business process management
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Salesforce applies AI to workflow with Einstein Automate
While Salesforce made a big splash yesterday with the announcement that it’s buying Slack for $27.7 billion, it’s not the only thing going on for the CRM giant this week. In fact, Dreamforce, the company’s customer extravaganza, is also on the docket. While it is virtual this year, there are still product announcements aplenty, and today the company announced Einstein Automate, a new AI-fueled set of workflow solutions.
Sarah Franklin, EVP & GM of Platform, Trailhead and AppExchange at Salesforce, says that she is seeing companies facing a digital imperative to automate processes as things move ever more quickly online, being driven there even faster by the pandemic. “With Einstein Automate, everyone can change the speed of work and be more productive through intelligent workflow automation,” she said in a statement.
Brent Leary, principal analyst at CRM Essentials, says that combined, these tools are designed to help customers get to work more quickly. “It’s not only about identifying the insight, it’s about making it easier to leverage it at the right time. And this should make it easier for users to do it without spending more time and effort,” Leary told TechCrunch.
Einstein is the commercial name given to Salesforce’s artificial intelligence platform that touches every aspect of the company’s product line, bringing automation to many tasks and making it easier to find the most valuable information on customers, which is often buried in an avalanche of data.
Einstein Automate encompasses several products designed to improve workflows inside organizations. For starters, the company has created Flow Orchestrator, a tool that uses a low-code, drag and drop approach for building workflows, but it doesn’t stop there. It also relies on AI to provide help to suggest logical next steps to speed up workflow creation.
Salesforce is also bringing into the mix MuleSoft, the integration company it bought for $6.5 billion in 2018. Instead of processes like a mortgage approval workflow, the MuleSoft piece lets IT build complex integrations between applications across the enterprise and the Salesforce family of products more easily.
To make it easier to build these workflows, Salesforce is announcing the Einstein Automate collection page available in AppExchange, the company’s application marketplace. The collection includes more than 700 pre-built connectors so customers can grab and go as they build these workflows, and finally it’s updating the OmniStudio, their platform for generating customer experiences. As Salesforce describes it, “Included in OmniStudio is a suite of resources and no-code tools, including pre-built guided experiences, templates and more, allowing users to deploy digital-first experiences like licensing and permit applications quickly and with ease.”
Per usual with Salesforce Dreamforce announcements, the Flow Orchestrator being announced today won’t be available in beta until next summer. The MuleSoft component will be available in early 2021, but the OmniStudio updates and the Einstein connections collection are available today.
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Microsoft brings new robotic process automation features to its Power Platform
Earlier this year, Microsoft acquired Softomotive, a player in the low-code robotic process automation space with a focus on Windows. Today, at its Ignite conference, the company is launching Power Automate Desktop, a new application based on Softomotive’s technology that lets anyone automate desktop workflows without needing to program.
“The big idea of Power Platform is that we want to go make it so development is accessible to everybody,” Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s corporate VP for its low-code platform, told me. “And development includes understanding and reporting on your data with Power BI, building web and mobile applications with Power Apps, automating your tasks — whether it’s through robotic process automation or workflow automation — with Power Automate, or building chatbots and chat-based experiences with Power Virtual Agent.”
Power Automate already allowed users to connect web-based applications, similar to Zapier and IFTTT, but the company also launched a browser extension late last year to help users connect native system components to Power Automate. Now, with the integration of the Softomotive technology and the launch of this new low-code Windows application, it’s taking this integration into the native Windows user interface one step further.
“Everything still runs in the cloud and still connects to the cloud, but you now have a rich desktop application to author and record your UI automations,” Lamanna explained. He likened it to an “ultimate connector,” noting that the “ultimate API is just the UI.”
He also stressed that the new app feels like any other modern Office app, like Outlook (which is getting a new Mac version today, by the way) or Word. And like the modern versions of those apps, Power Automate Desktop derives a lot of its power from being connected to the cloud.
It’s also worth noting that Power Automate isn’t just a platform for automating simple two or three-step processes (like sending you a text message when your boss emails you), but also for multistep, business-critical workflows. T-Mobile, for example, is using the platform to automate some of the integration processes between its systems and Sprint.
Lamanna noted that for some large enterprises, adopting these kinds of low-code services necessitates a bit of a culture shift. IT still needs to have some insights into how these tools are used, after all, to ensure that data is kept safe, for example.
