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Billfold Selects Elastic Path to Bolster Customer Experience and Drive Revenue

EP Payments Provides Optimized Payment Operations and White Glove Service

Elastic Path, the leader of the Composable Commerce Movement, is announcing that Billfold has selected EP Payments, powered by Stripe, to optimize its payment offering, which includes expanding payment methods. Billfold’s cashless wristbands and wireless point-of-sale (POS) stations help event organizers drive revenue and power exceptional experiences at festivals and live events.

EP Payments streamlines payment operations for Billfold users comprised mainly of live event operators. Now, Billfold will be able to support offline credit card functionality as well as offer additional mobile payment methods, such as Apple Pay. With customer experience at the heart of every interaction, EP Payments equips Billfold customers with more cashless payment options and a top-notch experience thanks to Elastic Path’s commitment to customer success.

“Our objectives are simple: reduce operational headaches and ensure a seamless and efficient contactless payment experience,” said Billfold CEO and co-founder Stas Chijik. “There’s no margin for error in this business—EP Payments’ robust functionality and exceptional support are key to the success of our customers in what might be their only event of the year.”

The benefits of EP Payments include higher checkout completion rates, increased payment acceptance, and lower fraudulent transaction rates.

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Features include:

  • Payment methods for all business models: Subscriptions, Digital Wallets (i.e. Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc.), Buy Now Pay Later, POS machines, one-click checkout, and more.
  • Fraud management: Increase top-line revenue with decreased false positives on credible transactions. Every year, businesses lose an estimated 3% of their revenues to false positives.
  • Network-wide acceptance: Avoid declines due to network issues or unrecognized cards with automated re-tries and credentials updates.
  • Powering global brands: Offer payment acceptance in 135+ currencies. Provide up to a 46% increase in sales after enabling local payment methods.
  • Best-in-class security: Compliance with the most current standards, including PCI DSS Level 1, PSD2 (EU), and SCA.
  • Unified reporting: Centralized dashboard for real-time metrics reporting.

“Billfold is an innovative, highly-customized payment solution with the kind of backend complexity that EP Payments was created to serve,” said Tamra Gray, vice president of payments at Elastic Path. “When it comes to ensuring that the end-user experience is easy and delightful, there are no second chances. Elastic Path’s technology ensures that every transaction is seamless regardless of the many variables that come with serving customers in the live entertainment space.”

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UiPath Amplifies Value of New Machine Learning Models by Integrating Amazon SageMaker with Automation Workflows

New UiPath Business Automation Platform capability allows data science teams to reduce cost, time, and effort of deploying machine learning models into business processes

UiPath, a leading enterprise automation software company, announced data science teams using Amazon SageMaker, an end-to-end machine learning (ML) service, can now connect to UiPath to quickly and seamlessly connect new ML models into business processes without the need for complex coding and manual effort.

The UiPath Business Automation Platform makes it simple for data scientists, ML engineers, and business analysts to automate deployment pipelines, reducing the cost of experimentation, and increasing the pace of innovation.

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to prepare data and build, train, and deploy ML models for any use case with fully managed infrastructure, tools, and workflows. By connecting Amazon SageMaker to UiPath, users can:

Read More: SalesTechStar Interview with Bart De Muynck, CIO at project44

“UiPath’s Amazon SageMaker connector is designed to solve a key pain point by allowing our customers to realize business value from their ML models faster. Data science teams can quickly embed ML models into actual business processes and reduce effort and the time to market”

  • Rapidly deploy new ML models into production: connect newly completed ML models into production workflows in minutes, minimizing the time to value for business users; integrate Amazon SageMaker ML models into automation workflows without code; and use UiPath robots to drive workflows and manage end-to-end business processes.
  • Optimize the productivity of data science teams: facilitate consistent and accurate workflows that reduce the need for human involvement and free up critical resources for strategic work. With UiPath automation, organizations can greatly lessen the burden on data science teams to deploy the latest ML models to end users. Teams can also improve reliability by decreasing human error while maintaining human oversight to meet governance and compliance standards.
  • Increase the speed of ML innovation: enable engineering teams to test their ideas, tackle new challenges, and experiment more frequently with their data. Automation removes the manual effort to code, troubleshoot, and maintain scripts across the breadth of the ML data pipeline and improves the speed and reliability of new model deployment into business processes.

“Tens of thousands of active customers use Amazon SageMaker to train models with billions of parameters and make trillions of predictions per month,” said Ankur Mehrotra, General Manager, Amazon SageMaker at AWS. “With the integration with UiPath, our goal is to help customers accelerate the deployment of their machine learning models cost efficiently and with optimized infrastructure.”

