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Tag Archives: Services

IBM and Cognizant acquisitions cap a wave of IT services deals in 2020

December 21, 2020   Big Data
 IBM and Cognizant acquisitions cap a wave of IT services deals in 2020

With dual acquisitions from IBM and Cognizant announced today, there have now been well over 100 such deals this year involving IT services providers. IBM is acquiring Nordcloud, a provider of cloud computing services expertise, while Cognizant is acquiring Inawisdom, a privately held IT services provider that specializes in AI and data analytics.

IBM’s acquisition of Nordcloud is being driven by the need to add additional cloud computing expertise. Right now, organizations are starting to accelerate deployment of new classes of applications based on microservices constructed using containers and other cloud-native technologies, said Marcel Greutmann, vice president and European leader for IBM Global Business Services. “It’s an infusion of hyperscaler skills,” he said.

Based in Norway, Nordcloud operates in 10 European countries. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but IBM has been on an IT services provider buying spree lately. Last week, the company acquired Expertus Technologies, an IT services provider based in Montreal that specializes in digital payment systems. Last month, IBM announced that it’s acquiring TruQua Enterprises, a provider of IT services for SAP application environments.

Overall, IBM has now acquired three IT services providers in 2020, while Cognizant has acquired nine. Accenture, meanwhile, has rolled up the most IT services this year after acquiring no less than 29 smaller companies. IT vendors themselves in the past year are also fueling this acquisition activity as they look to expand their portfolios beyond product sales. Salesforce this month, for example, acquired Acumen Solutions to expand its professional services capability.

That pace of acquisition activity should continue into the new year because demand for cloud expertise continues to grow, said Judith Hurwitz, CEO of Hurwitz & Associates, a provider of IT consulting and market research.

Most internal IT teams are not as familiar with cloud platforms as they are with on-premises IT environments. Meeting demand for that expertise is requiring IT services providers to acquire smaller firms that have specific areas of expertise as they seek to expand the depth of capabilities they provide beyond merely provisioning cloud services. IT organizations are now specifically looking for cloud governance expertise that is relevant to their specific industry, Hurwitz noted. “It’s a new arms race,” she said.

Organizations are looking for that additional expertise because rather than working on isolated cloud projects, Hurwitz said, organizations are looking to now standardize on cloud platforms in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, rather than getting locked into a specific platform, most organizations also want to be able to deploy application workloads on multiple cloud platforms as they see fit, she added.

A recent survey of 400 IT decision makers and 400 IT staff conducted by SPR, a provider of IT services, finds that well over two-thirds (69%) of respondents said they were somewhat likely to switch cloud providers or add another cloud provider in the next year. A full 39% said they were extremely likely to do so. Nevertheless, two-thirds of respondents (63%) who are decision makers said they were extremely satisfied with how their cloud provider supported them throughout the pandemic.

Given the merger and acquisition activity, venture capital has unsurprisingly been pouring into the IT services sector. Investors see an opportunity to roll up several smaller IT service providers before selling them to a larger entity. Platinum Equity, for example, drove several of those deals; last month it expanded those efforts to include acquiring Ingram Micro, a distributor that also provides professional IT services via its partners, for $ 7.2 billion. Earlier this year, Tech Data, the archrival of Ingram Micro, was acquired by the Apollo Group Management for $ 6 billion. Funds affiliated with Apollo Group Management invested $ 3.75 billion in Tech Data as part of that transaction.

Of course, one of the unique attributes of the IT services sector is that not too long after one company is acquired, the leaders of those firms generally start another firm. In that sense, then, it may not be long before IT leaders are again seeing a familiar face working for yet another IT services firm they have never heard of before.

