Miro^®, the visual workspace for innovation, today announced the appointment of David Obstler to the Miro Board of Directors.

Obstler, who currently serves as Datadog's Chief Financial Officer, brings more than 30 years of deep financial experience, with more than 20 years specifically focused on tech companies. Prior to Datadog, Obstler served as CFO of TravelClick, OpenLink Financial, MSCI Inc., Risk Metrics Group, and Pinnacor. Prior to that, he held investment banking positions at JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, and Goldman Sachs. Obstler also serves on the Board of Directors of Braze Inc.

"We are very pleased to welcome David Obstler to the Miro Board of Directors. As Miro continues to scale, we believe we'll benefit greatly from the expertise and outside perspective David brings," said Justin Coulombe, Chief Financial Officer, Miro. "David's experience building and growing successful SaaS businesses are deeply relevant. We look forward to partnering closely with him to execute on our vision."

"I was drawn to Miro because of its large opportunity, category leadership, and strong business profile," said Obstler. "I'm looking forward to working with the Miro team to help scale this business into the future."

Rollup is designed to be the last auth system developers ever need to integrate

Rollup ID, the user management platform providing simple and secure auth for the private web, announces its Beta launch. By bringing all of a user's authentication methods under a single digital ID, Rollup enables simpler onboarding and sign-in and provides businesses with a better means of keeping track of users, no matter what credentials they use. Rollup is standards-compliant for seamless integration and supports a variety of common authentication methods, with support for more to be rolled out over the course of the Beta period.

Rollup ID reimagines auth from first principles to make authentication and authorization easier to manage and simpler for users to navigate with a user-centric solution. For too long, authentication (verifying credentials) and authorization (permissioning users) have been treated disparately, resulting in high-friction user experiences and challenging user management. Rollup takes the opposite approach, housing all of a users' credentials in a unique digital ID "Passport" that puts users in control of their credentials and allows apps to identify users no matter which authentication method they use.

"User management is a headache for many businesses, and auth remains a problematic part of conversion funnels," said Adrian Maurer, Founder of Rollup ID. "It turns out that both pain points can be addressed in a single stroke when authentication and authorization are harmonized in a unified digital ID system."

Using Rollup, businesses can progressively authorize users' access to particular features or domains. Whereas in a fragmented auth system, each authentication method is logged as a unique user, Rollup automatically associates all of a users' credentials with their digital ID. This allows for vastly improved onboarding and offboarding experiences where users can get started trying out an app by just sharing a single identifier, such as an email, and only at the moment of accessing a particular feature will the app prompt them for an additional credential that's needed. This makes it simple for companies to operate in compliance with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.

Rollup ID is built to be enterprise-ready. It's OIDC and OAuth 2.0 compliant, making integration plug-and-play, and can be easily personalized with custom designs and host names. This also means it works out of the box with widely used existing auth platforms, so companies can phase into using Rollup. Additionally, Rollup supports a variety of authentication methods, including passwordless credentials like email-based one-time password (OTP) and Web3 wallet sign-in as well as social sign-ins, with support for passkeys coming later in the Beta.

"Rollup ID is the easiest way to add robust Web3 login to your web app," said Byron Hsu, Orange DAO Head of Product. "Because it's Oauth2 compatible, it's simple and secure to integrate.

"There are many legacy players in identity access management that have antiquated ways and means of federating identity across multiple applications and services," said Steven Ward, Authenticate.com Founder & CEO. "Rollup ID is revolutionizing how users control their data, their privacy and access to their information in a compliant, ethical and practical way."

"Rollup ID is solving problems that businesses deal with every day," said George Colwell, Sr. Vice President, IDVerifact. "In a world of constantly evolving and complex regulations, we really need more technology like Rollup ID."

"Rollup ID bridges the chasm between the user experience people demand and the power and freedom of the distributed web," said Andrew Schwab of Protocol Labs. "Rollup ID's approach incorporates the ethos of Web3 into a solution that meets users where they are while offering an intuitive onramp to truly user-controlled identity."

