Category Archives: Press Releases

Concur Acquired by SAP

PayStream Advisors just learned of big news concerning one of our partners: Concur, a leading concur Travel and Expense (T&E) management provider, has just been acquired by one of the biggest names in financial automation, SAP. Though we are excited to hear of this new connection for Concur, we are not especially surprised, as the company has never failed to work towards greater improvement and innovation for their products and their customers.

Steve Singh, Concur CEO, announced the acquisition only yesterday. Because SAP delivers software and services to more than 261,000 companies globally, Mr. Singh expects new resources, expertise, and value for Concur customers, as well as greater opportunity for Concur to work with developers and partners to extend the capabilities of their platform. “We expect our focus on innovation and on the success of our customers to be even stronger in the years ahead,” said Mr. Singh.

The company already has a good eye on their customer’s needs, as they have made recent movements in many areas of the travel industry to bring innovative enhancements to their offerings. Earlier this year, Concur partnered with US Air to expand their corporate booking capability, and shortly after that they improved their TripLink capabilities to include a variety of unique hospitality and transportation options. Concur’s corporate customers can now use TripLink to easily expense their uses of Uber, AirBnB, and Starwood Hotels & Resorts. Overall, Concur’s recent improvements have provided companies with an increased visibility into travel spend, as well as an increased set of travel options.

Their recent acquisition is set to be completed early next year. In the meantime, Steve Singh urges open communication from his customers: “We value your feedback, and our whole leadership team, along with our account managers, is available to answer any questions you may have. We remain 100% committed to your success and thank you for your business.”

PayStream is looking forward to seeing what Concur will do next, and we are excited for this change. To see more about Concur’s innovation as seen in their solution’s offerings, download your free copy of the Travel and Expense Management Report.

eGistics Aquired by TIS- UPDATED

Update: As of Tuesday, July 16th, eGistics was officially acquired by Top Image Systems in a transaction valued at $18 million.

Today, PayStream Advisors was excited to hear the announcement of a new business eGistics_2010_Logo_blocks-278x70_1 deal involving one of its vendors, eGistics Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based banking and payments solutions. eGistsics will be acquired by Top Image Systems (TIS), the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Business Process Management (BPM) solutions provider. This strategic arrangement will be beneficial for both companies geographically, technologically, and financially.

A major mo TIS tivation for TIS’ acquisition is eGistics’ secure and compliant cloud infrastructure, which effectively aligns with TIS’ cloud-centric growth strategy. eGistics’ CloudDocs solution will be leveraged with TIS’ own system to develop on-demand, smart processing applications for AP, AR, and other financial functions. Following the acquisition, TIS will extend its software portfolio to include additional smart process applications for banking and payment processing, and will also offer several TIS applications to the existing eGistics’ customer base.

eGistic’s is excited about expanding TIS’ capabilities to their own blue chip clients in the U.S. financial sector. “We believe the combination will have a very positive reception within the eGistics customer base and in the marketplace,” said Don Dixon, a member of the eGistics Board of Directors and Managing Director and Co-Founder of Trident Capital.

Not only will eGistics be supplying their clients with more diverse applications, they will also be expanding the global scale of their customer base. TIS will similarly profit, as this acquisition will strengthen their presence in the US market. “This transaction will also provide TIS with an additional distribution vehicle for offering our native mobile capture applications to large U.S. financial institutions which we did not have before, creating a significant business opportunity,” explained Michael Schrader, TIS COO.

Top Image Systems has been developing end-to-end solutions to capture, classify, process, validate and deliver business-critical key data since 1991. The company operates all over the world—they have several international branches and their solutions have been placed in 800 enterprise-level installations in more than 40 countries. eGistics is fully confident and optimistic about this acquisition, believing that both companies share a vision for creating smart financial applications.

“Not only does eGistics share a synergistic customer base with TIS, but also a common technology stack that we can build upon to further revenue growth for the combined company,” commented Robert Lund, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of eGistics.
PayStream Advisors congratulates eGistics on their promising and dynamic business move.

Yooz Launches Powerful and Affordable AP Automation in the Cloud

DALLAS/FORT WORTH, May 6, 2014 –Yooz, the cloud service designed and built for medium to large businesses to instantly streamline their accounts payable (AP) workflow, today announced its North American launch. Its end-to-end service runs entirely in the cloud so businesses can easily and seamlessly capture, manage and process financial documents without up-front investments or the need for IT experts.