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Another Success Story: Amigos Library Services

October 23, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Amigos Library Services is a member-led and member-focused cooperative whose mission is to unite libraries for action and strength in service to their communities. A not-for-profit organization dedicated to serving libraries, their vision is that members will view Amigos as indispensable for strengthening their ability to serve their communities. HCL-PowerObjects has been Amigos’ Dynamics CRM…

Source

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PowerObjects- Bringing Focus to Dynamics CRM

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Microsoft explains how it improved automatic image captioning in Azure Cognitive Services

October 14, 2020   Big Data

Automation and Jobs

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Microsoft today launched a new computer vision service it claims can generate image captions that are, in some cases, more accurate than human-written descriptions. The company calls the service, which is available as part of Azure Cognitive Services Computer Vision, a “significant research breakthrough” and an example of its commitment to accessible AI.

Automatic image captioning has a number of broad use cases, first and foremost assisting users with disabilities. According to the World Health Organization, the number of people of all ages who are visually impaired is estimated to be 285 million, of whom 39 million are blind.

Accuracy becomes all the more critical when vision-impaired users rely on captioning for daily tasks. According to a study by researchers at Indiana University, the University of Washington, and Microsoft, blind people tend to place a lot of trust in automatically generated captions, building unsupported narratives to reconcile differences between image contexts and incongruent captions. When asked to identify captions of images on Twitter that might be incorrect, even blind users who describe themselves as being skilled and consistent about double-checking tended to trust automatic captions, the researchers found — no matter whether the captions make sense.

In early 2017, Microsoft updated Office 365 apps like Word and PowerPoint with automatic image captioning, drawing on Cognitive Services Computer Vision. (Cognitive Services is a cloud-based suite of APIs and SDKs available to developers building AI and machine learning capabilities into their apps and services.) More recently, the company launched Seeing AI, a mobile app designed to help low- and impaired-vision users navigate the world around them.

But while Office 365 and Seeing AI could automatically caption images better than some AI baselines, Microsoft engineers pursued new techniques to improve them further.

The engineers describe their technique in a September paper published on Arxiv.org, a server for preprints. Called visual vocabulary pretraining, or VIVO for short, it leverages large amounts of photos without annotations to learn a vocabulary for image captioning. (Typically, training automatic captioning models requires corpora that contain annotations provided by human labelers.) The vocabulary comprises an embedding space where features of image regions and tags of semantically similar objects are mapped into vectors that are close to each other (e.g., “person” and “man,” “accordion” and “instrument”). Once the visual vocabulary is established, an automatic image captioning model can be fine-tuned using a data set of images and corresponding captions.

 Microsoft explains how it improved automatic image captioning in Azure Cognitive Services

Above: Image captioning results on nocaps. B: A baseline without adding VIVO pretraining. V: With VIVO
pretraining. Red text represents novel objects. The bounding box color is brighter when the similarity is higher.

Image Credit: Microsoft

During the model training process, one or more tags are randomly masked and the model is asked to predict the masked tags conditioned on the image region features and the other tags. Even though the dataset used for fine-tuning only covers a small subset of the most common objects in the visual vocabulary, the VIVO-pretrained model can generalize to any images that depict similar scenes (e.g., people sitting on a couch together). In fact, it’s one of the few caption-generating pretraining methods that doesn’t rely on caption annotations, enabling it to work with existing image data sets developed for image tagging and object detection tasks.

Microsoft benchmarked the VIVO-pretrained model on nocaps, a test designed to encourage the development of image captioning models that can learn visual concepts from alternative sources of data. Evaluated on tens of thousands of human-generated captions describing thousands of images, the model achieved state-of-the-art results with substantial improvement for objects it hadn’t seen before. Moreover, on a metric called consensus-based image description evaluation (CIDEr), which aims to measure the similarity of a generated caption against ground truth sentences written by humans, the model surpassed human performance by a statistically significant margin.

In addition to the latest version of the Cognitive Services Computer Vision API, Microsoft says the model is now included in Seeing AI. It will roll out to Microsoft products and services including Word and Outlook, for Windows and Mac, and PowerPoint for Windows, Mac, and web later this year, replacing an image captioning model that’s been used since 2015.

