According to SIIA, CODiE Award recipients produce the most innovative businesses technology products around the world. The award spotlights the unique innovation associated with Max, Apttus' applied AI for Apttus Omni, the company's Intelligent Middle Office Platform. Max utilizes an intelligent conversational user interface that proactively delivers insights and recommendations to help sales, legal, operations and financial professionals maximize revenue and other critical business outcomes. The resulting actions accelerate and optimize Apttus' CPQ, CLM, E-Commerce and Revenue Management solutions that comprise Apttus Omni. Max's success stems from an overwhelming customer need for speed and efficiency in executing revenue operations and managing commercial relationships.

Apttus, the global Middle Office leader, today announced its applied artificial intelligence offering, Max, has been named the best AI Solution of 2018 as part of the annual SIIA CODiE Awards. According to SIIA, CODiE Award recipients produce the most innovative businesses technology products around the world. The award spotlights the unique innovation associated with Max, Apttus' applied AI for Apttus Omni, the company's Intelligent Middle Office Platform. Max utilizes an intelligent conversational user interface that proactively delivers insights and recommendations to help sales, legal, operations and financial professionals maximize revenue and other critical business outcomes. The resulting actions accelerate and optimize Apttus' CPQ, CLM, E-Commerce and Revenue Management solutions that comprise Apttus Omni.

As seen with the offerings from mega tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon.com, Facebook and Google, AI (Artificial Intelligence) is rapidly becoming mainstream. Yet much of the technologies have been for consumer applications. Well, things often do not move as fast. However, there are some enterprise software companies that have been well ahead of the curve.

SAN MATEO, CA – September 21, 2017 – Apttus, which provides the first and only integrated platform to combine end-to-end Quote-to-Cash business process automation and Contract Lifecycle Management with behavior applications and artificial intelligence to enable customers to maximize revenue, today unveiled Apttus Contract Management with Artificial Intelligence (AI). The addition of Artificial Intelligence to Apttus' leading Contract Management product offers legal departments numerous benefits, including reductions in contract cycle time, enhanced agreement risk management, and the automation of third-party paper. "Apttus' history of contract management innovation goes back eleven years, and today we're just as invested in driving the industry forward and creating successful outcomes for our customers," said Kirk Krappe, CEO at Apttus. "It should come as no surprise that Apttus is the first to leverage artificial intelligence in this space, and in ways that enterprise organizations can leverage immediately and effectively." To learn more about Apttus Contract Management with Applied AI, download the whitepaper or review Forrester's most recent CLM report.

The week of August 21, 2017, was a big week for Apttus in the world of sales compensation. We publicly launched the Apttus Intelligent Incentive Compensation (IICM) solution and sponsored the World at Work Spotlight on Sales Compensation conference. This annual event brings sales operations leaders, finance executives, compensation specialists and thought leaders from around the global to Chicago for a three-day immersion of all things sales compensation. It is THE event for sales compensation professionals and for the first time, Apttus was front and center with this audience. This year's event exceeded expectations and we look forward to participating again next year.

The real-world application of this algorithm used a series of iterative calculations to determine the best routes for traveling salespeople to use to fully and most efficiently cover their territory. Through the iterative process, this appeared to learn routes and improve efficiency over time. Many scholars considered this a little bit of a stretch on machine learning and artificial intelligence. To quote the introduction in the book, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2016 edition): "We call ourselves Homo sapiens – man the wise – because our intelligence is so important to us." And while we consider ourselves intelligent, many people think only living, breathing beings can be intelligent and learn. I would have to disagree with that – thanks to the introduction of neural networks, natural language processing and all the other disciplines that touch artificial intelligence, machine learning is a real thing. Machines learn from the data that passes through them and are capable of processing vast amounts of data faster than us humans can. And those machines have the power to remember all that data, find the hidden patterns, the missing links, etc. – better than people can, and even faster than groups of people working together in enterprise businesses. Think about that device in your back pocket for a moment.

It seems AI and machine learning are quickly becoming a must-have for today's software. Apttus, the quote-to-cash service is putting AI to work in contract processing in an effort to speed up a highly inefficient system and close sales faster. Contracts have traditionally been a bottleneck in the sales process. As Apttus CEO and company founder Kirk Krappe explains it, there are a series of decision points in the contract workflow and companies can use AI to help decide which way to go and which of these to prioritize. "Organizations that combine contract management with artificial intelligence gain an ability to explicitly trade off considerations of risk, cycle time, cost and negotiation outcomes," Krappe told TechCrunch.

PremjiInvest, the family investment arm of Wipro Ltd chairman Azim Premji, has spread its bets on Silicon Valley startups, leading a new investment in artificial intelligence unicorn Apttus. Apttus, a quote-to-cash vendor built on the platform of American cloud computing company Salesforce, has raised $55 million (Rs 352 crore) in a Series E round, the company said in a statement. Existing investors Salesforce Ventures, the venture arm of Salesforce, K1, and Iconiq also participated in the round, it added. This is Premjiinvest's first deal in a Silicon Valley-based firm in more than a year while it has been actively investing in the domestic market. "PremjiInvest is always highly selective in its investments, working with the strongest management teams and the most promising companies," said Sandesh Patnam, partner and lead investor in the US for PremjiInvest.

The traditional suite of enterprise applications -- ERP, HCM, CRM and SCM, or more prosaically money, people, sales and spend -- reflects the functional organization of the traditional enterprise. In other words, these applications have their roots in functions that were originally defined by the need to marshall operations using the flow of paper documents around the twentieth-century enterprise. Those functional boundaries are beginning to dissolve in the digital enterprise. Connected technologies, most notably cloud computing and smart mobile devices, make it possible to connect up data and processes across the old demarcations. Where once each separate function managed its own dataset and only occasionally married up data with adjacent operational silos, today's connected digital infrastructure makes it possible to share data in real-time and access it anywhere.

These and other insights are based on The Forrester Wave: Configure-Price-Quote Solutions, Q1 2017 by John Bruno published February 7, 2017 (17 pp., PDF; client access). A variety of CPQ vendors including Apttus, CallidusCloud, FPX, Oracle, PROS and others have licensed the report and provide a free downloadable copy in exchange for contact information. Please see page 14 of the study for a description of the methodology. The Forrester Wave is the latest in a series of studies that confirm Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) is one of the hottest enterprise apps today. The rapid development and launch of intelligent agents by Apttus, Infor, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and others are creating a new era of intelligent selling.