• First-of-its-kind solution discovers and helps remediate difficult to detect identity-based threats

• Provides organizations with a 360-degree view of all identities and privileges to eliminate blind spots and shut down attack pathways

BeyondTrust, the worldwide leader in intelligent identity and access security, today announced the general availability of its groundbreaking Identity Security Insights solution. With the escalating complexity of cyber threats targeting identities and credentials, this innovative solution sets a new standard in securing both human and non-human identities and privileges, providing organizations with unparalleled visibility and advanced identity-first threat detection capabilities.

Identity Security Insights represents a transformative addition to the BeyondTrust platform, providing an advanced intelligence layer that empowers organizations to achieve new levels of identity and access security. The solution offers a unified view of identities, accounts, cloud entitlements, and privileged access across the entire identity estate, enabling organizations to seamlessly correlate data from both BeyondTrust's products and third-party identity providers, such as Okta, Ping Identity, and Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), and cloud providers, such as AWS and Azure.

By harnessing advanced analytics and intelligence, Identity Security Insights provides real-time visualization of threats, illuminates potential attack paths, and offers smart, actionable recommendations to enhance identity hygiene. Early adopters of the solution have quickly discovered and remediated security risks where unauthorized users could gain access to sensitive systems and data, including unmanaged admin and over-privileged accounts, potential on-premises to cloud privilege escalation paths, pivot points that attackers could use to go from personal email accounts to corporate admin accounts, opportunities for session hijacking, and many other previously undetectable security gaps that could be compromised by bad actors.

Key Features of BeyondTrust's Identity Security Insights Solution include:

• Comprehensive Identity & Access Visibility: Gain a unified view of identities and access across your entire estate, including multi-cloud and on-premises environments, all from a single interface, providing a holistic understanding of identity-related risks.
• Identity Threat Detection: Instantly identify identity-based anomalies, ranked by severity, empowering organizations to detect and proactively respond to potential threats.
• Reduced Identity Attack Surface: Pinpoint blind spots and mitigate risks by proactively identifying vulnerabilities and recommending ways to close gaps and strengthen your identity security posture.
• Integrated Ecosystem: Leveraging the intelligence of BeyondTrust Privileged Access Management (PAM) products and other core Identity Access Management systems to automatically remediate identified threats, Identity Security Insights creates a robust and unified defense against cyberattacks.
• Quick Start, Instant Value: With a simple two-step process, organizations begin reaping benefits from actionable findings in less than 30 minutes.“The biggest thing that I’ve been excited about with Identity Security Insights is that you’re looking at my Okta,” said Chris Dailey, Manager of Information Security, Benjamin Moore. “You’re also the only one that has access to this kind of information across all my servers and my employees. I don’t have a tool collecting that local information other than BeyondTrust's solutions. There’s a lot that you can show me that no one else can.”

“Identity Security Insights completely revolutionizes the way organizations approach identity security, providing an unprecedented level of visibility, threat detection, and actionable insights that haven’t been available to date,” said Marc Maiffret, CTO of BeyondTrust. “We focus on securing the privileges and access that make compromised identities dangerous. By empowering organizations to proactively protect their identities, we’re continuing to spearhead advancements in cybersecurity that safeguard critical assets in today's evolving threat landscape.”

Taboola (Nasdaq: TBLA), a global leader in powering recommendations for the open web, helping people discover things they may like, today announced a new partnership with Foursquare, a leading geospatial technology platform designed to help businesses make smarter decisions and create more engaging customer experiences.

Through the deal, Taboola is giving its large number of advertisers access to Foursquare Attribution, a solution which allows advertisers, such as retailers, auto dealerships and dining brands, to measure the real-life effects of their Taboola campaigns. Through this partnership, Taboola and Foursquare are providing tens of thousands of advertisers clear visibility into the effectiveness of their campaigns, which focus on driving visitation. The partnership also provides insights that can help advertisers understand the customer journey.

Taboola is offering Foursquare Attribution, where available, to Taboola advertisers. Once advertisers are approved by Taboola for measurement, they will be able to view results automatically within Foursquare's Attribution User Interface (UI).

“We’re excited to partner with Foursquare, a pioneer of helping advertisers understand the real-world effect of their advertising,” said Adam Singolda, CEO and Founder at Taboola. “With Foursquare, we are offering yet another way to showcase the effectiveness of ads that run on Taboola, and in the process, giving our nearly 15,000 advertisers new ways to track their return on ad spend and inform future campaigns.”