“Given the benefit of this, we’ve worked to accelerate the integration of this research breakthrough and get it into production and Azure AI,” Eric Boyd, corporate vice president of AI platform at Microsoft, told VentureBeat via phone earlier this week. “It’s one thing to have a breakthrough of something that works in a delicate setup in the lab. But to have something that [in a few months] we can have pressure-tested and operating at scale and part of Azure … showcases how we’re able to go from the research breakthrough to getting things out into production.”

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How Power Apps and Power Automate Can Optimize Dynamics 365 Sales for Professional Services Firms

August 11, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM
crmnav How Power Apps and Power Automate Can Optimize Dynamics 365 Sales for Professional Services Firms

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales offers a wide range of functionalities to help the sales team manage their day-to-day activities, but every organization has their “secret sauce” or slightly different process that gives them their competitive edge and unique selling proposition. Microsoft understands this, which is why the Microsoft Power Platform lets professional services firms add their personalized processes to the application.

Microsoft Power Apps is an application that sits within the Dynamics 365 environment and allows you to build, conceptualize and group business processes and information together. By streamlining processes, employees can better focus on their priorities and complete their tasks more efficiently.

In the case of professional services firms, the sales cycle typically includes a team that builds and validates mandates. As a result, additional steps, information or approvals may be required on top of the standard sales process. This is where Power Apps can be useful: users may only need to view or complete a small portion of the information and can now enter it into the system without having to access the complete list of opportunities or details regarding the prospective client.

Microsoft Power Automate allows you to automate certain actions, such as approvals or email alerts, ensuring that members of the organization can take proper action when needed to ensure the process moves to the next stage without interruption. For example, other team members will be notified when the opportunity reaches a certain stage in the process or when a specific activity is triggered. This is especially useful for users who are outside the direct sales process to ensure that proposals are sent to the client and that deals are closed as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Personalizing your operations according to your needs can help with user adoption as it improves the usability of the system and increases the efficiency of the team. This reduces the learning curve and the number of back-and-forth communications between teams, ensuring the process can follow its course without obstacles. The Power Platform also provides better visibility on the overall process to the person overseeing the deal and helps notify other team members without having to return to that particular account. By benefitting from these improvements, users are more likely to keep using the system.

For more information, read our article to learn How to Customize Your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales (CRM) Solution with the Microsoft Power Platform.

JOVACO Solutions is a leading ERP and CRM solution provider operating in Quebec for over 35 years. As a specialist of Microsoft Dynamics business management solutions, we offer a wide range of products and services to meet all the needs of professional services firms and project-based organizations. We also offer specialized project management tools and timesheet add-ons fully integrated to Microsoft Dynamics solutions. Visit our website or contact us for more information.

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Teradata Strengthens Cloud Offerings on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure

July 11, 2020   BI News and Info
teradata logo social Teradata Strengthens Cloud Offerings on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure

Continued investments in the cloud improve performance, security, availability, operations, ease-of-use and integration
 
As-a-service offerings for Teradata Vantage will soon be available across the top three public cloud providers, including Google Cloud Platform, in 2H 2020

Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the cloud data and analytics company, today announced a myriad of enhancements to its as-a-service offerings for Teradata Vantage on public cloud providers Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. The improvements will also apply to Vantage on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which will begin limited availability in July 2020. The collection of upgrades, as well as the expansion of public cloud offerings, demonstrate Teradata’s ongoing, strong cloud commitment and underscore the company’s critical role in migrating enterprises to the cloud with easy and low-risk hybrid cloud deployments.

Business leaders are increasingly looking to cloud services to access and use software rather than take on the responsibility, cost and effort involved with owning and maintaining IT infrastructure. With the cloud offering new standards of speed, massive (and low cost) storage and scale – in addition to greater flexibility and more expansive service capabilities – it’s easy to understand the cloud’s rapid growth. Teradata enables enterprises to take full advantage of the cloud with quick and low-risk migrations and expansions, offering the industry’s most scalable hybrid cloud and multi-cloud deployments. Because Teradata Vantage software is consistent from one environment to the next, the process is greatly simplified and risk to analytics performance, security, availability and operations is mitigated.