“Yooz brings intelligence to AP automation to save enterprises time and money. We offer an end-to-end service that’s up and running in hours and pays for itself almost instantly. Our customers reduce invoice processing costs by 70 percent,” said Didier Charpentier, chairman and president of Yooz. “Only a true cloud service gives businesses in the upper mid-market access to the latest and proven technologies for document capture and processing.”

Yooz automates the workflow for AP with three easy steps: capture, approve and pay. Unlike traditional solutions, it is volume-based and requires neither a set-up fee nor investments in hardware, software or IT staff. It will modernize a market ripe for disruption, since fewer than one in three U.S. companies have automated their AP workflow, with most still relying on manual, paper-based processes. There are about 100,000 upper mid-market companies with 1,000 to 2,500 employees in the U.S.

Built on 30 years of expertise by ITESOFT (ITE:EN), one of the world’s leaders in intelligent document capture and management, Yooz puts high-performance AP workflow automation within reach of every business. It understands incoming documents, no matter whether they are received as an email attachment, scanned to the cloud or uploaded via smartphone camera. End-to-end processing means automatic GL coding of documents for proper accounting and approval, indexing to make documents searchable and preventing duplicate billing. Yooz interfaces with ERPs and payment platforms for accounting and payment execution.

According to Aberdeen Research, enterprises that automate their invoice receipt and approval workflow policies on average lower invoice-processing costs by 55 percent, and cut invoice cycle times by 30 percent.

“With Yooz, you can do much better. The average medium-size enterprise can save hundreds of thousands of dollar a year,” explained Matt Williams, vice president at Yooz. “AP intelligence means a business decreases cycle times from three weeks to three days. It improves cash management and lets a business take advantage of all available discounts, including automated payments with virtual credit cards to generate rebates. All with zero risk and no vendor lock-in since Yooz is a true cloud service.”

Yooz provides a simple Google-like search box and can be customized to suit the workflow needs of an organization. As an end-to-end service, Yooz integrates with more than 50 financial and ERP systems as well as payment gateways to get invoices processed, approved and paid at lower cost and in record speed.

Since its European launch in 2011, more than 800 businesses are already streamlining their AP workflow with Yooz, among them Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Toshiba.

About Yooz:

Yooz^® brings intelligence to AP automation. It is designed and built for the era of cloud computing, empowering medium to large businesses to streamline their financial workflow in order to save time and money. Yooz was developed by ITESOFT (ITE:EN), a European company that has for more than 30 years been a leader in intelligent document capture and process automation. Yooz has more than 800 customers.

Inviting Top Developers to B2B: Tradeshift Studio

Tradeshift, a leading platform that allows enterprises to increase supply chain productivity and efficacy has recently announced Tradeshift Studio. The initiative provides technology and design consulting and expertise for app development, as well as funding and resources for third-party developers. The initiative enables customers to create customized transaction and workflow applications in order to increase their speed of change and decrease their cost of change.

By functioning as an application design and development agency to Tradeshift customers, Tradeshift Studio simplifies the transition to working with the cloud-based platform because applications can be tailored to the needs of each customer and the companies with which they do business. In addition, this customization can be done without incurring the cost and time that often happens with adapting applications to existing platforms.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Christian Lanng, Co-Founder and CEO of Tradeshift, and our Managing Director, Henry Ijams to discuss Tradeshift Studio and where they feel the supply chain finance and P2P market is headed.

The P2P space is moving very fast with increasing openings around big data and analytics. There’s more opportunity for the back office to be reactive and part of the decision making process. They can help drive innovation; they know where the issues are and where manual transactions are getting away. For them, the next generation of challenges in P2P is really about delivering value to their organizations.

The B2B realm hasn’t done well in attracting smart young developers and thus apps aren’t really making their way to the space. B2C organizations often attract the top talent and thus the B2B market is underserved. However, today’s top developers generally know very little about enterprise-level organizations, processes, or accounting in general. That’s why this initiative is so powerful—Tradeshift studio is providing them with the knowledge and experience.

At each of Tradeshift’s offices in Copenhagen, China, and San Francisco, mentors and product designers are available to give interested developers the data and guidance they need. Furthermore, Tradeshift has allocated $5 million to fund this program with $150k-$500k available for each project. They will also help market new products by promotion throughout their channels, app marketplace, and sales teams. Developers are also given full access to technical support and APIs. In short, financial tech startups and developers wishing to tackle the largely untapped B2B market now have an incubating ally to help them in their journey.

