Highlights of GMC Software’s European Events

Mar 4, 2017 11:22:28 AM

By David Stabel

GMC Software (GMC), a Neopost Digital Company, recently hosted two events in Europe. On February 14^th, it held its first EMEA analyst summit in Paris, France. The following weekend, it hosted its Service Providers Executive Advisory on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. InfoTrends was invited to participate in both events.

The EMEA analyst summit included discussions around GMC’s latest major product release, R11, the future state of customer communications technology, and GMC’s future strategy. In addition to presentations of Henri Dura, COO at Neopost Enterprise Digital Services (EDS), Scott Draeger, VP Product Marketing at EDS, and several other product managers at GMC, there was ample opportunity for 1:1 networking with the leadership team.As for the executive advisory board, GMC did a great job of pulling together a group of 13 service providers and 15 representatives from various countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia Pacific. Attendees received updates from leadership at GMC on enhancements to the offering, discussed market disruption and service expansion opportunities during the session, as well as shared best practices and provided input on how GMC can continue to evolve its offering to best support their future needs.GMC Adapting to the Future State of Customer CommunicationsOver the last few years, GMC has been extensively focusing its marketing and development efforts on enterprises within the banking, insurance, and healthcare industries. Despite this shift in focus, GMC has not forgotten its established PSP relationships, such as Adare, Communisis, DST International, and RR Donnelley. As GMC continues to grow its enterprise business, it carefully maintains its relationships with the print service providers’ community.Looking forward, GMC aims at reconnecting consumers, businesses, and technology by expanding its ecosystem of partners as well as by investing in its professional services division. Henri noted that in 2016, GMC expanded its workforce by onboarding an average of two employees per week, mostly within R&D.The week before the analyst event, GMC announced the general availability of GMC Inspire Release 11 (R11). R11 includes over 700 new features and enhancements and one of its main focus area has been cloud and mobile support. Previous focus areas have been responsive design (R9, released in 2013) and omni-channel proofing (R10, released in 2015). Next to an improved user interface targeting non-expert designers and other users, it also comes with a new look and feel (“the green bar”). Further to this, with R11, GMC is also entering two new technology markets:

CX Management. R11 includes a cloud-based customer journey-mapping tool that allows enterprises, and service providers that serve them, to maintain insight and control over customer communications for improving the overall experience.
Rapid Mobile Application Development (RMAD). R11 comes with a “no-code” or “low-code” solution that allows non-IT users to build and deliver cross-platform mobile applications quickly, increasing efficiency and time-to-market.

Executive Advisory Board: An Open Discussion Didier Rouillard, VP of Global Service Provider business at GMC, is part of the glue that holds this group together. With GMC growing its enterprise client base more rapidly in recent years, Rouillard has helped to ensure that service provider clients still have a prominent seat at the table when discussing how GMC can continue to evolve its offering to best support their future needs.In one session, Rocco Marra, COO at Italian service provider Nuova CS shared the successes that he has had with implementing GMC Inspire Dynamic Communications with several clients in the Utility market. He discussed the improvements that these utilities saw in open rates and interaction, as well as best practices that came out of those case studies. In our 2016 State of the Transactional Communications and Payment Market, 64% of businesses showed interest in offering their customers dynamic bills and statements and 51% of consumers in our research sample said they were open for receiving such dynamic communications.

Didier Rouillard (left) and Rocco Marra (right)During Marra’s presentation, the assembled group continued to open up about the opportunities that they are seeing in their own markets for dynamic communications and other GMC offerings.InfoTrends’ OpinionGMC has been focusing on CX for a while now, giving cloud and mobile support a lower priority. With R11, however, it has made significant advancements on cloud and mobile support. We consider this a crucial step in securing a position as one of the leading vendors in the CCM space. By introducing a new look and feel (and simplifying its user interface), GMC is appealing to a new user segment that comes from the creative and design world. This shows that GMC is well aware that technology alone will not enable acceptance in a CX-driven market.As for the service provider event in Switzerland, it had the desired effect for GMC—helping to generate a thoughtful discussion on how to best position these service providers for the future, with GMC Software as a critical component of that positioning. Matt Swain, David StabelInfoTrends, a division of Keypoint Intelligence, continues to track the customer communications market from the perspectives of consumer preference, business strategy, and investment, as well as through enterprise outsourcing services and the technologies that drive these communications. We will soon be launching our 2017 annual global research. For more information on how to gain access to the results, contact Deanna Flanick today at deanna.flanick@keypointintelligence.com!