Global composites expert Exel Composites has appointed Pauliina Holma to the role of Product Business Owner (PBO) for their line of frangible composites used at airports. She will oversee business growth of composite products for airport infrastructure. With eight-years’ experience working in customer service at the company, Holma takes up the role from the organization’s factory in Joensuu, Finland. She will manage the development of new sales of composite products globally, to accelerate the uptake in frangible structures that are lightweight, easy to install, and long lasting.

Holma has been a part of Exel Composites for eight years, working in the customer support team, focusing on the company’s frangible products. She has garnered an excellent reputation in her customer-facing role, building a wealth of experience in understanding the sales challenges of international customers. Her depth of knowledge in this product area, coupled with her customer care experience and background in languages, means she is well positioned to act as a communication bridge between customers and R&D.

“My career has always been about developing better relationships with our customers, particularly international companies,” said Holma. “For example, before joining Exel I held a position at an export company, where my main role was to collaborate with clients abroad, helping them to navigate their challenges around orders and lead times. This is how I came to work with Exel Composites. My experience in providing customer support for our airfield systems customers will be valuable to the company in creating new pricing strategies and helping us to accelerate the uptake of these products.

“Beyond the regions with which Exel is well established, such as Europe, there is potential to grow market share for composite airfield products in areas like North America and China. Exel combines the expertise of a global company, meaning that prospective customers in the USA and China can benefit from working with industry leaders across the world,” continued Holma.
Exel Composites is world-leading in pultrusion manufacturing, which ensures high-volume production of composite profiles for frangible airport masts, poles, and fencing. The company also offers high-quality machining and assembly services across its factories.

“With Pauliina’s vast knowledge about the airfield composite solutions and customer know-how, she will be instrumental in liaising between customers and R&D to ensure the customer gets the right solution for their application,” commented Patrick Loock, Segment Business Owner for products and applications at Exel Composites. “Having Pauliina in this new role will help us to grow our business internationally and understand, design, and deliver new composite solutions that overcome the challenges facing airport infrastructure.”

To find out more about Exel Composites’ products for airports, visit us here at www.exelcomposites.com/composites-in-infrastructure-applications.

Sectigo, a global leader in digital certificates and automated Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM), today announced the latest expansion to its industry-leading CLM ecosystem, via Sectigo Certificate Manager (SCM).

Organisations can now seamlessly issue and manage digital certificates originating from Google Cloud Platform (GCP), AWS Cloud Services, as well as publicly trusted CAs, providing complete visibility and lifecycle control over all public and private digital certificates within a single platform. This functionality builds upon Sectigo’s already robust capability and enables enterprises to discover, deploy, install, and renew the lifecycles of all digital certificates deployed within an enterprise ecosystem.

These additional integrations further deliver on Sectigo’s CA agnostic commitment and add to a growing roster that enables the issuance and management of digital certificates within Microsoft Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS), other public CAs, popular DevOps platforms such as Kubernetes, Docker, HashiCorp, and more than a dozen leading technology integrations.

According to Gartner®, “Security and risk management leaders are increasingly dissatisfied with the operational inefficiencies and the lack of integration of a heterogenous security stack. As a result, they are consolidating the number of security vendors they use.” Since 2020, Sectigo’s ongoing strategy has been built around this trend. Sectigo is focused on helping organisations establish digital trust and reduce risk by developing its SCM platform with openness and interoperability at its heart. This allows IT security leaders and their teams to consolidate existing technology silos, achieve crypto-agility, reduce security-stack complexity, optimise resources, enable compliance, and deliver ROI.

“Certificate Lifecycle Management is increasingly becoming mission-critical for IT leaders as they work to establish digital trust for their enterprises in remote and hybrid work environments. CISOs and their teams must acquire and manage multiple, expensive, and siloed public key infrastructure and CLM solutions to tackle human and machine identity management,” said Kevin Weiss, CEO, Sectigo. “Our priority is to help them with security vendor consolidation by combining public and private certificate issuance and CLM into one single pane of glass. Our customers see substantial cost savings and management efficiencies.”

Sectigo’s universal SCM platform represents market-leading innovation and is CA agnostic, meaning it can work with a host of different IT environments, digital certificate types, use cases, and Certificate Authorities. SCM provides a modern approach to securing massive amounts of human and machine identities at scale. The platform can request, deploy, and manage any public or private certificate from Microsoft ADCS, Google Cloud Platform, and AWS Cloud Services, alongside public and private certificates from third-party vendors, all within one cloud-based interface.

Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, is today unveiling the latest version of Bigin, the company’s CRM solution for small businesses. As the preferred CRM solution for small businesses, Bigin offers a simple yet powerful CRM without the high barrier of entry and cost, to promote business growth.

Today’s product updates further support small and micro businesses by providing users with the tools and insights they need to maintain and grow meaningful and high-value relationships with customers in a challenging economic environment.

Since Bigin’s launch in 2020, it has stood out as a robust, easy-to-use, and welcoming CRM solution thanks to its 30-minute set up promise. Zoho has observed that around 65 per cent of Bigin’s customers have never used a CRM previously, making it the ideal choice for business owners who are looking to move away from spreadsheets. When they outgrow Bigin, Zoho also offers customers an easy migration to Zoho’s full-fledged CRM solution.

Daniel Jesensky, CEO of Skyon, commented: “I migrated from a competitor to Bigin last year, and I’m very happy so far. Bigin allows us to be flexible about which platform it runs on—a deal breaker for us—and its new pipelines feature provides visibility on status and upcoming tasks in the blink of an eye. We’re planning to connect other teams to Bigin in the new year, ensuring everyone is immediately on the same page.”