In regards to the evolution of the P2P space Christian said, “In 5-10 years, you’re not going to be thinking about the 4-5 applications that make up P2P, you’ll be thinking of the 50-100 applications that make up P2P. So I think the whole one-size fits-all and one-vendor-to-rule-all strategy is doomed to fail with something as complex as the supply chain.” At PayStream Advisors, we couldn’t agree more. We are very excited to see where this groundbreaking development leads the market. To learn more about Tradeshift, click here. To read Christian’s blog on the topic, click here.

SAP Announces Ariba Network on HANA

SAP announced early this morning that they will be moving the Ariba Network to their HANA platform by the end of 2014. HANA is an in-memory real-time computing platform; to read more, click here. SAP started the transition to HANA with Ariba Spend Visibility. The release was the first major upgrade that was deployed on HANA and was pushed to 2,200 customer areas and 4.7 million buy-side users instantly with zero downtime.

The advantages of this are fairly straightforward—the network will be faster and more reliable. Companies will still be able to garner predictive intelligence on risks, performance, capabilities, rates and more from the more than 15 years of transaction and relationship data and content that reside within the Ariba network, but now they will have quicker access to this data.

Bill McDermott, co-CEO and member of the Executive Board of SAP AG said, “We always knew the true potential of the SAP HANA platform would be realized by the applications that run on top, the Ariba Network is already changing the way businesses work together with more than 1.5 million companies transacting half a trillion USD in commerce. With Ariba solutions on SAP HANA, companies will gain unprecedented real-time insights and transparency into their business networks. The network is a powerful example of the business value that SAP can deliver in the cloud.”

With SAP HANA, data loads 30 times faster and is instantly accessible. So once a sourcing project, contract or invoice is initiated on the network, companies can immediately perform more complex analyses based on an expanded set of variables, including cost centers, purchase price variances and micro regions, and receive results in real time.

Leveraging SAP® Lumira™, the company’s visualization software, they will be able to see and interact with their data in entirely new ways and outline more informed strategies that advance their business goals. Suppliers, for instance, will for the first time be able to access their complete transaction history with a given customer and create intuitive data visualizations that allow them to understand how their payment cycles are trending or whether their invoice rejection rates are improving.

PayStream Advisors is excited to further explore the benefits that the HANA platform brings. To read the full official press release, click here. Be sure to stay tuned for our upcoming AP & Working Capital report that will feature Ariba’s dynamic discounting solution as well as market insights into the growing market.

Nipendo Reports Profound Growth

Nipendo, an up and coming solution provider of purchase to pay (P2P) software, has recently announced that its Supplier Cloud Platform has hit a new record of one million transactions per month. This juncture marks the rapid adoption of the software. Nipendo has reportedly tripled their growth in just two short years.

PayStream has been closely monitoring Nipendo’s success. During its relatively short time in the P2P arena, Nipendo has addressed several barriers that have afflicted the industry in recent years. By automating the P2P process across buyer and supplier exchanges, they have taken away the disincentives for suppliers to adopt the automated transition, thus harnessing the full value of a fully automated eInvoicing solution.

At the recent PayStream Advisors Annual Summit last September, Nipendo announced an AP automation industry breakthrough. Using their solution, they guaranteed that 90% of invoices are processed directly to a user’s ERP without any manual intervention. Coupled with a value-based per invoice pricing model, end users see tangible ROIs right out of the gate. Nipendo’s growth can largely be attributed to innovations such as these, which stand to differentiate the solution provider in an increasingly crowded market, and give Nipendo a leading edge to contend larger, well-established firms like Ariba and Coupa.

To read the official press release concerning Nipendo’s recent milestone click here.

To secure your seat at this year’s conference, PayStream Innovate ‘14 click here.

Kofax Launches Mobile Capture Platform

Kofax^® Limited, a leading provider of smart process applications for the business critical First Mile™ of customer interactions, recently announced the availability of the Kofax Mobile Capture™ Platform, which dramatically transforms how businesses can extend capture capabilities to their mobile customers. The Company also launched two new frameworks for mobile bill pay and mobile check deposit apps, which are built using the platform and can be easily customized to meet an organization’s unique branding and other requirements.

