Showpad, the world’s most powerful sales enablement platform – announced today the launch of Showpad Experiences, the industry’s first immersive presentation platform that ensures sales and marketing teams will stay one step ahead of how enterprise customers buy today.

Showpad Experiences will help buyers the way Waze helps drivers, converting static marketing materials into an immersive, interactive, branded experience for clients and prospects. Today, buyers are more educated about products and services than ever before. The fundamentals of successful sales conversation have shifted away from product details, pricing, and even relationships to more value-driven conversations where the experience has the biggest impact on a successful outcome. More than half of buyers today buy based on the buying experience over any other factor. Showpad Experiences is driven by the acquisition of London-based start-up Hickup, which created mobile sales playbooks.

“Showpad Experiences is going to change how sales teams have conversations with clients and prospects,” said Pieterjan Bouten, CEO of Showpad. “The acquisition of Hickup furthers our dominant position in this exciting market.”

With Showpad Experiences, marketing can craft new interactive ways of presenting their existing materials without needing to coordinate or create new collateral. And prospects, in turn, have more valuable conversations that dynamically focus on what they need, and only on what they need.

“Showpad Experiences adds value to the way we engage with our customers, ultimately improving our ability to convert more business,” said Graham Leeson, head of communications at Fujifilm. “It increases sales productivity, more deeply engages our buyers and gives marketing the power to control content.”

The core Hickup team, including founder Julien Lescure, is joining Showpad as part of the completion of the company’s acquisition and will continue to focus on product design and development. Several large Showpad customers are already using Showpad Experiences, and today marks the wide availability for more than 1,000 Showpad clients.

Key Showpad Experiences benefits include:

●        Maximise marketing impact on the sales conversation by guiding salespeople to the most relevant content for each conversation. Increase sales relevance by giving the buyer a clear visual storytelling experience and focus on the right content using contextual and segmented navigations that make it easy to come out with the most relevant information.

●        Give salespeople the flexibility to choose the right flow for every conversation, while maintaining control over which documents they can use.

“Showpad Experiences takes marketing collateral and sales team's’ effectiveness to the next level,” said Lescure. “I’m thrilled to be able to develop products like this at Showpad.”

3W Infra, one of the fastest growing IaaS hosting providers in Europe that managed to grow its server base by one third in just half a year to currently 4,000 dedicated servers under management, announces the launch of its 3W Infra Financing Program – a ‘lease-to-own’ program aimed at somewhat larger hosting infrastructures, for companies intending to pursue increased margins and cost control. 

3W Infra’s new Financing Program provides IaaS hosting customers the opportunity to obtain end-of-lease ownership of their dedicated servers and network equipment while paying fixed monthly instalments during life of lease.

Through the 3W Infra Financing Program, users are enabled to easily acquire new pieces of equipment and keep their investment costs in line with company revenues. The equipment acquired may include rack servers, blade enclosures, storage nodes, firewalls, load balancers, switches, optical fibers, cabling infrastructure, and more. The financing program is meant for enterprises, cloud services providers (CSPs), systems integrators (SIs), managed services providers (MSPs) and other companies requiring somewhat larger IaaS hosting infrastructures. 

OPEX vs. CAPEX

The 3W Infra Financing Program features flexible instalment schemes with instalment plans ranging from 12-month to 36-month periods. Users are eligible to apply for the 3W Infra Financing Program when they have located their IaaS hosting infrastructure within 3W Infra’s premises already or when they are planning to do so. 3W Infra Financing Program participants are able to select whichever hardware brand or appliances they prefer when financing their equipment.

“Our new Financing Program with lease-to-own offering provides CXOs and financial managers the opportunity to shift their IT investments from CAPEX to operating expense funding for their dedicated servers and network gear,” said Roy Premchand, Managing Director of 3W Infra. “Freeing up capital may give these companies the advantage to acquire up-to-date IaaS hosting technology while able to focus on their core missions and revenue generators. It also enables them to de-risk their IT investments when confronted with potentially high upfront hardware costs.”

The lease-to-own financing program builds on 3W Infra’s options for ‘Operational Lease’ (dedicated servers or network services with monthly charges, where 3W Infra retains ownership of the hardware), and ‘Purchase’ where 3W Infra operates as a reseller of server and network equipment. The latter provides customers the opportunity to obtain full ownership of the hardware from day one.

Financials, Cloud Companies

For 3W Infra it’s not that profitable to include a lease-to-own offering in its portfolio, but the company’s management team wants to offer it anyway. “Margins on solutions like these are quite low actually, but we think it’s important to go the extra mile and have this lease-to-own option available for our customers,” added Mr. Premchand. “It’s in line with 3W Infra’s unique go-to-market strategy to provide endless options for demanding clientele, where they are also able to choose whichever hardware brand they like while obtaining high levels of customization.” 

