taking advantage of UKG Pro to achieve operational efficiencies and boost employee productivity.
Sev1Tech has selected and implemented the Unanet project-based ERP solution for its technology business.
Product
Accelo launched Accelo Community. It combines knowledge base articles, a Q&A support forum, product updates, blogs, and events in one platform.
Anthology has announced a comprehensive renaming of its solutions with the prefix of Anthology.
Following a recent version update of Cezanne HR, the company revealed that customers have created scores of workspaces using the new features.
Criterion HCM announced that their payroll solution has been tested, recognized, and officially accredited by the UK government (HMRC) for sale in the UK.
FreeAgent has improved its Cashflow forecasting tool. It now includes more ‘fixed cost’ payments, like rent and professional fees, to improve the accuracy of the forecast. It has also improved the Open Banking feeds for NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland or Ulster Bank NI current accounts.
Katana has introduced support for bar code scanning for inventory management. It intends to extend functionality in the coming months.
N-Able has integrated N-able™ N‑central® with Microsoft Intune, a Microsoft 365 Business Premium component, helping MSPs manage and protect their clients’ apps and devices.
Nexthink announced extending end-to-end experience visibility to the application transaction level with its new Application Experience capability.
NICE has launched CXone Expert following the acquisition of MindTouch Inc, a San Diego-based leader in cloud-based knowledge management software for customer experience.
Nintex has launched pre-built configurable process maps, workflow and forms automation, and robotic process automation templates to help organizations accelerate their digital business transformation initiatives.
Phenom has launched Phenom CORE (Customer Onboarding & Readiness Experience). It is an exclusively Phenom-developed holistic strategy to guide our customers through onboarding, configuration, launch, user adoption, and strategic iterations.
Plex QMS is now available as a standalone solution. Plex QMS helps manufacturers adhere to industry compliance, regulations, and standards such as FMEA, PPAP, SQF, and BRC to avoid costly product recalls.
Qualtrics announced the new Customer Care Command Center to help organizations improve customer service agent effectiveness by helping every agent tap into the hearts and minds of the customers they’re serving and take action to improve the experiences they deliver.
Qualtrics also Launched Qualtrics Candidate Experience. It enables organizations to improve how they attract, recruit, and hire by acting on feedback directly from the candidate at multiple touchpoints throughout the process.
Replicon’s Time Tracking for Service Organizations solution is now a SAP® endorsed app, available for online purchase on SAP Store.
Salesforce announced Salesforce Learning Paths, which powers personalized learning in Salesforce so employees can learn in the flow of work, when and where they need it most. They will be GA in the summer.
Shopvue announced the release of ShopVue Analytics, a powerful dashboard tool built on a leading BI platform Qlik.
Teampay announced its new integration with Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) Innovators Card, extending critical spend management capabilities to businesses and employees that utilize the card.
Workiva Inc announced it had extended its cloud platform capabilities to help companies meet the rapidly changing landscape of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting with a fit-for-purpose ESG solution.
Research
ADP published “People at Work 2021: A Global Workforce View”. A survey of 32,000 adult workers in 17 countries looked across five dimensions: worker confidence and job security, workplace conditions, pay and performance, worker mobility, and gender and family. Key findings included:
- Worker Confidence: Optimism is shaken yet persistent
- Workplace conditions: Unpaid overtime has soared while flexible working has also increased.
- Employee performance: The pandemic has put employee performance in the spotlight, with 68% receiving a bonus or increase.
- Worker Mobility: 75% of the global workforce made changes or plan to change how or where they live
- Gender and Family: The pay gap is widening, especially in the US, and parents struggle with work-life balance.
A report entitled “Intuit QuickBooks Small Business Recovery” uncovered the varied impact the pandemic has had on small businesses across different industries and geographies since March 2020. Key findings include:
- Small businesses lost $4.6 billion in monthly revenue in April 2020 alone
- As of March 31, 2021, 61% of industries saw annual revenue increase compared to before the pandemic
The report also reveals the winners and losers by industry sector.
Wolters Kluwer has published a new study, “Account Reconciliation and Closing – The Journey from Excel to Artificial Intelligence” It highlights the challenges of the office of finances and studies the state of consolidation practices across the DACH region. The report found that Excel still dominates in many firms.
Xero uncovered the priorities for small businesses ahead of Australia’s Federal Budget 2021-2022. It highlighted five top priorities:
- Additional instant asset tax write-offs (26%)
- Free or low-cost training to upskill and reskill (24%)
- Relief packages relevant to COVID-19 lockdown impacts (23%)
- Support for young entrepreneurs to grow their networks and experience (22%)
- Skills training assistance to help with running the business (20%).
