Is it possible that there's a cyclical rhythm to phishing attacks? Reading the wrap-up of IBM's May Global Business Security Index, you'll notice that phishing peaked in January, then dropped back, and then peaked again in May. Is it a coincidence that these are two periods when most university students are on breaks from school? Just a thought.

The report also notes that in May, more than 30 percent of e-mails contained some form of a virus. These items still cause a lot of damage to PCs both at home and in the office, proving that there are still many people out there who will actually open the attachment in an e-mail from bobbyxxxxxx with the words, "Hi! U Gotta See This" These must be the same people who continued to stick their fingers into electric sockets after age 3...

TES

IBM Report: Phishing Attacks in May Jumped More Than 200 Percent; Email Viruses up 33 Percent

ARMONK, NY --(Business Wire)-- June 30, 2005 -- Today IBM reported that phishing attacks increased 226 percent, while viruses and worms, such as Sober and Mytob, also continued to spread rapidly through email and web applications, according to its May Global Business Security Index.

IBM security experts attribute the increase in phishing attacks to the rise of zombie botnets being used to pump out massive volumes of the scam emails used in phishing attacks, as cyber-criminals look to increase their profits.

IBM's report also indicates that in May more than 30 percent of emails contained some form of virus -- a 33 percent increase from the previous month. In many instances, the virus traveling via email infiltrated a computer's hard drive and then forwarded itself to the user's entire address book.

In addition, IBM reports that application hacking is how 90 percent of target systems are exploited. Two critical points in web application security are the creation and management of sessions and filtering all data input. These types of compromises from a web application can lead to exposure of banking information, private sensitive data like credit card information, and competitive intelligence information.

Key findings from IBM's May Global Business Security Index include:

-- Phishing explodes: Phishing incidents reached a peak point in January 2005 and then dropped again. In May, phishing attacks exceeded anything previously recorded, increasing by 226 percent.

-- Viruses grew: In May 1 in 32.2 (3.12 percent of all email) emails contained some form of virus or trojan attack, a significant increase over the past month of 33 percent. To combat malwares such as Sober and Mytob, and other variants of these viruses, IBM advises organizations to keep antivirus signatures up-to-date, and to keep current with Windows patches.

-- Spam levels off: In May, 68.7 percent of inbound email traffic contained some form of spam. This figure has remained relatively unchanged over the past three months; During the same period, the proportion of unwanted email originating from known botnets and open proxy sources has dropped by a further 1.7 percent for the second month running.

-- Application hacking exploits: Ninety percent of target systems are exploited because of Web application hacking. Financial applications and online shopping accounts are popular targets. Top Web application vulnerabilities include: invalidated input; cross-site scripting flaws; injection flaws; broken authentication and session management; and improper error handling.

-- Malware scam: a malware hijacking threat was discovered operating from the host name iframeDOLLARS.biz. This website attempted to recruit partner websites to host a variety of malicious code to exploit Internet Explorer browsers. A successful exploit would result in numerous trojans, backdoors and spyware installed on the client. IBM has been identifying the hosting ISPs, strongly recommending the malicious Web sites be removed.

-- Educational institutions systems pharmed: In late May, after a long period of calm, IBM security analysts observed active exploitation of a Microsoft Library ASN.1 vulnerability. Correlating the signatures with other security events, IBM was able to determine that several attacking sources belonged to educational institutions, revealing that the attacking sources were compromised hosts, belonging to an Rbot network. IBM quickly notified customers and possibly infected institutions to address any outstanding issues.

"IT systems have become so crucial to today's business operations, work productivity, and customer service, that even a small disruption can have serious impact on business operations, and loss of data integrity or confidentiality can lose a customer base that took years to build," said Cal Slemp, vice president, security and privacy services, IBM Global Services. "Security is now something that companies can no longer afford to be without. IBM's approach offers companies a way to reduce overall business risk while helping them comply with legislations, regulations and build better business intelligence."

The IBM Global Business Security Index Report is a monthly report that assesses, measures and analyzes potential network security threats based on the data and information collected by IBM's 2,700 worldwide information security professionals and half a million monitored devices. For more information, please visit www.ibm.com/security.

About IBM Global Services
With 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate, IBM is the world's largest information technology company. IBM is a leading provider of e-business solutions and is dedicated to helping companies, Business Partners and developers leverage the potential of e-business on demand across a wide range of businesses and industries. The company offers a host of cross-industry and industry-specific solutions designed to meet the needs of companies of all sizes. For more information on IBM, please visit: http://www.ibm.com/businesscenter.