Bigin now boasts 20K customers and continues to help small and micro businesses manage all of their customer-facing operations within a unified platform.

According to Laurie McCabe, co-founder of SMB Group, “In my years of working closely with SMBs it is evident that they simply can’t manage multiple tools for customer operations or afford the solutions that are more robust due to limited resources and budget. It’s frustrating to see that many CRM solutions available to SMBs offer limited functionality — where interoperability with third party apps, data sharing, and pipeline management aren’t included. As a result, they are unable to deliver the level of value SMBs want and need. This problem is so prevalent that 58 per cent of small businesses (with 1-100 employees) say that figuring out what tech solution will work best for them is a top tech challenge, and half note that they struggle to integrate new applications with existing ones, according to our latest research.”

Bigin’s latest version includes the introduction of Team Pipelines, which allows customer-facing teams to manage their particular operations using a distinct set of pipelines and sub-pipelines within a single Bigin account. Competitive offerings often cater only to a single function — like sales — whereas Bigin is an efficient solution for all customer-facing teams. New features compile customer operations into one place, and enable tighter alignment and collaboration between individuals and teams without compromising the simplicity that Bigin offers.

“Small businesses face challenges in choosing the right technology for managing their customer-facing operations because of constraints related to time, cost, and software implementation,” says Sridhar Iyengar, Managing Director, Zoho Europe. “Bigin is the only solution that brings together all customer operations like sales, onboarding, delivery, training, advocacy, and more into an intuitive interface that takes only 30 minutes to deploy. By bringing together all the facets of customer operations into a single view, Bigin allows small businesses to have a more accurate understanding of the customer’s journey. These insights help them attract and retain customers, ultimately growing the business. The fast-growing adoption of Bigin shows the expanding appetite of small businesses who want and need CRM technology suited to their particular needs, helping them move beyond old-school spreadsheets.”

Key Product Updates

● Team Pipelines: The most significant addition to Bigin, Team Pipelines brings together various customer operations into a single 360-degree view. Businesses can connect key customer processes such as deal management, onboarding, delivery, training, ticket management, refund requests, customer testimonials, etc. thereby ensuring small businesses manage their day-to-day processes in an easier way. Businesses can now enjoy a complete CRM that goes beyond sales management and offers them a single source of truth when it comes to analysing customer data.

● Connected Pipelines: Alongside Team Pipelines, Bigin introduced a new way of connecting customer records across different processes. With Connected Pipelines, businesses can automate the movement of customer data across various pipelines, enabling them to deliver seamless end-to-end customer experiences. For example, once a deal is won, sales teams can automate the creation of a connected record in the customer onboarding pipeline. This way, businesses spend less time entering repetitive customer information and have more time to focus on actual customer conversations.

● Toppings: Additional functionalities and third-party integrations can be added on-demand to address business needs that go beyond the standard offering. For example, the ‘Email-In’ topping ensures emails sent to different email aliases in an organisation are automatically mapped to the relevant customer records in each pipeline. Similarly, the ‘File Cabinet’ topping automates the process of file collection where customers can manage all their documents through unique, secure links.

● Mobile Capabilities: In response to the increased adoption of Bigin’s mobile app, Zoho is ensuring all new features are available across iOS, iPadOS, Android, and macOS. This makes for seamless employee experiences and is further enhanced with a new Dynamic Display which helps users customise the look, style, and visibility of records in their pipelines. Bigin also recently updated its apps for the Apple’s iOS16 and Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 launches, where it was an exclusive launch partner.

● Developer Centre: Bigin now opens its developer platform to a network of global app developers and partners who are looking to create custom solutions for unique business needs. With various developer tools and components like custom fields, buttons, links, widgets, related lists, and REST APIs, developers can create new Toppings which can be monetised in the Bigin Marketplace.

Disclaimer: All trademarks, product names, and company names cited herein are the property of their respective owners.

Pricing
Bigin by Zoho CRM starts at £5 /user/month (billed annually) for the Express edition and goes up to £10 user/month (billed annually) for the Premier edition. There is also a free edition available.

Paperpal, a CACTUS brand offering AI-powered tools for language and technical compliance checks for research manuscripts, has announced its partnership with Aries Systems Corporation, a leading technology workflow solutions provider to the scholarly publishing community. Through this collaboration, Paperpal’s Preflight product will be used to deliver a superior submission experience to authors, helping to reduce the editorial workload for Aries Systems’ Editorial Manager (EM) users.

Abhishek Goel, Co-founder and CEO, CACTUS said on the partnership, “Paperpal Preflight will provide EM users with instant feedback on the submission readiness of their manuscripts. Powered by machine learning and trained on millions of published articles, Paperpal Preflight helps editors save time when carrying out pre-submission checks, and improves quality of submissions, making sure they comply with journal guidelines.”

Jennifer Fleet, Managing Director, Aries Systems said, “We are thrilled to continue integrating AI tools into the industry-leading manuscript submission system, EM, to create a more robust system. Through our new partnership with Paperpal Preflight, we will be able to provide authors submitting research via EM a streamlined tool to bolster the quality of manuscript submissions and, ultimately, the chances of publication success.”

Through advanced AI algorithms, Paperpal Preflight identifies complex writing errors and provides subject-specific language suggestions in real time prior to manuscript submission. Paperpal’s technology understands the context of the writing, provides appropriate recommendations, and identifies the most common errors in the manuscript to improve the quality of submissions.

In the submission workflow in EM, manuscripts are sent to Paperpal’s user-friendly web-based interface where authors are provided with an automated check for structural inconsistencies and complex grammatical errors before the article is sent to the journal office. Once the manuscript passes through Paperpal, it is sent back to EM for submission, accelerating the writing process, enhancing the quality, and increasing the chance of acceptance.