“Teradata is heavily invested in the cloud and the sheer number of improvements we are introducing is a testament to our determination to continue providing customers with the lowest risk, easiest path to the cloud,” said Hillary Ashton, Executive Vice President of Teradata Products. “For many companies, hybrid cloud deployments are an ideal way to benefit from the cloud’s speed and scale without abandoning on-premises investments or regulatory compliance. Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud offerings remain an area of strength for Teradata and these updates advance our cloud offerings across the board.”

With Vantage delivered as-a-service, in the cloud, companies can start small and elastically scale compute and storage independently, and only when needed. The combination of pricing model flexibility with software tier choice enables Teradata’s cloud customers to match features and performance with diverse business requirements. 

Through the enhancements announced today for Vantage on AWS, Azure, and soon also GCP, Teradata cloud customers gain access to the following improvements:

  • Performance: Customers can experience reduced network latency via Teradata’s growing global footprint. With upgrades to compute instances and network performance, Teradata customers will also see improved query response times. 
  • Security: Teradata now offers support for customer-managed keys for both Vantage on AWS and Vantage on Azure. This alternative to the default of Teradata-managed encryption keys increases security options for Teradata customers.
  • Availability: The service level agreement (SLA) for availability is now 99.9% for every as-a-service offering. Guaranteed, higher uptime leads to improved business productivity and increased customer satisfaction.
  • Operations: Quicker compressed data migration times are the result of Teradata’s new data transfer utility (DTU) tool, yielding improved reliability and 20% faster transfers. Improved automation accelerates the submission and resolution of cloud customer requests.
  • Ease of Use: Teradata upgraded the self-service web-based console with expanded options for monitoring and managing as-a-service environments, providing greater ease of use for as-a-service customers.
  • Integration: Through co-development with engineering teams at AWS and Microsoft, Teradata provides greater convenience for customers via the integration of Vantage with multiple first party cloud services, including:  
  • Amazon Kinesis (data streaming);
  • Amazon QuickSight (visualization);
  • Amazon S3 (low-cost object store);
  • Amazon SageMaker (machine learning);
  • AWS Glue (ETL pipeline);
  • Amazon Comprehend Medical (natural language processing);
  • Azure Blob (low-cost object store);
  • Azure Data Factory (ETL pipeline);
  • Azure Databricks (Spark analytics);
  • Azure ML Studio (machine learning);
  • Microsoft Power BI Desktop (visualization); and more to come over time.

Teradata Vantage is the leading hybrid cloud data analytics software platform that enables ecosystem simplification by unifying analytics, data lakes and data warehouses. With Vantage delivered as-a-service, in the cloud, enterprise-scale companies can eliminate silos and cost-effectively query all their data, all the time, regardless of where the data resides – in the cloud, on multiple clouds, on-premises or anywhere in-between – to get a complete, integrated view of their business. Vantage delivered as-a-service subscriptions include Vantage software, high-performance infrastructure, and environment management in one convenient bundle.

Availability
Enhancements to the as-a-service offerings for Vantage on AWS and Vantage on Azure are available now to all Teradata cloud customers on these public cloud providers. Similar enhancements will be available to Teradata customers in the Vantage on GCP limited availability program starting July 2020. 

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Improve the Usability of Dynamics 365 Sales for Professional Services Firms with Power BI

June 23, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM
crmnav Improve the Usability of Dynamics 365 Sales for Professional Services Firms with Power BI

If you’re already using the dashboards provided by Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, you may not see the need to use Microsoft Power BI as well. However, it can be an important tool to help professional services firms obtain better visibility on all the information they need, even data outside the CRM.