Driving on Route 1 at lunch today, I spotted the following sign in the window of a Southeast Asian grocery store near TMC's offices in Norwalk:

Most Items: 99 cents (and up)

It's weird how many stores have exactly that same sale going on. What a funny world.

TES

For the second time in a week, a report has been released that documents Americans' high level of concern regarding data privacy and fears of identity theft. Seventy-eight percent of the 2,322 adults surveyed believe that consumers have lost all control of who collects their data and how the information is used. Though this survey does not register opinions on the the lack of action by U.S. government agencies, it does extrapolate that as many as 140 million U.S. adults have foregone shopping online because of concern regarding personal data theft.

What does the U.S. government think THAT will gouge out of the economy?

TES

As a follow-up to yesterday's announcement by Aspect of its Uniphi Suite version 6.1, the latest release of the company's applications convergence platform for contact centers, Aspect today announced a cooperation between itself and Web customer service company eGain Communications. eGain Mail, a component of eGain Service version 7, has been validated to work with Uniphi Suite 6.1 and provide users with a way to bring comprehensive e-mail customer care into their Aspect-based customer care operations (which already entail ACD, CTI and IVR functionalities). The goal was to allow agents using Aspect Uniphi Suite to access eGain’s centralized knowledge base.

“Contact centers using eGain Mail with Aspect Uniphi Suite can provide a consistent quality of customer service across e-mail, voice, Web and other Aspect-supported communication channels, ” said Brian Gentile, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Aspect. “Open standards-based solutions, such as these products from Aspect and eGain, offer businesses flexibility by enabling them to add multichannel capabilities to improve their customer interactions.”

“Our combined technologies can help companies differentiate themselves with the ability to respond promptly and professionally to customer inquiries, every time—regardless of media channel,” said Ashu Roy, chief executive officer of eGain. “eGain Mail and Aspect Uniphi Suite together produce a blended multichannel environment that ensures all communications are routed to the agents most appropriately skilled to resolve them satisfactorily.”

Announced yesterday, the new version of Aspect Uniphi Suite 6.1 was updated to help simplify application development, system admin and management, and literally double the number of agents that can be supported by previous releases, without requiring companies to purchase new hardware or software.

Version 6.1 includes support for up to 500 agents (blended and voice-only), Microsoft .NET and Windows, Aspect Call Center, Cisco Call Center Manager, Sharepoint, Microsoft Exchange and eGain Service. The software is built on core standards, such as VXML, SOAP/Web Services and SIP. Aspect is an active member of the SIP Forum, which contributes to the development of global Internet communications based on IETF and W3C standards.
For more information, visit www.aspect.com or www.egain.com.

TES

You may be hearing quite a bit about "workforce optimization" really. Considering the speed at which industry buzzwords fly over our heads nowadays, it may have slid by without your noticing. This one, unlike a lot of other terms, is a good one. It's a term that's likely to be around for a long time to come.

What is it? It's essentially a merger of several industries. It's the umbrella under which workforce management; call recording, monitoring and analytics; field sales processes; sales force automation; e-learning; and performance management all reside. To those of you who, like me, always felt that it made little sense to keep call recording and agent monitoring separate from workforce management, not to mention training, salesforce automation and analytics, this is an important market segment that will reach into almost every business on the planet, regardless of size.

In the July issue of Customer Interaction Solutions magazine, you'll find an article authored by Witness Systems' Oscar Alban, the company's principal global market consultant. In it, he states that, "Some may elect to define WFO as “utopia,” but at its core it’s simply the convergence of four key contact center technology segments that work optimally together in support of a greater customer service strategy. Simply said, it unites the following: 

Workforce management. Strategic forecasting and scheduling that drives efficiency and adherence, aids in planning and helps facilitate optimum staffing and service levels;

Performance management. Key performance indicators (KPIs) and scorecards that analyze and help identify synergies, opportunities and improvement areas; and

E-learning. Training, new information and protocol disseminated to staff, leverages best-practice customer interactions and delivers learning to support development."

The July issue of CIS will be with print subscribers by mid-July.

TES

It's no secret to anyone who works in the realm of marketing that the U.S.'s growing Hispanic community is now, and will continue to become, a hot commodity. Rising disposable income, increasing rates of broadband adoption and a preference to do business in their own language have all added up to make U.S. Hispanics one of the most targeted groups by the marketing and advertising communities.

