Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 62 | Page 58

MARKET MOVEMENT

Bridgepointe Technologies acquires customer experience provider PPT Solutions

PPT Solutions is a provider of clientcentric , performance-based Customer

Experience , CX and Contact Centre Consulting Solutions . The addition of PPT Solutions is an opportunity for Bridgepointe to expand its technology advisory services and provide clients with a wide range of CX-related services including Contact Centre Consulting , Contact Centre Technologies , BPO , Business Process , People Outsourcing , AI , RPA , Artificial Intelligence and Robotic Process Automation , and Managed Services .

PPT Solutions will operate as a Bridgepointe company effective immediately , with their team of 55 employees continuing to accelerate success for their clients . They have a proven track record of working with Fortune 500 companies with significant relationships in the media , entertainment and streaming industries .

PPT Solutions is based in the Midwest , which will help further expand the Company ’ s national reach . Dennis Weikle and Kris Kramer will become Managing Directors at Bridgepointe and continue to lead the overall CX organisation .

Bridgepointe Technologies is an advisory firm that helps mid-market and enterprise companies bridge the gap between technology investments and business results . Over the past 20 years , Bridgepointe has worked with over 12,000 companies to save time by shortening the procurement process while saving money and increasing ROI . Supported by in-house Solution Architects and IT Strategists , the firm has developed a proven process to quickly drive time to value with technology investments .

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IBM acquires StepZen based on contributions to database including IBM Db2 , PostgreSQL , Apache Derby

The rising adoption of hybrid cloud has resulted in data stored everywhere , in different types of data stores likes data warehouses , lakes , and lakehouses as well as across different clouds and on-premises environments . APIs serve as the essential connector between different data sources and applications , which means that businesses are relying on and creating more APIs than ever before to get the data they need to power their applications and experiences .

GraphQL has rapidly become a go-to query language for companies to interact with their data and is emerging as a new standard for APIs , layering upon the investments in REST APIs and data systems . Take an e-commerce application for example . With a single call , GraphQL can merge data that is found in different subsystems , like customer information , order numbers , and delivery status , and return it in an expected format . This simplicity is why the popularity and usage of GraphQL is growing quickly . A report from Gartner predicted that by 2025 , more than 50 percent of enterprises will use GraphQL in production , up from less than 10 percent in 20211 . While GraphQL APIs are significantly easier for application teams to use , they can be challenging for the teams tasked with creating them .

Founded in 2020 , StepZen provides an easier way for developers to build GraphQL APIs . StepZen takes a declarative programming approach , describing WHAT the program does , without explicitly

Kareem Yusuf , PhD , Senior Vice President of Product Management and Growth , IBM Software

specifying HOW , which results in smaller and more intuitive code , better runtime performance , and faster time to value . StepZen was also designed to be highly flexible . It is compatible with other API approaches and is available as-a- Service , SaaS while also supporting deployments in private clouds and onpremises data centres .

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