Dynamics 365 Sales dashboards only report on data found within your customer relationship management solution, but if you also want to consult information from outside the CRM, does it make sense to integrate all this data? Maybe not. That’s where embedded Power BI dashboards come in: Power BI lets you cross-reference information from virtually any database, letting you consult this information without having to bring it into the CRM first.

If you’re currently using your CRM for sales information and have another system to manage operations, you may also want to bring together the data stored in both systems For professional services firms, this could be what is coming up in the pipeline versus booked service hours, for example. The pipeline hours might come from the CRM and the booked hours from your ERP solution, but your sales team needs visibility on both to know what your bandwidth will look like over the next few months. While bringing operational information into the CRM may not make sense for your organization, the business development team may still need access to this information to make informed business decisions.

With embedded Power BI dashboards, Dynamics 365 Sales remains your main point of entry, allowing your users to access and find all the information they need from a centralized platform. Having all necessary details gathered in one place keeps things simple and user-friendly, increasing the likelihood that users embrace the change and adopt your new solution.

Visit our website to learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales or Microsoft Power BI, or contact us so we can learn more about your organization and help you meet your specific needs.

About JOVACO Solutions

JOVACO Solutions is a leading ERP and CRM solution provider operating in Quebec for over 35 years. As a specialist of Microsoft Dynamics business management solutions, we offer a wide range of products and services to meet all the needs of professional services firms and project-based organizations. We also offer specialized project management tools and timesheet add-ons fully integrated to Microsoft Dynamics solutions. Visit our website or contact us for more information.

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How Dynamics 365 Sales Can Optimize the Sales of Professional Services Firms

May 27, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM
crmnav How Dynamics 365 Sales Can Optimize the Sales of Professional Services Firms

While a customer relationship management solution is an important tool for any industry, it may be easier for companies that sell products to make a case for the use of a CRM than it is for professional services firms. As the latter sell time and expertise, they may not need to track which products clients use, but it’s just as important to properly manage client connections and business relationships, and to catalogue communications and proposals sent to clients.

Manage longer sales cycles and proposals

Typically, the higher the dollar value, the longer the sales cycle. Depending on the type of service you offer, your sales cycles are probably longer than most, and the necessity to track what has been done in the past becomes even more important. Dynamics 365 Sales lets professional services firms tailor the sales cycle to their specific reality, as it probably involves quite a few more steps than just a quote and a follow-up.

A CRM solution lets all the various stakeholders involved through the sales cycle have access to the information they need to facilitate the hours required for a particular mandate. It also provides an easy place to store all your mandates, as the integration between Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 (previously known as Office 365) lets you store your proposals in SharePoint, facilitating collaboration when putting proposals together in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint.

Strengthen your business relationships

After the initial sale, other critical elements for professional services firms is better visibility on future cross-sell possibilities, as well as retaining all contact information and the different influencers and connections within your firm. Having all this information centralized ensures you never miss an opportunity. Your professionals can manage and foster each client to build strong business relationships and ensure appropriate follow-up on all tasks, activities and opportunities.

Streamline and automate your business processes

An automated approval process within your sales cycle is another functionality that offers major gains to professional services firms, as it allows you to personalize your business approval process depending on size, industry or service. Automations can also be used to send reminders for follow-ups, meetings and other client tasks. Dynamics 365 also lets you incorporate other business processes into your solution, such as your employees’ various competencies and specialties to find the ideal staff members for a particular project.

All these features make Dynamics 365 much more than a traditional CRM system. One of the major benefits of a CRM solution for professional services firms is having a platform that will help structure your organization. At a certain point, you will need to systemize and automate certain processes to maintain the growth of your organization. To learn more about how a management information system can help you in your growth journey, check out our eBook

By JOVACO Solutions, Microsoft Dynamics 365 implementation specialist in Quebec

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NetSuite Expands Integration Capabilities with new REST Web Services

March 20, 2020   NetSuite
gettyimages 1142274453 NetSuite Expands Integration Capabilities with new REST Web Services

Posted by Tomas Novotny, Senior Product Manager, SuiteCloud Platform – Integration

SuiteCloud SuiteTalk REST Web Services are now generally available for all Oracle NetSuite products, extending a robust set of complementary SuiteTalk SOAP web services that have been part of NetSuite’s core integration solution for several releases. Including REST web services in SuiteTalk provides developers and administrators with even more options for integrating NetSuite with external applications, environments and data sources.