The increasing success of niche-market teleservices providers, such as Texas-based Hispanic Teleservices Corporation (www.htc.to), attests to this trend. HTC bases its call centers in Monterrey, Mexico and services the U.S. Spanish-speaking population with teams of college-educated, bilingual agents.

A recent In-Stat report tallies the potential of U.S. minority markets, particularly the potential of the telecom industry in broaching these markets.

The full release is below.

TES

Telecom Marketing to Hispanics Part of New Ethnic Focus

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. --(Business Wire)-- June 27, 2005 -- Telecom providers are marketing more aggressively to ethnic groups, reports In-Stat (http://www.in-stat.com). Examples of this include Qwest's low-cost long distance calling plans for Mexico, and Sprint's launch of Movida Communications, both of which target the more than 42 million Hispanics in the United States. Many of the current ethnic marketing initiatives tend to focus on the Hispanic market, as this is the largest ethnic population, with more than 43 million individuals in 2005.

"In-Stat has also found that some ethnic groups react better to specific types of advertising and marketing, and are influenced by different sources," said Amy Cravens, In-Stat analyst. "In better understanding these differences, providers may be able to more fully realize the potential subscribership of what may be undersubscribing ethnic groups."

A recent report by In-Stat found the following:

-- Although decreases in revenues from wireline services are expected from subscribers of all ethnicities, the lowest declines are expected from Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander subscribers due to their population growth.

-- By 2009, more than 40.4 million whites are expected to subscribe to broadband. The number of Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander subscribers is expected to grow at faster rates, however.

-- African-Americans are expected this year to account for the second-greatest percentage of dial-up subscribers, nearly 6.0 million. This number is expected to fall to 4.3 million by 2009.

The report, "Culture Shock: Trends in Ethnic Marketing" (#IN0502202IA), covers the results of the "Consumer Telecom Survey, 2005" research study. This report presents data from structured telephone interviews with consumers across the United States regarding their expected telecommunication service usage for 2005 and in future years.

For more information on this report, please visit http://www.instat.com/catalog/Ncatalogue.asp?id=95 or contact Erin McKeighan at 480-609-4551 or emckeighan@reedbusiness.com. The report price is $3,495.

Have you noticed lately that every time you call a company: your insurance agent, your car loan company, your cable TV provider: the first thing they ask you for is your phone number?

I know why they do it -- it's a unique way to track customer records, and since most people won't give out their social security numbers to anyone who asks, and your phone number is more unique than, say, your shoe size, birth date or high school locker combination, it's a good substitute.

The problem is, that most of us have many phone numbers today. Each time a company asks for my phone number, I respond, "I don't know." It's not that I don't know my own phone number, but it's impossible for me to remember WHICH phone number the company might have on record. My home phone number? My cell phone number? My work number? My former home's phone number? My former cell phone number?

The upshot is, half the time I offer up my home phone number, the agent responds, "Hmmm...we don't seem to have that number on record." We end up trying several before my record pops up. And I find that as I get older, "former" numbers, such as that of an old cell phone, get a little harder to call up out of the biological memory bank.

Though oddly, I do remember my high school locker combination.

TES

Perhaps you've been keeping an eye on the rather regular incidences of credit card and other personal information going "missing" from some company or another's database...hackers, user errors, "lost" backup tapes...it's been all over the news in the last few weeks. It's like watching a leaky bucket lose water.

You've noticed it. I've noticed it. The media has noticed it. You know who hasn't, it seems? Congress. So far, we've had deafening silence over the issue. Your personal information is being bought and sold like Hummels on eBay, and our government seems...well...oh, look at that shiny thing.

MSNBC reports on a survey conducted in May by Gartner that concludes that most members of the general public are concerned about the unregulated flow of personal data, and that same majority of the public has also noticed that Congress seems to be avoiding eye contact with American consumers over the issue.

We can only hope that our Congressional representatives' personal data are the first on the list to be misued. That should get them moving quick enough.

It's no secret that nowadays, companies are drowing in data. Every piece of software an enterprise uses today has built-in analytics and reporting functionality. Most companies are up to their armpits and sinking fast in data. Obviously, it's not enough just to possess the information...you need to know how to make sense of it.