“As brands with physical locations seek to connect with consumers, understanding the full consumer journey continues to be paramount to campaign success,” said Jim Watson, SVP of Global Business Development at Foursquare. “Taboola is a leader in native advertising, an industry effective at driving results, as evidenced by their work with many of the world’s top advertisers. We look forward to connecting our geospatial services and helping these brands unlock the potential of their marketing investment.”

Adobe Recognizes Customer Experience Solution with 2023 Adobe Experience Maker ‘Engager’ Award

Perficient, Inc. (Nasdaq: PRFT) (“Perficient”), the leading global digital consultancy transforming the world’s largest enterprises and biggest brands, today announced the successful implementation of an award-winning customer experience solution with Sunbelt Rentals, a leader in the equipment rental industry.

Sunbelt Rentals was growing rapidly, but its database and marketing solutions were not scalable due to system inflexibility. Perficient helped Sunbelt Rentals develop a scalable Adobe Commerce and Marketo Engage solution to collect and analyze data in real time, bring marketing campaigns to the market quickly, and deliver tailored content to customers at the right time.

“The Sunbelt Rentals network spans more than 1,200 locations, a portfolio of more than 550,000 pieces of equipment and tools, and customers from a variety of industries and touchpoints,” said Ronald Gaines, marketing automation manager, Sunbelt Rentals. “We needed a dynamic solution that could scale with our expanding enterprise and seamlessly integrate with our existing tools and platforms. Perficient worked in lockstep with us to strengthen our operations.”

By implementing Adobe solutions, Sunbelt Rentals transformed the customer experience and work management processes, resulting in increased abandoned cart conversion rates and a projected yearly revenue increase. Adobe recently celebrated the customer experience solution with a 2023 Adobe Experience Maker Award in the “Engager” category, recognizing the solution for exceptional achievement in transforming pipeline creation to drive measurable business growth.

“What an honor to be recognized by Adobe for our work with Sunbelt Rentals,” said Ed Hoffman, vice president, Perficient. “By harnessing the power of Adobe’s marketing automation and ecommerce technology, we were able to create an integrated solution with Sunbelt Rentals that drove immediate results, ROI, and revenue by delivering highly relevant and actionable content to customers when and where they need it. We’re proud to be the implementation partner for this award-winning solution.”

An Adobe Platinum Partner, Perficient provides end-to-end, integrated marketing solutions on Adobe Experience Cloud that tackle the ever-changing and increasingly complex challenges businesses face. With more than 20 years of experience and six Adobe specializations, Perficient combines the strategic imagination of an agency with a deep level of Adobe expertise and technical acumen to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Medallia’s $750M investments over the past two years in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning pays off as impressive milestones are reached

Medallia, Inc., the global leader in customer and employee experience, today announced it has surpassed more than 1 million active weekly users leveraging its powerful artificial intelligence-driven capabilities trained by more than 60 billion experience signals

Medallia Experience Cloud, the leading enterprise experience platform used by the largest and most admired brands in the world, captures signals across in-person, digital, and contact center interactions along with social media, transactional, and operational data, and democratizes insights across the enterprise in real time. By enabling everyone from the front line to senior leadership to make the right decisions and take immediate action, organizations are delivering more personalized experiences at scale using Medallia’s AI.

“While many companies are just now announcing their intention to invest in AI, Medallia customers have been leveraging our AI for more than 15 years to improve the experiences they provide to their customers and employees, increasing loyalty and retention, all while achieving significant operational efficiencies,” said Joe Tyrrell, Chief Executive Officer, Medallia. “Having 1 million weekly AI users on our platform, leveraging the insights from over 60 billion experience signals, proves Medallia AI is not a future promise, but rather has long been a reality. Having invested over $750 million in the past two years, combined with our deep domain expertise and proprietary data, enables our clients to automatically generate more personalized and unique experiences that lead to deeper relationships.”

Medallia has been building thoughtful, actionable, and native AI and machine learning capabilities since the launch of Text Analytics in 2008. Medallia’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) capabilities now support hundreds of languages, action-oriented machine learning models, and over 15,000 pre-learned topics, enabling personalized experiences.

What sets Medallia apart is the ability to embed intuitive and relevant AI across thousands of functionalities for every user and role for the largest enterprises in the world, while protecting customer data. Athena, Medallia’s native AI, is powerful enough for data scientists, while also being accessible for the non-technical front line user – enabling everyone to perform easier root cause analysis, take quicker action, and positively affect any organizations’ most important business metrics.