REST is a modern, lightweight, easy-to-use application program interface (API) based on a widely adopted architectural style. SuiteTalk delivers a full range of REST APIs exposed via a standard web services interface, securely accessible from external client applications.

REST web services provide users with seamless access to NetSuite record metadata, support API discoverability, offer link-based navigation and give users a uniform approach to interacting with both custom and standard records.

Another benefit: no server-side coding or management of custom scripts is necessary as is the case with server-side RESTlet scripts used to extend SuiteScript APIs when building REST-based integrations.

Here are some of the SuiteTalk REST Web Services Highlights from the latest update:

Metadata – Web services metadata provides schema defining each contract, enabling developers to dynamically discover API endpoints. This metadata contains all available resources such as records, data formats, values for input and output fields and supports HTTP methods and query parameters. Metadata can be returned either as JSON Schema, or via OpenAPI 3.0 (Swagger) format.

CRUD Operations – Create, Read, Update and Delete operations are now supported on records, sublists and subrecords within the parent record, and developers can make use of internal and external IDs to identify and reference these records. Additionally, upsert operations are now fully supported. It’s also possible for control the level of expansion for record subresources (sublists and subrecords) as a link or a fully expanded entity, and record subresources can even be accessed directly.

Query – The NetSuite 2020 Release 1 version of REST web services introduces powerful new query functionality, an area in which NetSuite will continue to invest. The NetSuite REST API now provides users with direct access to SuiteQL, a highly performant SQL-like query language. You can even execute advanced ad-hoc queries to perform actions such as multi-level joins, filtering, sorting, aliasing and paging. Logical, relational and equality operators are supported and make it possible to execute Saved Workbooks data sets.

Supported Records – All SuiteScript records available in the NetSuite 2020 Release 1 are supported in REST to maximize coverage of business objects. Please note that certain records may still be in beta status, so be sure to review the API and developer documentation to learn more.

For those who haven’t tried out these powerful new REST web services, spend some time exploring news ways to integrate NetSuite with other applications and environments managed by your organization.

To learn more, please refer to the Online Help articles available in NetSuite Help Center or SuiteAnswers, and get more specifics on the new features in the Release Notes.

Posted on Wed, March 18, 2020
by NetSuite filed under

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Live Webinar: How Financial Services Firms are Using the Microsoft Power Platform to Accelerate CRM by “Minding the Gap”…Even Around Salesforce!

March 20, 2020   CRM News and Info

Have you been to London? Then it’s likely you’ve ridden the Tube (subway) and heard an announcement politely saying as you enter or exit: “Mind the gap.” This deceptively benign statement was put there to warn you to watch out for the space between the platform and the train because if you don’t “mind the gap,” you can trip or fall. That could mean going to the hospital or at the very least, having a bad day. Either way, you slow down or even end your journey to your destination—and you’ll probably slow down the train, as well.

What is the connection between minding the gap and financial services?

“Mind the gap” has been adopted by business experts as an analogy. In an Inc. article, entrepreneur Josh Linker said, “While the gaps in your organization aren’t screaming for attention, they can be a wellspring of opportunity…the rallying cry for you to explore what’s missing, what’s not there, and what could be.” The act of minding gaps in your operations could mean failing to realize your vision (or at least slowing it down) or reaching it faster.

