Thread Solutions, a leading technology company in data integration solutions, and U-Hopper, a recognized excellence in the field of Artificial Intelligence, are joining forces to strengthen their positioning in the market and to more effectively support local companies and organizations in adopting Artificial Intelligence tools and models.

Trento, January 26, 2024 – Artificial Intelligence is now considered an instrumental element for businesses of any size to compete effectively in an increasingly digitized landscape. This has driven Thread Solutions, already recognized as a national leader in System Integration thanks to its extensive experience with MuleSoft (Salesforce), to leap forward in its role as a key tech partner for customers in the era of Digital Transformation.

Following the recent partnership agreement between Thread Solutions and Databricks, a leading Data Intelligence Platform in the international market, the company is entering full speed Artificial Intelligence landscape by acquiring 100% of U-Hopper Srl, a consolidated Trentino-based company specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Analytics solutions.

As stated by Davide Piazza, president and co-founder of Thread Solutions: "The acquisition of U-Hopper is a natural step, matured through the successful collaboration that has already led both companies to establish the Trentino.ai consortium in 2022, together with Delta Informatica and Dimension. Data is increasingly perceived as a strategic asset within organizations, which no longer just need platforms for Data Integration and Data Analytics, already in our portfolio with solutions from Salesforce: MuleSoft and Tableau. Especially after the launch of ChatGPT, artificial intelligence is on the table of every CEO, every CIO, every Digital Officer, and every Marketing Officer. We are expanding our expertise in Customer Data Platform and Data Intelligence Platform projects also thanks to new partnerships with Salesforce's DataCloud and Databricks. U-Hopper's experience allows us to position ourselves significantly in the AI market with the same reputation and competence with which we have successfully tackled Data Integration challenges for years. There can be no good AI without good data and good data without good Data Integration. For this reason, thanks to the acquisition of U-Hopper, Thread Solutions is positioning itself as  the best strategic partner to support customers in the adoption of AI and, broadly speaking, of  a Data-Driven strategy in a conscious and controlled manner."

U-Hopper, born as a spin-off of the international research center Bruno Kessler Foundation (FBK), has historically a strong connection with the research world and brings with it a decade-long experience in developing technological platforms for creating advanced analytics. In the new corporate configuration, this heritage will be further strengthened, aiming to launch new products and services enabled by Artificial Intelligence methods and models in the market in a short time.

According to the CEO of U-Hopper, Daniele Miorandi, "The union with Thread Solutions allows us to achieve critical mass in terms of skills and company size. This will facilitate the acquisition of corporate clients and create new outlets to bring innovative Artificial Intelligence solutions developed in research laboratories to the market, fully in line with U-Hopper's history and culture."

This acquisition represents a tipping point in the journey of the two organizations, with impacts that extend well beyond corporate boundaries, creating a solid foundation for growth, collaboration, and innovation in the field of AI at both local and international levels.

#1 trend: Automation

do more with less

53% of organizations (according to a survey by a major consulting services company) have started implementing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to drive efficient growth, enhance productivity, and generate much-needed cost savings.

However, MuleSoft suggests that to promote efficient growth and drive significant impact in 2023, organizations must move toward more strategic, enterprise-wide automation or hyperautomation initiatives. Hyperautomation will allow organizations to lower operational costs by 30%.

In this regard, Gartner predicts that 80% of organizations will have hyperautomation on their technology roadmap in the next 24 months and the market for hyperautomation software will hit nearly $860 billion.

#2 trend: Composability

drive innovation and agility

Legacy technology and data silos are the main barriers to responding quickly to users' desire for more connected experiences.

To address this issue, more and more organizations (according to Gartner, by 2023, 60 percent of organizations) will list becoming a composable enterprise as a strategic objective and will use an increasing number of PBCs to achieve this goal.

This approach gives organizations the flexibility they need to adapt with agility to changing market demands in the pursuit of customer loyalty and growth in 2023 — and to do so in a cost-effective and strategic manner.

#3 trend: Low-No Code Tools

create varied teams to accelerate transformation

The next big challenge for organizations will be to find a way to overcome the IT skills and delivery gaps in a managed and secure way.

To overcome these challenges, low-code/no-code tools must be rolled out across the workforce.

To drive further success, in 2023 we’ll see more organizations create fusion teams that combine business and technology experts.

In this way, organizations are 2.6 times more likely to accelerate their digital business transformation, according to Gartner.

#4 trend: Total Experience (TX) Strategies 

drive greater customer and employee loyalty and advocacy

The combination of initiatives to improve the customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) will be essential to increase revenue and address the scarcity of talents so that they can deliver more agile and resilient business outcomes.

According to MuleSoft, in 2023 an increasing number of organizations providing a total experience (TX) will outperform competitors by 25% in satisfaction metrics for both CX and EX. 

Moreover, by 2026, Gartner predicts that 60% of large enterprises will use TX to transform their business models.

To support this push, organizations are focusing on integration and automation strategies. The goal is to deliver customer, employee, and partner experience innovation from a single unified platform with strong governance guardrails and a simple low/no-code user interface.