Another new feature the company announced today is an integration between the Power Platform and GitHub, which is now in public preview. The idea here is to give developers the ability to create their own software lifecycle workflows. “One of the core ideas of Power Platform is that it’s low code,” Lamanna said. “So it’s built first for business users, business analysts, not the classical developers. But pro devs are welcome. The saying I have is: we’re throwing a party for business users, but pro devs are also invited to the party.” But to get them onto the platform, the team wants to meet them where they are and let them use the tools they already use — and that’s GitHub (and Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code).
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Implement DevSecOps to transform your business to IT-as-code
Michael Fraser is an Air Force Veteran and co-founder of Refactr, a DevSecOps automation platform that helps tech teams modernize towards IT-as-code.
Conduct an online search and you’ll find close to one million websites offering their own definition of DevSecOps.
Why is it that domain experts and practitioners alike continue to iterate on analogous definitions? Likely, it’s because they’re all correct. DevSecOps is a union between culture, practice and tools providing continuous delivery to the end user. It’s an attitude; a commitment to baking security into the engineering process. It’s a practice; one that prioritizes processes that deliver functionality and speed without sacrificing security or test rigor. Finally, it’s a combination of automation tools; correctly pieced together, they increase business agility.
The goal of DevSecOps is to reach a future state where software defines everything. To get to this state, businesses must realize the DevSecOps mindset across every tech team, implement work processes that encourage cross-organizational collaboration, and leverage automation tools, such as for infrastructure, configuration management and security. To make the process repeatable and scalable, businesses must plug their solution into CI/CD pipelines, which remove manual errors, standardize deployments and accelerate product iterations. Completing this process, everything becomes code. I refer to this destination as “IT-as-code.”
Why is DevSecOps important?
Whichever way you cut it, DevSecOps, as a culture, practice or combination of tools, is of increasing importance. Particularly these days, with more consumers and businesses leaning on digital, enterprises find themselves in the irrefutable position of delivering with speed and scale. Digital transformation that would’ve taken years, or at the very least would’ve undergone a period of premeditation, is now urgent and compressed into a matter of months.
The keys to a successful DevSecOps program
Security and operations are a part of this new shift to IT, not just software delivery: A DevSecOps program succeeds when everyone, from security, to operations, to development, is not only part of the technical team but able to share information for repeatable use. Security, often seen as a blocker, will uphold the “secure by design” principle by automating security code testing and reviews, and educating engineers on secure design best practices. Operations, typically reactive to development, can troubleshoot incongruent merges between engineering and production proactively. However, currently, businesses are only familiar with utilizing automation for software delivery. They don’t know what automation means for security or operations. Figuring out how to apply the same methodology throughout the whole program and therefore the whole business is critical for success.
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How startups can leverage elastic services for cost optimization
Joey Lei is director of service management at Synoptek, a global systems integrator and managed services provider. Prior to joining Synoptek, he was a lead product manager for Dell EMC’s Data Protection Division and was a founding product manager for Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager, Dell EMC’s newest generation data protection and data management solution.
Due to COVID-19, business continuity has been put to the test for many companies in the manufacturing, agriculture, transport, hospitality, energy and retail sectors. Cost reduction is the primary focus of companies in these sectors due to massive losses in revenue caused by this pandemic. The other side of the crisis is, however, significantly different.
Companies in industries such as medical, government and financial services, as well as cloud-native tech startups that are providing essential services, have experienced a considerable increase in their operational demands — leading to rising operational costs. Irrespective of the industry your company belongs to, and whether your company is experiencing reduced or increased operations, cost optimization is a reality for all companies to ensure a sustained existence.
One of the most reliable measures for cost optimization at this stage is to leverage elastic services designed to grow or shrink according to demand, such as cloud and managed services. A modern product with a cloud-native architecture can auto-scale cloud consumption to mitigate lost operational demand. What may not have been obvious to startup leaders is a strategy often employed by incumbent, mature enterprises — achieving cost optimization by leveraging managed services providers (MSPs). MSPs enable organizations to repurpose full-time staff members from impacted operations to more strategic product lines or initiatives.
Why companies need cost optimization in the long run
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Enterprise companies find MLOps critical for reliability and performance
Rish Joshi
Contributor
Contributor
Rish is an entrepreneur and investor. Previously, he was a VC at Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund), co-founded a fintech startup building an analytics platform for SEC filings and worked on deep-learning research as a graduate student in computer science at MIT.
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Enterprise startups UIPath and Scale have drawn huge attention in recent years from companies looking to automate workflows, from RPA (robotic process automation) to data labeling.
