1. Strategic Acquisitions:

   - Buyers Edge Platform acquires The Full Range and Delta Procurement, two prominent UK Group Purchasing Organizations, as part of its European expansion strategy.

   - These acquisitions align with the company's mission to revolutionize procurement practices and empower businesses across Europe.

2. Expansion Plans:

   - John Davie, CEO of Buyers Edge Platform, expresses excitement about the acquisitions, emphasizing the company's goal to bring the best GPOs in each European country on board.

   - Daniel Wilson, President of Buyers Edge Platform Europe, highlights ambitious plans for expansion and collaboration with the acquisitions' teams, supply partners, and customers.

3. The Full Range Acquisition:

   - Founded by Barry Knight and Nicky Prentice, The Full Range is one of the largest independent GPOs in the UK, known for its comprehensive support and consultancy services across various sectors.

   - Barry Knight, Director of The Full Range, emphasizes shared values and vision with Buyers Edge Platform, anticipating enhanced opportunities for UK hospitality owners.

4. Delta Procurement Acquisition:

   - Led by Dave Anderson and Nick Ryan, Delta Procurement has become a transformative force in the UK procurement service industry, focusing on delivering value and exceptional customer satisfaction.

   - The acquisition by Buyers Edge Platform signifies a significant opportunity for Delta's clients, providing access to advanced technology and enhanced buying power.

Buyers Edge Platform's acquisitions of The Full Range and Delta Procurement represent strategic moves to expand its European presence and strengthen its position in the international procurement landscape. With a commitment to innovation and customer-centricity, the company aims to drive greater efficiencies and value for foodservice businesses across Europe.

Contentful, a prominent player in the digital content management space, announces the appointment of Karthik Rau as its new Chief Executive Officer. Rau brings a wealth of experience in leadership and market creation, poised to lead Contentful into its next phase of growth and innovation.

Karthik Rau's Background and Vision:
- With over 20 years of leadership experience, Rau has previously served as the founder and CEO of SignalFx, a cloud monitoring company acquired by Splunk for $1.05 billion.
- Rau's tenure includes notable roles at VMware, where he played a pivotal role in the company's early growth and its landmark IPO in 2007.
- Expressing his vision for Contentful, Rau emphasizes the crucial role of content in modern digital strategies and foresees exponential growth driven by generative AI.

Contentful's Growth Trajectory and Future Outlook:
- Contentful's Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Sascha Konietzke, highlights Rau's track record in market and value creation, praising his leadership qualities and people-centric approach.
- Under Steve Sloan's leadership, Contentful has experienced significant growth, with annual recurring revenue soaring from under $40 million to nearly $200 million, and a customer base surpassing 4,000.
- The company's global team has expanded from 250 employees primarily based in Berlin to nearly 800 worldwide, reflecting Contentful's commitment to scaling and innovation.

Acknowledgment and Transition:
- Konietzke expresses gratitude to Steve Sloan for his dedicated leadership over the past four years, acknowledging his role in driving Contentful's growth and success.
- As Sloan steps down, Rau assumes the helm, poised to leverage his expertise and leadership to capitalize on the exciting opportunities ahead for Contentful.

With the appointment of Karthik Rau as CEO, Contentful looks forward to a new chapter of growth and innovation in the digital content management landscape. Rau's proven leadership and vision are expected to propel Contentful to new heights, delivering value to customers and driving forward in an evolving digital era.

Twilio, the customer engagement platform that drives real-time, personalized experiences for today’s leading brands, today announced that it has appointed Andy Stafman, a partner at Sachem Head Capital Management LP (“Sachem Head”), to the company’s Board of Directors, effective immediately.

“Over the last year and a half, we have made important changes to accelerate our path to profitability and position Twilio to capitalize on the opportunities we see ahead,” said Jeff Epstein, Chair of the Board for Twilio. “We look forward to benefiting from the addition of Andy’s perspectives as an additional shareholder in the boardroom as we continue our strong oversight of the company’s strategy to enhance value for all our stakeholders.”

Khozema Shipchandler, CEO of Twilio, added, “We are operating Twilio with greater focus, rigor, and discipline than ever before, and remain focused on our commitment to drive durable, profitable growth. As we look ahead, we are confident that Twilio is well positioned to unlock the power of AI by converging our data capabilities with our powerful Communications solutions. The Board and I will partner with Andy as we continue to advance our strategy to realize the full potential of the business.”

Twilio plans to hold an investor day within the next twelve months to discuss the company’s strategy in greater detail and to share medium-term financial targets. Twilio will provide more details on the investor day once a date for the event has been set.

“I am excited to join the Twilio Board during an important time for the company,” said Mr. Stafman. “Sachem Head invested in Twilio because of its strong leadership position in the customer engagement market and the significant upside potential from the application of AI. The company has already taken meaningful actions to strengthen Twilio’s profitability and growth trajectory, and I look forward to working with the rest of the Board and management team to build upon that progress and enhance value for shareholders.”

