FUTURE TECH
Vendr | August 10, 2022
Vendr, the world’s first SaaS buying platform, today announced the launch of Vendr 2.0, the most complete SaaS buying platform on the market. SaaS is a top-three line item expense, but most companies aren’t getting the appropriate return on their software investment. Vendr 2.0 harnesses Vendr’s SaaS purchasing and SaaS management products, combining the power of seasoned negotiators armed with insights from over 13,000 deals alongside robust software featuring an integrated system of record.
Now, enterprise customers will be equipped with an unprecedented level of visibility into which software their teams are buying and using — in one central location. This enables leaders to reduce overspend and eliminate duplicative products. Most importantly, it unlocks insights that lead to better software choices and faster procurement at lower prices.
The launch comes on the heels of the company’s recent $150MM Series B, co-led by return investor Craft Ventures and new investor SoftBank Vision Fund 2––which brought the company into Unicorn status––and its acquisition of SaaS management company Blissfully earlier this year.
“The software purchasing process is broken and becoming all the more cumbersome as companies everywhere work to cut costs, as they seek to do more with less. “The introduction of Vendr 2.0 enables organizations to manage their second-highest expense––software––more effectively than ever before, while reducing the difficulties surrounding the process. Vendr 2.0 aims to be the most complete, no-brainer, SaaS buying platform on the market –– and one that pays for itself.”
Ryan Neu, Vendr CEO and co-founder
The standard buying process historically wastes time and resources for both software vendors and customers. Vendr enables businesses to maximize the return on their SaaS investments through cost savings and more efficient spend, improving stack visibility across the organization. Composed of the best industry data of more than 2,000 SaaS suppliers, Vendr 2.0 is facilitating critical transformation in how organizations purchase and manage software.
Tapping Into Transparency
Software buying is a perpetual process and it no longer makes sense to have buying and supplier lifecycle management exist in disparate places. By bringing everything into one place, companies layer the benefits of an expert service team and deep SaaS insights into an integrated system of record that offers unparalleled visibility into their stack. Using Vendr, customers can take a proactive approach to their SaaS spend, equipping their teams with the best software while saving money.
Buyer <-> supplier: Vendr offers insights and negotiation support to help buyers and sellers quickly evaluate whether a deal is fair for both sides, ensuring that the process continues moving along internally once it comes time to buy.
Buyer <-> procurement function: Vendr provides visibility into internal approval workflows and offers fast-tracked ways to request purchases, leading to smoother relationships between buyers and their company procurement functions.
Finance/procurement <-> department heads: With better visibility and faster purchase cycles, stakeholders can easily see the value-add of finance and procurement, ensuring compliance and keeping a handle on costs, leading to better business outcomes for all.
This new platform builds upon the competitive advantages that Vendr has in the market as the category creator with the deepest source of supplier insight––based on thousands of deals––as well as the most seasoned negotiators in the industry. Vendr has processed over $1.5B in customer software spend and delivered over $240M in software savings to its customers. To see how much you could be saving on your annual software expense, get in touch here.
About Vendr
Vendr is changing how companies find, buy and manage SaaS. The first of its kind, Vendr's SaaS buying platform offers both a product and people-powered service to enable the world's fastest-growing companies to purchase software quickly and with guaranteed savings. Today, Vendr has facilitated over $1.5B+ in SaaS purchases across 2,500+ suppliers for Finance and Procurement teams at HubSpot, Brex, Canva, Reddit, Toast, and more. Headquartered in Boston with a second location in Charleston, Vendr was founded in 2019 by Ryan Neu and co-founders Ariel Diaz and Aaron White, who joined the team through the acquisition of Blissfully in 2022. The company has over 250 employees globally
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SOFTWARE
New Relic | August 10, 2022
New Relic , the observability company, today announced it has joined the Atlassian Platform Partner Program as part of the Atlassian Open DevOps solution that integrates Jira Software with popular DevOps tools. New Relic has integrated errors inbox with Jira Software to empower developers to easily access and set up full stack error tracking and software performance monitoring from inside Jira Software, Atlassian’s issue and project management tool. With this integration, developers can create Jira Software issues directly within errors inbox, the New Relic platform functionality for error tracking. This announcement coincides with the launch of the Jira Software toolchain page, which helps developer teams to discover and install DevOps tools to improve DevOps practices across their software development lifecycle.
“As applications grow more complex, developers need a system in place to proactively fix errors before the customer experience is impacted,” said Peter Pezaris, SVP, Strategy and User Experience at New Relic. “Errors inbox for Jira Software, which builds on the strong history between New Relic and Atlassian, makes developers’ lives easier by allowing them to get to the root cause faster with full error details — including stack traces — and alerts whenever a critical, customer-impacting error arises. Ticketing is made easier, too, as teams can instantly create Jira Software issues with all the right information, without leaving their error management workflow.”
Key benefits and capabilities of the New Relic and Jira Software integration include:
Track, triage, and resolve errors in one place: Errors are grouped and displayed on a single screen for visibility and easy triaging. Tackle errors across the full application stack with APM, RUM, Mobile, and Serverless (Lambda Functions) data tracked.
Resolve errors before impacting customers: Proactively review and triage errors before they affect customers. Get to the root cause faster with full error details, including stack traces and logs in context, provided in the error inbox.
