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U.K. Charities and Universities Select Blackbaud Software to Maximise Impact

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With Recent Enhancements for Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® and Blackbaud Grantmaking™, Organisations Can Raise More Funds and Drive More Impact

LONDON, July 1, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Blackbaud (NASDAQ: BLKB), the leading provider of software for powering social impact, is helping U.K. customers maximise their impact with technology innovations that enable charities and universities to raise more funds and streamline their operations.

Blackbaud’s recently announced enhancements for its flagship fundraising product Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® illustrate the cutting-edge technology available to help fundraisers engage donors, save time, and deliver remarkable outcomes for their organisations. New features that will be available to all users at no extra cost, include:

Powerful new fundraising AIA streamlined Raiser’s Edge NXT user experiencePersonalised productivity dashboardsTop-performing donation forms

In addition, new capabilities are being rolled out for Blackbaud Grantmaking™, including a new applicant-centric portal. This portal allows grant applicants to view and edit applications across funders that use Blackbaud Grantmaking. The submission process has been streamlined with features that enhance communication, enabling both grantmakers and applicants to save time. In addition, new AI features allow users to translate application forms to over 25 languages, including French, Spanish, Welsh and more, which will help reduce barriers to funding and increase accessibility.

Enabling Impact
Charities and organisations across the U.K. and around the world are leveraging Blackbaud software to increase their impact and achieve their missions.

Martlets provides round-the-clock hospice care and essential services to people who are terminally ill in Brighton and Hove in East Sussex, and surrounding areas. Donations that used to require five to six processing steps with the hospice’s previous technology now can be processed in batches with a single click with Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT for fundraising and Blackbaud Merchant Services for payment processing. “I love Raiser’s Edge NXT and the way it has transformed our workings,” said Claire Docteur, Donations Processing and Data Officer.

Oxford Brookes University, set in a historic student city, is one of the UK’s leading modern universities and is amongst the world’s top universities in 21 subject areas. To fully engage the university’s community of graduates across the world, their alumni relations team realised they needed to streamline how they capture, store, and apply alumni information by modernising their database and reimagining their processes. The university adapted their use of Raiser’s Edge NXT to leverage the system’s purpose-built modern capabilities. “We’ve really streamlined our processes and realised a lot of information we were capturing wasn’t serving us or our objectives,” said Anne Cossutta, Senior Alumni Manager. “Now, we have data that’s easily accessible that we actually need.”

The British Film Institute (BFI) is a government-supported charity that administers grants worth tens of millions of pounds for film production, distribution, education, audience development, and marketing intelligence and research. In 2023-24, BFI distributed £43 million in grants to support film and moving image activity across the UK. “We couldn’t deliver our grants program without Blackbaud Grantmaking working as well as it does,” said Paul Richardson, Head of Counter Fraud, Scrutiny and Risk for BFI. “It is absolutely a key, essential part of our grantmaking.”

Royal Navy & Royal Marines Charity (RNRMC) pursues a multi-faceted mission to care for older age veterans, improve relationships within naval families, assist those in time of need, help sailors and marines transition into civilian life, and improve morale of those serving and deployed. By switching their CRM database to Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT and creatively collaborating with Blackbaud specialists, RNRMC is advancing fundraising growth needed to achieve “a world in which UK sailors, marines, and their families are valued and supported, for life.” Now, four years later, they are bolstering their capacity to support the UK’s naval community through an even deeper partnership with Blackbaud’s teams for customer success, professional services, and training.

Other organisations that have recently chosen Blackbaud solutions include:

BeyondAutismSmart Works CharityThe Japan SocietyThe Myalgic Encephalopathy AssociationThe Royal NAAFI

CIOF Annual Convention
This week, Blackbaud will be a sponsor of the Chartered Institute of Fundraising (CIOF)’s annual convention, taking place in London July 3-4, 2024. At the fundraising convention, Blackbaud will lead a workshop entitled “Maximising Your Fundraising with Technology: Why Creating a Failure-Friendly Culture is Key to Innovation” and will also be sharing a new eBook, “The Importance of Charity Fundraising Technology.”