“UiPath’s Amazon SageMaker connector is designed to solve a key pain point by allowing our customers to realize business value from their ML models faster. Data science teams can quickly embed ML models into actual business processes and reduce effort and the time to market,” said Sai Shankar, a Managing Director at Slalom, a purpose-led, global business and technology consulting company. “Working in cooperation with AWS and UiPath helps us deliver AI and ML enabled business process automations for our customers. Our data science and intelligent automation teams are eager to leverage the connector to help our customers operationalize ML models faster and leverage them at scale.”

“Data scientists and data science team leaders are working at the cutting edge, creating powerful new machine learning models to accelerate business performance. At the same time, these professionals are saddled with time-consuming, manual management which slows progress and adds costs,” said Graham Sheldon, Chief Product Officer at UiPath. “By connecting Amazon SageMaker to the UiPath platform, we are helping reduce this complexity with automation. This opens avenues for faster deployment, lower costs, and more opportunities for innovation through machine learning.”

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ZINFI Releases New “Feet on the Street” Video Podcast on Channel Management Strategies Featuring Industry Influencer Jay McBain, Chief Analyst, Channels & Partnerships, Canalys

McBain shares his insights with ZINFI CEO Sugata Sanyal on the crucial role of collaboration in new channel management strategies

ZINFI Technologies, Inc., a company leading the definition and creation of Unified Channel Management solutions that include affiliate marketing management (AMM), partner relationship management (PRM), partner marketing management (PMM) and partner incentives management (PIM), along with special guest Jay McBain, Chief Analyst at Canalys, today announced the release of their latest “Feet on the Street” educational video podcast series focused on innovative channel management strategies for collaboration across partner ecosystems.

The seven-chapter video podcast series – which is now available on demand from the ZINFI website – commences with a conversation regarding new types of partners and how to best collaborate with them to drive profitability.

McBain points out that every prospect has seven trusted partners, many of whom play a key role in the implementation of a product while not actually involved with the transaction, which can be completed digitally and through marketplaces.

Sanyal and McBain go on to discuss the role of technology platforms, such as channel management software, in this new type of collaboration. They also discuss the importance of automation in effective partner relationship management strategies. McBain points out that a prospect will engage in an average of 28 “moments” before making a selection, so collaborating with partners across the entire engagement process through automation is critical to achieve scale.

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To deliver an automated experience that successfully engages prospects, hyper-personalized collaboration needs to be a cornerstone of these new channel management strategies. McBain poses the question: “Six questions will be asked that need collaboration assistance. How will you address them?”

McBain also emphasizes the essential role mobility plays in partner collaboration, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. He notes there are more than 30 different ways for partners to communicate and learn by leveraging channel management software. “Twelve percent love podcasts and webinars, 33% prefer email – others prefer WhatsApp and other communication tools,” he says. Both channel leaders conclude by agreeing that mobility makes channel management an anywhere-anytime activity that requires hyper-personalized experiences to engage users.

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The podcast series concludes with a vibrant discussion on the role of artificial intelligence in new channel management strategies and the potential for tracking partner behavior and performance to build predictive models. Will partners become the new subject matter experts and content providers for their own ecosystems? How will they compete and secure that position of expertise? Listen in to hear the full story.

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o9 Solutions Recognizes Microsoft In Its Inaugural Partner Awards Program

o9 – Apps on Google Play

Winner of the 2022 Digital Brain Award, o9 honors Microsoft for its strong technology collaboration and joint value proposition

o9 Solutions, a leading enterprise AI software platform provider for transforming planning and decision-making, announced that it is honoring Microsoft as o9’s Technology Partner of the Year as part of o9’s inaugural Partner Awards program. Microsoft will receive the Digital Brain Award for the successful integration of the o9 Digital Brain platform across all three of Microsoft’s cloud infrastructures.

In 2022, Microsoft’s continued collaboration with o9 resulted in the integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365, which brings together o9’s Digital Brain platform and the breadth of solutions offered by the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform. o9’s AI-powered platform for integrated business planning and decision-making is also available, which allows joint customers to benefit from streamlined deployment and integration, as well as Azure’s scalability, flexibility, and security. In addition, Azure Synapse Analytics meets o9’s needs for processing very large datasets typical in market intelligence as an analytics service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics. Each integration showcases the commitment o9 and Microsoft have to help leading companies transform their supply chain, commercial, and integrated business planning capabilities to convert data into actionable insights and drive high-quality, business-critical decisions.