Collaborate across teams: Squash bugs as a team with shared error visibility, shared comments, and an integration with Slack.
Create Jira Software issues with a click: With the new integration, set up templates and quickly file Jira Software issues containing error details, associated issues, and direct links to the stack trace and entities in New Relic for easy debugging.
“Atlassian and New Relic share a vision to improve the developer experience by meeting users where they are and allowing them to use the tools they know and love. “We are excited to include New Relic errors inbox as an app in the Jira Software toolchain page, which makes it easier for millions of users to discover and connect DevOps apps used throughout the software development lifecycle to fill gaps in the toolchain as their DevOps practices evolve.”
Bryant Lee, VP of Partnerships and Developer Experience at Atlassian
“We have been really impressed with how New Relic errors inbox offers a single place to track all the errors for the entire stack," said Mudit Mehta, Software Engineer II at Postman. "Errors inbox helps developers save time instead of looking and jumping through multiple tools for cloud-based or external error tracking. With the integration for Jira Software, I can quickly view an error and notify the right team members by filing a templated Jira Software issue in seconds without even leaving the New Relic platform.”
The Jira Software toolchain page is the latest collaboration between New Relic and Atlassian. The integration builds on the recent launch of the Bitbucket quickstart in New Relic Instant Observability, which gives engineers visibility into the health and performance of their Bitbucket pipelines to continuously improve and optimize their deployments. Developers can also connect Jira Software to New Relic alerts to help the right teams get the right information in the software development life cycle.
Errors inbox for Jira Software is available for free to all New Relic full platform users and Jira Cloud users. For more information, visit www.newrelic.com. Additional integrations for Atlassian’s Connect applications with errors inbox and other capabilities will be available later this year.
About New Relic
As a leader in observability, New Relic empowers engineers with a data-driven approach to planning, building, deploying, and running great software. New Relic delivers the only unified data platform that empowers engineers to get all telemetry—metrics, events, logs, and traces—paired with powerful full stack analysis tools to help engineers do their best work with data, not opinions. Delivered through the industry’s first usage-based consumption pricing that’s intuitive and predictable, New Relic gives engineers more value for the money by helping improve planning cycle times, change failure rates, release frequency, and mean time to resolution. This helps the world’s leading brands including adidas Runtastic, American Red Cross, Australia Post, Banco Inter, Chegg, GoTo Group, Ryanair, Sainsbury’s, Signify Health, TopGolf, and World Fuel Services (WFS) improve uptime, reliability, and operational efficiency to deliver exceptional customer experiences that fuel innovation and growth.
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AI TECH
XSELL Technologies | August 09, 2022
XSELL Technologies, a leader in conversational AI for contact center agent optimization, announced that XSELL Agent Experience powered by VoiceStream is available on the Five9 CX Marketplace, empowering customers to amplify top performer outcomes across their contact centers. Leveraging the strength of Five9 cloud contact center solutions, the partnership makes it easy for businesses to integrate XSELL Agent Experience with the Five9 Intelligent Cloud Contact Center.
Working together, Five9 and XSELL partnered to deliver real results to a healthcare customer, in the form of $6.9 million in annual incremental profit, an 11% increase in conversion rate and a 52% increase in appointments booked by agents. Read more in the just-published case study: “Health Insurance Provider Uses AI Conversion Maps to Drive Patient Acquisition, Engagement, and Retention with Care at Home.”
“We are delighted to bring the power of XSELL Agent Experience to Five9 CX Marketplace to support organizations in their pursuit of a better customer experience while delivering results that matter.”
Matt Coughlin, Founder and CEO, XSELL Technologies
The Five9 platform facilitates billions of call minutes annually and provides digital engagement, analytics, workflow automation, workforce optimization, and practical AI to create more human customer experiences, engage and empower contact center agents, and deliver tangible business results. XSELL’s AI-powered technology takes a data-driven approach to consistently delivering top performer outcomes by identifying and replicating specialized skill sets, with precision and at scale, across every agent, enterprise-wide. With XSELL Agent Experience, businesses can access AI-generated guidance to improve their customer and agent experience in real-time across the enterprise, driving tangible results like increased NPS scores, decreased Average Handle Time (AHT), and increasing Speed to Proficiency.
“Five9 is committed to delivering AI solutions that improve the customer and agent experience, and we are excited to work with partners like XSELL who want to build on our VoiceStream platform to deliver additional innovation and use cases with that same goal in mind,” said Jake Butterbaugh, SVP Global Partner Sales, Five9.
XSELL Technologies is sponsoring Five9 CX Summit, taking place Aug. 9-11 at the Aria Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, and will demonstrate XSELL Agent Experience in the CX Hub at the event. Five9 CX Summit is the #1 cloud contact center conference dedicated to making CX work for real life. Learn more about the event, including how to register, here.
About XSELL Technologies
XSELL Technologies was founded on the belief that the behaviors of the best contact center agents could be learned, replicated, and amplified to every agent in real-time to transform the way that businesses interact with their customers. Today, the XSELL team is partnering with Fortune 50 customers to drive quantifiable improvements in sales results, service metrics, agent engagement, and the overall customer experience.
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