Company Touts Recent New Customer Wins, Including Bombas and Wendy’s

Braze, the leading customer engagement platform that empowers brands to Be Absolutely Engaging™, today announced strategic leadership appointments and new customer wins on the heels of a significant financial milestone. As previously announced, the company recently passed $500 million of Committed Annual Recurring Revenue (CARR), demonstrating the continued demand for Braze as brands recognize the critical role of customer engagement in driving growth, loyalty, and retention–particularly in a complex and challenging macroeconomic landscape.

“There’s never been a better time to be a better marketer,” said Bill Magnuson, cofounder and CEO of Braze. “In today's dynamic market, consumer loyalty is volatile and hinges on a brand's ability to deliver valuable and personalized experiences, both with and alongside their products and services. Brands who prioritize excellence in customer engagement are also building a foundational asset for their businesses–first-party relationships with their customers. Braze empowers them to leverage rich data, advanced machine learning, and sophisticated cross-channel orchestration to advance their customer engagement prowess as they navigate this exciting landscape.”

Customer Expansion, Product Innovation, and Industry Recognition

The need for brands to use customer engagement strategies that harness technology and creativity to create memorable, personalized experiences is greater than ever. More brands around the world are recognizing this need, and as a result Braze has seen steady growth of its diverse customer base globally. The company’s growth and customer expansion are due to the rapid pace of product innovation at Braze which has earned the company top recognition from several industry analysts and peer review sites.

• Over the past year, Braze welcomed impressive new customers across diverse industries, company sizes, and geographies worldwide, including Bombas, Miro, Nestlé Purina US, Papa John’s UK, and Wendy’s.
• Strategic product investments in updates to Sage AI by Braze, a suite of AI capabilities designed to power better, faster, and more effective outcomes from engagement across the user journey. Advancements in Cloud Data Ingestion partnerships, features, and functionality help brands streamline data integration and reduce time to value—and is notably supporting over 2,000 customer integrations ingesting about 400 million rows of customer warehouse data every single day.
• In 2023 Braze was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs, Q1 2023, and named a Leader by Gartner® in the 2023 Magic Quadrant™ for Multichannel Marketing Hubs. The company was also recognized in G2’s 2024 Best Software Awards for the second year in a row.

Strengthening the Leadership Bench

As Braze continues to increase its global footprint, the company is strengthening its leadership across departments with promotions and new hires that support growth, innovation, and operational excellence. This includes the promotion of Eric Sanders to SVP, Global Head of Sales. Sanders, who has 20+ years of experience in enterprise SaaS sales, first joined Braze in April 2020 and most recently led the Americas Sales organization, playing a pivotal role in the company's positive trajectory. New leadership additions include:

• Christopher Foss as VP, Financial Planning and Analysis: Foss brings over 20 years of finance and sales experience to Braze, and previously served as the VP, Revenue & Operations at Toast, where he helped to scale and grow their global operations.
• Kelsey Nelson as VP, Product Marketing: Nelson joins Braze from Okta, where she spent the last six years leading Product, Technical, and Solutions Marketing for Okta's Workforce Identity Cloud.
• Rene Lima as Area VP, Sales, LATAM: Lima brings 25+ years of experience in enterprise software sales to Braze, and was most recently the Chief Revenue Officer for Acid Labs. He also previously served as the Head of Sales, VP Latin America at Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud.
• Shahid Nizami as VP, Sales, APAC: Nizami has two decades of experience working with renowned companies across APAC like Google, Oracle, and HubSpot, and was recently the General Manager and Regional Vice President of Sales, Asia Pacific & Japan at ActiveCampaign.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including, but not limited to, statements regarding anticipated performance of, and benefits from, the Braze platform and products. These forward-looking statements are based on the current assumptions, expectations and beliefs of Braze, and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Further information on potential factors that could affect Braze results are included in Braze’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended October 31, 2023, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on December 7, 2023 and the other public filings of Braze with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the views of Braze only as of the date of this press release, and Braze assumes no obligation, and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.

Louisnord brings decades of experience in marketing, human resources and change management to build upon Beekeeper's record growth

Beekeeper, the leading app for frontline teams, today announced the appointment of Nancy Louisnord to Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Louisnord will lead Beekeeper's global marketing strategy, capitalizing on the addition of over 150 new frontline organizations in 2023 and building upon Beekeeper's record-breaking year of growth.