How do you realize your vision…and realize it quickly? Use the Microsoft Power Platform to mind the gap

Nobody wants to delay realizing their goals or vision, and they certainly want to avoid missing goals and missteps along the way. You do that by identifying the gaps—processes, technologies, methodologies—then look for ways to address them with the right technology. The issue is, unfortunately, that traditional approaches of customizing off-the-shelf software that is already in place or spending lots of time and money building a custom application doesn’t work or is cost-prohibitive. That’s when it’s time to turn to the Microsoft Power Platform.

The Microsoft Power Platform: A low-code, rapid application development environment that bridges the gaps

Smart financial services firms are already using the Microsoft Power Platform to quickly and easily build apps, automate workflows, and extend solutions they already use—not just Microsoft applications. Even software like Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP can be extended by the Power Platform to bridge any gap.

This might sound too good to be true, but it works—fast and cost-effectively. Plus, you don’t have to uproot, change, or replace applications or systems you’re already using. If you’re happy with what you have but just have that one gap to fill, the Power Platform does it with finesse. Here are a just a few examples of AKA financial services clients that have put the Power Platform into action and are already seeing results:

Automated Client Reporting…From Salesforce: The asset management arm of a life insurance company was risking penalties and losing huge investors, but they didn’t want to replace Salesforce. AKA built a Power Platform solution “surrounding” Salesforce that streamlined the process, resulting in empowered, happy employees who can put their focus on delivering white-glove customer service.

Client Engagement Hub with Next Best Action…Within Dynamics 365 CRM: A global asset management firm had a goal to double sales growth, but their current system had a poor user interface, did not offer personas, and did not offer insights for next best actions. AKA designed in the Power Platform and rolled out in just 3 months a Client Engagement Hub with Next Best Action—fully integrated with Dynamics 365 CRM and Marketo.

Mobile Trade Approval App…Integrated with Salesforce: Portfolio managers for an investment firm were slammed with emails for trade approvals. They needed an easy, fault-proof way to approve/disapprove trades from mobile devices. In a one-day workshop, AKA designed a Power App that integrates with Salesforce, enabling the managers to approve trades with the click of a button on their mobile devices.

Build an app to bridge that gap

Would you like to see for yourself how the Power Platform works? Sign up for our webinar, hosted by AKA financial services experts Tom Berger and Michael Quattlebaum, where you’ll see how other financial services firms have used the Power Platform to accelerate their CRM systems by eliminating gaps:

LIVE Webcast
Bridging Gaps and Building Apps – IN DAYS, NOT MONTHS
How 5 Financial Services Firms are Using the Microsoft Power Platform to Accelerate their CRM–Including Salesforce

April 7, 2020 | 1 pm EDT / 10 am PDT 

During the webcast you’ll learn about the Power Platform and what makes it the best choice above custom development or customizing existing software. We’ll discuss several typical gaps the Power Platform bridges, followed by 5 real-life examples of how the Power Platform is being used at by financial services companies.


ABOUT AKA ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS
AKA specializes in making it easier to do business, simplifying processes and reducing risks. With agility, expertise, and original industry solutions, we embrace projects other technology firms avoid—regardless of their complexity. As a true strategic partner, we help organizations slay the dragons that are keeping them from innovating their way to greatness. Call us at 212-502-3900!


Article by: Amy Spencer | 212-502-3900

Amy leads the team that is responsible for go-to-market strategies, messaging, and demand generation for AKA’s financial services practice. The better part of her 25+ year career has been dedicated to working for Microsoft’s most successful ERP and CRM partners, including The Taylor Group (aka ManagedOps.com & Surebridge), Navint (acquired by Tribridge and then DXC), Innovia Consulting, and now AKA Enterprise Solutions.

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The Intelligent Professional Services Enterprise: Three Ways Forward

March 12, 2020   SAP

IndustrySummit ProfessionalServices BannerImage 250x250 The Intelligent Professional Services Enterprise: Three Ways ForwardWill the largest services firms of the future have no employees? For years, the industry was built on the “leveraged talent” model: teams of highly educated people would grapple with a problem for a client and charge fees based on time and materials. Today, that model is giving way as professional services firms automate basic tasks, develop digital knowledge-based products, and rely more on a network of non-employee workers.

