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Verint a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Workforce Engagement Management

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Few businesses can claim being positioned as a “Leader” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. Customer engagement giant Verint has done it – for the twelfth year in a row.

Verint was also recently named the winner in 2020 CRM Watchlist, an annual evaluation conducted by Paul Greenberg, President of the 56 Group, LLC and author of The Commonwealth of Self Interest: Business Success Through Customer Engagement.

About the Magic Quadrant, President Elan Moriah said, “We believe this recognition continues to validate Verint’s commitment to WEM. We have a proven track record of continuously innovating in ways that deliver business impact to our customers and the market at-large.”

Accenture Finds Timid Approach to Technology Costing Enterprises Billions

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A new survey showcases the delta between vision and implementation in digital transformation. Accenture’s recent report, “Your Legend or Your Legacy” found that C-level execs embracing bold technology initiatives are reaping the rewards. Yet the number who do so is surprisingly small – Accenture finds only 10% are investing optimally in technology and adoption decisions to realize full value of those investments. Further, Accenture finds that, “By adopting new technologies more aggressively and breaking down barriers to effectively scale innovation across their organizations, these leading companies are generating more than twice the rate of revenue growth than those on the lower end of the spectrum.”

The study was conducted with 8,300 organizations across 20 industries and 20 countries.

Accenture offers five key factors— or “PATHS” — that it has identified as distinguishing the top 10% of companies from the rest:

  • Progress: The extent to which companies apply new technology to evolve business processes across the enterprise. One example is the use of cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) to increase the effectiveness of multiple business processes rather than working in silos.
  • Adaptation: Ensuring that IT systems can adapt and respond to changing market conditions with actions such as decoupling from legacy systems and using cloud services as a catalyst for innovation.
  • Timing: Creating an appropriate sequence and roadmaps for deploying new technology. This begins with identifying foundational technologies and prioritizing adoption based on their enterprise-wide impact.
  • Human+machine workforce: Using technologies to augment employees and make work more engaging while simultaneously realizing efficiency gains. This could entail delivering technology-augmented training that is personalized and experiential for working with technologies of the future.
  • Strategy: Actively aligning business strategy and IT strategy and weaving technology investments together to better seize opportunities.

KeyFactor Announces Unique IoT Identities for Device Manufacturers

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One of the more interesting announcements out of RSA is that of the partnership with Keyfactor and wolfSSL. IoT growth has exploded, but is still bound by security concerns, especially in regard to how to lock down low-power devices. Keyfactor, which offers award-winning PKI as-a-service platform for certificate lifecycle automation and IoT device security, announced it will integrate with SSL/TLS crypto-library provider wolfSSL to improve IoT security.

Keyfactor VP of product, Mark Thompson, commented, “Establishing critical trust at design and over time is complex for device manufacturers juggling multiple mass-production product lines.“Assigning a unique identity to every device hardens its overall security and ability to securely install firmware and software updates. . . combining full-featured, easy-to-use cryptographic libraries with a solid Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) platform makes IoT security at scale manageable and achievable.”

The new integration, KeyfactorControl, allows device designers and manufacturers to leverage technology and PKI to continuously replace, manage and update cryptography on IoT devices, while wolfSSL SSL/TLS libraries support resource constrained IoT systems across industrial control systems, connected vehicles, and medical devices.

RSA Announces SECURITI.ai Lands Top Spot at RSAC Innovation Sandbox Contest 2020

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Today at RSA, AI-powered PrivacyOps provider SECURITI.ai was announced as the winner of the Conference’s Innovation Sandbox Contest. The winner was determined by a panel of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and industry veterans.

For the past fifteen years, the RSAC Innovation Sandbox Contest has been a leading platform for startups to showcase their technologies within the cybersecurity industry. And nabbing the top spot is quite the milestone, since RSAC Innovation Sandbox Contest’s top 10 finalists have collectively seen over 50 acquisitions and over $6.2 billion in investments.

SECURITI.ai simplifies and automates privacy and offers PRIVACI.ai, which automates privacy compliance with patent-pending People Data Graphs™ and robotic automation. Using it, enterprises can give rights to people on their data, comply with global privacy regulations, and build trust with customers.

Frost and Sullivan Find Retail and Transportation Ahead of Other Sectors with Digital Transformation

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Frost and Sullivan released results from its “Top End User Priorities in Digital Transformation, Global, 2019,” which measures current use and future decision-making behavior toward Information Technology and communications and monitors the status of digital transformation. For those evaluating IT spend, Frost and Sullivan found that improving customer experience, digital presence and sales and marketing effectiveness were the three major drivers for IT/Telecom investment.

Other key findings include:

  • The retail (44%) and transportation (43%) sectors are ahead of others in their digital transformation.
  • More than two-thirds of companies feel that the sales and marketing department will be the most impacted department by their digital transformation.
  • Enhancing customer experience, digital presence, and sales and marketing effectiveness are the three major drivers for IT/telecom investment over the next two years.
  • Improving operational efficiencies is a top priority in Asia-Pacific and Latin America, while upgrading customer experience and satisfaction is the most important corporate goal in North America and Europe for 2020.
  • Malware (41% of companies) remains the greatest security threat, followed by security misconfiguration and hacking. Malware is common in both smartphone and desktop platforms.
  • Internet of Things is being used by 65% of companies. Almost 42% of organizations are developing IoT through a third-party service provider. Government is the predominant developer of IoT in-house.
  • IT and communications, finance, banking, and insurance are the top industries implementing artificial intelligence.
  • Cost of integration remains a major setback for the adoption of new digital technologies.

