In a move that significantly strengthens France’s digital sovereignty, SAP and S3NS (the joint venture between Thales and Google Cloud) have announced a strategic collaboration to accelerate the migration of critical enterprise workloads to a trusted cloud environment. Confirming the partnership’s immediate impact, Thales has been named the first major organization to adopt SAP’s private cloud solutions hosted on the S3NS platform.

This collaboration addresses the growing demand among French public and private sector entities for cloud-native agility that remains compliant with stringent local data protection regulations and the “SecNumCloud” label requirements.

Securing the Digital Core of French Enterprise

The partnership allows organizations to deploy SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, within the S3NS infrastructure. By combining SAP’s industry-leading ERP capabilities with the sovereign security layer provided by S3NS, businesses can undergo digital transformations while ensuring their data remains under French and European jurisdiction.

“Expanding our partnership with S3NS is a major step in our commitment to provide our French customers with cloud solutions that meet the highest standards of security and sovereignty,” said Gerald Karsenti, President of SAP France. “The choice of Thales to trust SAP and S3NS for its digital transformation is a strong signal for the entire French ecosystem.”

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Thales: Leading the Sovereign Transition

As the inaugural customer, Thales will utilize the SAP and S3NS offering to modernize its internal operations. This transition is designed to provide Thales with a flexible, scalable infrastructure that meets the security demands of the aerospace, defense, and digital identity sectors.

“Digital sovereignty is at the heart of Thales’s strategy, both for our customers and for our own infrastructure,” said Philippe Keryer, Executive Vice-President, Strategy and Technology, Thales. “By choosing the SAP solution on the S3NS sovereign cloud, we are securing our digital transformation with a high-performance environment that meets the most demanding security standards in France.”

A Blueprint for Trusted Digital Transformation

The S3NS platform is engineered to bridge the gap between the innovation of global cloud providers and the security requirements of the French state. By hosting SAP’s critical business applications, S3NS provides a “Local Cloud” alternative that protects against extraterritorial laws while offering the full technical benefits of Google Cloud technology.

“Our mission at S3NS is to offer French companies and public institutions the best of cloud technology with the highest level of security and sovereignty,” said Cyprien de Jussieu, CEO of S3NS. “The availability of SAP S/4HANA Cloud on our infrastructure is a key milestone, and we are proud to support a global leader like Thales in its move to a trusted cloud.”

As European regulations regarding data residency continue to evolve, the SAP and S3NS alliance provides a scalable roadmap for French enterprises to modernize without compromising on compliance or control.

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Fastly, Inc., the world’s fastest global edge cloud platform, is launching a new product line for Edge Observability, enhancing its delivery of advanced edge and origin visibility, analytics and more. By expanding existing real-time logging and metrics functionality, Fastly gives its customers the ability to build their own observability systems by surfacing real-time and historical data in a single pane of glass. Fastly customers can now interpret data and take quick meaningful action using near-instant deployment times.

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“Observability is essential for digital transformation. It helps Site Reliability Engineering teams manage application health and provide security operations teams insights into trends and anomalies that they can act upon to keep their applications and users safe and running,” said Lakshmi Sharma, Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Fastly. “We can now offer developers, and an entire chain of DevOps teams, the fastest, most flexible edge observability solution where they have the freedom to be innovative and creative.”

Customers need the ability to monitor the status of a site, product, or service, while also being able to quickly address potential issues. Fastly’s solution provides valuable insights, helping to identify and block suspicious activity, continuously improve processes, and ultimately provide better customer experiences.

To introduce the value of origin-to-edge and domain visibility, Fastly is offering two 30-day free trial offers for Origin Inspector and Domain Inspector. Customers can now start an Origin or Domain Inspector 30-day free trial directly from the Fastly UI and put the capabilities to the test without commitment.