“Our upcoming releases for AI will embed predictive and proactive intelligence into every experience that customers and employees have with an organization,” said Tyrrell. “AI has always been foundational to how we empower our clients. We will continue to drive innovation with our generative models, while also ensuring that we protect our clients’ data by using our own proprietary neural networks that inform and automate personalized experiences across every interaction.”

Medallia’s AI powers text analytics, speech and conversational analytics, and numerous other capabilities, including:

• Real-time sentiment analysis of unstructured text to understand how customers and employees feel about what they are saying
• AI-powered speech-to-text transcription to capture insights from every conversation
• Automated scoring of every digital customer experience with a unique digital experience score (DXS) for predictive analytics that measures the quality of a user’s experience to prioritize areas most in need of attention and predictions of the user’s next likely action
• Automated surfacing of comprehensive trends, using unsupervised machine learning, to simplify root cause analyses for quicker resolution of rising issues
• Real-time decisioning informing next best actions that are tailored to the dynamic needs of each customer, in the moment

Medallia continues to develop new generative AI capabilities with Athena that will deliver immediate and tangible value to every user.

“Athena will enable users to automate the mundane, democratize generative AI, and anticipate the needs of every user,” said Tyrrell. “Medallia believes that every user should be able to ask questions about their data and be served user-friendly answers to those questions using generative AI. Intuitive, granular generative AI models should automatically be created to save teams hours of work and drive intelligent, automated actions.”

Athena’s future enhancements will empower businesses to personalize every individual experience at scale with common sense automations and analytics that empower front line employees to act on data-driven decisions.

Surpassing 1 million weekly active AI users and 60 billion experience signals reflects Medallia's vast innovation and investment in AI over the past 15 years, setting up Medallia to drive the next generation of AI-powered technology for experience stakeholders across organizations.

Rohan Sivaram to replace Steffan Tomlinson as Chief Financial Officer

Confluent, Inc. (NASDAQ:CFLT), the data streaming pioneer, today announced that Rohan Sivaram has been named Confluent’s Chief Financial Officer, effective August 16. Sivaram replaces Steffan Tomlinson who is leaving Confluent for another opportunity.

“Rohan is an exceptional finance and operations leader who has been instrumental to the success of our IPO and the track record we’ve established as a public company,” said Jay Kreps, co-founder and CEO, Confluent. “I’m thrilled to partner with him in his new role as we continue to grow the business while continuing to improve our margins. I also would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Steffan for his tremendous contributions to Confluent over the last three years.”

As CFO, Rohan will lead all of Confluent’s finance and business technology & data teams. Rohan is a seasoned executive with nearly two decades of experience across technology and the financial services industry. In his three years at Confluent, Rohan led Confluent’s FP&A, investor relations, treasury, and business operations teams. Prior to joining Confluent in October 2020, Rohan was the senior vice president of finance at Palo Alto Networks. In his six years at Palo Alto Networks, Rohan helped scale the company from a $750+ million to a $3.7 billion revenue run rate. Prior to that, he held a variety of roles at Symantec Corporation and Morgan Stanley. Rohan holds an MBA from Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management and a Bachelor’s in Commerce from St. Xavier’s College.

“I am thrilled about this opportunity and look forward to leading Confluent through its next stage of growth,” said Sivaram. “Our talented team and innovation engine have robust growth in data streaming. Looking forward, we remain focused on driving durable and efficient growth as we work toward becoming a profitable company.”

Jonathan Chadwick, Confluent board member and audit committee chair, added: “Having worked with Rohan closely over the past several years I am pleased to see this recognition of his capabilities and to welcome him as Confluent’s new CFO.”

New Technology Further Revolutionizes Gifting

Snappy, the award-winning gifting company, today announced the launch of its personal gifting plugin for ChatGPT, further revolutionizing how people give gifts. The Snappy Gifts plugin is powered by GPT-4. It uses Snappy's proprietary gifting data, as well as its rich expertise and deep insights earned from sending more than 3 million gifts worldwide, to ensure that the perfect gift is sent every time, for every recipient, on every occasion.

To use the Snappy Gifts plugin for ChatGPT, gift-givers input details about their recipients' interests and hobbies, and the desired gift budget. For example "A $50 gift for a camping-obsessed new dad who loves to bake." Using this information, the plugin generates a custom-curated gift collection. Gift givers can personalize the experience with a message and a range of delightful digital wrapping experiences and then notify their recipients via text or email that a gift collection is waiting for them. Recipients then use a custom link to select their favorite gift from the curated collection of gift options. 