What’s been overlooked in the wake of such workflow-specific tools has been the base class of products that enterprises are using to build the core of their machine learning (ML) workflows, and the shift in focus toward automating the deployment and governance aspects of the ML workflow.
That’s where MLOps comes in, and its popularity has been fueled by the rise of core ML workflow platforms such as Boston-based DataRobot. The company has raised more than $430 million and reached a $1 billion valuation this past fall serving this very need for enterprise customers. DataRobot’s vision has been simple: enabling a range of users within enterprises, from business and IT users to data scientists, to gather data and build, test and deploy ML models quickly.
Founded in 2012, the company has quietly amassed a customer base that boasts more than a third of the Fortune 50, with triple-digit yearly growth since 2015. DataRobot’s top four industries include finance, retail, healthcare and insurance; its customers have deployed over 1.7 billion models through DataRobot’s platform. The company is not alone, with competitors like H20.ai, which raised a $72.5 million Series D led by Goldman Sachs last August, offering a similar platform.
Why the excitement? As artificial intelligence pushed into the enterprise, the first step was to go from data to a working ML model, which started with data scientists doing this manually, but today is increasingly automated and has become known as “auto ML.” An auto-ML platform like DataRobot’s can let an enterprise user quickly auto-select features based on their data and auto-generate a number of models to see which ones work best.
As auto ML became more popular, improving the deployment phase of the ML workflow has become critical for reliability and performance — and so enters MLOps. It’s quite similar to the way that DevOps has improved the deployment of source code for applications. Companies such as DataRobot and H20.ai, along with other startups and the major cloud providers, are intensifying their efforts on providing MLOps solutions for customers.
We sat down with DataRobot’s team to understand how their platform has been helping enterprises build auto-ML workflows, what MLOps is all about and what’s been driving customers to adopt MLOps practices now.
The rise of MLOps
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Proxyclick raises $15M Series B for its visitor management platform
If you’ve ever entered a company’s office as a visitor or contractor, you probably know the routine: check in with a receptionist, figure out who invited you, print out a badge and get on your merry way. Brussels, Belgium and New York-based Proxyclick aims to streamline this process, while also helping businesses keep their people and assets secure. As the company announced today, it has raised a $15 million Series B round led by Five Elms Capital, together with previous investor Join Capital.
In total, Proxyclick says its systems have now been used to register more than 30 million visitors in 7,000 locations around the world. In the U.K. alone, more than 1,000 locations use the company’s tools. Current customers include L’Oréal, Vodafone, Revolut, PepsiCo and Airbnb, as well as a number of other Fortune 500 firms.
Gregory Blondeau, founder and CEO of Proxyclick, stresses that the company believes that paper logbooks, which are still in use in many companies, are simply not an acceptable solution anymore, not in the least because that record is often permanent and visible to other visitors.
Proxyclick’s founding team.
“We all agree it is not acceptable to have those paper logbooks at the entrance where everyone can see previous visitors,” he said. “It is also not normal for companies to store visitors’ digital data indefinitely. We already propose automatic data deletion in order to respect visitor privacy. In a few weeks, we’ll enable companies to delete sensitive data such as visitor photos sooner than other data. Security should not be an excuse to exploit or hold visitor data longer than required.”
What also makes Proxyclick stand out from similar solutions is that it integrates with a lot of existing systems for access control (including C-Cure and Lenel systems). With that, users can ensure that a visitor only has access to specific parts of a building, too.
In addition, though, it also supports existing meeting rooms, calendaring and parking systems, and integrates with Wi-Fi credentialing tools so your visitors don’t have to keep asking for the password to get online.
Like similar systems, Proxyclick provides businesses with a tablet-based sign-in service that also allows them to get consent and NDA signatures right during the sign-in process. If necessary, the system also can compare the photos it takes to print out badges with those on a government-issued ID to ensure your visitors are who they say they are.
Blondeau noted that the whole industry is changing, too. “Visitor management is becoming mainstream, it is transitioning from a local, office-related subject handled by facility managers to a global, security and privacy-driven priority handled by chief information security officers. Scope, decision drivers and key people involved are not the same as in the early days,” he said.
It’s no surprise then that the company plans to use the new funding to accelerate its roadmap. Specifically, it’s looking to integrate its solution with more third-party systems with a focus on physical security features and facial recognition, as well as additional new enterprise features.
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Signavio raises $177M at a $400M valuation for its business process automation solutions
Robotic Process Automation has been the name of the game in enterprise software lately — with organizations using advances in machine learning algorithms and other kinds of AI alongside big-data analytics to speed up everything from performing mundane tasks to more complex business decisions.
