E2Open Acquires Terra Technology

On March 8, E2Open (NASDAQ: EOPN), a California-based provider of supply chain collaboration, planning, and execution solutions for the cloud, announced that it acquired Terra Technology, the Connecticut-based provider of supply chain demand, forecasting, and planning solutions, for an undisclosed sum. According to company officials, the deal will allow both companies to synergize their capabilities, particularly demand sensing, inventory optimization, forecasting, planning and execution, and enable their clients to bring enhanced intelligence to their extended supply chains. The deal will allow such companies to better leverage supply chain data to help them optimize inventory, plan, and execute business operations across the supply chain.

Nexonia Acquires ExpenseWatch

In a blog post from March 10, JoAnn DeLuna of Business Travel News reported that Nexonia, a Toronto-based provider of travel & expense management (T&E) solutions, acquired one of its chief competitors, Pennsylvania-based ExpenseWatch, for an undisclosed sum. Under terms of the deal, Nexonia will retain Expensewatch employees, and will not alter the company’s offerings for at least two years. ExpenseWatch provides purchase order (PO) and other accounts payable (AP) solutions, which will help to build out Nexonia’s T&E and direct spend management offerings. Company officials indicate that this may be the first of several acquisitions for Nexonia; although they are not growing for growth’s sake, they are open to further acquisitions when they “make sense.”

Informatica Launches Intelligent Big Data Management Solution

On Monday, March 21, Informatica (Nasdaq: INFA), the California-based provider of data management solutions, announced the release of Informatica Intelligent Data Lake, which is marketed to complement Informatica’s Big Data Management tool (readers may recall that we covered the release of Informatica Big Data Management in the December 23, 2015 edition of this Technology Round-Up). Informatica Intelligence Data Lake is meant to provide a managed and secure, yet self-service digital environment where data scientists can collaborate, manipulate data, and search for connections before releasing that data “into the wild.” It provides the benefits of an IT-managed environment with the freedom, flexibility, and agility of working with a dataset outside of IT’s control.

SAP Ariba Partners with American Express to Drive Purchase Order Reconciliation

On March 14th, SAP Ariba,  the online business network wholly owned by SAP, announced that it has partnered with American Express to simplify the process of reconciling off-contract purchases and corresponding purchase orders. Often times, there are legitimate B2B purchases that must be made off contract, yet reconciling them with the accounts payable team can be tricky. Under the terms of this partnership, Ariba users will use Ariba Spot Buy to purchase off-contract goods and services in accordance with procurement policies and rules, and will leverage American Express commercial accounts to automatically identify and reconcile those purchases. The transactional data will automatically be matched within Ariba Spot Buy and AmEx for a PO-reconciliation process that ought to be faster and less complicated than traditional processes.

Lavante and Beroe Partner to Enhance Supply Chain Data Management and Intelligence 

On March 16, Financial News U.K. reported that Lavante, Inc., a cloud-based supplier management solution provider, and Beroe, a supply chain risk and intelligence solution provider, have partnered to synergize offerings and deliver the best of both worlds to their clients. As partners, Beroe will leverage the Lavante Connect Platform in order to bring enhanced collaboration and communication to its clients and their supplier base. Meanwhile, Lavante users will benefit from the supply chain intelligence and risk information available from Beroe’s solutions. Lavante’s latest partnership follows other such arrangements it has made with Taulia, Experian, and FlexTecs (interested readers can read up on Lavante’s partnership with Taulia by clicking here).

Ultima Risk Management Deploys Third-Party Supplier Risk Assessment Tool

On March 9, LogisticsManager.com posted about Ultima Risk Management, a U.K.-based provider of risk management consulting and IT services, and its release of an online tool meant to assess risks associated with third-party suppliers. The tool, dubbed “Abriska 27036”, is an add-on feature to its suite of solutions that automatically conducts risk assessment of the IT services of third-party suppliers. As Chief Procurement Officers (CPOs) and enterprise procurement teams increasingly become responsible for managing their suppliers’ and their suppliers’ supplier risks, IT risk and security become part of an ever-expanding risk and threat landscape. As a result, Ultima Risk Management’s web-based plug-in provides an automated risk assessment and management tool to help CPOs and their teams get some visibility into and control over the outer rungs of their supply chain.

SAP Concur Partners with Several Travel Services for Enhanced T&E Reporting

On March 9, SAP, the parent company of travel and expense management solution provider, Concur, announced a flurry of partnerships with travel and transportation companies, Hertz, HRS, and Runzheimer. For starters, Hertz rental car services and HRS Global Hotel Solutions will now integrate into Concur’s TripLink (read more about TripLink here), allowing business travelers the ability to book directly with these providers, yet have their bookings appear in Concur’s TripLink tool, providing visibility, governance, and compliance to the business traveler. And in other news, SAP Concur announced that it has partnered with Runzheimer, a business vehicle and relocation information services provider, to integrate its mileage tracker/calculator, Equo, into the Concur App Center. Equo enables business travelors to leverage sensors within their phones to automatically (or manually) log their related business mileage into a mobile app and create corresponding expense reports. The partnership aims to cut down on both the time and effort needed to manually record business mileage, delineate it from personal mileage, and populate an expense report.

Seal Software Enhances Contract Discovery and Analytics Platform

On March 2, Seal Software, the San Francisco-based provider of contract discovery and analytics solutions, announced a new version of its Contract Discovery and Analytics platform, V4.1, which aims to bring increased speed, efficiency, and visualization to the end user. V4.1 features a five-fold performance increase of its analytic engine, allowing it to increase the speed and depth of contracts that the platform can process at any given time. It also features enhanced machine learning, with updated algorithims that ought to improve the speed and accuracy of the platform when returning search results. V4.1 also features Seal API V2.0, which ought to make it easier to integrate with other solution providers, like DocuSign. Finally, the newest version of Seal’s solution leverages Qlik BI data management and visualization software to allow users to aggregate data within individual contracts or across enterprise contracts and then visualize that data according to desired variables and analyses. This feature lets users illustrate which contracts are going to expire within a given period, which ones are governed by certain clauses, which ones are susceptible to certain risks, etc., in a manner that is quickly and easily digestible.

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