Business data derived from the disparate departments of an organization are more useless than an icemaker in the Antarctic if the information isn't organized to be actionable. What's needed is a coherent business intelligence system that understands that you want to hear, for instance, about how your customers responded to your latest marketing campaign rather than how many paperclips were used by accounting last year.

A recent study by Knightsbridge Solutions showed that 65 percent of respondents indicated thier number one priority with business data is generating real, actionable intelligence that can be quickly leveraged and turned toward profit. What's actionable? That's a bit like asking how long a string is...what's actionable to one company will be useless to another. Highly customizable BI solutions, deployed well and used intelligently, may become the hottest solutions in the business market in the coming year.

The full release follows.

TES

What Do Business and IT Professionals Want Most from BI in 2005? Facts over Fiction; Knightsbridge Survey Shows That Accurate, Timely Data is under Hot Pursuit

CHICAGO --(Business Wire)-- June 22, 2005 -- Relying upon accurate and timely information to make decisions, rather than intuition, is what organizations are paying attention to most this year. And for the most part, companies are paying more than lip service to this notion by taking measures to organize their enterprise data and enhance analytics capabilities, say business and IT professionals in a recent survey by Knightsbridge Solutions.
The survey, entitled the 2005 BI Peer Review, was completed this past spring by more than 2,000 respondents among all levels of business and IT functions and industries.

When it came to singling out the most relevant information-centric issues in their workplaces in 2005, 65% of respondents named actionable and/or operational business intelligence as their first or second most relevant issue for 2005. Actionable business intelligence provides users at various levels of an organization with access to tactical, time-sensitive business information to improve the speed and effectiveness of operations. Data quality followed as the next most relevant issue, with 54% of respondents claiming it as either their first or second most pertinent concern.

The high priority placed on these two issues underscores the information management challenges all large organizations face--too much data, inefficient access, and data consistency and quality problems.

Corporate action to make good on these intentions appears to be definitive. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said that their company's biggest information-centric priority in 2005 is to invest in business intelligence or enterprise data warehousing strategy (51%) or implementation (27%). Furthermore, 46% say their company is planning, developing, implementing, or maintaining a business intelligence or data warehouse initiative at the moment; only 32% indicated their company is in the investigative stage.

"Achieving the promise of BI has been long overdue," said Roderick Walker, president and CEO of Knightsbridge Solutions. "For years, companies have talked about leveraging data to advance their goals, but didn't take a long-term, iterative approach to get there. Finally, we're seeing a great deal of momentum and success in major corporations becoming much more analytic as they seek to optimize their business operations."

Survey results also indicate that the collaboration between respondent companies' business and IT departments is improving. Seventy-seven percent rated the relationship between the business and IT functions as somewhat or very collaborative. Only five percent described the relationship as not collaborative at all.

A sampling of companies making their BI aspirations real include:

-- Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City has nearly completed its seven-phase enterprise data warehouse initiative, designed to help it compete more effectively in its market. The company implemented this system to provide one-stop access to critical data and support enterprise analytics. The project has facilitated a complete organization transformation resulting in total integration of business and IT, now aligned together under one organizational umbrella.

-- Neoforma, a leading supply chain management solutions provider for the healthcare industry, engaged in a full-fledged data warehouse implementation to deliver reports containing powerful, on-demand product conversion and price standardization information for medical/surgical products to its hospital customers -- something that has not previously been possible in the healthcare industry. This pioneering offering promises to significantly improve hospitals' financial performance.

Despite these positive examples of progress, achieving an ideal state of enterprise data management continues to be a challenge. Many companies still face a litany of roadblocks to achieving long-term success with BI, which typically include but are not limited to:

-- Getting stuck in reactive modes and cycles

-- Not building a compelling business case for projects

-- Lack of executive sponsorship

-- Disunity between business and IT departments

In fact, the Knightsbridge BI Peer Review found that many business respondents are unfamiliar with their organizations' stage of BI development. This might be because business users are less involved in BI and data warehousing projects on a day-to-day basis, but it also might indicate that IT needs to do a better job of communicating with the business - and vice versa.

A more detailed version of the 2005 BI Peer Review report, along with Knightsbridge's 2005 Top 10 Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Trends white paper, can be found at http://www.knightsbridge.com/webinars/trends/main.php.

A lively early morning visit to TMC by FrontRange Solutions' VP of Products, Kevin Smith, yielded some interesting news on the company's future plans, both short-term and long-term.