To underscore the opportunity and growth in the market, today a startup in the wider segment of process automation is announcing a significant fundraise. Signavio, a company founded out of Berlin that provides tools for business process management — “providing the ‘P’ in RPA,” as the company describes it — has picked up an investment of $177 million at what we understand is a valuation of $400 million.
This round is large on its own, but even more so considering that before this the company — founded in 2009 — had only raised around $50 million, according to data from PitchBook. This latest capital injection is being led by Apax Digital (the growth equity team of Apax Partners), with DTCP. It notes that existing investor Summit Partners is also keeping a stake in the business with this deal.
The company was founded by a team of alums from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, who used research they did there for creating the world’s first web modeler for business process management and analytics as the template for Signavio’s own Process Manager. (The name “Signavio” seems to be a portmanteau of “navigating through signals,” which essentially explains the basics of what BPM aims to do to help a business with its decision making.)
Partly because it’s raised so little money, Signavio has been somewhat under the radar, but it has seen a huge amount of growth. It says that revenues in the last 12 months have grown by more than 70%, and its software is used by more than one million users across 1,300 customers — with clients including SAP, DHL, Liberty Mutual, Deloitte, Comcast and Puma. It counts Silicon Valley as its second HQ these days; that trajectory will be followed further with this latest funding: Signavio says the funding in part will be going to international expansion of the business.
“10 years ago, we set out on a journey to tackle the time-consuming practices that limit business productivity,” said Dr. Gero Decker, CEO and co-founder of Signavio, in a statement. “This significant new investment further validates our approach to solve business problems faster and more efficiently, unleashing the power of process through our unique Business Transformation Suite. We are thrilled to welcome Apax Digital as our new lead partner, and look forward to building upon our success to date by leveraging our partners’ operating capabilities and global platforms for our international expansion.”
The other area of investment will be the company’s technology suite. While BPM has been around for years as a concept — and indeed there are a number of other companies that provide tools that are compared sometimes to Signavio’s, such as from biggies like IBM and Microsoft through to Kissflow and others — what’s interesting is how it’s had a surge of interest more recently as organizations increasingly start to add more automation into their IT infrastructure, in part to reduce the human labor needed for more mundane back-office tasks, and in part to reduce costs and speed up processes.
Robotic process automation companies like UiPath and Blue Prism bring some of the same processing tools to the table as Signavio, although the argument is that the latter — which says it helps to “mine, model, monitor, manage and maintain” customers’ data — provides a more sophisticated level of data crunching that can be used for RPA, or for other ends. (It also works with several of the big RPA players, mainly Blue Prism but also UiPath and Automation Anywhere.)
“As businesses have become more global, and workforces more distributed, business processes have proliferated, and become more complex,” noted Daniel O’Keefe, managing partner, and Mark Beith, managing director, of Apax Digital, in a joint statement. “Signavio’s cloud-native suite allows employees across an enterprise to collaborate and transform their businesses by digitizing, optimizing and ultimately automating their processes. We are tremendously excited to partner with the Signavio team and to support their vision.” The two will also be joining Signavio’s board with this round.
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The next service marketplace wave: Vertical market-networks
Ivan Smolnikov
Contributor
Contributor
Ivan Smolnikov is the CEO and founder of Smartcat, the market network platform for the translation industry.
The last few decades have produced many successful marketplaces. We went from goods marketplace pioneers such as eBay and Amazon to simple service marketplaces such as Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Upwork, Thumbtack, TaskRabbit, and Fiverr. But why haven’t we seen many successful B2B service marketplaces?
Table of Contents
- Why Many B2B Service Marketplaces Failed
- What Makes A Successful Service Marketplace?
- Summary: Figure Out How to Unlock Value for All
Why Many B2B Service Marketplaces Failed
Some would argue that companies such as Upwork, Thumbtack, Fiverr, or TaskRabbit are horizontal B2B marketplaces in the sense that they provide access to suppliers of different services. But while businesses do indeed transact with freelancers on such “horizontal” marketplaces, for most service verticals these are limited-value, one-off transactions. They fail to enable long-term business collaborations.
So, such marketplaces haven’t delivered more valuable services nor introduced a new paradigm for how businesses buy specific services at scale and on an on-going basis. Why is that?