Twilio has entered into a cooperation agreement with Sachem Head. Pursuant to the agreement, Sachem Head has agreed to customary standstill, voting and confidentiality commitments, among other provisions.

With the appointment of Mr. Stafman, Twilio’s Board will increase to 10 directors, nine of whom are independent.

About Andy Stafman

Mr. Stafman is a partner at Sachem Head Capital Management LP, a value-oriented investment management firm based in New York. Prior to Sachem Head, Mr. Stafman worked as an Associate at Silver Lake Partners, a global private equity firm focused on technology-enabled investments. He received a B.S. in Economics, with a concentration in Finance from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Comscore to Provide Currency-Grade Measurement Metrics for Nexstar’s Local TV, Broadcast, Network, and Digital Businesses

Comscore, Inc. today announced that it has reached a comprehensive multi-year agreement with Nexstar Media Group, Inc. on cross-platform audience measurement. Under the terms of the agreement, Comscore will become a key measurement partner for Nexstar, providing it with critical measurement metrics across Nexstar’s local TV, broadcast, network, and digital businesses.

Comscore has provided local market measurement to Nexstar since 2010, but with continued evolution and innovation in its suite of insights and planning solutions across digital, social, CTV, and linear TV, Nexstar now sees unique opportunities to move Comscore into a leading currency provider position. Together, Comscore and Nexstar will be able to deliver more precise audience insights across screens to help advertisers optimize total reach and measure the holistic cross-platform campaign with de-duplicated in-flight monitoring of key metrics such as reach and frequency, incrementality, and co-viewing.

Comscore, a leading provider of currency-grade television measurement for local TV, provides measurement across all 210 local Comscore Markets. Comscore’s National measurement is the summation of all 210 local markets, establishing Comscore as the foremost authority in comprehensive TV metrics. At the core of Comscore's success is a unified methodology, setting the gold standard in the industry. With local market-level data starting at the household level, building to all 41,704 zip codes, and then seamlessly integrating into and elevating national metrics, Comscore continues to redefine excellence in linear TV measurement.

“Comscore is proud to expand its relationship with Nexstar Media Group to empower Nexstar’s advertisers to unlock optimal reach across key markets and platforms. Nexstar will offer unmatched value to advertisers in a critical election year and beyond, by seamlessly validating its true audience reach with market level precision down to the specific region across linear and digital,” said Comscore Chief Executive Officer Jon Carpenter. “Our partnership demonstrates our ability to eliminate costly ‘make goods’ as Nexstar leverages the strengths of Comscore’s cross-platform solutions to ensure ad dollars are optimized across non-linear mediums to complete incremental reach to what is achieved by linear television.”

“Comscore’s ability to provide us with total audience measurement metrics across our local television stations and websites, NewsNation, The CW Network, and The Hill, enables our cross-platform sales team to leverage our unique scale and reach to customize bespoke advertising and marketing solutions for our clients,” said Michael Biard, Nexstar’s President and Chief Operating Officer. “We look forward to offering our advertisers deeper insight into who is watching and interacting with our programming and when they are doing so, enabling them to focus on the audiences they want to reach.”

All-Inclusive TV advertising agency Marketing Architects introduces Annika Streaming, the first opportunistic rate performance marketplace for streaming TV advertisers.

Streaming TV advertising is taking a step toward the future. This week, TV advertising agency Marketing Architects launched a new platform for CTV advertisers called Annika Streaming. Based on technology initially developed for linear TV, Annika Streaming buys CTV and streaming inventory more efficiently than current marketplace offerings allow. This enables performance brands to capitalize on streaming’s potential.

Annika’s development began six years ago when Marketing Architects built an AI-powered DSP for linear TV. The platform was designed to evaluate custom audience and performance criteria, set it against market trends and historical data, then calculate which media buys will drive the best ROI for individual brands. The result was a linear TV marketplace that delivered premium inventory for TV advertisers without premium price tags.

But as viewership shifted to streaming and connected TV, it was essential brands follow consumers to the channel. Unfortunately for performance marketers, streaming’s promise of advanced targeting and measurement capabilities has been overshadowed by its high prices, typically 5-10X higher than linear TV.

To close this gap, Marketing Architects spent the last two years building a proprietary streaming capability, bringing the efficient prices Annika achieved in linear into streaming and CTV. Now, Annika Streaming solves some of the biggest challenges for performance marketers on the channel.

• Pricing: Annika Streaming obtains rates significantly more efficient than industry-leading third-party DSPs. These are achieved through a data-driven approach that benefits streaming publishers and advertisers alike.
• Targeting: The platform offers several layers of contextual, geographic, and dayparting targeting capabilities, plus retargeting.
• Distribution: Annika is fully integrated with dozens of streaming publishers and buys inventory available on Roku, Chromecast, Amazon Firestick, and smart TVs.
• Measurement: With Annika, advertisers get access to multiple measurement models running in parallel, including IP address tracking and holdout groups for incrementality testing.