What piqued my interest the most was their announcement of the company's intention to bring to market a hosted CRM solution next year. The as-yet-unnamed (or, if there is a name, it wasn't mentioned) ASP-delivered CRM solution will follow the launch of a new hosted IT solution.

Such a solution will be a hot system to watch, and give competitors (Salesforce.com, Siebel) a long run for every bit of their money. FrontRange is practically a household name: this company counts fully half of the Fortune 500 as customers, and is one of the few companies able to boast very strong growth in its licensing revenue.

Additionally, the company will be announcing plans to expand into new product arenas. Watch this space for more FrontRange news down the road.

TES

This morning brings the announcement of Salesforce.com Summer '05, the 18th inception of the San Francisco-based company's wildly successful hosted CRM system. Along with new features debuted with Summer '05 is the announcement that the company has created the world's first hosted operating system, Multiforce 1.0.

I agree in part with Marc Benioff's statement that Saleforce.com is, "the most robust, flexible and customizable on-demand applications that precisely conform to their business processes," but after having spent some time with SugarCRM (see blog from yesterday), I don't know if I'd call Salesforce.com "the most customizable."  Still...it's a product a great many people have had astronomical success with, and it certainly turned the enterprise business software industry on its ear.

Full release below.

TES

Salesforce.com
(NYSE: CRM), the technology and market leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM), today announced the general availability of Summer '05, the 18th generation of its industry-leading on-demand Salesforce and Supportforce CRM solutions. The Summer '05 product launch also includes Multiforce 1.0, the world's first on-demand operating system, the Customforce 2.0 on-demand application customization tool and the Sforce 6.0 on-demand integration platform. Salesforce.com's latest generation of products is an extraordinarily powerful, customizable and easy-to-integrate set of on-demand applications and application development technologies.
With Summer '05, salesforce.com enables enterprises of all sizes, industries and geographies to gather, organize, share and communicate information to raise customer satisfaction and employee productivity to new heights. And with the introduction of Multiforce 1.0, customers also now benefit from an on-demand operating system that serves as the hub for managing and sharing their information on-demand. Multiforce makes running multiple salesforce.com and customer- and partner-created on-demand applications that go way beyond CRM faster, easier and more effective than ever before.
"With the Summer '05 release, salesforce.com has taken its game to the next level," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. "Summer '05 further empowers salesforce.com's 15,500 customers with the most robust, flexible and customizable on-demand applications that precisely conform to their business processes, not the other way around. There's no question about it. The 'take it or leave it' era of legacy CRM vendors is officially over." 
Announced at salesforce.com's Summer '05 launch events, held June 21 in San Francisco, June 30 in London, and July 7 in Tokyo, Japan and Sydney, Australia, Summer '05 is now available to all 15,500 customers and 267,000 paying subscribers worldwide. Salesforce.com's on-demand model automatically delivers the new benefits and features of Summer '05 to the entire salesforce.com customer base at no additional cost. In addition, all existing customizations and integrations seamlessly migrate to the new release. Summer '05 is available in Personal, Team, Professional and Enterprise Editions, allowing customers to select the best product for their size of implementation and enterprise. Salesforce.com also continues its commitment to democratizing access to its solutions by making Multiforce 1.0 and Customforce 2.0 available in Professional Edition with Summer '05.

Summer '05 Product Details
Multiforce 1.0: The World's First On-Demand Operating SystemMultiforce 1.0
is the world's first on-demand operating system. It offers a complete environment that gives users a single platform to manage, deploy and access their salesforce.com applications, as well as whole new customer and partner applications created using Customforce. Multiforce 1.0 seamlessly unites all of these applications with a single data model, single security model, and a single user interface. With Multiforce 1.0, data can be easily shared and accessed across applications to enhance cross-organizational collaboration and eliminate silos of information.

-- Single Data Model -- All applications now share the same powerful data model, which enables users to streamline application access and eliminate deployment complexity. 
-- Single Security Model -- Multiforce allows the same security and information sharing model at the heart of salesforce.com to be used across all of a company's data, ensuring users from different departments or groups only see the information appropriate to their role, regardless of which Multiforce application they are using. 
-- Single User Interface -- During the past five years, salesforce.com has continued to deliver applications offering unprecedented ease of use. 
Multiforce 1.0 now offers that same benefit for customer- and partner-created applications. It provides a sleek, intuitive and consistent user interface across all applications that seeks to be as simple-to-use as Amazon.com or Google. 

