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SaaS and Intelligent Automation Industry Veteran Sumit Johar Joins BlackLine as Chief Information Officer

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Digital finance transformation leader expands leadership team, adding former Automation Anywhere CIO to oversee IT and InfoSec, scale internal cloud operations, and lead AI initiatives

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 12, 2024 /CNW/ — BlackLine, Inc. (Nasdaq: BL) announced today that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and intelligent automation industry veteran Sumit Johar has joined the company as chief information officer (CIO), effective Feb. 12th. Reporting to Co-CEO Therese Tucker, Johar will oversee Information Technology and Information Security globally for the digital finance transformation leader.

“Sumit’s extensive SaaS and intelligent automation experience, coupled with his deep knowledge of emerging technology and AI, aligns perfectly with our vision and will prove invaluable in fostering innovation and bringing a competitive edge to our global business operations,” said Tucker. “With Sumit on the executive leadership team, we are poised to advance and accelerate our own digital transformation and scale operations, so we remain best equipped to deliver on our mission as the premier accounting and finance platform for the Office of the CFO.”

Johar comes to BlackLine with more than 20 years of enterprise cloud experience spanning applications, infrastructure, cybersecurity, data governance and engineering, and automation. He most recently served as CIO at Automation Anywhere, a leading provider of AI-powered intelligent automation solutions. Previously he was CIO at enterprise mobile security provider MobileIron where in just his first two years, he significantly reduced operational costs while making room for digital transformation initiatives. Before that, he led Enterprise Applications at TIBCO Software for 10 years and also has held management-level consulting and engineering positions at Wipro and Infosys.

“Generative AI and other emerging technologies have put fuel on the fire for IT innovation, creating endless opportunities for CIOs to transform business operations,” said Johar. “I look forward to taking BlackLine’s IT infrastructure, business intelligence, and business applications to the next level with leading-edge AI and automation technologies that will enable our global workforce to perform at an even higher level, ultimately supporting BlackLine’s leadership in the digital finance transformation market.”

Johar holds a Bachelor of Technology degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the National Institute of Technology Kurukshetra.

About BlackLine
Companies come to BlackLine (Nasdaq: BL) because their traditional manual accounting and finance processes are not sustainable. BlackLine’s market-leading cloud platform and customer service help companies move to modern accounting by unifying their data and processes, automating repetitive work, and driving accountability through visibility. BlackLine provides solutions to manage and automate financial close, intercompany accounting, invoice-to-cash, and consolidation processes – inspiring, powering, and guiding large enterprises and midsize businesses on their digital finance transformation journeys.

More than 4,300 customers trust BlackLine to help them close faster with complete and accurate results. The company is the pioneer of the cloud financial close market and is recognized as the leader by customers at leading end-user review sites including G2 and TrustRadius. BlackLine is a global company with operations in major business centers including Los Angeles, New York, the San Francisco Bay area, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Singapore, and Sydney. For more information, visit blackline.com.

BlackLine Forward-looking Statements
This release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “could,” “expect,” “plan,” anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “intend,” “potential,” “would,” “continue,” “ongoing” or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology. Forward-looking statements in this release include statements regarding our growth plans and opportunities.

Any forward-looking statements contained in this press release are based upon BlackLine’s current plans, estimates and expectations, and are not a representation that such plans, estimates, or expectations will be achieved. Forward-looking statements are based on information available at the time those statements are made and/or management’s good faith beliefs and assumptions as of that time with respect to future events and are subject to risks and uncertainties. If any of these risks or uncertainties materialize or if any assumptions prove incorrect, actual performance or results may differ materially from those expressed in or suggested by the forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, risks related to the Company’s ability to execute on its strategies, attract new customers, enter new geographies and develop, release and sell new features and solutions; and other risks and uncertainties described in the other filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time, including the risks described under the heading “Risk Factors” in our Annual Report on Form 10-K.  Additional information will also be set forth in our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q.

Forward-looking statements should not be read as a guarantee of future performance or results, and you should not place undue reliance on such statements. Except as required by law, we do not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise.

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SOURCE BlackLine

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Kevin Murphy Grows Marketplace Revenue 141% with Pattern

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Premium haircare brand strengthens marketplace control while maintaining salon channel growth

MELBOURNE, Australia, June 19, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Premium haircare brand Kevin Murphy has grown its Amazon Australia revenue by 141% with ecommerce accelerator Pattern, transforming the marketplace from a grey market challenge into one of the brand’s fastest growing retail channels.

Distributed in Australia by Ozdare, Kevin Murphy partnered with Pattern to manage its presence on Amazon Australia amid growing consumer demand and unauthorised reseller activity.

“Given the growing influence of marketplaces in Australia, it was important for Kevin Murphy to establish a stronger presence where consumers are increasingly searching for and purchasing products,” explained George Leighton, Head of Retail (Consumer) for Ozdare/Kevin Murphy. “At the same time, maintaining the balance between our professional salon channel and consumer retail presence remained a key priority throughout the process.”