Horizontal marketplaces are stuck at the discovery process
Horizontal services marketplaces don’t provide much value beyond matching clients with quality service providers. In other words, they don’t facilitate collaboration between buyers and suppliers, never mind provide ways for the two parties to collaborate more efficiently over time as they engage in follow-on projects.
In essence, the model these marketplaces were built around is not much different from the likes of Craigslist, which put a convenient UX on traditional classified advertisements.
Complex B2B services require workflow and collaboration tools
In their article “What’s Next for Marketplace Startups?,” Andrew Chen and Li Jin found that there aren’t many successful service marketplaces because those offerings are complex, diverse, and difficult to evaluate. It’s challenging to define a successful transaction in a service marketplace because it’s harder to quantify success.
One reason is that several service providers must often work together to complete a single job for a buyer, requiring a complex workflow from end to end. As a result, it’s difficult for marketplaces to not only mediate service delivery but also make it significantly more efficient for buyers and suppliers. If both the buyer and suppliers don’t see a significant efficiency gain other than being initially matched, why would they continue using the marketplace?
(Image via Getty Images / Lidiia Moor)
The $50 billion translation industry is a prime example of complex B2B services marketplaces. On the supply side are roughly 50,000 small agencies around the globe responsible for more than 85% of this $50 billion industry. (Note we are referring to agencies here as suppliers, though they play on both sides.)
On the demand side are businesses that need to translate text from one language into another. Plus about 1,500,000 freelance linguists work in this industry, many of whom are more specialized than professionals in other industries.
Anyone can find and hire a translator on Fiverr or Upwork. Both provide a vast selection of language translators. However, the quality and cost of the translation depends on the translation tools available to the translator as well as their subject expertise.
Neither Fiverr nor Upwork provide computer-aided translation (CAT) and collaborative workflow solutions for users of their platforms. Additionally, neither provides an effective way for all parties to collaborate and continuously improve the efficiency and quality.
But the problem with traditional marketplaces goes even further: Multiple translators and reviewers are usually needed to complete a single job for a customer. Multi-language translation projects are even more complicated. Such projects require multiple service providers and cost estimates, in addition to project management tools.
This is why building a B2B service marketplace is difficult. Service marketplaces must not only connect buyers and suppliers, but also provide tools to enable an efficient and collaborative workflow that reduces wasted time and effort.
Horizontal marketplaces suffer high attrition
In addition to the problems already outlined, traditional marketplaces experience another issue that prevents them from growing and retaining market participants: Buyer and supplier attrition.
Many business services are based on regularly recurring engagements. In some cases, a buyer and a service provider interact daily, requiring a different workflow than gig-marketplaces are built around.
Buyers and suppliers have little motivation to continue interacting on a platform with no workflow automation solutions. They lack a way to improve service efficiency and quality, automate collaboration, payment, paperwork, and other basic processes required for a business.
This is why many traditional marketplaces suffer from slow network effects and high attrition. (A network effect is what happens when a platform, product, or service delivers more value the more it is used.
Think Facebook, eBay, WhatsApp.) Why wouldn’t companies work directly with service providers outside of a marketplace after they were introduced? What incentives keep the service transaction on the marketplace? These are critical questions to answer when building a marketplace.
Traditional marketplaces target broad services, making it nearly impossible to provide workflow solutions for buyers and suppliers. Going forward, successful service marketplaces will be developed relying on an industry-specific SaaS workflow. This will focus buyers and suppliers on longer-term projects and interactions that serve the unique needs of collaborations and transactions in a specific vertical.
Image via Getty Images / OstapenkoOlena
What makes a successful service marketplace?
In “The next 10 Years Will Be About Market Networks,” James Currier, Managing Partner at NFX Ventures, defines a new era of service marketplaces, which he calls market networks.
A market network is a platform that combines elements of an n-sided marketplace, a network, and workflow solutions. An n-sided marketplace is one that requires coordination of multiple supply-side parties to provide a complex service for a single buyer.
Market networks enable multiple buyers and suppliers to interact, collaborate, and transact on the same platform. They provide users with industry-specific workflow solutions that enable efficient, ongoing collaboration on long-term projects. This reduces costs and leads to a higher quality of services and increased overall value for all users.
But how do you actually build a successful market-network platform? While the answer to that varies from company to company, here is our approach. We were able to build a market network for the translation industry that combines the components: network, marketplace, and workflow solution.
STEP 1: SaaS workflow platform unlocks high-value collaboration
The first step to building an effective complex market network is to develop a workflow that is easy for users to embrace. It might not seem like much, but this increases productivity by enabling teams to perform tasks that were previously impossible.
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