"Multiforce is the complete on-demand application platform we've been waiting for," said Dean Dresser, Controller and Senior Director, Finance, ClearCube. "Multiforce literally puts all of our on-demand applications on the same page. With easy access, secure sharing and seamless application switching, Multiforce further underscores why salesforce.com's on-demand applications remain the unquestionable choice for driving sales and maximizing productivity while keeping IT costs to a minimum."

Salesforce Summer '05
Salesforce Summer '05 builds on the industry's leading on-demand sales force automation product with comprehensive and customizable sales methodologies, enhanced forecasting capabilities, marketing analytics and mass address updates.

-- Sales Methodologies -- Through salesforce.com's open approach, users can integrate many selling methodologies into Salesforce Summer '05, including several built-in best-of-class offerings from Miller Heiman, SPI (Solution Selling), The Complex Sale and ValueVision. These methodologies help sales representatives capture and analyze data more effectively to support all aspects of the selling process. All of these methodologies can be tailored to mesh with any organization's existing processes. This open system makes legacy CRM vendors' model of locking users into a single methodology a thing of the past.

-- Customizable Forecasting -- Salesforce users can now roll-up forecasts according to exacting business criteria such as product line, time period, direct report, forecast stage and revenue schedule. Users can drill deep down into opportunities and benefit from an integrated, global view that can be customized to meet different business needs. 
Users also have the ability to override data to control overall forecasts.
-- Marketing Analytics -- Enables users to ensure marketing campaigns accurately reflect the sales pipeline by providing comprehensive 
real-time visibility into campaign lead status. Users can leverage that analysis and make immediate adjustments to marketing campaigns to ensure they are accurately targeted and segmented for maximum ROI. 
Salesforce also embeds state-of-the-art data management and cleansing functionality to maintain data validity for precise reporting. 
-- Mass Address Update -- Identifies inconsistencies in data entry and standardizes data values for higher data quality. It can also handle large-scale updates to eliminate poor-quality data, enabling more accurate reporting and greater business insight.

"We are excited to roll out the new features available in the Summer '05
release from salesforce.com," said Patricia Menadier, Director of Sales Operations, Macromedia. "Summer '05's customizable forecasting will help increase confidence in sales forecasts and give us better visibility across our enterprise."

Supportforce Summer '05
Supportforce is salesforce.com's on-demand customer service application, launched with the support of the industry's leading contact center infrastructure providers including Avaya, Cisco Systems, Alcatel, Aspect Communications and Genesys (an Alcatel company). Supportforce Summer '05 updates include: 

-- Email Case Management -- Meets the needs of more sophisticated customer service and support environments and greatly reduces the processing and response time for customer emails. By using multiple customer service email addresses, incoming messages can automatically generate cases that are routed to appropriate case queues. Ongoing email interactions with customers happen from within their cases for greater efficiency and better tracking of all email dialogue.
-- Advanced Case Escalation -- Handles even the most challenging service level commitments by adapting escalation rules to complex requirements. 
This new feature also helps ensure all cases are "touched" in a timely manner through multiple escalation options.
-- Self-Service Portal Style Editor -- Enables users to make their self-service portals match the look and feel of their company's corporate Web site. Now, companies can quickly and easily configure and launch easy-to-use self-service portals without any design or technical assistance.

    "The Summer '05 edition of Salesforce has impressive features and functionality that enable us to deliver excellent customer support with unprecedented ease," said Ginny Boney, Salesforce Project Manager, MedImpact.
"This is a product clearly designed to deliver the highest customer satisfaction levels possible while simultaneously maximizing the value of each customer interaction. Supportforce Summer '05 edition also enables us to produce the metrics we need to manage our business through its custom report formulas and calculated fields. Without question, salesforce.com represents the future of customer service and support solutions."

Customforce 2.0: The On-Demand Customization Tool
    Customforce 2.0 builds on the extraordinary success and popularity of Customforce 1.0 that has seen users create more than seven million customizations to date. Customforce enables users to customize Salesforce and Supportforce features including workflow, controls, fields, tabs and objects with unprecedented ease and speed. Customforce 2.0 also allows customers and partners to build whole new powerful applications quickly and easily. Just a few of the hundreds of new application possibilities that go way beyond CRM include expense reporting, project management, schedule management and recruiting. Customforce 2.0 combines these unique abilities features with a brand new set of rich functionality, including:

-- Customforce Analytics -- Gain comprehensive visibility through real time analysis of business data that incorporates visual highlighting and custom calculations in reports and dashboards.
-- Customforce Formulas -- Create customized business formulas for immediate, accurate decisions. Spreadsheet-style formulas and calculations can be applied to any field in the application.
-- Customforce Business Processes -- Boost productivity and visibility by leveraging more than 100 pre-built processes such as lead scoring, discounting, quota attainment, round robin lead/case assignment, price totals, case aging and auto-dialing.
-- Customforce Standard Related Lists -- Customize any related list to show relevant data for accounts, contacts, opportunities and cases. 