"Beekeeper's focus on connecting frontline workers with what they need to excel is not just noble but essential," said Louisnord. "My background in human resources, service management and digital transformation has shown me how crucial it is to support these often overlooked yet vital workers. I am thrilled to be part of a company that places such a high value on improving the lives and work of frontline workers with a solution that's truly purpose built for their specific needs."

In her role as CMO Louisnord will be responsible for bringing further awareness to Beekeeper's ability to address the growing and costly disconnect between frontline workers and their companies. Leveraging her international experience, particularly in Europe and the United States, Louisnord will spearhead Beekeeper's marketing team as Beekeeper continues to expand its global customer base.

"With an impressive background in the HR and B2B SaaS space, Nancy is uniquely positioned to tackle the specific and nuanced challenges that come with empowering a frontline workforce," said Beekeeper CEO and co-founder Cris Grossmann. "In filling this role, it was critical that we brought a leader onto the team who not only understands the urgency of closing the frontline disconnect, but who is also versed in the needs of our global customer base. I have no doubt that Nancy will help us to continue to set the standard for frontline excellence."

Louisnord brings nearly 25 years of experience fostering transformative growth within the technology sector. Before joining Beekeeper, she served as Global Chief Marketing Officer at Manta, where she played a pivotal role in overhauling marketing strategies, boosting ROI and elevating the brand globally, leading to a successful acquisition. Louisnord has a proven track record of driving successful marketing initiatives in demand generation, channel marketing, product marketing and brand development at the global level.

Evidenced by both Beekeeper's record growth and the findings from Beekeeper's recently released 2024 Frontline Workforce Pulse Report, one of the largest reports of its kind, there is clear need for purpose-built solutions tailored to frontline employees. Louisnord's appointment will help to continue to showcase Beekeeper as the clear leader in frontline employee engagement and a top solution to meet this demand.

BlueConic recognized based on Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute

Market-leading customer data platform (CDP) BlueConic today announced that it has been recognized as the only Challenger in the inaugural Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms. We believe this industry recognition marks a major milestone for CDPs and the maturity of the space on a global scale.

BlueConic differentiates from other vendors for its:

• Privacy-by-design philosophy: Maintaining responsible data practices is essential for garnering consumer trust, but maintaining compliance with a patchwork of regulations is only getting more difficult. That’s why BlueConic has been built with privacy at the forefront. The platform has been purposely designed to collect first-party data in ways that ensures it is unified, actionable, and privacy-compliant. Collecting and using data within the framework of privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA enables companies to build trust and deliver valuable customer experiences, while mitigating their consumer data risk at the same time.

• Easy-to-use interface: To keep up with customers and market trends, customer-facing teams need the ability to directly access, analyze, and activate first-party data when and where they need it. With BlueConic’s easy-to-use interface, these teams can effectively harness the full potential of first-party data to optimize customer experiences while reducing their reliance on external vendors, streamlining internal processes, and improving their agility in the process.

• Data clean rooms capabilities: With third-party data deprecation and increasing privacy constraints from customers and regulators alike, companies are looking for ways to extend the value of their first-party data. BlueConic was the first customer data platform to offer a data clean room, enabling companies to facilitate second-party data sharing in a neutral, secure, and privacy-safe environment so they can build upon their valuable, consented first-party data.

“Companies across industries have unprecedented opportunities to collect customer data, but often struggle to derive meaningful insights or take effective actions based on that data, especially when it’s housed in data warehouses and removed from the immediate customer experience,” said Cory Munchbach, CEO of BlueConic. “Our comprehensive, purpose-built platform, coupled with an unparalleled customer experience, empowers our innovative customers to unlock a wealth of insights and act faster so they can achieve better returns on their data. We have, and always will, make both the operational efficiencies and performance success of marketers our north star.”

The Gartner^® Magic Quadrant™ offers visual snapshots, in-depth analyses and actionable advice that provide insight into a market's direction, maturity, and participants. Magic Quadrants compare vendors based on Gartner's standard criteria and methodology. Each report comes with a Magic Quadrant graphic that depicts a market using a two-dimensional matrix that evaluates vendors based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute.

A complimentary copy of the Magic Quadrant report can be downloaded here.