“We are excited to interface with customers and those interested in learning more about Blackbaud solutions at the CIOF convention this week,” said Dan Keyworth, Vice President and Managing Director, Customer Success, Blackbaud. “With our recent advancements to Raiser’s Edge NXT, Blackbaud Grantmaking, and other technological innovations, charities and universities across the U.K. and around the world can implement the best solutions to meet their goals. As a leading software provider, we’re committed to helping these organisations improve their fundraising and engagement, and increase efficiency, so that they can remain focused on their mission.”

To learn more about Blackbaud at the CIOF convention, stop by stand 9 in the expo hall, or attend Blackbaud’s workshop on Wednesday, July 3, 2024, at 10:45 AM BST.

About Blackbaud
Blackbaud (NASDAQ: BLKB) is the leading software provider exclusively dedicated to powering social impact. Serving the nonprofit and education sectors, companies committed to social responsibility and individual change makers, Blackbaud’s essential software is built to accelerate impact in fundraising, nonprofit financial management, digital giving, grantmaking, corporate social responsibility and education management. With millions of users and over $100 billion raised, granted or managed through Blackbaud platforms every year, Blackbaud’s solutions are unleashing the potential of the people and organisations who change the world. Blackbaud has been named to Newsweek’s list of America’s Most Responsible Companies, Quartz’s list of Best Companies for Remote Workers, and Forbes’ list of America’s Best Employers. A remote-first company, Blackbaud has operations in the United States, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica and the United Kingdom, supporting users in 100+ countries. Learn more at www.blackbaud.co.uk or follow us on X/Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.

Media Inquiries
media@blackbaud.com

Forward-looking Statements
Except for historical information, all of the statements, expectations, and assumptions contained in this news release are forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties, including statements regarding expected benefits of products and product features. Although Blackbaud attempts to be accurate in making these forward-looking statements, it is possible that future circumstances might differ from the assumptions on which such statements are based. In addition, other important factors that could cause results to differ materially include the following: general economic risks; uncertainty regarding increased business and renewals from existing customers; continued success in sales growth; management of integration of acquired companies and other risks associated with acquisitions; risks associated with successful implementation of multiple integrated software products; the ability to attract and retain key personnel; risks associated with management of growth; lengthy sales and implementation cycles, particularly in larger organization; technological changes that make our products and services less competitive; and the other risk factors set forth from time to time in the SEC filings for Blackbaud, copies of which are available free of charge at the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov or upon request from Blackbaud’s investor relations department. All Blackbaud product names appearing herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blackbaud, Inc.

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Times of India Launches Inaugural ‘TOI AI Quotient Awards’ to Celebrate Pioneers in AI Innovation

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In collaboration with Knowledge Partner Adrosonic, the premier nomination-led platform will honor excellence, scalability, and measurable impact across India’s AI ecosystem.

NEW DELHI, June 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The Times of India has announced the launch of the inaugural edition of the TOI AI Quotient Awards—India’s most credible, nomination-led recognition platform celebrating excellence in artificial intelligence adoption, innovation, and impact.

Organized in collaboration with Adrosonic as the official Knowledge Partner, the awards will bring together pioneering enterprises, technology leaders, startups, innovators, and institutions that are harnessing the power of AI to drive business transformation, optimize decision-making, and enhance customer experiences.

As AI becomes a core driver of competitiveness and productivity, this initiative marks the beginning of a prestigious annual celebration. The awards aim to spotlight those leveraging AI to solve complex challenges, unlock new opportunities, and deliver meaningful, scalable outcomes across sectors.

Leadership Insights

“The conversation around AI has rapidly moved from experimentation to execution. For modern brands, a high AI Quotient is now a boardroom priority. The TOI AI Quotient Awards will serve as India’s most credible validation platform, spotlighting the enterprises that are successfully navigating this transition to drive real business outcomes and stronger governance. We look forward to uncovering the incredible stories of human-machine collaboration that are redefining the future of Indian industry.”
— Prasad Sanyal, Group Business Head – TOI, IndiaTimes, WhatsHot

“AI will not replace human intelligence, it will amplify it. The organisations that succeed with AI will be those that combine technology with human judgement, domain expertise and a clear focus on business outcomes. The true measure of AI success is not how much AI is deployed, but how effectively it improves decision making and delivers measurable value. Achieving this requires clear objectives, strong governance and responsible guardrails. The TOI AI Quotient Awards celebrate organisations turning AI potential into meaningful business impact.”
— Mayank, Founder & CEO, Adrosonic

Award Tracks & Categories

The initiative features 25+ awards distributed across 4 distinct tracks: Industry, Functional AI, Maturity-based, and Special Jury Awards. Key categories include:

Sector Excellence: BFSI, Retail & Commerce, Healthcare & Wellness, Travel & Hospitality, Media & Content.Functional & Strategic AI: Customer Experience, HR & Talent, Risk & Compliance.Enterprise & Impact: Social Impact, Women in AI, Legacy to AI Transformation, and Native Enterprise.

