Gernaey to Lead Transformation of Global Marketing Strategy at Aptean

Today, Aptean, a global provider of mission-critical enterprise software solutions, announced the appointment of Miguel Gernaey as the company's new Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Gernaey brings decades of expertise in B2B enterprise software marketing to guide strategic growth for the company.

"Miguel's proven leadership, extensive experience in the technology industry, and innovative approach to demand generation and digital marketing make him an invaluable addition to our team,” said TVN Reddy, CEO at Aptean. “His track record of leading global transformation and driving growth make him the ideal marketing leader for Aptean’s next stage of growth. We look forward to leveraging his expertise as we continue to expand our presence in the global market."

Prior to joining Aptean, Gernaey served as EVP, Digital and Demand Marketing at Sage. There, he spearheaded global digital marketing transformation, significantly boosting digital availability of the brand, which ultimately translated to revenue growth. Gernaey’s past tenure also includes eight years at Dell Technologies, where he served in several marketing roles, including founding and leading the company’s global marketing analytics, insights and strategy function. His early career also encompasses fifteen years in management consulting, focused on enhancing performance outcomes for clients in the technology industry.

Gernaey’s appointment underscores his expertise in leading global teams, his in-depth understanding of the enterprise software market and his extensive knowledge of buyers in Europe, all of which will be vital in driving Aptean's continued success.

“I’m pleased to join Aptean at such an exciting time in the company’s history,” said Miguel Gernaey, CMO at Aptean. “I look forward to working with the talented team at Aptean as we build the engine to strengthen and extend the company’s global reach together.”

The new solution combines customer intelligence, audience definition, and content personalization into a single Gen AI-powered workflow, enhancing efficiency and speed for marketing campaigns at scale.

Today, at Google Cloud Next '23, Typeface introduced an integrated solution with GrowthLoop and Google Cloud’s BigQuery and GenAI Foundation Models to empower marketers with personalized generative AI throughout the entire campaign creation process. This solution merges generative AI into a single, streamlined workflow that spans from precisely defining audience segments to crafting tailor-made content that can be distributed quickly across multiple marketing channels. Marketers can now accelerate campaign launches, achieve impressive efficiency gains, and uphold a uniform brand message across all touchpoints.

Despite substantial investments in audience and customer data, marketing organizations still grapple with effectively transforming this data into targeted, personalized content at the pace required by market demand. Generative AI presents a solution by expediting audience and content creation, while retaining brand consistency.

An End-to-End Solution to Scale AI-Powered Marketing Campaigns

The GenAI Marketing Solution streamlines campaign creation, enabling rapid experimentation and personalized content delivery across channels. Key capabilities include:

• Unified customer data access in BigQuery: Using BigQuery, users can build a holistic Customer 360 view by tapping into first-party data from ads, sales, customers, and products.
• Intuitive audience definition with natural language understanding: By connecting GrowthLoop with BigQuery, marketers can define audience segments using GrowthLoop's natural language understanding capabilities and drag-and-drop journey orchestration tools, all within their data cloud.
• Tailored cross-channel content creation: Utilize Typeface's embedded application to craft personalized content that blends GrowthLoop and BigQuery's detailed audience segments with Typeface's brand-personalized AI leveraging Google GenAI Foundation Models. Marketers can generate tailored content across various channels, such as blogs, landing pages, and more. They can even create brand-specific content with Typeface directly within Workspace, such as Google Docs and Google Slides, to bring AI-content generation into existing workflows.
• Effective orchestration and performance measurement: Deploy target audiences and content to your advertising channels with just a few clicks. Monitor audience targeting and creative success in BigQuery, complete with performance metrics like ROI and A/B tests in GrowthLoop.

The solution offers immense value for personalized, targeted campaigns that enhance engagement and conversion rates. Business outcomes include amplified campaign and experiment launches, realized productivity efficiencies with up to a tenfold increase in content creation, broadened reach across additional creative channels, delivery of personalized creative and audiences to numerous customer journeys, and consistent brand representation across teams, campaigns, and business lines.

