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Today, we catch up on the latest enterprise technology news. PHOTO: Joanna Bourne

Oracle released new capabilities and enhancements to its Oracle Cloud Applications suite this week.

Oracle Cloud Applications Release 13 offers enhanced user experiences for customer experience, finance, HR and supply chain professionals.

The release includes new capabilities and enhancements across the entire Oracle Cloud Applications portfolio, including Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud, Oracle Customer Experience (CX) Cloud Suite, Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud and Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud. 

Among the new capabilities, the Oracle Sales Cloud receives enhanced mobile and data visualization capabilities. 

Oracle also extended Oracle CX Cloud Suite with the introduction of Oracle Engagement Cloud, which combines sales and service capabilities to help organizations increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and up-sell opportunities.

In other technology news ...

Accenture Acquires Search Technologies

Accenture is acquiring Herndon, Va.-based Search Technologies for an undisclosed amount.

The acquisition is geared at expanding the Dublin-based professional services company's existing search capabilities and content analytics. 

Kamran Khan, president and CEO of Search Technologies, will lead content analytics within Accenture Analytics as part of the deal. Accenture also adds nearly 200 big data engineers and search experts located worldwide with the buy.

In a statement, Accenture Analytics Chief Analytics Officer Narendi Mulani stated, “With the addition of Search Technologies’ capabilities, we are in an even stronger position to help organizations take advantage of their data, regardless of format, to generate more precise and actionable insights.”

The company plans to integrate Search Technologies' Content Processing Framework into its Accenture Insights Platform.

Accenture will also establish a new delivery center in Costa Rica to act as a base for local Search Technologies big data engineers.

LiveTiles Raises Another $8.7M

LiveTiles has raised $8.7 million to support global expansion. 

That brings the total raised by the New York City-based digital experience design company to roughly $19.1 million. LiveTiles provides businesses with a mobile Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

LiveTiles officials said the company grew its annualized subscription revenue by 293 percent to $4 million between 2016 and 2017.

In 2015, LiveTiles listed on the Australian Securities Exchange following a $12 million capital raise.

LogMeIn Acquires Chatbot Provider Nanorep

Boston-based LogMeIn, Inc. announced plans to acquire Nanorep, provider of a chatbot and virtual assistant. The deal is worth $50 million. 

Headquartered in Herzliya, Israel, Nanorep uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies for customer service initiatives. 

In 2012, LogMeIn acquired Boldchat, an intelligent customer engagement platform which has since evolved into Bold360.

“Artificial intelligence is changing the way we interact with our favorite brands and will play a critical role in the future of customer engagement,” Bill Wagner, CEO of LogMeIn, said in a statement. “With Nanorep, we gain proven technology and AI expertise that expands our Bold360 offering, accelerates our customer engagement vision and provides a natural path for us to leverage these emerging technologies across our entire portfolio."

Nanorep will complement LogMeIn’s Bold360 platform as a standalone offering and by adding digital self-service capabilities to the Bold360 product portfolio. 

ASG Technologies Launches Workspace 10.0

Also this week, Naples, Fla.-based ASG Technologies unveiled its Workspaces 10.0, an enterprise platform designed to bring workers a virtual desktop. 

Workspaces 10.0 will deliver IT-sanctioned access to information, services and applications.

Workspaces 10.0 offers:

  • Customization with branded material and in-setting user access rights. Built-in app delivery and an API to ensure the UX stays the same across any device or access point and is open to integrations
  • Controlling employee access to content and using policies meet compliance, privacy and security requirements
  • A single point of access and authentication with a URL
  • Multitenancy delivery method to help avoid several deployments and maintaining agents on end-users devices.

Velocidi Adds 'Real' AI

Marketing intelligence provider Velocidi has integrated artificial intelligence (AI) tools into its flagship platform.

Marketers access Velocidi's new AI-powered platform through a simple user interface which displays trends and relationships in data that are relevant for their campaigns.  

"Unfortunately, the marketplace is polluted with AI-lite solutions that are all hype, and no substance. We set out to deliver what marketers truly need: a platform powered by real artificial intelligence that is easy to use, both for those with and without data science expertise," David Dunne, founder and CEO of Velocidi, said in a statement. "Our team has managed to democratize and accelerate access to insights so that all marketers have more time to focus on strategic decisions."

Company officials said they added AI to provide marketers greater access to insights for the entire marketing value chain of planning, creative and buying processes.

Velocidi's foundational AI tools are available to existing subscribers at no additional cost.

Velocidi

Optimizely Debuts Features for Experimentation

San Francisco-based experimentation platform provider Optimizely has announced three new feature enhancements to the Optimizely X platform. The new features include: mutually exclusive experiments, custom snippets and change history.

The goal is to help customers scale their experimentation program with confidence across more teams and more areas of the business. 

Mutually exclusive experiments allow users to run multiple experiments at the same time on a website without interaction effects.

Custom snippets​ add flexibility and control across projects and teams.

Change history provides access to detailed change history.

Bridgeline Digital Decreases Shares

Burlington, Mass.-based Bridgeline Digital has reduced the number of common stock shares currently outstanding from approximately 21 million shares to 4 million shares in a reverse stock split. 

Company officials said the move is intended to increase the market price per share of the company's common stock to allow the company to maintain its listing on the NASDAQ Capital Market. The Company's common stock will continue to trade on the NASDAQ Capital Market under the symbol "BLIN."

The split went into effect at close of business July 24, 2017. The stock started at a high of $3.10 a share on July 25, but has since declined to $2.57 a share at the time of this writing.