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“Microsoft is honored to accept o9’s Technology Partner of the Year award”

“We’re pleased to recognize Microsoft as an outstanding technology partner with our first Digital Brain Award,” says Igor Rikalo, President and Chief Operating Officer o9 Solutions. “Through our partnership and platform integrations on Microsoft’s cloud services, we’ve been able to provide robust solutions to our joint clients. o9 looks forward to collaborating alongside Microsoft to continue enhancing our business and supply chain planning possibilities for current and future customers.”

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“Microsoft is honored to accept o9’s Technology Partner of the Year award,” says Dominik Wee, CVP, Manufacturing and Mobility Industry at Microsoft. “Through our collaboration, we are proud to deliver powerful business outcomes on the Microsoft platform. We look forward to accelerating our rich co-innovation to deliver meaningful supply chain transformations for our valued customers worldwide.”

In addition to the Digital Brain Award, o9’s annual Partner Awards will highlight the outstanding contributions made by its partner organizations across four additional categories:

  • The Digital Operating Model Award, for the largest transformation of the year
  • The Graph-Cube Award, for the most impactful innovation on the o9 platform
  • The 10x Partner Award for the fastest-growing partner of the year
  • The MVP Award for the best all-around player in sales and delivery

Recipients of the o9 Partner Awards are selected based on their exceptional performance and collaboration within specific categories. The o9 Partner Awards will continue to be announced prior to the aim10x global conference, which will take place March 28-29, 2023. Microsoft is also a gold o9 partner sponsoring aim10x live in London, NYC, and Tokyo.

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ChatGPT Accelerates AI Discussions for Grocers; 59% Plan to Test an AI Solution in 2023

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Grocery Doppio’s survey of grocery industry executives, shoppers, and shopping data reveals state of AI in grocery, further digital basket size increase, and decline of third-party share of sales.

Incisiva next-generation industry insights firm that helps retailers and brands navigate digital disruption, and Wynshop, the leading provider of digital commerce and fulfillment solutions for local store-based retailers, revealed the findings from their State of Digital Grocery Performance Scorecard for February 2023, reflecting the latest analysis of shopper orders, plus interviews of grocery shoppers and executives about their 2023 outlook on AI in grocery.

Key findings from February’s survey included:

  • 67% of grocers say they have discussed ChatGPT at senior level meetings.
  • 82% of grocers consider AI a necessity to remain competitive in the future.
  • 59% of grocers will test an AI solution in 2023, while 13% will spend non-budgeted funds to do so.
  • Grocers believe that AI will have the greatest impact on inventory forecasting, supply chain management, and pricing/promotions, while ChatGPT/large language models will affect customer service, product discovery, and store associate tools.

These and other data insights are now available for download on Grocery Doppio, a free, independent source of grocery insights and data designed to help grocers jumpstart, accelerate, and sustain digital growth.

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Grocery Doppio’s “State of Digital Grocery Performance Scorecard” for February 2023

The monthly State of Digital Grocery Performance Scorecards are one of many resources available on the Grocery Doppio website. The reports are built around data analysis of 1.7 million shopper orders and survey results from more than 27,000 shoppers and 2,600 U.S. grocery executives.

More key findings from the February 2023 Performance Scorecard include:

  • Digital basket size grew, even as digital’s share of market slipped

—Compared to February 2022, digital basket size grew 47.2%, representing an average of 5 items more.
—Digital sales saw 2.1% growth from $9.6 to $9.8 billion between February 2022 and February 2023, but digital’s share of the total grocery market slipped from November 2022’s high of 17.1% to just 13.8% in February.

  • Third-party providers continue to lose market share

—Grocery sales through third parties fell to $1.8B in February 2023, down from $2.7 billion in February 2022 and $1.9B in January 2023.
—The balance of digital grocery sales were taken by grocers’ apps (5.9%), and grocers’ websites (75.8%).

  • Share of grocery pickup sales continues to rise

—Curbside/pickup sales grew by 8.3% from February 2022 to February 2023, rising from $4.8 billion to 5.2 billion, YOY.

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“ChatGPT has taken the world by storm, and grocers are no exception,” said Gaurav Pant, Chief Insights Officer of both Incisiv and Grocery Doppio. “Grocers acknowledge they need advanced analytics and AI and are willing to experiment and invest in building those capabilities. Those that focus on high-impact use cases like inventory optimization or can figure out a better search and recommendation experience using LLMs have a chance to leapfrog their peers.”