The new Kofax Mobile Capture Platform enables organizations to rapidly develop and deploy any number of mobile apps on a single platform that uses Kofax’s patented and market-leading image capture and perfection, real time data extraction and validation and analytics capabilities. Using this platform, organizations can speed time to market with mobile apps, achieve substantial cost savings, make better informed decisions to drive incremental revenue and free themselves of the undesirable vendor dependencies associated with alternative approaches.

As consumer preference for conducting business via mobile devices continues to grow, Kofax’s Mobile Capture Platform can help organizations turn their customers’ smart phones and tablets into powerful devices that enable real time transactions. Data contained within captured documents can be automatically extracted, validated and submitted for downstream processing, eliminating the need for tedious manual entry. In addition, the platform’s analytics improve an organization’s customer knowledge and can be positioned to take advantage of upselling opportunities. Businesses that provide the best possible mobile user experience and better understand their customers naturally enjoy a competitive advantage.

Drew Hyatt, Senior Vice President of Mobile Applications at Kofax, stated, “Prior to the launch of the Kofax Mobile Capture Platform, banks and insurance organizations had limited options for mobility and were investing in unique, proprietary solutions for each individual use case while relying upon the related vendor to maintain and enhance those apps. By empowering businesses with tools that allow them to drive their own mobile development on a single platform, Kofax has blown away the early market limitations, opening up a world of new opportunities in mobile. Kofax’s perpetual license pricing model also is more cost effective than the per-click pricing prevalent before today.”

Kofax also is launching easily customizable frameworks for two apps built on the Kofax Mobile Capture Platform:

Kofax Mobile Bill Pay, with patented image perfection, enables banks and their customers to easily and effectively capture bills and add payees to a bank’s automatic bill pay system. This improves customer service and satisfaction, and more closely ties users to the banks’ mobile banking and online solutions, which has proven to significantly reduce the likelihood of a customer switching banks.
Kofax Mobile Check Deposit gives banking customers the ability to deposit checks directly from their smartphones and tablets. Kofax’s ability to capture checks with superior image quality enables banks to process more checks faster with greater accuracy. It also delivers more accurate data to the core banking system, resulting in fewer exceptions that would otherwise require manual intervention.

Click here to view the entire Kofax press release.

PayStream research shows that many businesses today are utilizing mobile technology to increase productivity and profitability while on the go. The Kofax Mobile Capture™ Platform allows for mobile captured documents to be automatically extracted, validated and submitted for approval and/or processing. This not only increases time to market speed, but also achieves substantial cost savings. To learn more about data capture, download a complimentary copy of PayStream Advisors Data Capture for Accounts Payable report.

Survey: Data Loss and Privacy Breaches Remain Top Challenges in 2014 for IT Professionals

Iron Mountain® Incorporated, a storage and information management company has published predictions from 230 IT professionals on how organizations will protect data in 2014 and beyond.

Titled The Cost of Inertia, the newly released report indicates that IT professionals believe most organizations will not do enough in the near future to fortify their data backup and recovery practices, despite recognizing that information security risks continue to grow. Some of the report’s key insights include:

Data loss ranks as number one concern of IT leaders: With 68 percent probability, the report shows that data loss and privacy breaches are the most prevalent concern for IT leaders over the next 12-18 months.
Managing increased data volumes will continue to overwhelm organizations: There is a 77 percent likelihood that the rising tide of data will remain the greatest challenge facing IT organizations. Contributing to the issue is that many enterprises have data stored on various technologies, making access to this data a concern as these organizations work to meet growing archiving requirements.
Backup tape is still an attractive storage option: Respondents indicated with a 62 percent confidence level that IT organizations are grappling with limited funding for aligning data growth and data protection. At the same time, tape’s low total cost of ownership (TCO) makes it an attractive factor for its role in a hybrid backup strategy.

“As the volume of data continues to explode, companies are strapped with how to cost effectively archive that information and protect it from potential data loss,” said Jay Livens, director of product and solutions marketing, Iron Mountain. “The only way organizations can accomplish these goals and overcome their limited budgets is to store smart with a mix of cloud, disk and tape technologies.”

Click here to view the entire Iron Mountain press release.

Data is the lifeblood of any business. Decision makers rely on data to effectively run the business, strategize and make important decisions, enter new markets and support the organizations compliance needs. As big data continues to grow, finding a system to manage, store and protect data can be a complex process. To learn more about Iron Mountains data management services click on PayStream’s Solution Source.

