Streamlined solution helps financial advisors leverage Nitrogen's lead-generation tools within FMG's platform for accelerated growth

Nitrogen, the company that is revolutionizing how financial advisors and wealth management firms grow, has entered into a strategic alliance with FMG, a leading SaaS company specializing in marketing software and services for financial advisors. This collaboration seamlessly integrates the email marketing and website creation capabilities of the FMG digital marketing platform with the risk alignment, financial planning, proposal generation, and client engagement tools of the Nitrogen Growth Platform. The integration offers joint customers a scalable process for acquiring new clients, raising client satisfaction, retaining clients, and driving organic growth.

Available immediately to subscribing mutual customers, the new integration makes the complete Nitrogen marketing toolkit – including the lead generation questionnaire – available as a collection within the FMG all-in-one marketing and website creation platforms. With the click of a button, broker-dealer advisors, solo practitioners, firm executives, marketing teams, or customers of FMG’s completely managed “do-it-for-me” service can effortlessly leverage Nitrogen's extensive lead-generation assets in email, social, and on their website. This integration drives prospective clients into the proven risk-aligned Nitrogen proposal generation process, resulting in extremely high conversion from lead to client.

“Firms frequently abandon marketing due to two key factors: they don’t have the time to invest in it, and the generated leads don’t convert into clients,” said Craig Clark, chief marketing officer at Nitrogen. “This integration directly combats these two growth roadblocks by combining the power of professionally executed marketing with a proven process for turning leads into clients—and clients into referral champions. We have firms experiencing more than a 90% close rate and 10% boosts in client retention. As a professional marketer myself, these are exciting numbers for the industry itself and the broader goals of expanding access to quality financial advice.”

According to research conducted by the Spectrem Group, the single greatest factor in client loyalty is the ability to effectively demonstrate a deep understanding of each client’s degree of risk tolerance. The new Nitrogen and FMG integration makes it easy to harness risk tolerance as a call to action for lead generation, while also continually reinforcing the advisor’s command of client risk tolerance throughout the initial sales experience, proposal generation and ongoing client relationship.

"The firms that are seeing the most growth today are those that have mastered the art of building their brands and expanding their networks on social media, engaging prospects on their websites, and sharing valuable, relevant resources with clients,” said Susan Theder, chief marketing and experience officer at FMG. “However, given time and resource constraints, achieving this is a tall order for most advisors. This integration enables our shared clients to effortlessly execute multi-channel campaigns, leveraging Nitrogen's comprehensive marketing toolkit, to accelerate lead generation and drive new business." Firm leaders and individual advisors can learn more about the new FMG and Nitrogen integration by visiting here.

Teams from FMG and Nitrogen will be on hand to showcase the combined solution live from Nitrogen’s Fearless Investing Summit. Theder will also be speaking in a main-stage presentation. The event will take place in Miami, Florida from October 2^nd-4^th, 2023.

Quorum Information Technologies Inc. , a North American SaaS Software and Services company providing essential enterprise solutions that automotive dealerships and Original Equipment Manufacturers (“OEMs”) rely on for their operations, announces effective immediately, the appointment of Mr. Damien Leonard, President of Pinetree Capital Ltd. (“Pinetree”), to Quorum’s Board of Directors.

“We are pleased to welcome Damien to Quorum’s Board of Directors,” said Neil McDonnell, Chair of the Board. “We believe that Damien’s expertise will help guide Quorum’s strategy of balanced, profitable growth. In addition, L6 Holdings Inc. and Pinetree’s investment in Quorum reflects the confidence that Pinetree has in Quorum’s future and is a testament to Quorum’s commitment to driving shareholder value.”

Mr. Leonard brings more than 15 years of experience investing in software businesses across North America, Europe and Australia. He is the President of Pinetree, a TSX-listed investment company, and Managing Director of L6 Holdings, a family office, both of which focus on investing in enterprise software and together own 25.5% of Quorum.

