News from the week beginning May 4 2026

Ian Murphy spoke to Parm Sandhu, Vice President, Enterprise 5G Products and Services at NTT Ltd, about his company’s strategy of helping OT organisations face a critical challenge. OT environments remain stuck with legacy systems, creating a gap between modern enterprise capabilities and industrial operations. NTT enables organisations in manufacturing, energy, transportation, logistics, and healthcare by providing processing, computing, AI, analytics, and connectivity solutions on premises. This approach differs from cloud-based services.

An interview with Sachin Agrawal, Managing Director of Zoho UK, explores why an organisation’s AI strategy needs a compliance backbone. Compliance is not a tax on innovation. It is the friction that stops you from driving off a cliff. Agrawal comments,  “Moving fast and breaking things works for a startup, not for an enterprise handling patient data or financial records.”

Corporate research labs are notorious for their graveyards of innovation. Brilliant patents sit gathering dust, too academic to sell, too risky to shelve. For NTT, which invests $3 billion annually in R&D, it’s become research for the sake of it. Now it’s time for a change. Bennett Indart, Senior Vice President of Product Incubation at NTT Research, is here to break the locks and explain how in this podcast.

In this podcast episode, Stephen Brooks talks with Ajmal Mahmood, VP of Sales and CX at Omningage, about how organisations should think about the use and value of AI in contact centres. Mahmood has decades of experience, from frontline agent to technical and leadership roles. He starts by defining value for three groups: customers, businesses and agents.

Appointment

NetApp announced the appointment of Jürgen Hofkens as Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Sales Engineering for EMEA and LATAM, effective May 1 2026.

Spacelift has announced the appointment of two new executive team members. John Henry Archer joins as Senior Vice President of Sales and Channel, and Jonah Kowall as Senior Vice President of Product and Design.

Business

10x Banking has announced a new partnership with Tweezr. Tweezr provides an AI-powered surgical code assistant that unlocks developer productivity in legacy environments.

Freshworks has released its financial results for its first quarter ended March 31, 2026. The results have exceeded estimates for revenue and non-GAAP operating income.

Gainsight has announced a new partnership with Glean. Glean is a Work AI platform that provides an assistant powered by enterprise AI that understands the context of work through integrations. The partnership sees a new integration between the Gainsight Revenue engine and Gleans’ platform.

Panasonic TOUGHBOOK has launched a restructured channel partner program for its rugged mobility partners. The new program, named Elevate, includes many of the standard features that one would expect from a vendor.

Product

Aera Technology has announced new agentic reasoning capabilities in its decision intelligence solution.

FourKites has released significant enhancements to Inventory Twin, the inventory intelligence layer within the FourKites Intelligent Control Tower. FourKites also launched a new Oceans Booking platform powered by Agentic AI. Booking Connect for Oceanis will automate several components of the Ocean Freight Booking processes.

Precisely has added new capabilities to its Data Integrity Suite to help organisations make better use of agentic-ready data.

Rootstock has announced Rootstock Ready, a methodology it claims will enable Midmarket Manufacturers and Distributors to deploy its ERP solution better, faster and at a predictable cost.

Alkira

Lumen announced it has agreed to acquire Alkira. This cloud-native, carrier-agnostic networking platform enables enterprises to design, deploy, and operate connectivity and network services across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

The proposed transaction pairs Alkira’s cloud-native control plane — the software layer that programs and orchestrates connectivity — with Lumen’s fibre network. Thus, advancing Lumen’s digital platform strategy to deliver cloud-like consumption for global enterprise networking.

Kate Johnson, CEO of Lumen Technologies, commented, “For decades, networking ran in the background. Today, it’s the nervous system, determining how fast you can move, how much you spend, and whether your AI investments produce value.

“With Alkira, Lumen will pair the trusted network for AI with a cloud-native control plane, which will give customers a programmable network designed for the AI era. It’s what the market needs, and it’s what we’re building at Lumen.”

Azul

Azul announced four wins in the 24^th annual American Business Awards, earning three Gold Stevie Awards and one Bronze Stevie Award. The recognition spans cloud innovation, DevOps efficiency, financial achievement and marketing leadership, underscoring the breadth of Azul’s impact across its products, business performance and go-to-market execution.

Deel

Deel announced several product updates for May. They included improvements to both HRIS, Payroll, Employer of Record, Contractor, PEO, Deel IT, Deel Mobility and the Deel Platform. The firm also launched Akai by Deel. An interconnected system of agents learns your workflows, automates every step, and gets smarter with every run—auditably, on any system.

Deel also announced the acquisition of Sastrify — the AI-powered platform that gives companies real visibility into software usage, renewals, and spend.

Epicor

Epicor Prism Developer for Application Studio

ERP vendor Epicor announced Epicor Prism Developer for Application Studio. Built directly into Kinetic Application Studio, it uses AI to generate customisation components from natural language—helping your team move faster, reduce manual effort, and focus on delivering value.

Helical Consulting

Epicor welcomed Helical Consulting to the Epicor Partner Ecosystem, supporting customers across East Africa. Helical Consulting brings strong expertise in ERP advisory, implementation, and digital transformation. This is alongside deep regional knowledge, and a consultative, outcomes-focused approach.

Kinetic release 2026.100

In a blog, Daniel Charvoz, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, gave a sneak peek of the latest release of Kinetic ERP. The 2026.100 release focuses on making Kinetic easier to scale and operate by improving planning flexibility, reducing friction in financial workflows, strengthening browser usability, and continuing long-term platform modernisation.