As the Beta progresses, Rollup will be implementing feedback and releasing additional valuable features. The team is committed to enabling fine-grain privacy controls and will be launching masked emails as well as thoughtfully implemented know-your-customer (KYC) functionality that allows users to first visit an application through pre-authorization and only complete the KYC process when they're ready to perform particular actions like financial transactions. Better yet, with Rollup users' KYC information is portable, meaning once they've completed the identity verification once it will enable them to access other sites and apps. Finally, Rollup will enable object storage, allowing information such as application data to be stored in a user's ID rather than on a centralized database. Because this object storage is portable, users will be able to do things like take financial data from their bank to an accounting app for preparing their tax returns.

Pendo, the all-in-one product experience platform, today announced highlights from its first two fiscal quarters ending July 31, 2023. Key highlights include onboarding over 35 additional six-figure customers, launching an exciting new AI product roadmap, and appointing three new C-suite executives. Will May has joined the company as chief revenue officer; and JR Rettig and Jason McKerr were promoted to chief people officer and senior vice president of engineering, respectively. More than 10,000 companies now use Pendo to provide better software experiences to over 700 million people every month.

Today's announcement comes on the heels of the July 2023 launch of Pendo AI, an ever-growing collection of AI-powered products and features that enable customers to accelerate product discovery, drive product-led growth, and automate personalized in-app experiences at scale.

"We've sped up the pace of innovation at Pendo and it's paying off in a compelling AI roadmap, and a record number of new products and features shipping in time for Pendomonium," said Todd Olson, CEO and co-founder of Pendo. "Our strong start to this fiscal year is promising and with a new revenue leader and our flagship event on track to be our biggest and best yet, we are well positioned to carry this momentum forward." 

Highlights of H1 FY24 include:  

Revenue and customer growth: Pendo's strong start to the year was driven by accelerated international momentum, existing customer expansion, and free-to-paid conversions. With the addition of meaningful six-figure customers, Pendo now has 425 customers with an annual contract value over $100,000. 

New North American customers include Vimeo, U.S. News and World Report, Facilisgroup, Connect for Health Colorado, TimelyCare, Ivanti, and Transflo. New EMEA customers include Euromonitor International, CARMA, Newcross Healthcare Solutions, Mangopay, and Flock. And in APAC, new customers include Nearmap, AI Inside Inc., and Kanazawa Institute of Technology. 

Customers that expanded their relationships with Pendo in the first half of 2023 include Abrigo, Atlassian, Grubhub, Quickbase, StarRez, and Simpro Group.

Product: In the first half of the fiscal year, Pendo announced numerous new products, features and capabilities, including: 

• Pendo AI: A series of new innovations, along with a long-term product roadmap, to enhance every part of the Pendo platform with artificial intelligence and automation. Pendo's AI investments include one-click guides, instant summaries of qualitative user feedback, and auto-generated customer expansion campaigns, enabling companies to deliver exponentially better digital experiences across the software they buy, build, or sell.
• Pendo Data Sync: An easy way to export product usage data from Pendo into a cloud storage destination of choice, enabling teams to analyze product data along with other business data to make more confident, data-informed decisions.
• Pendo Free enhancements: Pendo's free offering now includes the ability to create roadmaps and deliver in-app NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys. Additional tiered subscription plans help free users easily upgrade to a paid plan.
• New certification course: Pendo continues to drive the product-led movement forward with its suite of certification courses, launching a new Product Management Basics Certification, and bringing its highly popular Product-led Certification to Japan. The courses have had over 85,000 registrations in total.

Pendomonium 2023: Preparation has been fierce ahead of the seventh edition of Pendo's annual tech event, Pendomonium, returning to Raleigh, NC on October 17-19. Over 1,500 attendees are expected at the annual festival for product and digital transformation leaders, who will explore the theme "How to break away". The event will feature 35+ educational sessions, including an AI spotlight series featuring experts from Google Cloud, Pendo, Writer, and Ada. Other highlight speakers include OpenAI innovator and investor Fraser Kelton, and Milk Bar Founder and Chef Christina Tosi. The event culminates with a live performance from seven-time Grammy Award winner Big Boi, formerly of legendary hip hop band OutKast. 