Fastly offers a flexible Observability product line, combined with the fastest edge, which encompasses:

• Customizable logging: Customers can log any aspect of HTTP requests and responses through a large variety of logging formats (e.g., Common Log Format, JSON, Key/Value, CSV, etc).
• Support for an extensive variety of integrations: 33 at current count, including third-party services for storage and analysis to enhance business workflows.
• Breadth and depth of Edge Observability data: Including extremely granular visibility into more than 200 metrics related to client, origin, cache, WAF, Compute@Edge, Image Optimization, and more.
• Historical reporting: Fastly’s historical metrics go back to the day of the service creation, resurfacing 100% of the data.
• Real-time data:Metrics and logs are available in real-time. Metrics are available every second and logs can be streamed as they occur.
• Private log storing: Customers store their own logs so they can have complete control and confidence over access and protection of their data.

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AllCloud, a global cloud services company AWS Premier Partner and Snowflake Premier Partner, announces the launch of the Matillion One Click solution, its latest Solutions Factory offering. AllCloud’s Matillion One Click solution is an IP-led solution that accelerates customers’ journey to the cloud for data analytics by helping them acquire data faster and at scale, reducing the amount of time it takes to fully productionize their Matillion instances by 75%. AllCloud is a Platinum Matillion Partner.

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Matillion helps a company turn its raw data into timely and meaningful information. Its ETL tool integrates with an extensive list of pre-built data source connectors, loads the data into a cloud environment, and performs the transformations necessary in order to make data consumable by analytics tools such as Sigma, Tableau, Power BI, and more.

One of the challenges with ETL tools is that line-of-business leaders don’t understand the complexity of acquiring data, bringing it into a data warehouse and making it accessible. It’s an onerous process that can take a company months to achieve. With AllCloud’s Matillion One Click solution, companies can accomplish this goal in a matter of weeks, showing value to the business faster. AllCloud’s Matillion One Click solution complements Matillion’s ETL by adding six (6) critical components needed to fully productize their Matillion instance. Clients are now able to: rapidly setup and configure the initial deployment and configuration; automate the setup and maintenance of data pipelines and quality checks; automate testing of changes and promotions; monitor job, server, costs and performance; increase team productivity through CICD and Git integration; and manage upgrades and disaster recovery.

“AllCloud is focused on accelerating our customers’ journey to the cloud, whether that journey involves AWS, Salesforce or data analytics,” said Dave Taddei, SVP, Data and Analytics Practice, North America, at AllCloud. “AllCloud’s Matillion One Click solution greatly enhances our ability to provide clients with data that is business-ready so they may realize increased revenues, find new revenue streams, improve margins and create a competitive advantage in the marketplace.”

The AllCloud Matillion One Click solution is part of AllCloud’s Solution Factory. The AllCloud Solutions Factory supports every stage of a company’s cloud journey, from migration and modernization to security, compliance and DevOps, while optimizing cost and governance.

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Calix, Inc. announced that the award-winning Calix Support Cloud (Support Cloud) is the only solution that delivers insights to enable customer support across the industry’s most extensive portfolio of managed services. Calix introduced its 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th managed services last month at Calix ConneXions 2022. The growing portfolio enables broadband service providers (BSPs) to win in increasingly competitive markets by delivering managed services. These include social media monitoring , connected home security, connected device protection , and scalable community-wide Wi-Fi for subscribers and smart neighborhoods. To support business growth by increasing support efficiency, BSP support teams leverage Support Cloud, which provides increased visibility into the complete subscriber experience. Continual updates to Support Cloud make it easier than ever for BSP customer support teams to provide proactive customer support that contributes to an exceptional subscriber experience—all while reducing operating costs. This also extends to the Calix managed service, SmartTown.