"We are delighted to join forces with Typeface and Google Cloud to deliver a new era of marketing workflows for businesses worldwide," said Chris Sell, Co-Founder of GrowthLoop. “It is an exciting time at GrowthLoop to have the ability to support digital marketing teams in their efforts to be more efficient and have the best tools in the business at their fingertips.”

"Collectively, we're addressing a fundamental challenge that enterprises have grappled with for years – the ability to consistently tell their stories and engage with customers with compelling content quickly," said Abhay Paransis, Founder and CEO of Typeface. "Our partnership with Google Cloud and GrowthLoop helps marketers effortlessly merge data insights with creative storytelling, amplifying campaign impact and transforming a handful of campaigns into hundreds."

“We are pleased that Typeface and GrowthLoop will use Google Cloud's generative AI capabilities and AI Lakehouse platform, BigQuery, to simplify personalized content creation,” said Gerrit Kazmaier, VP & GM, Data & Analytics at Google Cloud. “With generative AI, customers can create more impactful, tailored marketing campaigns, with tools that help improve efficiency throughout the campaign lifecycle."

Join the ever-growing cohort of companies embarking on the journey of generative AI for marketing. The new GenAI Marketing Solution is now available in private preview for current BigQuery users or users seeking to migrate to BigQuery. 

New Designer Cloud integration brings AI-powered data preparation capabilities to Looker Studio, accelerating the data prep process by up to 10 times faster

Alteryx, Inc., the Analytics Cloud Platform company, today is expanding its partnership with Google Cloud to provide Looker Studio users with native access to a free limited version of Alteryx Designer Cloud's AI-powered data preparation capabilities and enhanced connectivity. This new integration builds on Alteryx and Google Cloud's commitment to make it easier for customers to surface critical insights for decision-makers in a timely manner, resulting in actions that can improve business outcomes.

"With businesses under more pressure to get value from technology investments, Alteryx, in partnership with Google, is minimizing the friction in the analytics process so enterprises can gain more accurate insights much faster than before," said Kate Wright, senior director, product management at Google. "Deepening our partnership with Alteryx will help deliver seamless data preparation and powerful insights from one interface, making it easier for our customers to achieve even more breakthrough innovations with their data."

The new Alteryx Designer Cloud and Looker Studio integration will initially provide users enhanced cloud connectivity to Excel and CSV files and storage platforms like Sharepoint and OneDrive. Users will also be able to efficiently transform data and improve data quality using Designer Cloud's data preparation capabilities, allowing them to prep their data up to 10 times faster, and leading to greatly improved decision intelligence.

Further, Designer Cloud's intuitive self-service interface enables non-technical workers with functional domain knowledge to prepare their own data as part of their process of building data visualizations. The free version of Designer Cloud available on Looker Studio will have limited features with the option to upgrade to the full Designer Cloud experience.

"In today's macroeconomic environment, time to insight is key to thriving and gaining competitive advantage," said Alteryx's Adam Wilson, senior vice president and general manager of Alteryx Analytics Cloud. "Alteryx provides Looker Studio's millions of monthly active users with access to critical new data sources and saves them a significant amount of time by cleaning up their data in just a few clicks. They'll be able to increase their productivity by automating the refinement of raw data and the blending of diverse sources to create new data products that will drive key business initiatives."

This integration expands on Alteryx and Google Cloud's partnership, which includes Google Cloud Dataprep, an intelligent cloud data service that processes more than 1.4 million jobs each month.

"Alteryx and Google Cloud have a strong relationship rooted in improving the most time-consuming portion of the analytics process as identified in our research: data preparation," said David Menninger, SVP and research director at Ventana Research. "By bringing Excel connectivity and native data preparation capabilities of Designer Cloud to Looker Studio, Alteryx and Google Cloud are giving users powerful end-to-end analytics from one interface. This is incredibly valuable at a time when dynamic environments and market conditions are forcing business leaders to make more strategic decisions at lightning speed."