Perceptive Software Launches Perceptive Media Connector

Lexmark’s Perceptive Software recently announces the launch of Perceptive Media Connector enabling cloud-based capture, management and access of video content within the Perceptive Content client interface.

Perceptive Media Connector extends the ECM capabilities of Perceptive Content allowing companies to manage rich media files alongside other types of content in the Perceptive Media cloud service — available in all geographies through a fault-tolerant content delivery network. This allows rich media files to be captured, stored, accessed and viewed as easily as traditional forms of electronic content like scanned images, emails and word processing or spreadsheet files.

Perceptive Media Connector was developed to solve the growing unstructured information challenges of organizations across all industries that are increasingly using video in their business processes. Universities are incorporating video into the admissions process and adding eLearning capabilities, and healthcare delivery organizations utilize clinical video content in patient records, training and studies. Insurance companies use video in the customer claims process, while retailers rely on video to enhance branding, employee training and incident management efforts. Government agencies use video to better communicate with constituents.

Built on the powerful Perceptive Software platform, Perceptive Media Connector is equipped to manage the unique storage, security and accessibility challenges of large rich media files.

“Perceptive Media Connector was designed to solve the unique technological challenges presented by our customers’ increased use of rich media content,” said Brian Anderson, chief technology officer, Perceptive Software. “Perceptive Media Connector allows our customers to easily incorporate video content directly into relevant business processes, eliminating the need to download and store large files on premises and enabling the enforcement of appropriate governance.”

Lexmark’s Perceptive Software builds intelligent capture, content management, process management, enterprise search and integration products that connect the unstructured printed and digital information across enterprises with the processes, applications and people who need it most.

As technology continues to evolve, and more companies implement video content into their day-to-day operations, the need for capture, management and access to the video content will be of vital importance. Click here to view the entire Perceptive Software press release.

New Version of SciQuest Advanced Sourcing Optimizer Delivers Improved Bid Analysis Flexibility

SciQuest , a leading provider of cloud-based business automation solutions for spend management, announced in the fourth quarter of 2013, the newest version of the company’s Advanced Sourcing Optimizer. This is the first upgrade to the company’s advanced sourcing solution since SciQuest acquired CombineNet in September 2013. Designed in response to customer feedback, the new version provides several new and innovative ways to conduct bid analysis and scenario optimization, delivering greater analytical power and flexibility to end-users.

Available immediately, the new version of Advanced Sourcing Optimizer includes more flexible ways for customers to evaluate sourcing data. As a result, users are able to gain a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of sourcing activities. New capabilities include:

Cost Model Analysis Flexibility – Allows users to create multiple cost models, including historic cost models, in a single sourcing event while electing which cost model to apply in “what if” scenarios for bid analysis and optimization. As a result, buyers can now look at multiple pricing models and compare total costs or specific portions of total cost to historic prices, benchmark data or market rates.
New Ratio Balancing Rule – A brand new optimization scenario rule that enables buyers to ensure that, when suppliers are awarded certain items, they are also awarded other items based on a ratio determined by the buyer. This results in more efficient transportation and supply chain execution, improves support for corporate sustainability and helps buyers balance the award of different items to suppliers.
Pre-defined Scenarios – Sourcing events in ASO now include three pre-defined scenarios (Single Supplier, Lowest Bid and Lowest Bid Considering Capacity) to support faster analysis of simple award strategies and support novice users as they begin to use optimized scenario analysis.
Event Editing – New functionality allowing buyers to change certain event features that would have previously been “locked in” once the event was opened to suppliers, allowing buyers to easily make changes to sourcing strategy at any time.

“This release underscores SciQuest’s continued commitment to pushing the boundaries of sourcing innovation,” said Greg Holt, product marketing director at SciQuest. “SciQuest has a long track record of listening to our customers’ needs and developing innovative solutions to meet those needs, helping users turn spending into a strategic source of savings. The Advanced Sourcing Optimizer enables better, faster decision-making while providing the flexibility required to conduct advanced sourcing events.“

Click here to view the entire SciQuest press release

To learn more about SciQuest’s solution functionality, download a complimentary copy of PayStream Advisors 2013 Electronic Procurement report. The report includes a detailed SciQuest profile and case study.

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