“Grocers are no longer technology laggards,” said Charlie Kaplan, Chief Revenue Officer of Wynshop. “AI is making an impact on grocers’ digital operations in inventory planning, online search, product recommendations, substitutions, pricing, and promotions, every day.”

Each month, Grocery Doppio brings together rich, research-driven grocery content, fact-based observations, inspiring perspectives, and deep performance benchmarks that identify improvement opportunities for grocery retailers. The site is designed specifically to help grocery and food executives optimize their digital and in-store channels, and accelerate growth profitably.

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Kofax Advances Printix with Industry-First Integrated Print and Capture Solution

Secure, cloud-managed service adds increased functionality, reduced costs, and eliminates the need for print server infrastructure.

Kofax, a leading Intelligent Automation platform for digital workflow transformation, announces the latest edition of Printix, its industry-leading cloud print management SaaS offering. Designed to provide a complete print infrastructure and environment for improved efficiency, productivity, and cost savings, Printix bolsters all-cloud strategies for organizations and eliminates the need for print server infrastructure.

Built to work and grow with today’s modern workplace organizations, Printix supports Single Sign-on (SSO) with Microsoft Azure Active Directory and can be deployed with Microsoft Endpoint Manager. The product is scalable by design and can handle any number of users, printers, and multi-function devices (MFDs) for flexible and secure printing, mobile printing, and document capture workflows.

“This edition of Printix completely eliminates print servers from network infrastructure and replaces them with a secure, cloud-managed print infrastructure with next-generation integrated capture,” says Rod Hughes, Vice President, Product Strategy at Kofax. “This significantly reduces on-premises infrastructure costs, services, support and maintenance fees, freeing up resources that organizations can reallocate toward innovation that helps move their business forward.”

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Key features of the latest edition of Kofax Printix include:

  • Next-generation capture. MFD and mobile users can scan or capture documents to the Printix Cloud and generate PDFs with embedded OCR results, or Microsoft Word DOCX-formatted documents to submit to email, Microsoft SharePoint Online or Microsoft OneDrive.
  • Simplified print management. Printix Administrator allows organizations to centrally manage printers from web browsers and connect new printers from a smartphone, tablet or computer in just minutes.
  • Print-anywhere and print-later capabilities. Users can release documents from the Printix app when they arrive at the printer or release documents to a printer anytime with the Print Later feature.
  • Automatic printer discovery. Printix allows users to automatically discover the print network and integrate printers and drivers or deploy and remove printers and print queues when users change.
  • Enhanced Microsoft integration. Printix supports full integration with Microsoft Azure AD including effortless deployment with EndPoint Manager and Single Sign-On providing confidence for users, while removing IT and administration overhead.
  • Full support for all network printers. Complete independent and multi-vendor support for an organization’s mixed fleet of devices, enabling users to print to any printer from any device.

“The ease and convenience of handling multiple printer sites and separate networks can’t be overstated,” says James Barber, Service Owner – End User Computing at global customer Jotun A/S. “Cloud-based print infrastructure is the future for cloud-first businesses, and Kofax Printix supports that in ways we never thought were possible.”

The cloud continues to empower Kofax Document Automation & Security solutions, creating new flexible services that reduce the typical back-office burden that comes with running a print infrastructure.

“With the introduction of a cloud-based capture solution that uses Kofax’s OCR scanning technology, Kofax is addressing the growing requirements for cloud solutions that drive increased productivity and efficiency,” says Louella Fernandez, Director at Quocirca, a global market insight and research firm.

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Shopbox AI Wins Digital Impact Of The Year at the National Digital Awards

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At an awards luncheon held at Dublin’s Gibson Hotel, Shopbox AI rises above its fellow nominees to lift the award for Digital Impact of the Year.

Shopbox AI, the retail technology company, are delighted to announce they have won the award for Digital Impact of the Year 2022 at the National Digital Awards ceremony held on March 3rd. The Awards drew over 500 entries and celebrated the very best and brightest in digital and online enterprise, rewarding businesses, innovators, organisations and people who have showcased exceptional digital prowess in the past year. Ashley McDonnell, Chairperson of DBI, the awarding body, said, “We are deeply encouraged by the dynamism, ingenuity, innovation and talent of the businesses, organisations and people who got involved with the process this year.”

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“This award means so much. As a company that supports the online retail sector exclusively, being recognised as the best amongst companies across all sectors of the digital economy is amazing.”