New capabilities give customers choice in where and how they place their data to enhance agility, reduce business risks, and lower costs

Quantum Corporation, the leader in solutions for unstructured data, today announced new features in the company's end-to-end data platform, including advances to its policy-driven data movement technologies, to help customers build their ideal hybrid cloud workflow to seamlessly bridge on-prem deployments with multi-cloud integration. With the massive amount of data customers need to retain for business and compliance purposes, customers are using both public and private cloud resources to store and manage this data, driven by their budget, frequency with which they need to access the data, and their data protection requirements. With these new features, customers can place data exactly where it's needed, when it's needed. By using a highly flexible and powerful hybrid cloud environment, customers increase operations agility, reduce business risk, and optimize costs across on-prem and public cloud resources.

"Our strategic vision is to deliver the best end-to-end data platform from on-premises to any cloud that empowers our customers to address their unstructured data needs across the entire data lifecycle," said Brian Pawlowski, chief development officer, Quantum. "This isn't about 'public cloud versus private cloud'; It's about giving customers choice and enabling them to create flexible, hybrid cloud workflows that are designed for their unique needs and goals, and these new features we are delivering make that easier for customers to achieve."

New capabilities include:

• Quantum DXi™ Cloud Share: DXi backup appliances have long delivered high performance, scalable backup, data protection, and disaster recovery across sites to give customers trusted business continuity. With DXi Cloud Share, customers get even more flexibility as DXi appliances can now tier compressed, deduplicated backup data sets to both private and public storage clouds, including Quantum ActiveScale, providing up to 70 times more efficient use of cloud storage*. This reduces business risks and costs, enabling offsite protection against ransomware and long-term retention of backup data for regulatory and in-house data compliance.
  
  
• Quantum FlexSync 3: FlexSync for years has been a trusted data mover of files to and from Quantum StorNext collaborative shared storage environments, and now FlexSync 3 adds fast, simple data replication to and from public and private clouds, including Quantum ActiveScale and in a future release, Quantum Myriad. FlexSync 3 provides a versatile data movement tool across Quantum's entire end-to-end portfolio, enabling customers to unite multiple on-premises and public cloud workflows across geographies with a shared, centralized object repository. This enables better collaboration among dispersed teams and delivers enhanced data protection and disaster recovery.
  
  
• Quantum ActiveScale™ Cold Replication: As organizations continue to collect, retain and analyze petabytes to exabytes of data with advanced AI analytics, they must reduce the total cost of ownership required to preserve this data. The ActiveScale object storage platform now provides the industry's first and only immutable object replication between cold data services, replicating cold data between ActiveScale systems, as well as replicating ActiveScale cold data to AWS S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval and Glacier Deep Archive Services. For massive data sets whose useful life spans from years to decades, ActiveScale Cold Replication delivers the most durable, cost-effective multi-copy solution for long-term retention so customers can analyze and derive insights from their data to drive business forward.

The new ActiveScale Cold Replication feature and FlexSync 3 are available immediately. DXi Cloud Share is planned for release in Q4 2023. FlexSync 3 for Myriad is planned for release next year.

Combination of Nylas and OpenAI will help developers to build deeper email integrations and more intelligent customer experiences without compromising on speed or security

Nylas, the state-of-the-art communications platform giving developers universal access to email, calendar, and contacts providers through a single API integration, today released its “Email by Nylas” a ChatGPT plugin, allowing ChatGPT plus users to build intelligent email integrations and features on top of Nylas. The plugin combines Nylas’ Email API, which allows users to connect to all the major email service providers, with OpenAI’s large language model so developers can efficiently harness the world’s most used communications channel, email, and most popular generative AI solution together in one single plugin.