Launched in November 2025 ahead of the peak Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) shopping period, Kevin Murphy entered Amazon Australia with no official marketplace presence despite significant existing consumer demand on the platform. Within just four months of launch, the brand increased units sold by 115% quarter-on-quarter while simultaneously increasing average order value by 8.4%, demonstrating strong consumer demand for premium haircare products on Amazon Australia.

Pattern’s ANZ Managing Director, Merline McGregor said the results reflected a broader shift occurring across the Australian retail landscape as premium brands increasingly embrace marketplaces as strategic growth channels rather than viewing them as discount environments.

“Many premium beauty and haircare brands have historically approached Amazon cautiously because of concerns around pricing control, unauthorised sellers and protecting brand equity,” McGregor said. “What Kevin Murphy has demonstrated is that with the right retail media, marketplace and brand protection strategy, Amazon can become a highly effective growth channel that complements existing retail and salon partnerships rather than competing against them.”

Kevin Murphy’s growth trajectory is significant given the brand launched during the peak BFCM promotional period yet continued accelerating well beyond the initial sales surge. Strong March performance against a BFCM-boosted comparison period highlighted that the brand’s Amazon Australia strategy was driving sustained long-term growth rather than short-term discount-driven spikes.

Working with Pattern has helped Kevin Murphy regain greater control over its marketplace presence and pricing environment. Since launch, Buy Box ownership increased from 65% to 91% while multiple unauthorised sellers were successfully removed from the platform, helping to protect brand integrity.

As part of the ongoing partnership, Pattern developed and manages Kevin Murphy’s Amazon Australia storefront, optimising all product listings and implementing a full-funnel advertising strategy spanning branded search, generic category discovery and competitor targeting. By the end of the first quarter, approximately 80% of ad-driven sales were coming from first-time Kevin Murphy customers on Amazon Australia, highlighting the platform’s ability to drive new customer acquisition.

“The reality is consumers are already searching for premium brands like Kevin Murphy on marketplaces, regardless of whether those brands officially sell there or not. What Kevin Murphy has demonstrated is that when brands take ownership of that customer experience with the right marketplace, retail media and brand protection strategy, Amazon can become a powerful channel for both growth and new customer acquisition,” concluded McGregor.

About Pattern Inc

Pattern accelerates brands on global ecommerce marketplaces leveraging proprietary technology and AI. Utilising more than 77 trillion data points, sophisticated machine learning and AI models, Pattern optimises and automates all levers of ecommerce growth for global brands, including advertising, content management, logistics and fulfilment, pricing, forecasting and customer service. Hundreds of global brands depend on Pattern’s ecommerce acceleration platform every day to drive profitable revenue growth across 60+ global marketplaces—including Amazon, TikTok Shop, Walmart.com, Target.com, eBay, Tmall, JD, and Mercado Libre.  For more information, visit https://au.pattern.com/

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/kevin-murphy-grows-marketplace-revenue-141-with-pattern-302805051.html

SOURCE Pattern

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Clock Ticking on San Jose Worker Contracts as City Council Eyes July Recess

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SAN JOSE, Calif., June 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Several months of tense negotiations between the San Jose City Administration and thousands of dedicated City of San Jose workers have now resulted in two of the City’s largest worker contracts set to expire – just as the San Jose City Council leaves for their July recess. On Thursday, June 18, after receiving the City’s Last, Best, and Final Offer (LBFO) and working to reach a deal before contract expiration, San Jose workers represented by IFPTE Local 21 and MEF-AFSCME Local 101 have called for mediation in order to reach a fair agreement.

Last Wednesday, June 10, workers rallied at San Jose Mineta International Airport (SJC) to call on the San Jose City Administration to secure a contract that will allow the City of San Jose to retain and recruit excellent public workers. While negotiations continued after the rally, the City’s LBFO remains one that does not invest in city services and one that will not retain the city’s skilled workforce.

Members of both unions are concerned that the upcoming budget has proposed staffing cuts to several departments, including the Library, Public Works, and the Housing Department. Instead of investing in our community, city officials have elected to spend taxpayer money on corporate giveaways through massive contracts with ineffective AI companies and an outrageous $351 million subsidy towards hockey arena renovations. The City could develop a strategy that ensures corporations pay their fair share from benefitting directly from city services. Instead, San Jose insists on cutting taxes for some of the largest corporations that occupy the city, while residents and working families pay more.

“We are the workers who keep San Jose running every day. We’ve shown up at the bargaining table ready to negotiate a fair contract every week. It’s time for the City to turn things around in order to retain workers. San Jose workers and the residents we serve deserve better,” said Carlos Murillo, an Associate Engineer at SJC, and IFPTE Local 21 Bargaining Team Member. “It’s time to invest in our city services. It’s time to put San Jose first.”