Especially for financial enterprises and cloud services providers (CSPs) this lease-to-own option would be a good fit, says Mr. Premchand. “Even for startups lease-to-own might be a suitable financing solution. Operational lease, in other words our regular dedicated server product portfolio, might be a good solution for them as well – as some startups may prefer to have more flexibility in their medium term commitments. The lease-to-own model enjoys quite some attention from the startup scene though, as cloud storage startups and streaming startup companies from respectively Canada and India have already shown interest in our lease-to-own offering.” 

“For some of our gaming customers operational lease would probably provide a better fit as well, as their dedicated server and network requirements can fluctuate enormously,” added Premchand. “For financials on the other hand, our network performance with 100% uptime guarantees and low-latency connectivity are usually more important than CPU power. When selecting high quality brands for their lease-to-own based infrastructure, they would be able to implement a sustainable and economically quite beneficial IaaS hosting infrastructure. The same accounts for well-established cloud services companies, for example when expanding their activities abroad from the U.S. to Europe.” 

The pioneering work of Danfoss has received international recognition at KuppingerCole’s recent European Identity & Cloud (EIC) Conference in Munich, Germany. Danfoss’ IoT security framework project was recognized with an esteemed European Identity & Cloud Award 2017 in the Best IoT Security Project category.

Duqu, Stuxnet, Mirai and similar malware was the start of a trend of attacking connected devices in industrial environments. With IoT just about to lift off, industries are witnessing increasingly connected devices being at risk of being breached or used as weapons to attack other environments, as in the first wave of connectivity enthusiasm, the unexpected appearance of malicious actors was typically overlooked by vendors during product design and development phases, leaving the device security ignored.

In close co-operation Danfoss and Nixu have jointly developed a clean slate security platform based on modern elliptic cryptography and manageable, streamlined and mostly automated PKI. As part of platform functionality, every device gets a strong cryptographic identity during the manufacturing stage, which is then used to secure all later transactions and communication in the open Internet. The ability to address, group and manage devices with the help of a virtually unforgeable device identity; also introduces new security and business critical capabilities in license management, remote monitoring and maintenance, software updates and other areas. Ensuring root-of-trust integrity by help of some innovative hardware mechanisms results in the devices being tamper-proof and resistant against even advanced physical attacks.

The new security platform enables Danfoss a highly secure way to perform preventive maintenance and new business models. As a result of the new security platform, Danfoss will also ensure even better product quality throughout the lifecycle in a cost-efficient way.

“It is remarkable to witness an industrial technology company like Danfoss leveraging security as a true enabler for new, innovative business models. We are privileged to be part of and support Danfoss in its digitalization journey”, says Aleksandr Vara, Head of Industrial Internet Security at Nixu Corporation. 

“Danfoss appreciates the new opportunities presented by the digital world. With more software built into our products, we can offer our customers appropriate control systems, intelligent data and functionalities – thereby improving user-friendliness, performance, and quality. It is imperative that we have the best possible data protection in place to do so. Nixu’s expertise has elevated us to the forefront of security in the industrial automation space “, says Theis Solberg Hjorth, Senior Security Architect, Global Research & Development at Danfoss Drives.

CHAPS Clearing Company Limited, the UK’s same day high-value payment system, welcomes Bank of China Limited as a shareholder and Direct Participant in CHAPS with immediate effect. 

As commerce evolves beyond the traditional storefront, so does the need for businesses to provide their customers with a seamless payment experience, regardless of where they check out. 

Hanse Orga Group, the market leader in financial automation software, today announces that is has reached agreement with Dolphin Enterprise Solutions Corporation (Dolphin), a leading provider of process automation and data management solutions for SAP customers, to become part of Hanse Orga Group and jointly deliver leading technology and process solutions to enterprise customers across the globe.

Mitchells & Butlers (M&B), one of the largest operators of restaurants, pubs and bars in the UK, has today announced a partnership with Flypay and its ground-breaking Flyt platform. 

Countr POS, a Dutch provider of a tablet based point of sale software for small to medium-sized businesses, announces a strategic partnership with Coinify, leading European blockchain payment and trading service provider. 

Pay360 by Capita has established a five-year alliance with ACI Worldwide, a leading provider of real-time electronic payment and banking solutions, to extend its card acquiring capability from the UK and Europe, to growth markets in North and South America, the Middle East and Africa.

Mastercard is joining forces with payments industry leaders to enhance and expedite the consumer checkout experience leveraging the company’s M/Chip Fast technology. M/Chip Fast prioritizes the parts of a transaction critical to security to speed chip checkout times.