The “Email by Nylas” plugin is the first of its kind, designed specifically for structuring and working with email data directly within the ChatGPT interface. With this, users can unlock email intelligence and insights, and build innovative email solutions quicker and more efficiently than before. Some potential benefits and use cases include:

• Enhanced Search: Save time by effortlessly searching entire inboxes, sent folders, and more based on sender, subject, date range, recipient, subject line, time frames, and keywords.
• Summarization: Quickly get the actionable insights and relevant information you need by removing clutter from long threads or summarizing emails within specific subject lines, individuals, or date ranges.
• Personalized Communication: Capture a user’s voice and tone based on previously sent emails in order to intelligently compose email drafts in personalized styles, lengths, and professional manners that accurately reflect the sender.

“Generative AI has taken the world by storm, and we are truly excited to be a part of the ChatGPT plugin ecosystem,” said Isaac Nassimi, SVP of Product at Nylas. “We believe that through the combination of Nylas and generative AI, we can help foster higher levels of productivity, creativity, and deep learning for developers and their teams. With the Nylas ChatGPT plugin, developers can layer large language model intelligence on top of the Nylas Email API in order to transform the way they complete business-critical tasks.”

The plugin is accessible to ChatGPT plus users through the ChatGPT plugin store.

Read our blog post for more details on the Email by Nylas plugin.

The Series C funding will accelerate AI21 Labs' ability to provide businesses with reliable and useful natural language AI

AI21 Labs, a leader in AI and large language models (LLMs), announced today the closing of $155 million in Series C funding to accelerate the growth of its highly accurate text-based generative AI services for enterprises. Investors include Walden Catalyst, Pitango, SCB10X, b2venture, Samsung Next and Prof. Amnon Shashua with participation from Google and NVIDIA. The new funding brings the company's total capital raised to $283 million at a valuation of $1.4 billion, further strengthening AI21 Labs as a leader among generative AI unicorns.

Founded in 2017 by AI luminaries Prof. Amnon Shasuha, Prof. Yoav Shoham, and Ori Goshen, AI21 Labs was one of the first to bring generative AI to the masses. In stride with growing demand, the company has built a strong customer base serving consumers to Fortune 100 companies with the power of its advanced LLM and natural language (NLP) technologies through easy-to-use applications and APIs.

AI21's unique approach goes beyond models, building AI systems that are easy to integrate and that generate reliable, trustworthy, and accurate results with more refined control than any standalone existing model.

AI21's proprietary Jurassic-2 foundation models are some of the world's largest and most sophisticated LLMs. Jurassic-2 powers AI21 Studio, a developer platform for building custom text-based business applications off of AI21's language models; and Wordtune, a multilingual reading and writing AI assistant for professionals and consumers.

Chairman Prof. Amnon Shashua said, "AI21 Labs is a pure play in AI as it develops and owns foundation models which are served as a platform to developers and enterprises, while developing derivatives, such as Wordtune, directly to end users. The current round fuels the growth of the company to reach its goal of developing the next-level of AI with the capabilities of reasoning across many domains. We believe that the impact of AI21 Labs growth plans would be of a global scale and quite soon."

Added co-CEOs Prof. Yoav Shoham and Ori Goshen: "We are grateful for this vote of confidence by current and new investors. AI21 Labs' cutting edge technology, including leading large language models and neurosymbolic technology, provides the robustness, predictability and explainability required in the era of AI-first enterprises. We look forward to continuing this journey with our investors, partners and customers".

"Generative AI is driving a new era of computing across every industry," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "The innovative work by the AI21 Labs team will help enterprises accelerate productivity and efficiency with generative AI-based systems that are accurate, trustworthy, and reliable."

The new funding comes on the heels of AI21's recent strides to bring generative AI to enterprises and professionals. This includes collaborations with market-leading customers in diverse sectors, among them Carrefour, Clarivate, eBay, Guesty, Monday.com and Ubisoft. The company was also named on the first ever CB Insights GenAI 50 List of Most Innovative Generative AI Startups.

Habu, the Global Innovator in Data Clean Room Software, announces it is bringing Google Cloud’s generative AI capabilities with Google Cloud to help enterprises and their partners implement data clean rooms with greater velocity and scale.