Never before has technological advancement offered more innovation and transformation opportunities for this industry. Intelligent technologies allow firms to grow revenue without increasing headcount. They can also empower employees to provide higher-value services for their clients.

But the question remains: how do organizations in the professional services industry move forward to become intelligent enterprises? The following strategic priorities are critical for making the transition.

Outcome-based engagements

Clients today expect professional services firms to deliver engagements where payment is based on a predefined set of outcomes rather than on the effort expended. Such outcome-based models transfer much of the project risk from the client to the service provider.

To minimize this risk, firms seek to implement frameworks for delivering outcome-based engagements successfully. They are starting early in the engagement process and leveraging capabilities such as intelligent deal-scoring, intelligent bid management, strategic execution, and post-delivery processes.

Critical to success is a smart, regimented bidding process that makes sure proposals are rigorously developed and accurate and use insights from past engagements to ensure that the outcomes can be realistically delivered with the planned effort. Firms are moving toward predictive analytics to monitor progress throughout the engagement to ensure that services are delivered as intended and that margins are realized.

Experience management technology is also playing an important role – enabling firms to quickly get accurate insights on the key drivers of the client experience. Based on data collected, firms can generate insights and implement programs to drive better business outcomes and deliver services more efficiently.

Knowledge as a service

Technology advances are allowing firms to innovate at speed and deliver expert knowledge in a digital package at scale. The goal is to unlock nonlinear growth by driving new revenue streams through innovative digital services that are instantly available, accessible, and affordable on an agile digital platform.

Today, firms are opening up their intellectual property to better monetize their institutional expertise via relevant digital services – such as tax or legal advice dispensed with help from intelligent natural-language processing.

By providing access to digitalized expertise, professional services firms are rewriting the underlying economics for their business. One critical capability moving forward is the need to understand the full lifecycle of the digital service – including the initial cost to develop, ongoing support, and lifetime revenue. For the knowledge-as-a-service model to work, firms also need to adopt a continuous innovation process and a digital cloud platform that contains all the required components. These components comprise a data platform, readily available business services, client feedback mechanisms for the product or solution experience, and intelligent technologies under the umbrella of an innovation system.

Talent networks

Today’s workforce is undergoing a massive cultural shift toward talented young professionals wanting a new work experience as free agents. The result is that traditional resourcing models are being disrupted.

Faced with the need to flexibly scale their workforce according to demand, professional services firms need to tap into talent networks to secure the right skills and resources at the right moment. Digitalization has enabled the emergence of an open talent economy that brings together people and work in a borderless workplace. Talent is readily accessible on a global basis, driven by the gig economy, crowdsourcing, and global platforms and networks.

Professional services firms, accordingly, are starting to use talent networks as an extension of the firm and seamlessly deploy these resources alongside their own employees, allowing them to flexibly scale resource capacity and access scarce skills. But execution depends on enhanced resource-management processes that enable a paradigm shift from “Who do I have with skills available?” to “Who is the optimal person (internally or externally) to deliver the service?”

Integrating talent networks, along with internal resource pools and even applicant profiles, will enable firms to make sophisticated “staff, hire, or contract” decisions that are based on a combination of skills, availability, cost, quality, and strategic criteria. Intelligent onboarding and personalized learning processes, meanwhile, are being used to integrate external talent with the company’s culture and working methodologies, key internal knowledge, and expertise. This is critical to provide clients with a consistent brand experience and level of service.

The future is bright

Ultimately, the basic value proposition of services companies – providing specialized expertise to their clients – will not change. But moving forward, the intelligent enterprise will prosper based not just on what they know but also how they deliver that knowledge.

Remember, too, that professional services companies are instrumental in helping their clients undergo digital transformation. Now is the time for those same firms to transform themselves.

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Thursday, March 26, 2020
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