The Digital Impact of the Year award is given to an organisation that demonstrates the power of their digital product or service and how it creates meaningful and quantifiable impact for the clients who use it. “This award means so much. As a company that supports the online retail sector exclusively, being recognised as the best amongst companies across all sectors of the digital economy is amazing.” commented Shopbox AI CEO, Alan Gormley. “The last year has been excellent in terms of company success and growth. Now to be recognised by our peers, it’s the icing on the cake. I’m also delighted for clients of ours who were also winners here today.” he added.

The winner was selected following two rounds of submissions by a panel of 15 expert industry judges, based on the winner’s ability to showcase their growth, impact on clients’ business performance and innovation.

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Pax8 Partners with Adobe to Offer Digital Media Solutions to MSPs Across Europe

Pax8, the leading cloud commerce marketplace, has today announced that Adobe will be available to purchase on the Pax8 platform across Europe, including the UK. Adobe is the world’s leading software company for providing digital marketing and media solutions. Pax8’s partners in the region will now have access to a portfolio of first-class cloud products, which will ultimately drive growth and transform business performance for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

“This is a hugely significant moment for Pax8 in the EMEA region,” said Harald Nuij, Chief Executive Officer at Pax8 EMEA. “Adobe’s solutions are the best in the world for empowering creativity and driving brand identity. Adobe’s game-changing innovations will truly diversify what our Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can offer their customers, making them more competitive and allowing them to target new markets.”

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With Deloitte forecasting that the global creative economy will grow by up to 40% by 2030, Pax8’s partners will now be able to connect their customers with industry-leading solutions that breathe new life into projects while simplifying complexities.

“At Adobe, we are excited to elevate our business with Pax8 to a new level and bring the cloud horsepower and capabilities of Pax8’s marketplace to our partners and customers in Europe,” said Brian Green, Vice President GTM & Sales, EMEA at Adobe. “Pax8 will play an important role in the Adobe channel ecosystem and will offer advanced technologies that allow MSPs to buy, sell, and manage Adobe products and solutions easily.”

MSPs in Europe will now be able to purchase two Adobe solutions through Pax8’s world-class cloud marketplace: Adobe Creative Cloud, which delivers the world’s best creative apps and services in a single, secure, integrated platform and Adobe Document Cloud, which enables complete, reliable and automated digital document and signature workflows that drive business productivity.

One of Pax8’s partners in Latvia recently spoke about the benefits of offering both solutions to their customers. “Adobe’s suite of products, paired with Pax8’s easy-to-use marketplace, have truly opened up new doors for us as an MSP,” said Mārtiņš Jurjāns, Country Manager at Primand SIA in Latvia. “With so many of our end-users wanting to take control of their brand identity and ensure smoother workflows, offering both of these products through the platform made total sense and the results are shown in our growth.”

As well as the unique product offering, partners will also be able to take advantage of Pax8’s in-house Adobe expertise to maximise results for their business and their end users.

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Business in a Box Launches Its New Cloud Drive Product, Entering the Business Cloud Storage Market

The document management cloud software helps you organize, manage and grow your business in one place.

Biztree Inc., the makers of Business in a Box, officially launched the Business in a Box Cloud Drive, a centralized business document management cloud platform that helps business people create professional documents in minutes. The platform allows teams to edit, store, share and collaborate on company files and folders in real time. Additionally, the new Cloud Drive enables users to organize their business folder structure and access folders and files anytime, anywhere, on any device, all while creating a space of seamless team collaboration. The software is a hub for business management and includes over 2,600 business and legal document templates for any business task, project or key initiative.

Empowering business owners and entrepreneurs to grow and succeed has always been core to Biztree’s mission, helping people reach their highest potential through cloud technology that simplifies their day-to-day work.

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“Managing a business is by no means a small task, and it can often be overwhelming for business people to have their documents and work in numerous places. It can also be hard to keep track of all the happenings of business execution and collaboration when you’re using numerous platforms and software. The Cloud Drive was created to bring all business folders and files securely to one place, collaborate on documents and projects live within the Drive, and monitor user activity and actions. It’s a one-stop shop,” says Bruno Goulet, Founder and CEO of Biztree, the maker of Business in a Box.

The efforts to bring the vision of the Cloud Drive to life have been in the works for well over two years.

“The new Cloud Drive is just the tip of the iceberg. We have a big vision, and our product will go through several phases of development over the coming year. Our team has nearly tripled in size over the last two years and will continue to grow as we develop more value-added services to our business management software. This is only the beginning.” says Bruno Goulet.

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