#5 trend: Data-Driven Decision Intelligence  

reduce the huge cost of wasted opportunities

The challenge for organizations is that the data needed to generate actionable intelligence is often locked away in enterprise silos because of poor integration of critical IT systems.

According to MuleSoft, with enterprise data volumes set to explode over the coming years, creating a single source of truth for intelligent decision-making in an automated, streamlined way will be a priority for organizations keen to carve out a competitive advantage in 2023.

Only by embedding analytics into the data fabric, organizations can automate decision making, helping dynamically improve data usage and cut data management efforts by 70%, accelerating time-to-value.

#6 trend: Cybersecurity

more layered and integrated to protect from increasing threat complexity

Organizations are increasingly investing in edge computing to create a competitive advantage and enhance business efficiencies in 2023.

However, these accelerating trends, according to MuleSoft, have created a new headache: how to securely manage critical systems and data with the increased complexity of highly distributed IT environments.

The solution, advocated by Gartner, is to follow the cybersecurity mesh approach which it describes as “a flexible, composable architecture that integrates widely distributed and disparate security services." 

What needs to be taken into consideration, to be successful, is the ability to manage connections, APIs, compositions, and automation bots from a single administration interface.

Only with universal API management capabilities, organizations can add security and compliance guardrails to integration projects in the form of centralized governance rules and reduce the financial impact of security incidents by an average of 90% by 2024 (according to Gartner).

#7 trend: Sustainability

drive ongoing IT investments

Business leaders realize that meeting sustainability goals isn’t just the right thing to do for the planet, it can also help reduce operational costs, attract the best talent, and differentiate their business as a "green crusader".

Therefore in 2023, sustainability is among the biggest goal for organizations. 
Sustainability that, according to MuleSoft, organizations can achieve by implementing a "composable enterprise" strategy. 
By using a composable enterprise strategy to unlock and integrate data and applications and applying automation and analytics to derive insight, organizations can create smart solutions to sustainability challenges — and they can do so faster and more efficiently than if they used legacy point-to-point integrations.

We are excited to announce the signature of a new partnership with AxonIQ. A company of Dutch origin specializing in event-driven architecture (EDA), which enables companies to develop event-driven Java applications in a flexible and high-performance way!

To support AxonIQ in growing the Italian community, we have decided to be the first Italian partner company to provide consulting and training locally.

A partnership that allows us to work closely with the leading AxonIQ experts in the world. So we can support modern organizations in the realization of new projects or the migration of monoliths towards a micro-service approach, always using DDD (Domain Driven Design), CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation), and Event Sourcing.

"We have chosen AxonIQ because we believe the only enterprise-ready solution to focus on the business logic and not worry about technicalities", says Davide Piazza, CEO of Thread Solutions.
"In Thread Solutions, we have seen that traditional state approaches are starting to compete in the race for the cloud and microservices. We have done a lot of research and experimentation to create evolutionary solutions with the CQRS/Event Sourcing approach. We immediately realized that there are countless things to manage to put a system of that type into operation. With AxonIQ Framework and AxonIQ Server (the ecosystem of event-based tools, techniques, and services), we found the answer we were looking for and which allowed us to focus on business aspects".

AxonIQ is also thrilled to have entered into this partnership in Italy: 
"We believe that Thread Solutions is more than able to provide local advice on event-driven architecture. We are excited to start working with Thread Solutions to grow the Italian community".

Brief description of AxonIQ

Country: Utrecht, Netherlands
Team: about 60 people from several countries of the world (DACH, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, Asia-Pacific, North America)
Industry: financial services, logistics, retail, and healthcare

AxonIQ enables organizations to see, understand, and flex their software systems.

They offer the world’s only purpose-built event-thinking platform. With Axon Server and Axon Framework, Axon helps you build digital-native applications for modern organizations.

Their customers have in common the desire to better understand how to work their systems, both from a technical and commercial perspective. 

They handle the amount of data, often sensitive data, and millions of information transactions daily. We enable our customers to streamline and redefine their systems to suit, not by rebuilding from scratch, but in ways that align with customer needs and a customer’s agility.

Axon is an end-to-end development and infrastructure platform that smoothly evolves event-driven microservices. It includes a programming model supported by a specialized infrastructure for scaling and distributing mission-critical business applications.

Visit the AxonIQ site to find out more. 

Or contact us to book a meeting where we can:

• briefly introduce AxonIQ and Thread Solutions;
• share our experience with the platform;
• talk about weekly/monthly AxonIQ meetups;
• provide eventual technical details, also through direct contact with an AxonIQ engineer;
• speak about the free courses of the AxonIQ Academy; 
• help with questions, doubts, or curiosities.

During the last few weeks, many companies have had the possibility to work from home: being able to manage the various teams and make them work together remotely was not easy. For this reason, Pipedrive CRM could help your company to manage your team in a simple and effective manner, without any effort. 

You can find some benefits of using Pipedrive below. Make your daily work simpler! 
 

1. Invite your team and start selling! 

Go to Settings > Manage > Users.
Add a user and set his/her authorizations.
You can decide to already add a few tasks, in this way, the user can start working as soon as s/he accepts the invitation received via email. By using the general filter you can see all the tasks on which your team is working on, and also see every individual task started by every component of the team. 
 

