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Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory (AD) is casting its ever-widening net over more third-party software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. The cloud-based identity management platform is now offering businesses centralized user account maintenance and single sign-on services for 23 new applications, including the A/B testing tool, Optimizely.
Part of the digital marketer’s arsenal, A/B testing enables organizations to assess different versions of email promotions, landing pages, ad copy or other forms of digital content and gauge their effectiveness. By adding Optimizely to the growing collection of supported apps in the Azure AD Gallery (more than 2,600 cloud apps and counting), customers can now control their digital marketing teams’ access to the popular tool.
Also new to the Azure AD Gallery is the business modeling and planning platform from San Francisco-based Anaplan.
“Anaplan offers a fully integrated business modeling and planning platform that helps customers be proactive and acts on opportunities earlier and faster,” Alex Simons, director of program management at Microsoft Identity, wrote in a blog post. “Anaplan platform offers a modeling engine, a scalable calculation engine, the connect models that collaborate across the entire business, and the ability to calculate outcomes based on customers’ scenarios.”
This spring, Anaplan announced it was adding predictive analytics capabilities to its Smart Business Platform.
Initially, the company is tackling corporate planning and budgeting and sales forecasting and other business practices before expanding into product marketing, supply network planning and workforce optimization. “These new functions can be applied to use cases across the business spectrum, from optimizing airline flight delay predictions to clinical trial success to sales forecasting,” Simon Tucker, chief product officer at Anaplan, said in a May 10 announcement.
Earlier this year, Anaplan announced it had raised $90 million in a financing round led by Premji Invest. The funds were slated to help the company cope with growing demand for its software, according to the company. “[Executives] are deploying Anaplan into every area of their business—Finance, Sales, Marketing, HR, Supply Chain, Operations, and IT—because Anaplan’s platform and apps enable a radically new approach to how businesses plan, execute, simulate changes and rapidly course-correct their operations,” Fred Laluyaux, Anaplan’s former president and CEO, said in a Jan. 14 statement.
Joining Optimizely and Anaplan are MailArchiva, an enterprise email archiving and discovery service, and the BenSelect online employee benefits enrollment platform from Selerix. Bynder, another SaaS-based marketing tool, offers users remote access to their digital assets via an online portal.
On the ERP front, Microsoft has added a new integration for Predictix Assortment Planning. The solution offers retail merchants “tools to evaluate and execute decisions quickly, in turn enabling increased services to customer,” said Simons. “The Predictix app helps retail customers evaluate assortment changes at both the national and local level, then reduces inventories while optimizing supply across the entire network.”
The full list of new Azure AD Gallery additions can be found in Simons’ blog post.