Global: A new datacenter in Japan now enables local customers to store data in the country. Also in Japan, the second-annual Digital Adoption Forum drew hundreds of attendees for talks by industry experts and Pendo customers. In Australia, Pendo launched its partnership with Product Rocket, a product management and UX design consultancy. 

Corporate: C-suite additions include:

• Will May, who joins Pendo as chief revenue officer to oversee the company's go-to-market (GTM) function, including sales, solutions, success, and services. Prior to Pendo, he was chief revenue officer of productivity platform ClickUp. During his tenure, he helped drive ClickUp's large customers up by 82% YoY. Before ClickUp, Will also led similar commercial, business growth-oriented roles at international brands Zscaler and AppDynamics (later acquired by Cisco).
• JR Rettig becomes chief people officer after serving as senior vice president of talent; and Jason McKerr moves into the global role of senior vice president of engineering, having previously led U.S. engineering.

Awards: Pendo earned spots on the Inc. Best Workplaces and Forbes Cloud 100 lists for the sixth year in a row. The company was also named among the Inc. 5000 for the fifth time, and was awarded a Best Software Product for 2023 by G2. Jennifer Shevach – Pendo's senior director of engineering – earned a Next Tech Award, gaining recognition as one of North Carolina's rising tech stars.

Vercel, the leading frontend cloud provider—and the creators and maintainers of Next.js—has announced the achievement of ISO 27001 certification.

ISO 27001 is a globally recognized standard that evaluates the effectiveness of Vercel's Information Security Management System (ISMS) implementation across various domains. By achieving this certification, Vercel continues to demonstrate its dedication to upholding industry-leading security standards and implementing robust security measures across all facets of their business.

To obtain the ISO 27001 certification, Vercel underwent rigorous audits performed by Schellman, an independent third-party auditor who evaluated the effectiveness of its ISMS implementation across various domains such as risk assessment, asset management, access control measures, incident response procedures, and continuous improvement processes.

"Our team at Vercel has had security at our core with every step we’ve made. The achievement of ISO 27001 certification reinforces our commitment towards safeguarding our customer's data while maintaining their trust in us,” said Guillermo Rauch, CEO and Founder at Vercel.

Coupled with Vercel’s SOC 2 Type II (Security, Availability, and Confidentiality) compliance, the ISO 27001 certification assures Vercel's global customer base that their assets are handled with top-of-the-line security and care. This latest accreditation reinforces the company's position as a trusted partner in providing innovative technology solutions across industries, including finance and banking, healthcare and more.

“As we envision the Frontend Cloud, Vercel considers security as a foundation of this future,” Ty Sbano, Chief Information Security Officer at Vercel. “It represents our dedication to fostering a collective approach to security, exemplified by our proactive measures to continuously adapt our security practices, effectively mitigating emerging risks and promoting a culture of more creative experimentation with reduced long-term risk."

Vercel remains dedicated to maintaining its security certifications and expanding its compliance program to other regulatory and industry frameworks as we continue to empower developers with the tools they need to build secure, resilient, and modern web experiences and applications.

The report also reveals the impact of poor Digital Employee Experience on workers, 57% report serious friction with work tech at least weekly and 61% say negative experiences with work tech impacts morale

Ivanti, the tech company that elevates and secures Everywhere Work, today announced the results of its 2023 Report: New Imperatives for Digital Employee Experience, which details how technology drives employee satisfaction, retention and productivity. Ivanti surveyed 7,800 IT professionals, executives and end users around the world, across a broad range of industries, to gauge their opinions on the current state and future of digital employee experience (DEX) – including how they believe the advancement in AI has and will impact employees.

While many IT workers see the productivity benefits of AI, 56% believe it benefits employers more than employees. Additionally, 63% are concerned generative AI tools might take their job in the next five years compared to 44% of office workers. Interestingly, when office workers need IT for a problem, they prefer to have a human on the other end, adding to IT's workload. When asked about leveraging a chatbot/automation that is as helpful as using a human, 58% still preferred human interaction. In short, IT professionals and employees aren’t sold on AI quite yet, so it is up to executives to address their employees’ fears and allocate resources to advance DEX.