To ensure absolute credibility, the evaluation matrix leverages Adrosonic’s deep technical consulting frameworks for an objective initial screening. Following a preliminary audit by the expert TOI Editorial Board, the final winners will be selected by an esteemed, independent jury comprising leading AI experts, technology pioneers, industry veterans, and business visionaries.

Why Nominate Your Organization?

The TOI AI Quotient Awards offer more than just recognition—they provide a premier platform for national visibility and industry-wide alignment:

National Recognition: Showcase your AI-led innovations and business impact before a distinguished audience of industry leaders and decision-makers.Credible Validation: Gain elite positioning backed by TOI’s powerful media reach and Adrosonic’s technical validation frameworks.Industry Benchmarking: Measure your achievements against the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem to strengthen your market leadership.

How to Participate

Is your organization setting new benchmarks in AI adoption and implementation? Do you know an enterprise driving measurable transformation through artificial intelligence?

Nominate your organization or a deserving industry leader today to secure your place among India’s most forward-thinking, AI-driven enterprises.

Learn more and submit your nomination here: toievents.indiatimes.com/ai-quotient-awards

 

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Saturn Cloud and Spectro Cloud Partner to Bring Production-Ready AI to Palette-Managed Kubernetes

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Organizations running Spectro Cloud Palette can now deploy Saturn Cloud’s managed AI platform directly onto their existing Kubernetes infrastructure, from data center to edge, including FIPS 140-3 validated environments.

NEW YORK, June 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Saturn Cloud, the AI token factory platform for GPU clouds, AI Factory operators, and enterprises, today announced an integration with Spectro Cloud, the Kubernetes management platform trusted by enterprises and government agencies worldwide. The integration allows organizations already running Spectro Cloud Palette to add Saturn Cloud as a managed AI layer on their existing clusters, giving engineers self-service access to Jupyter, VS Code, RStudio, SSH, distributed training, and model deployments without requiring changes to the underlying infrastructure.

This integration meets platform teams where they already are: on managed Kubernetes. Palette handles cluster lifecycle management, GPU operator deployment, compliance profiles, and infrastructure governance. Saturn Cloud delivers the AI experience on top. The result is a complete AI platform that inherits the operational model and governance controls established by the platform team.

A Managed AI Layer on Palette-Managed Clusters

Platform engineering teams at large enterprises, government agencies, and regulated industries have already invested in Kubernetes and standardized on Spectro Cloud Palette to manage clusters across data centers, cloud environments, and edge locations. What they lack is a way to deliver AI capabilities to their engineering teams without spinning up a parallel stack or compromising the controls they have spent years building.

Saturn Cloud fits into the Palette-managed environment as a workload layer. Engineers get distributed multi-GPU training with automatic retry and logging, one-click model deployments with autoscaling, experiment tracking across training runs, and pre-configured development environments, all deployed through the same Palette cluster profiles and governance policies that manage the rest of the organization’s infrastructure. Palette’s GPU Operator Packs handle driver installation, device plugins, and monitoring automatically across the cluster, so there is no additional GPU lifecycle overhead. Engineers write standard PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX code and ship to production with no Kubernetes expertise required on the practitioner side.

“Most enterprise AI teams already have Kubernetes. What they don’t have is a way to give engineers a self-service AI experience on top of it without months of internal platform work. With Spectro Cloud, we eliminate that gap,” said Sebastian Metti, Founder, Saturn Cloud.

Why This Matters for Regulated Industries

For organizations in defense, healthcare, financial services, and other regulated sectors, the integration extends to Spectro Cloud’s Palette VerteX edition. VerteX is the only multi-environment Kubernetes management platform to have achieved FIPS 140-3 validation and is in progress for FedRAMP Moderate authorization (Army-sponsored). Saturn Cloud running on VerteX-managed clusters inherits the cryptographic assurance that agencies and compliance-driven enterprises require, including air-gapped and tactical edge deployments.