Partnership accelerates and expands ClearObject's AI offerings with new Generative AI-powered experiences from Google

ClearObject, a leading provider of Generative AI, Vision AI, and MLOps solutions, today announced an expanded partnership with Google Cloud to develop new GenAI services offerings for its customers. The partnership will accelerate ClearObject's Generative AI strategy, bringing new AI-powered solutions and experiences to customers.

ClearObject's team of AI experts are already engaging with customers to deliver powerful new solutions for Manufacturing, Retail, and Financial Services customers by:

• Using GenAI to train and accelerate current manufacturer's ML and AI solutions to become greener and reduce waste (Manufacturing)
• Connecting GenAI to internal operations data so workers can use natural language queries to answer pressing questions (Manufacturing)
• Leverage GenAI to answer internal Tier 1 support tickets and streamline Tier 2 support (Manufacturing & Retail)
• Summarizing and analyzing vast amounts of data to uncover new insights for Investment Fund Managers (Financial Services)

"Partnering with Google Cloud is an exciting step, and a testament to our proven track record in delivering innovative AI solutions alongside Google Cloud," said Mike Masters, SVP of Sales & Marketing at ClearObject. "We are thrilled to work with businesses to unlock the full potential of generative AI on Google Cloud's suite of GenAI solutions, empowering our customers to discover unique use cases, build AI solutions, and drive meaningful business outcomes."

"We're excited that ClearObject is expanding its capabilities with Google Cloud to bring its customers new generative AI services and offerings," said Jim Anderson, Vice President, NA Partners Ecosystem & Channels at Google Cloud. "We look forward to working together to unleash the power of generative AI for organizations."

Through the partnership with Google Cloud, ClearObject is expanding its consulting and technology delivery offerings to help clients understand and maximize the value proposition of generative AI in their businesses:

• GenAI Discovery Workshop.
  Highly interactive one day workshop leveraging design thinking principles to: 1) Educate customers on Google Cloud's GenAI offerings and 2) Define customer's ideal target use cases, ROI, and success criteria.

• GenAI POC Development.
  A 2 to 4 week project to develop a GenAI POC that 1) Tests the feasibility of Google Cloud GenAI models & other Google Cloud AI services for our customer's use case; 2) Create and test a high-fidelity prototype with real customers; 3) Validate potential opportunities & solutions for our customers challenges; and 4) Deliver a solution architecture and SOW to scale the GenAI solution in their business.

• GenAI Production Deployment
  ClearObject's deep enterprise AI deployment expertise with Agile Product-Team-as-a-Service (PTaaS) works sprint by sprint alongside customers to both develop, deploy, and scale GenAI solutions across their business.

• GenAI Managed Services.
  Customizable ongoing GenAI solution support, monitoring, and optimization for customers.

New Generative AI offerings are available from ClearObject today.

Document AI (private preview) leverages Snowflake’s first-party large language model to unlock deeper insights from documents and extract value with increased speed, accuracy, and simplicity

• Document AI (private preview) leverages Snowflake’s first-party large language model to unlock deeper insights from documents and extract value with increased speed, accuracy, and simplicity

• Customers like Booking.com are using Snowflake Iceberg Tables (private preview soon) to extend Snowflake's performance and governance to data stored in open formats

• New Snowflake Performance Index shows an improvement of 15 percent in query duration for customers' recurring workloads since Snowflake began tracking this metric¹

^{Snowflake Unveils New Large Language Model to Extract Deeper Insights from Documents, While Continuing to Advance Platform Speed and Performance} 

Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), the Data Cloud company, today announced at its annual user conference, Snowflake Summit 2023, new advancements to its single, unified platform that make it easier for organizations to get value from all of their data, while continuing to deliver improved performance for customers’ most critical workloads. With new innovations like Document AI (private preview), Snowflake is launching a new large language model (LLM) built from Applica's pioneering generative AI technology to help customers understand documents and put their unstructured data to work. Snowflake is also unveiling updates to Iceberg Tables (private preview soon) to further eliminate data silos and allow organizations to use open table formats with fast performance and enterprise-grade governance for both data in Snowflake’s catalog and data managed by another catalog. In addition, the new Snowflake Performance Index (SPI) provides increased transparency and metrics around Snowflake’s ongoing performance improvements, revealing that query duration has improved by 15 percent¹ for stable customer workloads since Snowflake began tracking this metric over the last eight months — reinforcing how Snowflake continues to advance price per performance for customers.