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“We understand that exceptional subscriber experiences are the most important differentiator”

Last year, New York-based Ontario & Trumansburg Telephone Companies (OTTC) added managed services to their existing Wi-Fi offerings to stand out in crowded Rochester and Buffalo markets. Specifically, they launched ProtectIQ® home network protection and ExperienceIQ® advanced network controls. They also engaged Calix Premier Customer Success to help them accelerate go-to-market times and get the most out of their technology investments. OTTC leveraged the full Calix Revenue EDGE platform—including GigaSpire® BLAST systems, Calix Cloud®, and the Calix CommandIQ® mobile app—to see several benefits. They increased customer support workflow efficiency even as they added new managed services. Meanwhile, Calix Marketing Cloud enabled OTTC to find the best households to target for new managed services and drive more subscribers to their personalized CommandIQ mobile app. This high level of self-service, paired with the tools and visibility into the subscriber experience in Support Cloud, enabled the OTTC customer support team to decrease operating costs. They reduced truck rolls by 19 percent and mean time to repair (MTTR) by 34 percent.

As a new function in CommandIQ, subscribers can now click through to their BSPs’ billing portal so they can easily and quickly log in to view billing details. Customer service representatives (CSRs) can configure their BSPs’ billing portal URL for display in CommandIQ through Support Cloud, resulting in convenience for the subscriber and lower inbound call volume. Support Cloud is also launching multiple enhancements to network operations features to make support workflows and reporting easier to manage, edit and maintain over time.

Even as BSP offerings grow in complexity, additional enhancements to Support Cloud help reduce support operating costs by:

• Providing more support visibility into the complete managed services subscriber experience. Calix continually enhances Support Cloud to further enable CSRs and field technicians to support a growing list of managed services. CSRs can now support managed Wi-Fi experiences in community spaces with SmartTown. In the same system, they have increased visibility into residential subscriber experiences, like connected device protection from Servify Care. This results in faster troubleshooting.
• Enabling proactive monitoring and support for new markets with SmartTown. Calix launched SmartTown last month. Now Support Cloud is poised to help BSPs support Wi-Fi experiences at scale. Recent enhancements include proactive monitoring and support of the community subscriber experience, more insights, and troubleshooting tools.
• Leveraging the Revenue EDGE platform, including EDGE Systems, to deliver exceptional subscriber experiences. Calix has a growing portfolio of GigaSpire and GigaPro Wi-Fi systems that includes the upcoming u4g and just-launched p6he. These Revenue EDGE Wi-Fi systems integrate with Support Cloud to give CSRs end-to-end visibility into the subscriber experience. This means support teams can seamlessly provide proactive support. At the same time, subscribers can also self-service using the CommandIQ mobile app.
• Collaborating with Customer Success Services to support enablement and business growth for managed services.Calix has a dedicated customer support organization, Calix Customer Success Services (Customer Success). This award-winning team provides step-by-step guidance to help support BSPs as they grow their businesses. That support extends to all managed services Calix offers. New content is available to support SmartTown community implementation with hands-on technical workshops and new service introduction guidance.

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Cloud4C, an Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) member, recently entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Oracle at GITEX Global 2022, to accelerate cloud adoption in the Middle East, helping facilitate enterprises with in-depth IT acumen, smart cloud-native services, innovative technologies, and cost-effective executions. Middle East businesses stand to gain end-to-end managed cloud offerings powered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Cloud4C in a single SLA until application login.

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As part of the collaboration, Oracle will assist in strengthening people and talent competencies for the region and develop customized action plans for businesses willing to embrace their transformation journey on OCI. As a one-stop-shop implementation and managed services partner, Cloud4C will ensure that the projects come to fruition, aided by innovative delivery models and customer enablement.

In addition, enterprises can take advantage of Cloud4C’s ready-to-use transformation frameworks, hybrid managed services model, and in-country hosting powered by its proprietary Self Healing Operations Platform (SHOP). This can help businesses achieve their cloud evolutions at maximum availability and ensure compliance with regulations.

The MoU was signed on 13th October at GITEX Global 2022 by Rakesh Reddy, Regional Director MEA, Cloud4C and Nick Redshaw, Senior Vice President –Technology Cloud, Middle East and Africa, Oracle in the presence of senior representatives from both organizations.

Rakesh Reddy, Regional Director of Cloud4C MEA, said, “I’m delighted to announce a renewed partnership agreement between Cloud4C and Oracle to help Middle East businesses leverage top-notch cloud services. This, along with our Migration Factory, Automated Managed Services, and industry-focused accelerations such as in the BFSI sector would be a good fit for aspirational firms in the region.”