SanerNow Risk Prioritization, based on CISA's SSVC framework, builds upon SecPod's well-known vulnerability intelligence to effectively prioritize vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other security risks and improve cybersecurity posture.

SecPod Technologies, a global vulnerability management pioneer, has launched SanerNow Risk Prioritization, AKA SanerNow RP, to assess and prioritize the exponentially rising number of vulnerabilities in organizations. As the world's first SSVC-based risk prioritization solution, it will allow CISOs and IT Security teams to combine business impact, exploitability, vulnerability intelligence, and data analysis to rapidly and effectively prioritize security risks. 

With millions of security risks lurking in modern networks, IT Security teams are often overwhelmed in managing them and effectively mitigating them gets increasingly difficult. Further, remediating every risk is time-consuming and inefficient in effectively combating cyberattacks. With the focus being diverted to low-risk vulnerabilities and ever-increasing backlog, high-risk vulnerabilities that need immediate attention might be missed. Classification and prioritization are the only way to wade through the mountain of vulnerabilities.

Chandrashekhar Basavanna, the CEO of SecPod, said, "We are excited to launch this innovation from SecPod's lab. With every new product we introduce, we are setting a new standard for ourselves. SanerNow RP is a crucial bridge between vulnerability detection and mitigation that helps our Customers streamline their remediation efforts efficiently. SanerNow RP applies machine learning, prediction, kill-chain validation, and in-house vulnerability intelligence to prioritize the vulnerabilities into different priority buckets accurately."

Unlike other solutions that prioritize, SanerNow Risk Prioritization, natively integrated into the SanerNow Advanced Vulnerability Management solution, prioritizes AND mitigates risks that matter the most, providing an unparalleled improvement in vulnerability reduction and security posture. Furthermore, it also eliminates the need for multiple tools to effectively reduce the attack surface.

SanerNow Risk Prioritization is now available to the public as an add-on to SanerNow Advanced Vulnerability Management (AVM) platform to seamlessly simplify and integrate vulnerability management into a simple workflow. SanerNow AVM is a comprehensive vulnerability management platform providing visibility and control over IT infrastructure, detection and prioritization of vulnerabilities, and remediation of the vulnerability within the same platform. 

Latest Platform Release Streamlines Research Process, Expands Asynchronous and Global Recruitment Capabilities

Discuss, the leading purpose-built platform for turning experiences into insights, is changing the game for qualitative research with the latest release of the Discuss People Experience Platform. New features including generative AI-powered research summaries, enhanced asynchronous research tools and an expanded network for global recruitment are eliminating the long, winding road to insights and instead, offer customers a freeway to faster insights.

After introducing the first generative AI suite, Genie, for qualitative research, Genie Summaries was quickly adopted by dozens of Discuss customers who experienced the value of instantaneous recaps of live sessions and summaries across entire research projects. After thousands of summaries and customer feedback that helped further improve Genie summaries, it is now officially out of Beta and generally available for all new and existing customers. It is a step change in how researchers navigate their unstructured feedback allowing users to take hours of video and turn them into a final report in minutes.

“I used Genie for an online focus group project, and seeing the summary I was provided was one of those ‘wow’ moments for me, as I could see how the AI picked up on sentiment expressed through the longer conversation,” said Susan Sweet, Chief Insight Officer for Sweet Insight Group. “I’m excited most about the time savings, but also about the way it takes my own reliance on ‘emotional recollection’ down a notch, and I think it would be incredibly helpful for exploratory, in-depth interviews as well.”

Discuss has also expanded its asynchronous research tools and services to make it easier and faster to reach a global audience. These enhancements help customers optimize all types of research from in-home usage testing to shop-alongs and unboxing moments. Discuss also facilitates the recruitment of respondents for these asynchronous projects through the expansion of its global network of online panels and agency partners.

“This latest release is reflective of how the Discuss team truly obsesses over solving the biggest customer challenges in qualitative research combined with a world class innovation pace. We’re excited to continue pushing the boundaries and be out in front of the market providing our customers with a qualitative research platform that gets more robust almost weekly,” said Adam Mertz, SVP of Product & Marketing at Discuss. “The feedback from our customers and industry experts has been extraordinary in terms of the value of these new capabilities and their enthusiasm for how quickly Discuss has introduced them.” 

This focus on innovation and customer success, along with a unique unlimited research business model that removes the constraints of the past to scaling qual research has led to recognition across the industry for Discuss this year, including being named as a Strong Performer by Forrester in their Experience Research Platforms Wave and also receiving G2 leader recognition in their Recent Summer Grid reports for User Research and Video Feedback with top scores in ease of use, ease of doing business with, and quality of support. Discuss was also named a winner in the Analytics and Business Intelligence category of the 2022 and 2023 APPEALIE SaaS Awards.