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Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Comscore Campaign Ratings (CCR) Now Encompasses Top 100 Local Markets for Holistic Linear, Programmatic and In-flight Digital Optimization

In a groundbreaking advancement for the advertising industry, Comscore, a global leader in planning, transacting, and evaluating media across platforms, today unveiled a significant update to its Comscore Campaign Ratings (CCR). This enhancement now extends deduplicated audience measurement to the local market level, which can be applied to all programmatic environments and platforms. CCR will, for the first time, integrate national and local linear TV, digital, streaming, and social channels.

With the introduction of Comscore Campaign Ratings Local (CCR Local), Comscore has effectively bridged the last gap in cross-platform ad measurement, offering advertisers the tools needed for true reach and frequency optimization across the top 100 US local markets, with full coverage of all other local markets to follow. This expansion paves the way for complete local market coverage, revolutionizing how advertisers can harness data for precise, in-flight campaign adjustments across all media types.

With the vast majority of goods being purchased locally, it is critical for brands to incorporate their linear TV ad exposure into their digital strategies and vice versa. With the CCR localization feature, advertisers will be able to optimize their campaigns with precision at the market level to more effectively drive downstream performance outcomes.

“Comscore has delivered a true cross-platform solution that measures audiences at the hyper-local level, enabling our clients to advertise nationally and optimize locally," said Steve Bagdasarian, Comscore Chief Commercial Officer. “Advertisers need measurement partners who can address the scale of where their audiences are. We’re building enterprise-level cross-platform measurement that offers advertisers the ability to seamlessly measure and optimize against their intended audiences with speed and accuracy, whether it is programmatically, directly, nationally or locally.”

The Trade Desk will be the first demand-side platform to integrate CCR Local market reporting, giving The Trade Desk’s clients access to expanded insights to help measure data-driven campaigns powered by Comscore's unparalleled local market coverage.

“The average household has become more crowded with devices and platforms, so marketers need the best data and insights to help ensure the most impactful advertisements,” says Ben Sylvan, VP of Data Partnerships at The Trade Desk. “Comscore’s new offering has the insights to help our clients make the most out of their media investment, especially for auto advertisers or political campaigns, where success on the local level is key.”

In a year when major tentpole events are driving strategic investment strategy and the cross-platform nature of sports, entertainment and political advertising is ramping up, Comscore empowers advertisers to understand how linear and digital ad spend interact both nationally and within each local market. When existing clients have leveraged CCR Local, they have seen upwards of 28% incremental reach in their CTV buys.

CCR Local is a powerful tool for brands, agencies, publishers, networks, and local station groups.

Organizations can now view a healthcare provider as a person by enriching NPI data with demographics, psychographics and employment information

AnalyticsIQ, the leading provider of predictive people-based data, is excited to announce the launch of its latest innovation in healthcare marketing data and analytics: the enriched National Provider Identifier (NPI) data offering. This new addition to AnalyticsIQ's comprehensive suite of data solutions empowers healthcare marketing and analytics teams to gain deeper insights into healthcare providers (HCPs) as individuals, revolutionizing the way they target and engage with this critical audience.

The National Provider Identifier (NPI) is a unique, publicly available identification number assigned to healthcare providers in the United States. By connecting NPI data into its robust consumer marketing database, PeopleCore, and business marketing database, BusinessCore, AnalyticsIQ can now offer unparalleled demographic and psychographic insights into individual HCPs, allowing marketers to understand and connect with them on a more personal level.

"AnalyticsIQ is thrilled to introduce our latest data offering to the healthcare marketing and analytics community," said Anna Brantley, Chief Revenue Officer of AnalyticsIQ. "With the enriched NPI data, we're not just seeing healthcare providers as entities, but as people with unique preferences, behaviors, and motivations. This deeper level of understanding enables marketers to craft highly targeted and personalized campaigns that resonate with HCPs on a human level, ultimately driving better awareness, engagement and outcomes," adds Brantley.