One example of a customer embracing Snowflake’s single platform and continued innovation is Fidelity Investments. As one of the largest financial institutions serving over 40 million customers daily, key stakeholders across Fidelity’s 68,000-plus global associates rely on Snowflake’s unified data platform to drive impact.

“It’s every CIO’s dream to have all of your organization’s data in one place, and the Data Cloud actually makes that possible. It’s imperative that key stakeholders across our organization have visibility into the same single source of data truth to seamlessly answer questions and solve problems faster,” said Mihir Shah, CIO and Enterprise Head of Data Architecture and Engineering, Fidelity Investments. “The Data Cloud helps us eliminate silos and deliver governed access to data across key stakeholders, enabling us to continuously innovate at scale, drive increased efficiency, and ultimately create more value for our customers.”

Snowflake Brings the Power of LLMs to the Data Cloud

Over the next five years, over 90 percent of the world's data will be unstructured in the form of documents, images, video, audio, and more according to IDC². This massive volume of unstructured data is routinely stored by organizations, however gaining valuable insight from it has historically required manual, error-prone processes and limited expert skillsets. Building on Snowflake’s support for unstructured data, Snowflake’s built-in Document AI will make it effortless for organizations to understand and extract value from documents using natural language processing.

Document AI stems from Snowflake's acquisition of Applica (Sept. 2022) and leverages its purpose-built, multimodal LLM. By integrating this model within Snowflake’s platform, organizations will be able to easily extract content like invoice amounts or contractual terms from documents and fine-tune results using a visual interface and natural language. Customers are using Document AI to help their teams be smarter about their businesses, and enhance user productivity in secure and scalable ways. Snowflake is starting with Document AI and plans to expand these capabilities to more types of unstructured data.

Snowflake Extends Performance and Governance to More Data with Iceberg Tables

As Apache Iceberg continues to grow in popularity as the industry standard for open table formats, Snowflake is making it easier for enterprises to extend the value of the Data Cloud to Iceberg data. With Iceberg Tables, organizations can work with data in their own storage in the Apache Iceberg format, whether that data is managed by Snowflake or managed externally, while still benefiting from Snowflake’s ease of use, performance, and unified governance. This simplifies data management by eliminating the need for organizations to move or copy data between systems, all the while increasing flexibility and reducing costs. In addition, Apache Iceberg’s growing ecosystem of diverse adopters, contributors, and commercial offerings future-proofs storage, preventing vendor lock-in and frequent migrations. Customers like Booking.com are leveraging Iceberg Tables today to bring the power of the Data Cloud to all of their data.

Snowflake Improves Query Duration for Stable Customer Workloads by 15 Percent Since It Began Tracking This Metric

Snowflake’s number one value is to ‘put customers first.’ Snowflake remains focused on delivering continuous innovations with regular releases to improve performance and efficiency, often requiring no action from customers. With this in mind, Snowflake is introducing the new SPI to quantify improvements over time by analyzing actual customer workloads. Based on the SPI, query duration time has improved by 15 percent¹ since Snowflake began tracking this metric over the last eight months for stable customer workloads in Snowflake. The SPI highlights Snowflake’s commitment to continuously optimizing cost and performance for customers, and providing them with more transparency on the quantitative performance impact of platform capabilities and hardware improvements on their production workloads over time.

In addition, Snowflake is advancing its single platform to support a broader set of advanced analytics capabilities including pre-built machine learning functions for SQL users (public preview), and expanding its unified governance and privacy with new data quality metrics and classification features (both in private preview).

“Snowflake’s single platform continues to be core to our innovation strategy, and we're constantly enhancing it so customers can access, understand, and protect their data seamlessly, while benefiting from Snowflake’s leading performance, scale, and governance,” said Christian Kleinerman, SVP of Product, Snowflake. “We’re unlocking a new data era for customers, leveraging AI and eliminating silos previously bound by format, location, and more to revolutionize how organizations put their data to work and drive insights with the Data Cloud.”