Constellation Announces its ShortList™ for DevOps

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Ten DevOps vendors made the Constellation Shortlist as announced by Constellation Research. Veteran analyst Holger Mueller and team evaluated the solutions and weighed client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, vendor selection projects, market share and internal research. You can find out more and download the research here.

The vendors fall into four vendor categories: platform, best-of-breed, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and cross-platform players, and are:

  • Atlassian
  • Chef
  • CloudBees / Jenkins
  • Copado
  • GitLab
  • HashiCorp
  • Microsoft/GitHub
  • New Relic
  • Puppet
  • XebiaLabs

Jigsaw Launches New Publication and Platform to Combat Disinformation

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The potential for disinformation to impact everything from commerce to war has only grown as developments in AI have enabled increasingly sophisticated disinformation tools. To combat the threat, and to better arm fact-checkers and journalists with a seamless process for detecting disinformation, Jigsaw recently announced Assembler – a platform that’s been in development since 2016 with support from Google Research – and The Current, a new research publication.

Jigsaw’s team – comprised of researchers, engineers, designers, policy experts, and creative thinkers – has been working on Assembler, an experimental platform to test how technology can help fact-checkers and journalists to detect and analyze manipulated media.

The tool is currently being tested at Agence France-Presse, Animal Politico, Code for Africa, Les Décodeurs du Monde, and Rappler, wto determine how well it works in real newsrooms.

Jigsaw also recently announced the launch of The Current, a new research publication that examines “complex problems through an interdisciplinary approach — like our team.”

Ransomware Attacks Cost US Healthcare Organizations over $157M Over Since 2016

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Recent research from reviews and research firm Comparitech highlights come unsettling statistics regarding ransomware in the healthcare industry.

Comparitech’s team undertook these efforts to try and gain insight into the growing problem, a difficult task given the complexity of ransomware attacks that aren’t publicly disclosed, as well as the requirement from U.S. Department of Health Services that publish information about attacks only if over 500 people are impacted.

Using a variety of different resources including specialist IT news, data breach reports, and the Health Services reporting tool, Comparitech gathered as much data as possible on ransomware attacks on US healthcare providers, though they acknowledge that this may only be the tip of the iceberg.

The report details costs to individual states and while California had the highest number of ransomware attacks, Michigan saw the highest number of affected patient records.

You can find the entire report here.

Its key findings from looking at the attacks since 2016 included:

  • 172 individual ransomware attacks on healthcare organizations
  • 1,446 hospitals, clinics, and organizations affected
  • 74 percent of organizations affected were hospitals or clinics, the remaining were IT providers (5%), elderly care providers (7%), dental (5%) or optometry practices (6%), plastic surgeons (2%), medical testing (2%), health insurance (1%), government health (1%), and medical supplies (1%)
  • 6,649,713 patients affected
  • Ransomware amounts vary from $1,600 to $14,000,000
  • Downtime caused varies from hours to weeks and even months
  • Hackers have demanded ransoms totaling more than $16.48 million since 2016
  • Hackers have received at least $640,000 since 2016
  • The overall cost of these attacks is estimated at $157 million

Databook Lands $5M in Seed Funding

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Databook, which offers an enterprise customer intelligence platform, announced it has landed $5M in seed funding, led by Threshold Ventures. The company has a goal of changing the enterprise selling game by making every rep as good as the best rep through its AI-powered platform. Once deployed, the platform combines predictive intent data, real-time insights, and time-saving productivity tools to improve selling performance across the enterprise – with a goal of enabling every sales rep to deliver the right pitch for the right audience at the right time.

The company, backed by some powerful investors and advisors, claims its platform can: 

  • Increases sales productivity at scale. Better yield per rep means higher conversions; more reps hit their quota every quarter, which exponentially increases revenue. 
  • Improves organizational velocity at scale. More productive reps mean better customer engagement, which typically results in more pipeline and wins per quarter; all of this equals better performance at lower cost across the organization. 
  • More efficient growth at scale. Better productivity means top-line and bottom-line growth.

IDC Finds IT Spending Could Get Boost from 5G, But Growth May Be Impacted by PC Sales and Coronavirus

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IDC’s Black Books finds that IT spending is on track to increase by 5% in 2020, but that uncertainty around the Coronavirus may impact short-term investments:

“Much of this year’s growth is dependent on a positive smartphone cycle as the year progresses, but this is under threat from disruption caused by the Coronavirus crisis,” said Stephen Minton, program vice president in IDC’s Customer Insights & Analysis group. “Our current forecast is for broadly stable tech spending in 2020, but PC sales will be way down on last year, while server/storage investments will not recover to the levels of growth seen in 2018 when hyperscale service providers were deploying new datacenters at an aggressive pace.” 

Hyperscale service provider IT spending will recover to 9% growth this year, up from just 3% in 2019, but this is short of the pace of two years ago. Cloud infrastructure and digital services providers will also continue to increase their IT budgets in order to meet strong end-user demand for cloud and digital services, which will continue to expand at a double-digit rate of growth as enterprise buyers increasingly shift their IT budgets to the as-a-service model. 

“Much of the explosive growth in service provider spending from 2016 to 2018 was driven by aggressive roll-out of servers and storage capacity, but more spend is now moving to software and other technologies as these providers seek to drive into higher-margin solution markets including AI and IoT,” said Minton. “Nevertheless, after infrastructure spending cooled last year, we expect service provider spending to be broadly stable and positive in the next few years because these firms need to keep driving up capacity in order to deliver services to end-users.”