"Customforce 1.0 was a terrific achievement that made the inflexibility of traditional client/server CRM a thing of the past," said Chip Vanek, Director of Corporate and CRM Applications, Magma Design Automation. "Now, salesforce.com has taken many of our suggestions for further enhancements and incorporated them into Customforce 2.0. Customforce 2.0 is a tremendous base for new innovative corporate applications."

Sforce 6.0: The On-Demand Integration Platform
With its sixth major release, Sforce continues to enhance the Web services and integration capabilities that enterprises need to ensure their on-demand CRM systems seamlessly mesh with the rest of their enterprise architecture. Sforce 6.0 features these new capabilities:

-- Sforce Parter Portal Toolkit -- Helps companies easily create Web portals to better collaborate and communicate with partners, as well as get better insight into channel activity.
-- Sforce 6.0 Web Services API -- Now includes compatibility for applications written for earlier versions of the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) API (Application Program Interface), starting with API 2.5. The new API also includes powerful enhancements that further improve any integration already in place between Salesforce and other systems. 
-- Sforce Data Loader -- An easy-to-use, highly scalable data management tool that can perform large data uploads, mass updates, mass deletes and exports for any Salesforce, Supportforce or custom application or object.
-- Import De-Duplication -- Offers rapid import performance with built-in data cleansing tools that eliminate duplicate data. 

"The combination of Sforce, Multiforce and Customforce further solidifies salesforce.com's technology and market leadership," said Cathy Bensink, Director, Americas' Sales Operations, TANDBERG, Inc. "Salesforce.com's Summer '05 release sets a new bar for on-demand applications. It's the most powerful, customizable and easy-to-deploy CRM solution we've ever encountered. With the Summer '05 release, we can focus on hitting our core deliverables and business goals instead of navigating through the endless maze of head-scratching complexity offered by traditional CRM vendors."

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM). Through its award-winning salesforce.com family of products including Salesforce (http://www.salesforce.com ) and Supportforce (http://www.supportforce.com ), the company provides a comprehensive suite of CRM applications to help enterprises of all sizes, industries and geographies meet the complex challenge of sharing and managing information on-demand. Salesforce and Supportforce are built on the Sforce on demand integration platform and include Customforce tool complete on-demand customization. Sforce (http://www.sforce.com ) and Customforce(http://www.customforce.com ) allow customers and independent software vendors to customize and integrate salesforce.com's products, as well as build their own on-demand enterprise applications. As of April 30, 2005, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 15,500 customers and approximately 267,000 paying subscribers including Advanced Micro Devices, America Online, Automatic Data Processing, Avis/Budget Rent A Car (Cendant Rental Car Group), Dow Jones Newswires, Nokia, Polycom and SunTrust Banks. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase our services should make their purchase decisions based upon
features that are currently available. Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock
Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM". For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com , or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.

Having been a science fiction fan most of my life, and in particular a fan of the great Arthur C. Clarke, I was extremely pleased to read this bit of news today about the launch of the very first solar sail-powered craft. In recent days, I've picked up and re-read my ancient copy of "The Wind From The Sun," Clarke's 1971 collection of short stories. The book's titular story involves a race between solar sail crafts of different nations.

For someone like me, it's particularly poignant to note that the experiment has been funded by sci-fi author Carl Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan. Sagan may no longer be around to witness the event, but Clarke remains alive and involved in all things science at age 88.

TES

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -- The world's first solar sail spacecraft takes flight on Tuesday, launched by space enthusiasts who cobbled the privately funded mission together on $4 million and an untested theory that light can power limitless space exploration.

Cosmos 1, a disc-shaped craft whose two segmented sails suggest flower petals, is set to blast off from a submerged Russian submarine in the Barents Sea at 12:46 p.m. PDT (1746 GMT) on Tuesday.