Metazoa, the leading provider of software tools for the management of Salesforce orgs, has revolutionized the way admins work. Today, the company announced that its flagship product, Metazoa Snapshot, is now powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI). This game-changing enhancement supercharges Salesforce admins to understand issues, fix problems and uncover opportunities for org improvement—all while optimizing resources for maximum efficiency.

“Our mission has always been to empower admins to achieve higher levels of productivity,” said Metazoa CEO Jennifer Mercer. “By harnessing the power of AI, we’ve stayed true to our mission by revolutionizing the way admins work and accomplish their goals without increasing their workload. Snapshot adds even more automation to various aspects of a Salesforce admin’s work, providing them with enhanced efficiency and productivity. They can now streamline tasks like flows, queries and running reports with ease.”

This cutting-edge version of Snapshot provides admins with unprecedented problem-solving capabilities. If an admin gets an error message, they can ask Snapshot to explain what the error means, and then Snapshot will also provide a step-by-step instructions to fix the error quickly. Snapshot can also write Apex classes, explain Apex triggers, write SOQL queries, and even summarize complex reports, which can be exported and shared.

By simply typing a few words, Salesforce admins can find, understand and fix issues involving org management, relational data migration, org documentation, technical debt removal, profile and permission set management, and more.

“Snapshot captures detailed information about the data schema and metadata structure of any Salesforce org,” explained Bill Appleton, CTO of Metazoa. “This information provides the context that artificial intelligence needs to understand complex problems and provide expert guidance to Salesforce administrators.”

With their deep knowledge of the Salesforce platform, the Metazoa team pioneered the development of developer tools on the AppExchange. Metazoa Snapshot swiftly evolved into the industry’s most comprehensive toolset for org management, relational data migration, org documentation, technical debt removal, and profile and permission set management. Now with an AI-powered Snapshot as part of its suite of products, Metazoa is taking a giant leap forward in providing powerful tools that give salesforce admins superpowers.

Metazoa also offers turn-key services for Salesforce orgs with complex needs. Backed by Metazoa Snapshot, Metazoa’s services is a project-based offering created for enterprise-scale organizations to help with all aspects of Salesforce org clones, splits, merges, and technical debt removal. Those that require hands-on support can rely on Metazoa Services.

They face the same security threats as organizations overall but have less resources to address them

Netwrix, a cybersecurity vendor that makes data security easy, today announced additional findings from its survey conducted in February 2023 among security and IT professionals from 106 countries. The additional information is for organizations with less than 100 employees.

According to the survey, small organizations experience the same cyberthreats as the respondents overall. The most common security incidents are phishing, ransomware and user account compromise. However, smaller organizations usually have less resources and experience with which to address security threats. Indeed, lack of budget is their top security challenge, reported by one in two small companies.

"Cost efficiency is top of mind for small organizations. To improve their security posture, these organizations may want to seek out solutions that are tuned for the unique cost and security needs of small businesses. In addition, partnering with a vendor that offers multiple solutions is a way to get a larger discount for using several tools," says Dirk Schrader, VP of Security Research at Netwrix.

When we asked IT pros what they would do to improve the security posture of their small organization if they had a chance to decide on their own, their top choice was IT staff training.

"One option for addressing the lack of cybersecurity expertise is to consider outsourcing security-related tasks to a managed service provider (MSP) or managed security service provider (MSSP). This approach not only eliminates the need to hire additional internal IT talent but can also reduce the cost of maintaining security software. For example, if a new compliance requirement arises, the MSP can make the necessary changes once, implement them across their customer base, and share the cost of the customization among those clients," says Dmitry Sotnikov VP of Product Management at Netwrix.

More than two-thirds (68%) of small organizations have a hybrid IT architecture. Interestingly, only 45% of the small organizations that are exclusively on-premises plan to adopt cloud technologies, compared to 69% among respondents overall.