Nick Redshaw, Senior Vice President – Technology Cloud for Oracle MEA, said, “OCI is the preferred cloud platform for organisations from across all industries, and we are focused on supporting our customers across Middle East and Africa drive continuous innovation with latest cloud technologies. Cloud4C, with its deep knowledge of the region and its IT and cloud capabilities, is a great partner to help us in the journey.”

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Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, announced at its Snowday 2022 event, the final San Francisco stop on its Data Cloud World Tour, continued growth across the Data Cloud ecosystem, driven in part by Snowflake’s cloud, data provider, services, technology, and Powered by Snowflake partners, alongside its customers. Launched over two years ago, the Snowflake Partner Network continues to serve as the engine that fuels the growth of the Data Cloud ecosystem, unlocking the potential of the Data Cloud with a broad array of solutions, applications, and partners that help mobilize the world’s data.

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“Matillion and Snowflake are committed to maximizing the data productivity of our mutual customers by enabling data teams to transform and enrich data directly within the Snowflake Data Cloud”

“Together, Deloitte and Snowflake are supporting customers end-to-end through their data mobilization journeys,” said Frank Farrall, Principal – Data and AI Alliances Leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP. “Our alliance with Snowflake allows us to be part of the process of helping to redefine the market for data technology, empowering our joint clients to achieve their digital innovation goals and unlock business value at scale.”

Powered by Snowflake Fuels New Innovations

Powered by Snowflake is becoming synonymous with application development in the Data Cloud, with the program growing by over 6x year-over-year as of July 31, 2022. The program provides partners and customers developing applications on Snowflake with the tools and resources they need to build, market, and operate applications in the Data Cloud. Leading supply chain solution providers like Blue Yonder, cybersecurity organizations like Panther, media and advertising organizations like Piano, marketing technology organizations like Simon Data have built their customer-facing applications on Snowflake, enabling them to seamlessly scale with user demand, reduce operational burden, and unlock new revenue streams.

Snowflake announced the launch of its Native Application Framework (currently in private preview) at this year’s Snowflake Summit, unlocking the ability for application logic to come to the data instead of forcing the customer to relinquish control of or move data. Since then, companies like Capital One are leveraging the Native Application Framework to build a new class of applications on Snowflake that enable customers to install applications from Snowflake Marketplace, and run them directly in their Snowflake instances.

“Earlier this year, Capital One entered the enterprise B2B software market with the launch of Capital One Software and our first product, Slingshot,” said Salim Syed, VP and Head of Engineering, Capital One Software. “We chose to develop a Slingshot app for Snowflake Marketplace to further enhance the Slingshot customer experience and increase the time to value for our joint customers. The ease at which consumers can securely install and run applications directly in their Snowflake instances is of huge value to those building applications in Snowflake.”

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During the past 12 months Nexelus has introduced major enhancements to its cloud based operational platform. This includes Media Optimization and enhancements to its AP Workflow Automation product, apworks.ai.

apworks.ai addresses the manual practice and high cost of Accounts Payable processing, using AI and ML technology.

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Agency media teams routinely expend significant time and effort to maintain various platforms/systems to handle underspend and changes in execution strategy. This involves rolling over or moving spend from one vendor to another or across different channels to ensure maximum performance and effectiveness.

Nexelus has introduced new Media Optimization functionality to make this process more efficient. This tool assists the user in a wizard driven approach to roll over or move spend across different vendors and channels using either a calendar view or by editing underlying placement details. Robust integration with the digital media ecosystem makes managing spend in various ad tech platforms much easier using a single UI.

apworks.ai addresses the manual practice and high cost of Accounts Payable processing, using artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to automate and simplify the payables process for operations and finance teams.

This add-on product, released in Q4 2021, went through several enhancements based on initial adoption, especially by a large media management agency. Based on the Amazon tech stack, apworks.ai enables processing of all types of media, production and overhead vendor invoices with little to no human interaction. An easy-to-use dashboard guides users through the invoice lifecycle, providing seamless routing and approval of invoices.