Key benefits for healthcare organizations who turn to AnalyticsIQ's NPI data offering include:
- Enhanced Targeting: Marketers can target healthcare providers based on a comprehensive understanding of their demographic, psychographic, and professional attributes. This includes data points from age to lifestyles.
- Personalized Messaging: Leveraging insights from NPI data, marketers can create highly personalized messaging and content tailored to the unique preferences and behaviors of individual HCPs. It’s especially valuable for brand awareness messages related to pharmaceutical treatments, clinical study initiatives and even grant opportunities.
- Improved ROI: By targeting the right HCPs with the right message at the right time, marketers can maximize the effectiveness of their campaigns and drive higher return on investment. 

Enables organizations to extend the value of Oracle industry applications by seamlessly connecting to networks and IoT devices to reimagine how they do business 

Bringing real-time communications to its suite of industry cloud applications, Oracle today announced the Enterprise Communications Platform (ECP). By seamlessly connecting Oracle industry applications to networks and IoT devices to extend their value, ECP enables organizations to reimagine how they do business.  

Built on the high performance and security of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), ECP delivers a powerful communications backbone and edge architecture that users can embed directly into their Oracle industry applications stack. With integrated capabilities such as IoT device management, customers can eliminate the burden of managing complex integrations and network contracts to deliver the connectivity and data intelligence they need to power critical new services. This can range from a first responder leveraging a real-time immersive view of an active incident to a restaurant using tablets to take orders from anywhere, or a utility using IoT sensors to monitor the health of its transmission lines.

The platform supports various IoT protocols to connect edge and mobile devices over public and private communications networks to help enrich cloud services. ECP also offers enhanced services such as video and audio streaming, recording capabilities, device management, edge distributed processing, authorization, and authentication.

"Given our history of delivering market-changing communications capabilities and our deep domain expertise in industry verticals, the Enterprise Communication Platform is a natural progression of our mission to help improve the way the world communicates," said Andrew Morawski, executive vice president and general manager, Oracle Communications. "We're already seeing incredible impact in the way industries such as healthcare, the public sector, hospitality, and energy and water are using this technology to help tackle some of their biggest IoT challenges."

Connection without the chaos
Companies currently manage and maintain several disparate communication devices including video cameras, mobile devices, PCs, and tablets, with each having its own system and set of data and manual processes to record and archive. These disparate systems limit transparency and make it difficult to rapidly respond to critical situations. Leveraging embedded APIs, ECP enables secure real-time communications for Oracle industry cloud applications by orchestrating, connecting, and managing on-premises systems with IoT, edge, and mobile devices and sensors over one or more public or private networks.

ECP is already being used as the communications foundation for Oracle's Public Safety suite, providing secure communications for critical use cases such as a dispatch command center for police and first aid squads, or fire emergency call management where an operator is required to dispatch units, identify, and merge duplicate calls or verify the incident location in a blended map view. ECP Edge also enables mobile video capture on the police car dashboard, the body cameras, security cameras, or vehicle cameras with the capability to provide a 270-degree view of an incident.

"Oracle's Enterprise Communications Platform (ECP) provides a critical bridge between the power of 5G networks and the industrial processes that can benefit from those properties," said Caroline Chappell, partner, Analysys Mason. "ECP shows that there is an exciting opportunity for operator network APIs when the market is application-led."

Pindrop marks a significant advancement in protecting against audio deepfakes addressing both current and future voice security challenges. 

Today marks a significant milestone for Pindrop, a pioneer in voice security solutions, with the launch of its innovative technology, Pindrop^Ⓡ Pulse. Developed from nearly a decade of rigorous research, Pulse introduces cutting-edge audio liveness detection capabilities for real-time identification, monitoring, and analysis of audio deepfakes. Notably, Pulse was instrumental in identifying the TTS engine used in the recent President Biden robocall attack, By leveraging advanced deep learning models for predictive assessments between real and synthetic voices, this solution is engineered to address existing fraud threats and proactively prepare for the dynamic evolution of fraudulent activities. 

As we stand on the brink of what is projected to be a seismic shift in the landscape of cyberattacks—with potential damages expected to soar to $10.5 trillion by 2025—the launch of Pulse emerges as an essential, perfectly timed defense in this critical moment. Amidst a climate where the sophistication of cyber threats is advancing at an alarming rate, this innovation addresses the paramount importance of forward-thinking technological defenses.