The report revealed that inadequate DEX practices are much more than a tech problem for knowledge workers:

• 78% say they could be more productive with different tools.
• 57% report serious friction at least weekly while using workplace technology.
• 17% have either quit due to poor tech or would consider it — and the figure is nearly 2x as high for Gen Z.
• 61% say negative technology experiences impact morale.

“Organizations globally are grappling with how to optimize Digital Employee Experience (DEX) for the entire workforce,” said Jeff Abbott, Ivanti CEO. “Best-in-class organizations view DEX as a powerful tool to improve accessibility, employee retention and the security of their organization. However, with the rapid progress of AI and automation, the real DEX opportunity is for organizations to enhance employee productivity, speed, and value creation with the best possible IT solution platform.”

Notably, IT professionals who are tasked with implementing DEX in the organization don’t always reap the benefits of it. While the vast majority of IT professionals (84%) want to continue to work remotely at least some of the time, they’re also significantly more likely to experience a wide range of technology problems at work compared to other office workers. Among the IT workers we surveyed:

• 85% spend at least part of their week at home, yet over a quarter (27%) say their tech tools are not as effective when working remotely.
• 39% report too many logins, 47% report too many digital notifications and 42% report too many tools/platforms required as a tech problem they experience at work.
• One in five say they don’t have full visibility into which workplace applications employees use.

SVP of Global Account Management, Jim Tobolski, will be responsible for prioritizing the customer amidst high growth for the business

Validity, the leading provider of data quality and email deliverability solutions, announced the addition of its new Senior Vice President of Global Account Management, Jim Tobolski, to its leadership team. He will focus on fostering a collaborative and high-performing revenue team to support the customer experience and fuel the company's aggressive growth goals.

Tobolski brings over 25 years of experience in software and data sales where he has consistently showcased his expertise in creating and executing transformative strategies that deliver exceptional results for both customers and industry-leading organizations. Most recently he served as Vice President of Global Alliances & Channels at BrightEdge and Senior Vice President of Sales, Client Management & Strategic Alliances at Vericast. Furthermore, Tobolski's success is proven by his ability to orchestrate highly organized collaborations among cross-functional sales and customer success teams.

"Jim is known for his unwavering commitment to putting the customer first, with a distinguished reputation for inspiring results-driven customer strategies that not only cultivate strong client loyalty through value-driven engagement, but also influence revenue expansion and growth," said Jeff Lundal, CRO at Validity. "He is a critical addition to the leadership team to ensure Validity continues to uplevel the customer experience as we work toward achieving our growth goals."

"Validity is a key player in the ever-evolving data and email deliverability space. In the competitive and challenging economic environment of today, we must remain committed to putting the best possible customer experience first," said Jim Tobolski, SVP of Global Account Management at Validity. "I am passionate about software and data and can't wait to play a role in shaping and implementing innovative strategies to elevate the experience and results for our valued customers."

This hire follows significant momentum from the company, with the addition of Jeff Hassemer as SVP of Marketing and Jeff Lundal as Chief Revenue Officer, as well as new features and functionalities within DemandTools to make high-quality data more accessible across the globe.

AtData releases a robust machine-learning-based Engagement Score to identify the most engaged email addresses into its flagship SafeToSend email and verification hygiene solution.

AtData, the leading provider of email address intelligence, today announced the addition of its new Engagement Score within its SafeToSend® service which ranks email addresses based on a wealth of engagement and activity signals. The AtData Engagement Score will help clients identify actively used emails and utilize various levels of engagement to increase core metrics, improve deliverability, more accurately segment, and better qualify leads.

Investing heavily into machine learning – as seen with recent enhancements – the Engagement Score factors in recency, quantity, type, and sources of activity based on processing billions of email opens, website visits, and other usage signals every month. This new score provides a comprehensive view of a single email address and its activity across the web to inform an organization how an email behaves beyond the silo of its own email list or email service provider. This enables improved activation and segmentation as emails with varying scores can be targeted, messaged, and analyzed differently. The Engagement Score helps businesses get to know the individual behind the email address better, and, by targeting highly engaged emails, it can be used to improve inbox delivery and response.