The release also signals a shift from two releases a year to more regular updates. It includes updates to planning, financial workflows and UX.

Infor

Frontier

Infor released a case study about how Frontier recently implemented Infor Velocity Suite. Leveraging generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)-powered tools such as Infor Process Mining to focus on internal process efficiency.

While Frontier had access to traditional reports to investigate process issues, the information only showed what happened—not why it happened or where to intervene. Frontier originally deployed Infor Food and Beverage in 2020.

Eduardo Pulido, Vice President of Information Technology (IT), said, “In the past, analysing business processes required months of work, multiple teams, and a lot of frustration just to piece things together. Infor Process Mining and its process catalogue provide ready-to-act insights, enabling us to make improvements faster. The system extracts data, builds dashboards, and even explains the results using GenAI.”

Gartner Magic Quadrant

Infor, the Industry Cloud Complete company, announced that Gartner Inc. has positioned the company as a Leader, for the eighth consecutive time, in its 2026 Magic Quadrant for Warehouse Management Systems (WMS). Supply chain technology leaders can use this research to understand the current state of the WMS market and gain vendor insight.

Meyn Food Processing Technology

In a second case study, Meyn Food Processing Technology, a global leader in poultry processing equipment, modernised its enterprise operations with Infor CloudSuite Industrial Enterprise and the Infor Velocity Suite. The firm migrated to Infor CloudSuite Industrial Enterprise. With Meyn gaining a secure, industry-specific system that evolves with market demands.

The cloud upgrade from Infor LN also removed the burden of maintaining infrastructure. While enabling faster adoption of modern capabilities such as artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.

It has now added Infor Velocity Suite. Thus, further enhancing this foundation. Helping Meyn automate manual tasks, improve efficiency, and allow employees to focus on higher-value work. Instead of managing routine operations, teams can now concentrate on what truly matters: innovation, manufacturing excellence, and customer service.

Bart Kling, Director of IT, commented, “I recommend Infor Velocity Suite to every company out there. It provides the efficiency you need in your operational tasks, so you have more time to focus on what is most important—and that is the quality of service for your customers.”

NetSuite

Oracle NetSuite announced a series of innovations designed to help organisations in Mexico increase efficiency and accelerate growth. In addition, the next generation of NetSuite, NetSuite Next, will be available in preview to automate and accelerate business processes, improve visibility and decision-making, and achieve faster outcomes.

Quantware

QuantWare, the leading industrial quantum processor company, announced a $178 million (€152 million) Series B equity funding following the announcement of VIO-40K, a quantum processor architecture for 10,000 qubits, 100x larger than the state of the art today. The company is building KiloFab, the world’s largest dedicated quantum open architecture fab, increasing the company’s production capacity by 20x to meet strong global customer demand.

Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters reported results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2026:

Strong revenue growth in the first quarter:

• Total company revenues up 10% / organic revenues up 8%
• Organic revenues up 9% for the “Big 3” segments (Legal Professionals, Corporates and Tax, Audit & Accounting Professionals)
• Maintained full-year 2026 outlook for organic revenue growth, adjusted EBITDA margin and free cash flow
• Increased annualised common share dividend by 10% to $2.62, announced in February 2026
• Completed $605 million return of capital transaction on May 4, and reduced share count by approximately 6.5 million shares by way of share consolidation transaction
• Repurchased $262 million, or 2.5 million common shares under the $600 million share repurchase program announced on February 25, 2026

Steve Hasker, President and CEO of Thomson Reuters, commented, “We have delivered an encouraging start to 2026. Our positive momentum reflects the trust professionals place in Thomson Reuters in the moments that matter most.

“Across law, tax, audit and compliance, professionals accountable for high‑stakes outcomes are choosing our AI products, built to the standards their work demands – grounded in authoritative content, designed and tested by our domain experts, and created to produce results that can be verified and audited under real‑world scrutiny. We call this ‘fiduciary-grade AI.”

Stadium

Stadium, one of the Nordic region’s largest sports retailers, has selected Infor CloudSuite Fashion and Infor Warehouse Management System (WMS) to modernise its ERP and warehouse operations. The choice marks a significant step in Stadium’s journey to build a single, scalable digital backbone that supports growth, resilience, and innovation across its retail and sourcing operations in the Nordics and Asia.

Several factors drove the partnership between Stadium and Infor. Stadium valued Infor’s strong references in distribution-intensive retail environments and its deep industry fit within fashion and retail.

The proven ability to deliver ERP and WMS as an integrated solution, combined with close collaboration between Infor and implementation partner Columbus, were key differentiator. Flexible and transparent pricing, along with a clear long-term partnership approach, further strengthened the decision.

Zoho

Alight Media

Alight Media revealed how it centralised its complex inventory and sales processes into a single source of truth, partnering with Target Cloud to implement a bespoke Zoho CRM solution.

Grace Stanton, Operations Director, Alight Media, commented, “We have used the customisation to its full extent, and it’s been great. Zoho CRM offers a lot more flexibility than other platforms.”

The State of Workforce Password Security 2026

Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, today released the State of Workforce Password Security 2026, a global research study of 3,322 verified respondents across nine regions, six industries, and twelve roles. Conducted by Tigon Advisory Corp. on behalf of Zoho Vault, Zoho’s password management platform. The report documents a widening disconnect between how organisations assess credential risk and how they have invested to address it.

Findings from US respondents indicate that American businesses lead the world in security spending intent. Yet remain among the most exposed to credential-driven attack. A gap the report attributes to architectural fragmentation rather than budget constraint.

News from the week beginning 27th April 2026

 

 

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