Planned enhancements to the Nexelus platform in 2023 include:

• Enhancements to AP workflow automation (apworks.ai) for splitting invoices to streamline media invoice reconciliations
• New auto-reversal functionality for project/job/campaign level journal entries
• Enhancements to D365 integration
• Enhancements to MS Power BI integration
• Production/Job Management enhancements to revenue recognition rules and UI
• New wizard driven User Interface for media campaign management, planning and buying
• Expand the list of Digital Media AdTech integrations

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Verint^®, The Customer Engagement Company, released a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on The Total Economic Impact of Verint Digital-First Engagement (DFE) solutions, part of the Verint Customer Engagement Cloud Platform.

“Consumer priorities continue to evolve with a growing preference for digital-first, self-service options for customer service channels”

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As consumers shift to digital channels, brands are facing an increasing number of interactions and skyrocketing expectations. Verint solutions that support this shift to digital comprise conversational AI, engagement channels, engagement orchestration and knowledge management to help organizations successfully meet these challenges and create differentiated experiences.

The Forrester TEI study examines the potential return on investment (ROI) and business benefits organizations may realize by deploying Verint’s solutions that support an organization as it engages with today’s digital-first consumer. Through customer interviews and financial analysis, Forrester found that in a three-year timeframe, a composite organization experiences benefits of $22.80 million versus costs of $6.14 million and realizes a 271 percent return on investment with a payback period of less than six months.

Examples of these benefits include:

• 20% deflection of inbound customer calls to the contact center, yielding $15.4 million in savings
• 10% reduction in average handle times, resulting in $6.9 million in savings
• 80% reduction in system updates via a single fully integrated knowledge management platform, producing $266K in savings
• 40% improvement in passing rates for training courses, yielding $250K in savings

The findings of the Forrester study examine brands that are engaging their consumers through Verint solutions, while also easing the burden on contact center teams and enabling self-service for a better overall customer experience.

Notably, interviewees experienced a reduction in repeat inquiries and a decrease in average handle time – two key factors which signify an increase in customers’ ability to self-service, allowing overall agent productivity to increase. These efficiencies simultaneously increased overall happiness and job satisfaction of agents and customer-facing employees.

The study found additional benefits to organizations using Verint, including:

• Reduced contact center outreach by enabling self-service solutions – Interviewees said their call volume dropped and their first-contact resolution improved thanks to improved self-service and better access to knowledge.
• Increased customer satisfaction – Customers said Verint solutions enable their customers to easily seek support through multiple channels to get answers quickly.
• Improved internal processes and job satisfaction – By deflecting a portion of inbound customer inquiries and reducing average handle time through Verint solutions, customer service agents are more productive and more satisfied with their job performance.
• Improved compliance – Organizations, particularly those from the financial and healthcare sectors, shared how Verint solutions help with adherence to rigorous quality standards and in maintaining information consistency.
• Unified knowledge and streamlined reporting – Verint helps customers overcome challenges in unifying knowledge, eliminating the need to navigate multiple separate knowledge systems that often lead to information siloes. Other customers indicated Verint provided a streamlined approach to reporting and KPI tracking to measure successes and challenges.

“Consumer priorities continue to evolve with a growing preference for digital-first, self-service options for customer service channels,” says Verint’s Heather Richards, vice president, GTM strategy, digital-first engagement. “Companies need to manage an increasing number of customer interactions and the workforce and channel silos created as a result. Verint’s Digital-First Engagement solutions can be combined with the other applications on the Verint Cloud Platform to do this with a very compelling value proposition.”

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GoodData, a leader in data and analytics infrastructure, announced the general availability of GoodData Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the next-generation cloud analytics platform focused on ease of adoption, API-first design, and integration with the modern data stack.

