Sopheon Delivers Major Solution Updates and Enhancements with Accolade® Release 9.0 for Enterprise Innovation Performance

• Delivery of the new Accolade Roadmapping™ solution which supersedes the existing Accolade Vision Strategist™ product. This solution takes roadmapping technology for strategic planning and alignment of markets, products and technology to a new level of capability, flexibility and intuitive graphical user interface.
• Major updates and enhancements to the Accolade Idea Lab™ solution for idea and concept development that includes a redesigned, more intuitive user interface, pre-configured processes to get up and running faster, and more flexible pricing and purchase options. Not only is Idea Lab a market-leading ideation solution, it is the only full-function solution of its kind that is fully integrated with the entire innovation and new product development lifecycle processes.
• Enhancements to the recently introduced Accolade Innovation Planner™ solution for connecting annual operating plans (AOP) and business strategies with innovation and new product development planning. It provides companies with increased agility to dynamically adjust to changing internal and external circumstances across and through their organizations.
• Advanced real-time waterline analysis for Portfolio and Resource Planning in Accolade Portfolio Center™ to enable more interactive and responsive planning insights and analysis to make the best project and portfolio decisions and investments to produce the highest returns.
• Introduction of the new Innovation Discussions Feed that provides real-time, in-context, collaborative discussions across functional areas without the need for an external type of social networking system.
• Additional capability and enhancement to Accolade Mobile including gate voting capability, viewing and contributing to the Innovation Discussions Feed, explorer view in the iPad®, and compliance with iOS7 design standards.
• Continuing evolution and updates to Accolade Cloud to provide customers with complete flexibility on how they buy and deploy the Accolade solution, now and in the future, according to their prevailing circumstances.
• Various updates and enhancements to support Sopheon’s continuing commitment to deliver full-function Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) solution capabilities to meet the business needs in multiple areas across an organization.
• Simplification and streamlining of the powerful solution configuration capabilities to meet the specific business and industry needs, and accelerate the time-to-value for customers.
• Various additional capabilities and enhancements for integration with, and data transfer between, other solutions such as PLM and ERP.
• Enhanced on-line forms capability for enriched user experiences and ease of use.

 Sopheon’s Accolade solution provides integrated support for innovation planning, roadmapping, idea and concept development, process and project management, portfolio management and resource planning.

With this release, Sopheon continues to extend the market leadership of the Accolade solution with expanded functionality for users and business processes. This new release is another milestone in our commitment to our customers and to our belief that companies can achieve exceptional long-term revenue growth and profitability through sustainable product or service differentiation, by focusing on their enterprise innovation performance.

Don Sarno, Vice President of Product Development at Sopheon who has worked closely with customers and buyers over the past years, stated:

“I am proud of our 9.0 release for its advancement of Accolade’s industry leading capability in enabling Enterprise Innovation Performance through a highly enhanced end-user experience. Accolade 9.0 leverages rich web user technologies to advance support for all modern browsers including Chrome on Android devices. We also added a fully redesigned experience for enterprise planning and Roadmapping. As in the past, based on our fully Agile release principles, we leveraged deep relationships with many of Sopheon’s industry-leading customers to help drive the new user experiences and end-user value.“

Accolade release 9.0 is available immediately for purchase and implementation.  All Sopheon Accolade customers who are current on Maintenance and Support program fees are entitled to receive updates to their currently licensed products for this and future release upgrades at no additional cost.

Accolade® is a registered trademark of Sopheon.

About Sopheon

Sopheon partners with customers to provide complete Enterprise Innovation Performance solutions including software, expertise, and best practices to achieve exceptional long-term revenue growth and profitability. Sopheon’s Accolade® solution provides unique, fully-integrated coverage for the entire innovation management and new product development lifecycle, including strategic innovation planning, roadmapping, idea and concept development, process and project management, portfolio management and resource planning. Sopheon’s solutions have been implemented by over 200 customers with over 60,000 users in over 50 countries. Sopheon is listed on the AIM Market of the London Stock Exchange and on the Alternext Exchange in the Netherlands.