The efficacy and reliability of Pulse have been endorsed by leading financial institutions, including First National Bank of Omaha (FNBO), which has been utilizing Pulse in beta to bolster its customer service security measures. Steve Furlong, Director of Fraud Management at FNBO, stated, "In an era where AI advancements bring both innovation and new threats, FNBO remains committed to protecting our customers and their information. In an effort to proactively combat the emerging threat of deepfakes, our partnership with Pindrop provides us with cutting-edge solutions that safeguard our customers' information with precision. After rigorous testing, we're very happy with the results - Pindrop's technology ensures our defense mechanism is robust against advanced threats. Their commitment to excellence and innovation makes them an invaluable ally in our mission to protect our customers."

In Pulse's beta testing phase, it demonstrated remarkable efficacy in voice security, pinpointing manipulated voices with just two seconds of audio and offering responses in a swift 150 milliseconds. This rapid detection and response capability allows call centers to swiftly neutralize threats in real time. Engineered to counteract four predominant types of audio fraud—replayed voices, speech synthesis, automated voice chatbots, and real-time voice conversion—adeptly mitigating the risk of audio deepfakes. Beyond its detection capabilities, Pulse enhances Pindrop's broader suite of solutions, offering seamless integration with existing authentication and fraud prevention services to fortify a holistic defense against voice communication threats.

Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO & cofounder of Pindrop, articulates the critical need to address these advanced security measures, with  "Pindrop Pulse represents the company's evolution in response to increasing sophistication of attackers and allows us to answer the fundamental question of whether we are interacting with a real human or a machine" said Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO & cofounder of Pindrop. "Our solution doesn't just detect deepfakes; it is a pivotal step towards reinstating trust in commerce, media, communication, and society as a whole. We're excited to be at the forefront of this charge, equipping our clients with the necessary defenses against the sophisticated cyber threats that Generative AI has created."

Pindrop's commitment to advancing the field of voice security is a beacon for those navigating the complexities of cybersecurity in the digital age. As we move forward, our united efforts toward a secure digital landscape are led by the innovative strides of Pindrop Pulse.

OpenText reveals companies are embracing sustainability in IT, but are in the early stages 

A report commissioned by OpenText™, the information company, released today finds that IT departments are playing a major role in achieving corporate sustainability objectives and cited the lack of innovative tools and expertise as primary challenges they face in meeting those goals.

The 2023 State of IT Sustainability Report, conducted by Dimensional Research, found that 97 percent of companies have adopted or plan to adopt sustainability initiatives, but it is still early for adoption as only 42 percent of organizations are just beginning the journey towards environmental responsibility.

"The sustainability movement is in the early days, with IT taking the lead in most cases. However, this report's findings also show that companies are serious about making it a high operational priority," said Muhi Majzoub, Chief Product Officer, OpenText. "Sustainability is proving to be more than a popular social cause. There are solid business reasons pushing it: efficiency, cost savings, regulatory compliance. Because it is a 'win-win' scenario for all, sustainability is now a part of the decision-making process at most companies."  

Implementing IT sustainability initiatives can bring several obvious benefits to enterprise organizations whether it is in cost savings, resource efficiency, risk mitigation or regulatory compliance. However, there are other less obvious benefits such as innovation in product design, process efficiency or technology adoption that ultimately could lead to new revenue streams or market opportunities, all brought through the pursuit of sustainability.

Yet, for all the incredible business benefits of IT sustainability, it is not without its challenges. The report highlighted challenges and weak areas for sustainability. The biggest among them was obtaining the proper tools to implement these initiatives. Only 51 percent reported using software to help track their IT carbon footprint, with Europe outpacing North America in the adoption of tracking software. The lack of expertise was the second biggest challenge according to 46 percent of respondents, underscoring the need for education and skill development in sustainable IT practices.

Looking ahead

In 2024 and beyond, the integration of advanced tools like artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionize IT sustainability initiatives, ushering in a new era of efficiency and environmental responsibility. AI-powered algorithms will enable real-time optimization of energy usage in data center and cloud computing environments, drastically reducing carbon emissions and energy cost. Predictive analytics will facilitate proactive maintenance of IT infrastructure, minimizing downtime and conserving resources. Additionally, AI-driven supply chain optimization will streamline operations, reducing waste and environmental impact throughout the product lifecycle. Overall, these advancements in AI technology will play a pivotal role in driving forward IT sustainability initiatives leading to a more resilient and environmentally conscious digital ecosystem in the future.