With the addition of the Engagement Score within SafeToSend - an already best-in-class email validation service AtData continuously improves upon - organizations gain access to an efficient method to distinguish audiences of value. They can benefit from the score ranges more likely to engage with them and become customers, identify lookalike audiences to improve ROI, and increase conversions.

"By leveraging the power of our unparalleled data and our innovations utilizing advanced machine learning, AtData is developing tools no modern organization should be without," said AtData's CEO, Tom Burke. "We have the capabilities to minimize unknown rates on the status of an email address, identify dangerous domains rapidly, and monitor email lists to protect their integrity. Our Engagement Score has profound implications with email-centric data strategies, and we're including it to continue to improve upon our SafeToSend service."

The new Engagement Score is available to all new SafeToSend subscribers at no additional cost.

"Generally, email verification services only tell you whether an email address is deliverable or not. AtData is taking a leap forward to help marketers determine if an email address is active and engaged," said AtData's VP of Marketing, Mallory Green. "The addition of the Engagement Score into SafeToSend sets it apart from other verification solutions, providing more value and rapidly benefitting our customers."

Integration fully-governs data through automation, fine-grained controls, data classification and policy enforcement to secure data and improve transparency

Extend End-to-End Data Governance to generative AI to unlock innovation

Privacera, the AI and data security governance company founded by the creators of Apache Ranger™ and the industry's first comprehensive generative AI governance solution, today announced its integration with Collibra, the Data Intelligence company, which enables seamless end-to-end data security and data governance. From data cataloging and data classification to enforcement of data access policies, the integration automates data governance and streamlines compliance and auditing.

The new Privacera connector functionality for Collibra enables users to:

• Import Collibra's data classification tags into Privacera, ensuring consistent classification definitions between data catalog and data security governance platforms
• Automatically create and enforce Privacera's data access and security policies including data masking and encryption based on Collibra data classifications
• Surface Privacera's data access policies through Collibra UI, achieving a single and complete view for compliance

"Together with Collibra, we are enabling our joint users to build fully-automated data security and governance workflows with ease. This includes the initial step of discovering and classifying sensitive data, ensuring the automatic enforcement of relevant data policies, and the ability to streamline audits," said Balaji Ganesan, CEO and co-founder at Privacera. This integration is taking away the burden for users of performing manual, complex and error-prone tasks in an increasingly complex data and AI landscape."

"Privacera's Integration for Collibra is a major step to automate consistent data governance and policy enforcement," said Robert S. Seiner, Author of Non-Invasive Data Governance and Non-Invasive Data Governance Strikes Again (Technics 2014 & 2023) and the President and Principal of KIK Consulting & Educational Services. "Collibra users will be able to seamlessly push their data classification tags into Privacera. Based on those classifiers, Privacera will automatically apply fine-grained controls to sensitive data. In turn, these data access policies will be transferred back to where Collibra houses and maintains policies. This integration creates improved transparency for data stewards, simplifies audits and ensures a consistent policy enforcement at scale."

The Privacera integration with Collibra will give enterprises the confidence to secure their data end-to-end. Key capabilities include:

End-to-End Compliance
A complete compliance management solution integrates the processes for sensitive data discovery, classification, policy creation, and control implementation.

Automate Data Security
Import Collibra data classifications and automatically apply masking and encryption policies natively in the data sources, automating data security and ensuring data is protected, and adhere to privacy regulations such as GDPR or CCPA.

Enhanced Data Controls
Leverage Collibra classifications for fine-grained data access controls and enforce data access policies based on user roles or other user attributes, which enables granular control over who can access specific data assets, ensuring data confidentiality and eliminating the risk of unauthorized data access.

A Single View of Compliance
Integrate data security and access control policies into Collibra, allowing data stewards, internal auditors, and external auditors to have a one-stop shop for demonstrating regulatory compliance.