“San Jose remains already one of the most thinly staffed major cities in California. The City has a real opportunity. With San Jose being a World Cup host city, we have seen our community come together. San Jose has the potential to highlight the amazing public services our city has to offer and the hard-working people who make those services happen,” said MEF Local 101 Chief Steward Heidi Mendiola, a Police Data Specialist.

San Jose workers haven’t gone on strike in two decades. Three years ago, San Jose workers organized a city-wide strike vote that shed light on the city’s dangerous understaffing and retention issues. Workers are disheartened to know that instead of working on revenue, this administration has instead continued to remain one of the few cities to cap its business license tax on large businesses, with its largest only paying $185,532 in taxes. This includes massive Fortune 500 companies, such as Cisco Systems, which reported $56 billion in revenue and $10 billion in profits for Fiscal Year 2025; PayPal Holdings, which reported $33 billion in revenue and $5.2 billion in profits; and Adobe Inc., which reported $23 billion in revenue and $7.1 billion in profits.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/clock-ticking-on-san-jose-worker-contracts-as-city-council-eyes-july-recess-302805005.html

SOURCE IFPTE Local 21

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Trupeer AI Appoints Former UiPath APAC President & CEO Raghu Subramanian to Lead Japan Enterprise Expansion

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TOKYO, June 19, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Trupeer AI, the workflow knowledge layer for teams and AI agents, today announced the appointment of Raghu Subramanian as President and Chief Business Officer, as the company accelerates its next phase of global enterprise expansion. Backed by RTP Global and Salesforce Ventures and trusted by more than 50,000 teams in over 100 countries and 120 languages, Trupeer is strengthening its leadership team to scale adoption across enterprises, SaaS companies, Global Capability Centers (GCCs), and technology-enabled business services companies.

Japan is a strategic growth market for Trupeer, where enterprises face a growing knowledge-retention challenge as experienced employees retire and institutional expertise leaves with them. Trupeer addresses this by capturing workflows and institutional knowledge and turning them into AI-ready contexts accessible in more than 120 languages, including Japanese and English. By eliminating the bilingual bottleneck, the platform lets Japanese enterprises scale their own expertise to global teams, while giving multinational organizations instant access to existing knowledge for their Japan-based teams. Several of the world’s largest software companies use Trupeer to create Japanese-language content as they deepen their presence in the country, and  major Japanese pharmaceutical companies use Trupeer to enable learning and development at scale, capturing veteran expertise and standardizing how critical processes are taught across the organization.

Raghu joins from a distinguished career at the forefront of enterprise automation. As a founding member of the management team at UiPath, he was part of the core executive team that helped build the company into a $35+ billion NYSE-listed enterprise. He established UiPath’s APAC operations in 2016 and later served as President & CEO for India and APAC, making Japan one of their largest markets. Bringing over 25 years of enterprise technology leadership, Raghu has built and scaled enterprise businesses across global markets, with deep expertise in automation, business process management, and enterprise AI adoption. Prior to joining UiPath, he served as CTO of EXL Service.

At Trupeer, he will lead the company’s next phase of commercial expansion, with a sharp focus on Japanese enterprises, the GCCs operating in Japan, and the global parents of Japan-based delivery networks.

Shivali Goyal, CEO and Co-Founder, Trupeer AI, said, “Raghu has spent decades helping organisations adopt and scale transformative technologies and brings deep experience in building enterprises globally. Having seen first-hand the challenges enterprises face in organisational knowledge and agentic AI enablement, Raghu immediately resonated with our vision and the momentum Trupeer has built globally. His expertise will help us strengthen our commercial capabilities, deepen partnerships, and unlock the next phase of growth at Trupeer.”

Raghu Subramanian, President and Chief Business Officer, Trupeer AI, said, “Enterprises have long struggled to get real value from AI, and the reason is fragmented context. As businesses operate across languages, geographies, and distributed teams, critical knowledge often becomes difficult to access, share, and act on consistently. The knowledge that makes AI useful remains trapped in people’s heads and scattered across tools. In the agentic AI era, where agents are only as good as the context they run on, that gap becomes the difference between AI that works and AI that doesn’t. This is the gap Trupeer was built to close. I look forward to partnering with enterprises and organisations across the globe to build the context layer that makes enterprise knowledge structured, accessible, and actionable, and AI genuinely useful.”

About Trupeer

Trupeer AI is the workflow knowledge layer for enterprises that enables teams and AI agents. The company helps organizations capture critical operational knowledge that is often trapped in the minds of subject matter experts and scattered across tools, transforming it into structured, accessible, and queryable knowledge. Its platform captures enterprise workflows and turns unstructured, multimodal input into SOPs, guides, studio-quality videos, training assets into 120+ languages and continuously updated, AI-ready context that intelligent agents can leverage, making institutional knowledge accessible, actionable, and queryable. Backed by RTP Global and Salesforce Ventures, Trupeer supports more than 50,000 teams in over 100 countries, including Fortune 100 enterprises, Global Capability Centers and technology-enabled business services companies.

Further details: https://www.trupeer.ai/ 

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