"On one hand, there are a lot of cloud-native small businesses, born when cloud was already an integral part of the IT landscape. On the other hand, many small organizations made significant investments into their on-premises infrastructure and may not have the budget or resources to then migrate to the cloud," says Dirk Schrader.

"Lack of experience and fear of moving to the cloud can also hinder cloud adoption in small organizations. To benefit from the greater flexibility that comes from transferring some security-related tasks to a cloud provider, smaller organizations can engage an MSP to map the most effective cloud migration path for their business and consider using security tools that cover both on-premises and cloud infrastructure," says Dmitry Sotnikov.

CDNetworks, an APAC-leading network to deliver edge as a service, today announces its partnership with Irdeto to integrate CDNetworks' platform with built-in DRM capabilities. This integrated solution provides content creators and distributors with one-stop digital content protection for their video streaming business.

Synergizing CDNetworks' video streaming with DRM capabilities into an integrated solution gives content creators and distributors the power to maximize the engagement and revenue potential of their video service by safeguarding digital content against illegal streaming activities. The benefits are clear, empowering content creators and distributors to use CDNetworks for their DRM and media delivery requirements, without having to integrate separate third-party DRM systems and configure authorization on the CDNetworks' platform. This streamlining accelerates DRM implementation and reduces the amount of effort required for integration.

"With the rise of digital media piracy, DRM has become an essential tool for content creators and distributors. By adding this technology to our platform, we now have more comprehensive ways to help our clients protect their valuable content and ensure that it is accessed only by authorized users," said Doyle Deng, Head of Global Marketing and Product of CDNetworks. "We are excited to announce our cooperation with Irdeto to further enhance our media security capabilities. This integration reinforces our commitment to delivering the fastest and most secure digital experience at the Edge."

Highlights of CDNetworks' Built-in DRM Capabilities

• Multi-DRM Capability: CDNetworks' built-in DRM meets the unique distribution needs of a variety of organizations that use various DRM systems for their streaming requirements. This support covers disparate devices running on various ecosystems such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, and different streaming protocols — allowing customers to implement user-based security protection strategies according to their content needs.
• Flexibility: CDNetworks' integrated DRM technology works seamlessly with other streaming platform technologies and is designed to easily integrate with various encoding, CDN, or player platforms, with minimal changes to the content distributor's workflow. This flexibility allows content distributors to update their providers hassle-free while, at the same time, allowing CDNetworks to deliver comprehensive media delivery services to its customers.
• Scalability: CDNetworks' underlying DRM is sufficiently robust to handle spikes in users during high-demand events. High license delivery throughput coupled with low license-delivery latency allows the DRM to scale up effortlessly without problems or delays in delivering licenses. Additionally, CDNetworks has a highly efficient media distribution system that can handle large volumes of traffic and ensure uninterrupted playback. With over 200,000 servers and more than 2,800 Points of Presence (PoPs）in over 70 countries and regions, CDNetworks is uniquely qualified to provide real-time, high-quality live streaming to a large audience regardless of location or device.
• Customizable Security Setting: CDNetworks' built-in DRM provides customizable security settings that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of your business and the content being distributed. These controls allow you to adopt customized security strategies based on the type and level of protection required for different types of content.
• Global Support: CDNetworks offers round-the-clock support to ensure that any DRM issues are resolved quickly and to your satisfaction, particularly when it comes to high-profile events.

With over 20 years of successful CDN and media delivery experience, CDNetworks boasts strong content delivery capabilities in the areas of video streaming and delivering high-quality video content to any device running any operating system in any location. CDNetworks' CDN performance consistently ranks #1 in Asia, with a clear lead over the competition. Never satisfied to rest on its laurels, CDNetworks continues to work with streaming services of many major events, including popular top-tier OTT platforms in Asia.

According to Andrew Bunten, COO for Video Entertainment at Irdeto, "Working with CDNetworks was a clear choice for us due to their expertise and reputation as an exceptional CDN provider in the APAC market. Their experience serving a variety of clients in the Asia-Pacific region, especially in the OTT sector, will help us expand quickly and effectively into new markets."