The introduction of generative AI marks a significant milestone in the evolution of data collaboration. Habu’s technology improves business insights by performing three pivotal functions:

• Opportunity Discovery: Generative AI can help users in clean rooms understand what types of insights and outcomes can be derived based on the data available in the clean room. For example, proactive alerts about data spend.
• Use Case Implementation: Once an analytical opportunity is identified, generative AI can reduce the time and effort required to implement each of the steps of the clean room workflow. For example, creating templates based on specific data segments and attributes.
• Enhanced User Interaction: Going beyond the traditional BI model of consuming insights, generative AI can allow end users to simply ask questions within clean room workflows, providing a more natural language way of asking questions and interpreting outputs. For example, asking which collaboration partners have the highest overlap within particular product cross-sell segments.

Clean rooms can create meaningful value for businesses in this arena, acting as secure conduits to access partner data without the need for physical data movement. With secure data practices, clean rooms can encourage data-rich businesses to share insights with strategic partners for model refinement.

One specific opportunity for enterprises is the ability to use clean rooms to tune or train their own proprietary AI models with context that can only be provided in collaboration with partners. For example, teams at CPG companies who are looking to ask AI questions that can only be answered with data involving retailers’ transactions, can use those signals from clean rooms to inform the downstream models with the necessary context.

Through this pioneering technology, Habu breaks down barriers for enterprises seeking to integrate insights from their LLMs. The utilization of critical 2nd party data from partners within a secure clean room environment optimizes contextual understanding, ultimately bolstering the entire Google Cloud ecosystem.

"Today's business landscape demands contextually rich insights to drive impactful decisions," stated Matt Karasick, Chief Product Officer at Habu. "By enabling enterprises to access partner data securely through clean rooms, we're catalyzing the creation of truly insightful AI systems that can supercharge operations and outcomes."

“Generative AI represents an opportunity for businesses to better utilize and derive more value from their data,” said Rodrigo Rocha, Director, Global Partnerships at Google Cloud. “Through new generative AI features, built with Vertex AI, our partners like Habu are helping people more quickly understand their critical data, with the highest levels of privacy and security.”

AdCellerant releases its latest product, Addressable Streaming TV, to allow advertisers to optimize the ROI of their ad campaigns.

Built on a core principle of innovation, AdCellerant announced their newest product offering, Addressable Streaming TV. This groundbreaking solution combines large-screen, TV-sized devices' unparalleled brand awareness-building capabilities with micro-targeting precision and foot traffic attribution.

AdCellerant's Addressable Streaming TV product is set to reshape how businesses connect with their target audience, maximizing the return on their investment (ROI) for every advertising dollar spent.

"It's impressive to see how well this product is already working for advertisers of different industries," said Ben Bouslog, VP of Business Development. "As we know, video is one of the fastest growing digital channels, and this product combines precision targeting, high-quality networks and inventory, and success metrics like foot traffic attribution and conversion tracking to get our partners geared up for their next opportunity."

The new Addressable Streaming TV product offers a range of benefits that enable businesses to take their advertising efforts to the next level. These benefits include precise targeting, data-driven decisions, ad experience control, cross-device attribution, a safe environment, and impactful insights.

Unlock Maximum ROI with Addressable Streaming TV

This innovation allows advertisers to optimize the ROI of their ad campaigns by strategically placing video ads during premium, professional-produced TV shows and movies. In 2022, Streaming TV viewership surpassed traditional cable for the first time, reflecting the shift in consumer preferences. With 88% of American households owning at least one internet-connected TV device and 92% of streaming content viewers using ad-supported services, the impact of Addressable Streaming TV cannot be overstated.

Proven results with AdCellerant's Addressable Streaming TV

AdCellerant collaborated with a significant investment group on a campaign targeting homeowners interested in selling their properties at a discounted rate. Think, "We buy homes for less." Upon launching their Addressable Streaming TV campaign, the investment group experienced a remarkable 55x return on ad spend. It achieved $140,000 in savings on homes purchased within the first month of its campaign. The impact was quantifiable and verified through matchback reports, solidifying the effectiveness of streaming campaigns and driving revenue.