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“As companies move their data to cloud data warehouses and data lakes, they need easy access to cloud analytics infrastructure. This infrastructure needs to enable them to mine their data for real-time insights and deliver these insights across all digital workspaces or systems of work,” said GoodData’s Founder and CEO Roman Stanek. “We are excited to work with AWS on this launch. The global availability of GoodData Cloud on AWS allows us to deliver scalable analytics services that follow the local laws and compliance regulations worldwide.”

GoodData Cloud brings these key innovations to the market:

• Instant access — no installation or credit card required
• Data source querying in real-time without the need to move data
• Creation of visualizations and dashboards with a drag-and-drop user interface
• Self-service analytics integrated into customer applications
• Analytics consumption via open APIs and standard protocols

GoodData Cloud is a fully managed, open, API-first analytics platform, and it comes pre-integrated with modern analytics services like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, and Dremio. GoodData cloud also offers a wide variety of APIs, Software Development Kits (SDK), and low-code/no-code user interaction tools from dashboards to data exploration, plus out-of-the-box multi-tenancy, compliance, and advanced security.

“We are excited about the new features available in GoodData’s Cloud solution, and the possible new markets that it allows us to start digging into short-term,” said Diego Guedes, Business Intelligence Analyst at the largest technology company in Brazil, TOTVS.

“GoodData enables enterprises to build custom analytics solutions through interactive dashboards, drag-and-drop UI, and real-time data to make data-informed decisions or monetize data products. We are excited to work with a customer-focused, forward-thinking analytics organization on launching their new cloud platform,” said Howard Wright, VP, Global Head of Start Ups at AWS.

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Vonage, a global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation, has unveiled new research that shows businesses have technology gaps that prevent them from making meaningful connections with customers. After two years of nonstop digital transformation among businesses, only 45% of consumers are “very satisfied” with the way they connect with companies, revealing opportunities to enhance digital transformation efforts with omnichannel communications channels, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven capabilities, and more.

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“This is where AI tools can help and surface as underused technology.”

Vonage‘s 11th Global Customer Engagement Report, based on a survey of nearly 5,000 consumers from 11 countries, explores preferences when it comes to using technology to connect with their favourite brands.

Consumer Expectations and Satisfaction

The report found that 60% of customers are “very satisfied” with friends and family communications, while 45% rate business/service provider communications as high.

While many consumers use messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (57%) and make calls via messaging apps (48%) with friends and family on a daily basis, the study uncovered that phone calls (37%) tend to be consumers’ most-used method for communicating with businesses, followed by email (30%) and messaging apps (30%).

This disparity suggests that businesses are not providing consumers with the same, familiar experience they are used to in their personal lives when it comes to communications technology. In order to do that, businesses need to drive omnichannel customer engagement forward (voice calls, video, chat, messaging apps, and more) and embrace emerging technologies like AI, to eliminate common customer frustrations and technology gaps.

“The ubiquity of mobile phones delivers the kind of vehicle to businesses that allows them to speak to and engage with their customers directly — right from the palms of their hands. Yet, this research reveals that many businesses are still not using the communications channels made available by today’s technology to their full potential and are missing out on opportunities to make real connections with customers and drive customer engagement,” said Joy Corso, Chief Marketing Officer for Vonage. “This is where AI tools can help and surface as underused technology.”

AI tools like virtual assistants, for instance, can address common requests and eliminate long wait times for customers. Virtual assistants can also provide the initial triage to route customers to the right person — which is helpful during peak or seasonal periods.

Another tool is conversational commerce, which uses AI to engage customers in-channel. Companies can use it to add information, automation, and self-service to conversations. For example, companies can provide front-end FAQs, authenticate users, and authorise payments.

“In this age of digital transformation, as more businesses work to improve and simplify the customer journey, AI-powered technologies such as virtual assistants, programmable voice, chatbots, and conversational commerce are letting customers take control of their preferred communication channels,” said Dan Miller, Lead Analyst and Founder, Opus Research. “With this year’s installment of the Global Customer Engagement Report, Vonage is shining a light on the importance of personalised, real-time engagement as the key to driving enduring brand loyalty.”

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