2. Collaborate with your team!

If you want to create small teams that will be working on a particular project, now you can do it!
You can create small groups of people using the right filters, and see who is working on what. In this way, you'll have a complete picture of the work done by your team. 
 

3. Team's objectives 

Objective are a great way to measure data from your sales, and to make sure your team is able to reach its goals.  
During the implementation of a goal, you can decide whether to assign the goal to a single person, to everyone or to a particular team. You can decide the period in which you want Pipedrive to track your goal.  
 

4. User's authorization 

Go to settings > manage users > authorizations.
Two main roles are available to choose: Admin and standard user + Manager (in the case of Pipedrive PRO plan).
The first one can do pretty much everything: the admin can add other users and manage billings but can not see private emails. For all other users, he can personalize every permission according to his/her specific job.  
 

5. Visibility groups

This setting allows you to limit the visibility of a deal, person, organization, or product. This useful tool allows you to check that your data are visible only from authorized people, and thus are secure. You can create hierarchic groups: in this way, those who have a higher level of permission can see what the other people having lower permissions can do.

4 possibilities of permission are available: 

• Possibility to see the data only if you are the owner
• Possibility to see data of the users that are a part of your subgroup
• Possibility to see your data, those of other users from your group and those from users that are below you in terms of permission
   

6. Security

Security is one of the most important and critical aspects for a client, and with Pipedrive, it is guaranteed!

This section allows you to have full visibility of every access from the user and from the security events regarding your account. Moreover, it offers you updates on how you can improve the security of your company.

The following sections are available below: 

• “now”: it offers you the possibility to have a rapid view of what's happening: how many users have logged in and from which locations. Moreover, there is the possibility to see some details, e.g. active devices. 
• “last 7 days”: This section shows the anomalies of account access: e.g. new devices or location and other details such as device used, who used it and for how long.  
• “Control register”: You can see all the security events, all the changes done to the account, e.g. a password change. 
• “Security evaluation”: This section gives you a quick report on what Pipedrive regards as vulnerable in terms of security: you will see some hints on how you can improve your security
• “Active devices”: You can see from which whereabout and from which device and which authentication method the user entered on the platform. In case of anomalies, you can disconnect the device of the user. 
   

7. Single Sign On (SSO)

Tired to create multiple accounts for your app? This tool allows you to add multiple applications in a single place, in this way, you can access to all your app in one single sign on. Useful, huh? You won't have to remember 100 passwords anymore! This process requests a bit of technical knowledge and so I advise you to speak with your IT personnel. 
 

8. Success Case study: who should I use Pipedrive?

360 Payments Case study. 

360 Payments went from using Salesforce to use Pipedrive: its on net profit increased by 298%. 

The company has its own offices in California, Utah, Oklahoma: thanks to Pipedrive it has had the possibility to control the work done by its team and to see the various deals won. You can also have the possibility to have a clear picture not only from a company level, but also from an individual level, in this way, it is simpler to leave feedback when necessary.

Motivation demands to define an aim and if this one is unclear, it becomes really difficult to reach objectives.

In the last weeks, working from home has not always been easy. A team that once was working face-to-face in the office now is forced to work from home, often encountering some difficulties in scheduling all the goals the team wants to reach. 

For this reason, having a goal becomes fundamental: splitting it into micro-objectives can help you reach intermediate goals, necessary for maintaining always motivated. These micro-objectives are a perfect way to track your targets, and assure you to keep reaching your goals. Each member of the team will be able to create one or more objectives to achieve and monitor the development.

Pipedrive gives you the possibility to track these achievements giving you a global view on your overall progress. In this way, you and your team members can concentrate exclusively on your opportunities and leads, autonomously managing the organization of these activities.  Objectives can be assigned either to your entire agency, to one of your collaborators, and to single team members. 

Moreover, the goal can refer to 3 phases inside the pipeline:

• ongoing opportunities 
• won opportunities 
• development of your opportunities 

Planning fallacy bias

You've surely heard about this cognitive bias, elaborated by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979.

This cognitive bias consists of a phenomenon where people undervalue the time necessary for finishing a task, even though they are aware of how similar activities done in the past required more time than estimated.

An important research developed by Lovallo and Kahneman (2003) demonstrated how managers often fall in this cognitive bias, causing them to rely their decisions on a fake optimism, instead of evaluating gains, losses and probabilities. 

This inaccuracy in formulating these estimations can lead to important economic, personal, and social costs. 

How can we avoid planning fallacy bias?

You can find some examples below: 

• carefully evaluate every step you'll encounter in achieving your goal 
• split your objective(s) into smaller tasks
• think about every component of the team, and assign them a period of time for completing the task 
• visualize the plan from an observer's perspective 
• create some implementation intentions: in this way, every member of the team will focus on the future and imagine when s/he will have the intention to work on a particular project.  

Pipedrive will help you in planning your tasks, giving you a detailed analysis of the time and resources needed for the completion of your objective. In this way, you will have realistic plans, and, consequently, both you and your team will work in a more efficient and productive way. 

This was the #2 article of a list of 5. Did you miss the first one? Read it here!