Snappy offers a wide-ranging catalog of more than 10,000 expertly-curated gifts from trusted partners, ensuring that, whether it's for birthdays, anniversaries, or "just because," gift selections cater to every taste, preference, and budget.

Check out this video to see how the Snappy Gifts plugin takes all the guesswork out of gifting.

"We have always prided ourselves on eliminating the guesswork from gifting, and our new plugin seamlessly integrates Snappy's expertise with ChatGPT. With this integration, users can enjoy Snappy's functionality within the chatbot itself," said Hani Goldstein, Snappy's co-founder and CEO. "By meeting customers where they are and embracing the power of Generative AI, we were able to create an even more customizable, stress-free, time-saving, and joyful gifting experience. It's like having a personal gifting assistant at your fingertips." 

Users with a ChatGPTPlus account can install the Snappy Gifts ChatGPT plugin from the ChatGPT store directly without any additional charge. 

In a few short weeks the biggest WordPress event of the year is happening, WordCamp US. And GoDaddy (GDDY) will be front and center introducing its latest innovations to its WordPress Hosting product. GoDaddy will showcases its latest product offering focused on integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into WordPress to help designers and developers save time on a variety of tasks.

The new GoDaddy Managed WordPress brings AI into site building and managing customer relationships. By answering a few simple questions, users can have the first draft of a starter site completely built, with images included. And when it comes to working with customers, The Hub by GoDaddy Pro uses AI as a virtual assistant. This can help developers by improving their productivity by generating client communications, providing advice for running and growing their business, and helps with troubleshooting website errors. To see a preview of what's coming, check out this preview.

"The one-two punch of GoDaddy Managed WordPress and generative AI are incredible," said GoDaddy President Partners Paul Bindel. "The upgraded performance of GoDaddy Managed WordPress combined with the content creation abilities of generative AI almost gives designers and developers superpowers. This solution can help them save time and gives them the ability to create a variety of content easily. This is another step in our goal is to bring the latest technology to our customers in easy-to-use ways."

GoDaddy has revolutionized the onboarding process for building a WordPress site. Users are asked a few questions about their business and their goals for the site. GoDaddy AI takes over from there. It automatically creates a website, with content and images, based on the answered questions. Users still have complete control. Before the site is published, users can review and make edits to the content to ensure it aligns to their brand and reflects accurate and up-to-date information.

In addition to creating a website in a few short clicks, GoDaddy AI is also heavily featured in the Hub by GoDaddy Pro. This enables developers and designers to create customer proposals, get advice on how to more effectively and securely build a website, generate website content, and manage client communications all powered by AI. This gives designers and developers the ability to quickly and easily create their most vital communications to customers. Once they are happy with the message, they can send it to their clients. It is designed to be an indispensable asset in the toolbox of web professionals, guiding them through the intricacies of their web design and development projects.

To get a demo of these features, in addition to many others, stop by the GoDaddy.com booth at WordCamp US, August 25-26 in National Harbor, Maryland.

Dun & Bradstreet Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: DNB), a leading global provider of business decisioning data and analytics, announced today that Moody’s Investors Services (“Moody’s”) has upgraded both its corporate family rating and probability of default rating to B1 from B2 and its senior unsecured rating to B3 from Caa1. The company’s overall outlook is stable.

We are pleased with Moody’s decision to raise our ratings.” said Anthony Jabbour, Chief Executive Officer, Dun & Bradstreet. “This is yet another external proof point of the strength of our financial results, operational execution, and overall balance sheet.”

According to Moody's published report, the upgraded ratings and stable outlook reflects Moody’s view that in the next 12-18 months, there will be continued moderate improvement in Dun & Bradstreet’s operating performance fueled in part by healthy product demand, stronger pricing, as well as the Company's expansion of its ESG-related product offerings.

“The company's credit profile is supported by its very long operating history, strong brand recognition within its target markets, and established long-term relationships with a large number of diverse customers. Additionally, the company's credit quality is bolstered by a largely subscription-oriented sales model that provides a predictable revenue base while ongoing cost reduction initiatives drive gradual expansion of DNB's strong margins and improved annual free cash flow generation approaching 10% of total debt over the next 12-18 months,” according to Moody’s.