This is a meaningful distinction from public cloud AI services that cannot operate in disconnected or classified environments.

Where the Integration Runs

Spectro Cloud Palette manages Kubernetes across bare metal, VMware, public cloud (EKS, AKS, OCI), private data centers, and edge locations, often from a single control plane managing thousands of clusters. Saturn Cloud’s integration spans that same footprint. An organization can run AI workloads in a central GPU cluster and deploy trained models to Palette-managed edge clusters at hospital sites, retail locations, manufacturing floors, or forward-deployed military installations.

“Most organizations do not want to build a separate AI platform from scratch. They want to extend the Kubernetes operating model, governance, and security they already trust into AI development and production. Our integration with Saturn Cloud does exactly that. Together, we enable platform teams to deliver a self-service AI experience on Palette-managed infrastructure – across data center, cloud, edge, and regulated environments – without introducing a parallel stack or compromising operational control”, said Saad Malik, Spectro Cloud’s CTO and Co-Founder.

About Saturn Cloud

Saturn Cloud is the AI token factory platform for neoclouds, AI Factory operators, and enterprises. Saturn Cloud’s platform layer gives these operators a managed AI platform on top of their GPU infrastructure, including fine-tuning, model serving, per-token inference, development environments, distributed training, OpenAI-compatible model deployment, and enterprise security and governance. Saturn Cloud supports GPU architectures and deploys across public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises environments. Learn more at saturncloud.io.

About Spectro Cloud

With our Palette and PaletteAI platforms, Spectro Cloud solves how enterprises and public sector organizations manage full-stack application and AI infrastructure in any environment: from edge to cloud, and from metal to model. Using the power of cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes, we give platform engineers and operations teams flexibility to choose their perfect stack, while benefiting from complete repeatable consistency. We automate the full lifecycle of complex infrastructure at scale, for massive cost savings and better business outcomes. Learn more at spectrocloud.com.

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SOURCE Saturn Cloud

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Orion Innovation Achieves AWS Migration Competency for Cloud Transformation

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New AWS competency empowers Orion to guide enterprises through seamless cloud migration and accelerated modernization at scale.

ISELIN, N.J., June 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Orion Innovation (“Orion”), a data and AI-enabled software engineering services partner, announced that it has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Migration Competency. This designation recognizes Orion’s demonstrated expertise in helping customers plan, accelerate, and execute their cloud migration and modernization journeys to AWS with a proven, outcome-driven methodology.

Achieving AWS Migration Competency differentiates Orion as an AWS Partner that delivers specialized consulting services designed to help enterprises adopt, develop, and deploy complex workloads on AWS. To earn the designation, partners must demonstrate deep technical proficiency and a strong track record of successfully delivering cloud migration solutions at scale.

The AWS Migration Competency enables Orion to offer customers the ability to participate in the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), a comprehensive and proven program based on AWS’s experience migrating thousands of enterprise customers to the cloud. Through MAP’s three-phased framework, Assess, Mobilize, and Migrate, and Modernize, Orion helps organizations reduce risk, optimize cost, and accelerate timelines as they move to the cloud.

“Earning the AWS Migration Competency reflects the depth of our cloud engineering expertise and our commitment to delivering secure, seamless migrations that create real business value for our clients,” said David Winter, EVP, Chief Cloud & Strategic Partner Officer at Orion Innovation. “This recognition strengthens our partnership with AWS and validates the proven methodology our teams use to modernize mission-critical workloads, reduce migration risk, and help our customers innovate faster on the cloud. We look forward to helping more organizations unlock the full benefits of AWS and build intelligent, future-ready enterprises.”

AWS established the AWS Competency Program to help customers identify AWS Partners with deep industry experience and proven expertise. As an AWS Partner with a proven approach to migrating applications on AWS, Orion enables organizations to move faster and create competitive business advantages.

About Orion Innovation

Orion Innovation is a data and AI-enabled software engineering services partner with deep cloud expertise, delivering digital experiences that create measurable business impact for clients.

Orion combines strategy, experience design, and engineering capabilities to help enterprises innovate, scale, and embrace future technologies.

Envision what’s next. Build what matters. For more information, visit orioninnovation.com.

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SOURCE Orion Innovation

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