CDNetworks' partnership with Irdeto will strengthen its connection to the upstream and downstream communities, maximize the larger industrial ecosystem, and leverage its advantages of being a CDN provider in order to deliver an end-to-end superior user experience. Moving forward, CDNetworks will continue to seek partnerships with various upstream and downstream providers in the streaming industry to offer more end-to-end solutions.

RudderStack Profiles enables companies to unify first-party data from every customer touchpoint into complete profiles, build ML user features, and deliver powerful customer experiences

RudderStack, the leading warehouse native customer data platform, today announced at Snowflake's annual user conference, Snowflake Summit 2023, the release of RudderStack Profiles for Snowflake customers. RudderStack Profiles enables data teams to quickly build complete customer profiles in their warehouse, generate user features, and activate them to deliver powerful customer experiences.

Data teams are often overwhelmed by the complexity of collecting and unifying clean, first-party data, which can take months or even years and cost millions of dollars. RudderStack Profiles solves this problem by providing tools for data teams that automate the SQL grunt work and automatically build a full customer 360 table natively in Snowflake.

With RudderStack Profiles, data teams can reduce engineering costs and reallocate their most valuable resources to focus on delivering customer data use cases, not plumbing or cleaning data. They can also improve time to value for critical projects by building on a complete view of their customer in their warehouse. Plus, they can say goodbye to inflexible black box SaaS and configure RudderStack models that generate a customer profile table in their warehouse.

Wyze, a consumer electronics company that specializes in smart home products and wireless cameras, was one of the beta customers. By leveraging RudderStack Profiles built on top of Snowflake's Data Cloud, they were able to quickly build out a full customer identity graph in their Snowflake instance, develop user features, and create a comprehensive and actionable customer 360 table. The results were realized in time measured in weeks. Their marketing team was able to ship 2-3x more campaigns using ML-scored features driving revenue growth. Additionally, their data engineering team was able to become 5-10x more productive as they were able to focus on value-added work instead of data wrangling and cleaning.

"Previously, we had an incredibly difficult time tying together the full customer journey. For example, a user would browse our products on Wyze.com, our Shopify store, and then download our mobile app. To piece all of this together, we would have to go into all of these different systems," explains Wei Zhou, Director of Data Engineering at Wyze. "With Profiles, we are now able to resolve customer identities using our first-party data, compute machine learning user features, and deliver personalized recommendations to drive revenue."

Unlike traditional Customer Data Platforms (CDP), RudderStack's Warehouse Native CDP does not persist data and is built on top of your warehouse or data lake. With the introduction of Profiles, RudderStack now has a complete platform across each step of the Data Activation Lifecycle:

• Collection: RudderStack's Event Stream and Cloud Extract ETL pipelines make it easy to collect data from every website, app, or SaaS tool
• Unification: RudderStack's Profiles feature leverages our standardized schemas to significantly reduce the time it takes to build a complete view of the customer, including an identity graph and rich customer features
• Activation: RudderStack's Reverse ETL pipeline delivers the Profiles and user features to downstream destinations to trigger marketing automation, drive real-time analytics, or deliver personalized experiences

"We are thrilled to announce the launch of Profiles, which when used with our data collection and data activation features enables companies to unlock the value of their customer data," said Soumyadeb Mitra, CEO and Founder of RudderStack. "With the introduction of this product, data teams can now benefit from the scalability and security of Snowflake's Data Cloud and the power and flexibility of RudderStack's Warehouse Native Customer Data Platform to deliver revenue growth and reduce cost."

"We are excited about the ecosystem continuing to develop around the Snowflake Data Cloud," added Tarik Dwiek,  Head of Technology Alliances at Snowflake. "The RudderStack platform enables companies to collect first-party data, enrich it in the Snowflake Marketplace ecosystem, then activate it through their Reverse ETL pipeline. With Profiles, our joint customers can save months of time and significant costs in delivering the data that drives powerful customer experiences."

RudderStack and Snowflake are excited to see the success that customers have already achieved with RudderStack Profiles and look forward to helping more customers unlock the power of their customer data.