Mission controllers hope to fill each sail's four 49-foot (15-meter) segments with streams of photons, or light particles, emanating from the sun to lift Cosmos 1 to a higher orbit.

The mission's sponsors at the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, think Cosmos 1's flight ultimately will prove the science-fiction conceit that sailing to the stars aboard a light-powered ship is possible.

"Our role is as the dreamers and instigators behind this spacecraft," Emily Lakdawalla, project operations assistant, said on Monday.

"It is very promising technology but one that nobody is really pursuing into space. All we are trying to do is to demonstrate that the technology can work," Lakdawalla said.

The project started as a dream held by Planetary Society founders Carl Sagan, the late science fiction writer, and Louis Friedman, who proposed sending a solar sail craft to rendezvous with Halley's Comet in the 1970s when he worked at NASA.

Friedman, the society's executive director, and others believed the impact from a constant stream of photons bouncing off a huge sail be enough would impel a craft through frictionless space at an ever-increasing rate of speed.

With sunlight as its only fuel, a solar sail craft could open the farthest reaches of the solar system to space travel.

Off drawing board

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the need to find commercial uses for Russia's long-range missiles helped Cosmos 1 get off the drawing board three decades later.

The project was funded mainly by an entertainment company run by Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan, and by contributions from Planetary Society members and philanthropist Peter Lewis.

Cosmos 1 was built by Russian spacecraft contractor NPO Lavochkin. It will be launched in the tip of a converted intercontinental ballistic missile that was part of the Soviet Cold War arsenal. The plan is for it to orbit Earth for at least a month.

The rocket trip and a boost from a "kick motor" will put the 220.5-pound (100 kg) spacecraft into orbit about 550 miles (885 km) above Earth shortly after 1 p.m. PDT (1800 GMT).

Cosmos 1 will orbit for several days to acclimatize its instruments to the vacuum of space before its twin sails are deployed via inflatable booms. Mission controls now plan to deploy the sails late on Saturday.

Each sail is made up of eight triangular blades whose combined structure looks like a disk. The reflective Mylar sails are about 5 microns thick, or about one-quarter the thickness of a plastic trash bag.

After it deploys its sails, Cosmos 1 will be visible as it circles the Earth about once every 100 minutes.

I'm recently back from a tour of Northern California companies, and still have a lot of notes to assimilate. One of the biggest standout companies was SugarCRM. What an interesting story they have to tell. For those of you unfamiliar with the Cupertino, California-based SugarCRM, the company offers the first completely open-source CRM product. The company, founded by former Epiphany employees, aims to fit in where other CRM companies cannot: by offering their products via open source, they can appeal to companies that need low cost and a high level of flexibility: something for which traditional CRM companies are not well known. (Director of Marketing Tara Spalding told me the cost for SugarCRM is approximately $240 per user, per year.)

Predictably, SugarCRM, which is built on a Linux/Red Hat base, has shown it has great appeal to the IT community. Tara Spalding indicated that while Salesforce.com skipped the IT departments of companies to appeal to the business users of CRM solutions, SugarCRM has decided to begin from an IT perspective, understanding that today's IT departments have a great deal of influence on business processes, and they do not like to be cut out of the process of business software implementations.

For more information about SugarCRM, visit www.sugarcrm.com.

TES

I'm out on the road this week, visiting vendors up and down the Northern California coast. But I have a great "Web news" story to relate. Of course, it's only great in retrospect. It wasn't great at the time.

About 9:00 pm PST last night, I was checking e-mail, with a television doctor drama (House M.D.) on in the background. Suddenly, the show is interrupted for a newscast. The anchorwoman's voice was fairly urgent. "Due to an offshore earthquake of 7.5 magnitude off the coast of Eureka, California, the northern California coast has been issued a tsunami warning. The tidal wave, should it occur, will happen within the next 15 minutes. More information to follow. Now, back to your program."

Yeah. I was really interested to see the rest of that show. Nothing else to do while I wait for the tidal wave! (My hotel is a block from the water.) I spoke with my equally freaked out colleague, Karl Sundstrom, on the phone, and quickly logged into Google, using "California" and "tsunami" as search terms. Within 15 minutes I found that the tsunami warning had been rescinded. Not from the TV news or the San Francisco newspapers...but from the U.K. newspaper "The Scotsman." They were the first to post the info.

Geographical proximity means less than nothing nowadays in the era of Internet news.

TES