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Financial Services Blog Series: How Lemonade is Disrupting Insurance

Back in the 1980’s an established computer company, Applied Computer Techniques or ACT, wanted to crush a young upstart called ‘Apple.’ So, they renamed their computer Apricot. This copycat strategy was not much of a success, Mitsubishi Electronics bought them in the early 1990’s as a competitive domestic play at NEC eventually shutting down the brand altogether. Maybe not the smartest move by ACT. Fast forward 30 years and a young upstart made its way to the market and its consumers. Founded in 2015, Lemonade has grown to become one of the leading InsurTech companies across the world. But how does a fairly young company compete with various ...

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Hidden Costs in Your Technology Agreements: Beware the 'I' Word

Inflation impacts the cost of nearly all your supplier agreements. Look closely at your IT agreements (especially your Cloud agreements). Even though the cost of technology goes down over time, and technology advancements make processes less manual, less error prone, less expensive, and more automated, many of your agreements still have antiquated clauses allowing your suppliers to *increase* your costs on an annual basis by an amount equal to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) amount, and generally include an accelerator above that amount; something like CPI + 3%, which would provide a contractual right of your supplier to increase your costs ...

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Top 4 (of 100) Technology Review Platforms for 2021

Clients often ask how we can stay on top of the market due to its constantly changing nature, and our answer is simple. We are constantly researching and analyzing the market in real-time, availing ourselves of a variety of resources. First among those is our own FMI (Federated Market Intelligence) gathered from thousands of executed deals since 2002. It’s a luxury to have that kind of data to inform Client strategy and optimization. However, we do also frequently vet our own understanding of the market by using a variety of resources, including the major Technology Review Platforms. If you can imagine, there are literally hundreds of ...

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Top 10 Technology Suppliers to Watch in 2021

Dexter Siglin
Mar. 12,2021 | Software SaaS

Working with our Clients during a time of heightened need has given us a unique perspective on the market with an ability to see the Industry in real time and in practical terms. Being ahead of the market has its advantages in that we can see the ‘up and comers’ emerging; those technology suppliers who are showing up in more Client accounts offering high value solutions with real world application and practical use cases. In our first ever post of its kind, here is our list of the Top 10 Technology Suppliers to Watch in 2021: One: Veeva Category: Life Sciences Data Management Location: Pleasanton, CA By: Steve Zolman Veeva Systems is the ...

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Can the White Walker Ghouls at Bloomberg Be Stopped?

Table of Contents: Introduction Background Market Summary Current Market Conditions Use Case Competitive Market Government Regulation Bloomberg News Fossil AI's Role in Trading Bloomberg in Disruption Loss of Customer Trust Failure to Innovate Instant Bloomberg Arrogance Help Intro – Here’s How You Can Save 30-93% on your Bloomberg Costs The name Bloomberg conjures up images of the Night King himself, but also of the market dominance in the Financial Services industry, of its flagship product, the Bloomberg Terminal. Just whispering the Bloomberg name also sends shivers up the spines of their customers when they think about the exceedingly ...

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WILL “RISE WITH SAP” BE YOUR DOWNFALL?

Michael Welsh
Feb. 18,2021 | Software SAP

SAP CEO Christian Klein is in a tough spot, trying to minimize the damage of a brand that has lost ground to competitors who have better adapted to the new reality of cloud computing. This exposure has been amplified during the global pandemic and has negatively impacted SAP’s profitability in a time when other companies are prospering due to customers’ increased dependency on technology and automation. In an attempt to remedy these challenges and re-focus his brand, Klein is promoting a new program for ‘business transformation as a service’, dubbed “RISE with SAP”. SAP plans to migrate your ERP to its cloud, promising to improve and speed ...

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2021: Oracle Audits the World

If you thought Oracle audits were an issue in past years, buckle your seat belts for 2021. We expect Oracle audits to reach new heights of frequency and intensity over the coming months, specifically around Q2 2021. The driving factor is based on macro-market conditions that have been out of their control: Oracle has essentially been on hiatus for a year, not able to get on site and pester their customers about license compliance. Oracle customers have been more cost conscientious than in years past and have been more active in cancelling support for unused products. The global pandemic has caused many customers to delay or even scrap plans ...

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SolarWinds Breach: Three Lessons You Need to Heed

What do the Pentagon, the U.S. State Department, The White House, the NSA, all five branches of the US military, the top ten U.S. telecommunications companies, and four hundred twenty-five of the Fortune 500 all have in common? Given the title of this article, you already have a clue, which is that they are all SolarWinds customers. Those are just some of the higher profile organizations, but in all there are 300k SolarWinds customers around the world, with about 18k identified as impacted. The impact of this breach is so far and deep, the actual repercussions will not be fully understood for years potentially. However, we don’t have to wait ...

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Going Back to School on SAP Licensing

Unbelievably, it’s been four years since we published an article titled: Top Questions to Ask When Taking the Slow Road to SAP (S4) HANA. And despite that passage of time, not much has really changed about SAP’s predictability. We outlined six considerations to weigh before investing further in SAP’s vision of the future. The intent of that article was to invoke questions that would cause SAP customers pause and consider both short- and long-term issues that may have been considered foregone conclusions related to S/4 HANA. There is a famous saying that every history teacher probably says a hundred times a year to students, “Those who fail ...

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HCM Customers: 3 Warning Signs When Adding On Products

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused quite a bit of upheaval for IT and HR groups (and many others) as they support the immediate needs of their user communities and employees. To that end, the HCM suppliers have the tools that companies need to facilitate these requirements, but there are some warning signs that HCM customers should be wary of. We have noticed three prevalent themes coming through the ‘pandemic buying’ that are worth noting and taking heed when you see them. 1. Your HCM provider is offering a free trial of software you don’t currently own to “assist you during these times.” When you are offered anything for free, you are right ...

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