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Sometimes in all the talk about digital workplaces, it is forgotten that many enterprises are still struggling with the journey from traditional to digital enterprise. Digital transformation, though, is big business and many technology heavyweights have thrown their hat into the ring to catch a piece of the $250 million market.
By 2024, according to the Reuters finance news wire, this market will still be growing and worth $470.5 million and will continue to grow. Digital Transformation, to be clear, is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business resulting in fundamental changes to how businesses operate and how they deliver value to customers, which explains why this week Newton Square, Pa. SAP has just announced that it is partnering with India based Infosys, which provides next generation digital services and consulting, to offer Innov8, a program that is designed to take enterprises from traditional to digital.
The fact that this is not uniquely a technology alliance is an interesting starting point. However, what it will do is give both companies access to enterprises that are in the process of transformation and into which both SAP and Infosys can sell services and technology.
As part of the program, Infosys and SAP are creating a joint go-to-market engagement model between project Embrace from SAP and Infosys' Innov8 program. The joint engagement model is intended to help companies accelerate their digital transformation based on SAP S/4HANA to build intelligent enterprises.
Populated by more than 70 ready-to-deploy use cases spanning artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML), blockchain, the internet of things (IoT) and analytics, the Infosys Innov8 program enables organizations to build truly intelligent enterprises.
It also enables users transform their business model to one based on predictable costs and offer flexible points of entry to the SAP environment for both existing and new cloud users, all within one comprehensive end-to-end business solution.
Infosys and SAP have a long-standing partnership having delivered several successful projects globally. The fit with Infosys is a one as the company has a deep footprint in many geographies already. It will be interesting to see how this venture works out but with digital transformation services in high demand already, this is bound to be a successful move.
Dropbox Adds More Enterprise Appeal, More News
Last week during the Dropbox Work in Progress conference, we noted how Dropbox was pushing deeper into organizations as its looks to become an enterprise player along with its existing consumer based. This is nothing new and Dropbox has been pursuing this goal for years. Even after last week’s conference it took another step this time with the announcement of a new partnership with BetterCloud.
BetterCloud provides data protection and orchestration functionality the result of which is that Dropbox users will be able to customize their security polices, scan for sensitive data and automate critical processes.
Dropbox is so sure of this partnership that it is also investing $5 million in Atlanta-based BetterCloud. The investment will give Dropbox’s users’ solutions to automate and centralize management of their unique SaaS environments and to keep their data secure.
The partnership will allow businesses that subscribe to Dropbox to customize security policies, scan content for sensitive data and automate critical processes.
BetterCloud is bringing a lot of new additions for Dropbox into this partnership, but one that will be particularly useful for digital workplace workers is the Automated Workflows feature. Custom workflows will be availed for orchestrating IT administrative actions related to the migration of new Dropbox Business accounts by ensuring captured user account settings.
It will also offer monitoring of shifts in file and folder settings, changes the in-team administrators, new user-managed groups. Automated policies can alert team admins to overexposed misconfigurations with custom conditioning. Remediation will be suggested through native Dropbox admin actions.
In future, the BetterCloud functionality will be embedded into the Dropbox product and admin console. It already has 2500 customers in nearly 60 countries, which ties in nicely with Dropbox’s global presence. Its another development in the evolution of Dropbox. Expect more in the coming months.
Salesforce Closes $1.35B ClickSoftware Acquistion
This week also saw San Francisco-based Salesforce close the acquisition of ClickSoftware an Israeli workforce management software company, for $1.35 billion. The deal had originally been announced on August 7, but with this announcement the deal is sealed and gives Salesforce a new field service management solutions.
Founded in 1979 by Israeli entrepreneur Moshe Ben-Bassat, Massachusetts-headquartered ClickSoftware develops and sells enterprise software, offering task scheduling, resource management, and customer service tools
According to Salesforce, the ClickSoftware will incorporate with Salesforce Field Service Lightning, which was introduced in 2016 to give mobile workforce a 360-degree view of the customer, predictive insights and an offline-first mobile app. ClickSoftware and Salesforce have partnered since Field Service Lightning launched to deliver proactive, intelligent field service.
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As customer service continues to evolve, the acquisition of ClickSoftware will create strategic advantages, technological unity and innovation opportunities for Salesforce to better meet the needs of existing and new customers.
Salesforce is already one of the top players in the cloud integration services space. Their execution services include architecture definition, agile implementations and global rollouts?
Wrike Makes Digital Workplace Management Easier
Also, this week, San Jose, Calif.-based Wrike, which develops a collaborative work management platform, unveiled several offerings to address the growing demand for end-to-end work management solutions that measure the impact of effort and cater to specific use cases.
There were four in all: Wrike Analyze, Wrike for Professional Services, Wrike for Professional Services Performance, and Wrike for Marketers Performance today at Collaborate, the company’s annual user conference. Behind it all is the need to provide digital workplace managers with visibility into what is happening across the enterprise to enable workers focus on improving business performance.
Wrike Analyze makes this possible by enabling managers to connect projects and workflows to business KPIs, so leadership and individual contributors alike can derive insights in real-time and allocate resources to activities with the highest ROI. These new capabilities, the company has said will fuel the next generation of work management solutions that it is launching for high performance marketing and professional services organizations.
As an advanced analytics and reporting add-on, analyze improves visibility into and management of portfolios, projects, and unique business KPIs. It comes with pre-built dashboard templates, including project portfolio, project status, and productivity analysis overviews, for quick report creation, as well as a wide range of widgets, filters, and options to enable organizations to visualize data in the way that works best for individual use cases.
The other principle part of this release, Wrike for Professional Services, helps organizations increase on-time project delivery, profit margin, and client satisfaction by providing visibility into all stages of a project life cycle, empowering them to optimize resource utilization and automate repeatable processes.
The company also announced Wrike for Marketers Performance today, which has everything marketing teams need to unify the entire department across priorities and processes, supercharging the full work life cycle. It enables teams to focus on the most effective activities to create high quality, consistent brand experiences globally, at speed and scale.
There were a couple of other additions that will also improve the digital workplace and they will all be introduced over the comping months. Wrike Analyze will be available for Business, Enterprise, Wrike for Marketers, and Wrike for Professional Services customers as an add-on feature in Q4 2019. Wrike for Professional Services is available as of this weekend. Wrike for Professional Services Performance will be available in Q4 2019.
BMC To Develop Digital Transformation Business With New CEO
Finally, this week, Houston-based BMC, which builds IT solutions for the digital enterprise, has announced that Ayman Sayed has joined BMC as president and CEO. Sayed succeeds Bob Beauchamp, who joined BMC as interim CEO in April 2019 and will continue his service to the company as chairman of the board.
Sayed recently served as the president and chief product officer of CA Technologies, where he was responsible for the vision, strategy, and development of the company’s portfolio of products and solutions. Sayed was also a senior vice president at Cisco Systems, where he was responsible for the software on which nearly every Cisco networking product runs.
As CEO, Sayed will accelerate BMC’s focus on BMC customers’ ongoing digital modernization, providing them with artificial intelligence and machine learning, the convergence of IT service and IT operations management, and delivering self-managing mainframe environments.
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