First Coffee

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Don Byron's Ivey-Divey. Interesting clarinet jazz, we raised an eyebrow at the cover of "Freddie Freeloader," but it works:

Communications products vendor Unified360 has announced a new customer: Rasa Floors & Carpet Cleaning, described by Unified360 officials as "one of Texas' fastest growing floor and carpet cleaning companies."

 

Always good to have fast-growing companies as customers, yes. 

Rasa Floors wanted something to help "streamline communication with their customers," according to Jim Barker, CEO of Unified360, saying they wanted "a way of integrating their telephony infrastructure and systems with the core database and CRM."

In mid-2009 Unified360 helped Rasa upgrade their voice and data network to use more intelligent MPLS and SIP transport methods. After putting that network in place, Unified360 rolled out Cisco voice and data infrastructure for Rasa, including phones, soft phones, unified messaging, reporting, and recording.

"The team at Unified360 did a fabulous job of managing this major technology rollout for our business," says Michael Rasa, CEO of Rasa Floors & Carpet Cleaning. "This project was so important that we went to the extreme of checking multiple Unified360 references, going onsite to visit their reference sources, and visiting their offices on multiple occasions."

Unified360, a Premier business partner with Cisco Systems, is based in Dallas.

...

Here at First Coffee's we're suckers for news of any cool iPhone apps. If there are enough of them, why, Mrs. First Coffee just may agree that it's the perfect Christmas present this year. And look -- here's another one no modern man should be without.

Joy Entertainment, in partnership with iPhone application developer Big Nerd Ranch, has introduced an iPhone application of its kind that allows users to generate musical riffs, with their own instruments via the iPhone/iPod Touch. 

Riff Raters was created to "allow musicians and music enthusiasts alike to share their original riffs with the world," according to Big Nerd officials. Well, that and to keep people from getting work done, of course.

"Riff Raters enables musicians to spread the news about their music and expand their fan base," says Joy Glenwright, CEO of Joy Entertainment, who explains that using the app, which costs a buck ninety-nine, musicians can "share and get comments about their riffs with the entire App community."

Riffs are "short repeated melodic phrases," usually lasting no more than twenty seconds. Those of you addicted to Twitter can think of them as musical tweets. Use the app to record your riffs on your iPhone/iTouch "with any instrument," company officials say. 

Then do all the cool editing you want with reverb and trimming tools, post it to Riff Raters and watch it climb to the Top 25 charts. Fans even have the opportunity to be notified when their favorite riffers upload new riffs.

Then, in a few months, hear your very own riff stolen on the radio. Ha ha! Just kidding! First Coffee's sure that would never happen!

Gautam Godse, Software Director of Big Nerd, acknowledged that he's in a crowded field, noting that the iPhone is fast approaching 100,000 applications, "with music applications numbering in the thousands."

Oh, and friends, please: Do not, repeat, do NOT upload "Smoke On The Water." The world's coolest riff, yes, but it's been done. Feel free to avoid "Jumping Jack Flash" too.

...

AltiGen Communications, which sells Microsoft-based VoIP business phone systems and call center tools, has announced that online retailer BuySeasons adopted AltiGen call center technology to process up to 14,000 in-bound calls a day during the Halloween season.

We know what you're thinking: "Halloween season? Since when does somebody need to beef up the call center during Halloween season?" Ever since that somebody's an online-only retailer of costumes, party supplies and Halloween decorations. Now go eat some more leftover candy corn.

Speaking of candy corn, anybody else remember those old Bartles & Jaymes ads for wine coolers? The ones with two old country guys on the porch? Were those cool or what?

To market for the Halloween season, the company mails millions of catalogs and maintains the BuyCostumes.com and "CelebrateExcess" family of Web sites. It also added 250 seasonal agents to the 90 year round agents to address its share of the $5 billion a year Halloween industry.

etcha didn't know Halloween was a $5 billion-plus industry. That there's a lot of candy corn.

"We've experienced tremendous growth in the last several years," said BuySeasons Vice President of Operations Terry Rowinski. "It's unusual for most call centers to go from 90 to 300 agents in a few days, so we require technology that is flexible and easy to manage."

Using AltiGen's software, Rowinski said, the company can "adapt to changes that may take place in a single day."

Earlier this summer, BuySeasons deployed an AltiGen softswitch and call center suite. The company implemented digital lines from the phone carrier to allow up to 368 concurrent calls to the AltiGen system.

...

DocuSign, vendor of on-demand electronic signature tools, has announced its participation and sponsorship of the Salesforce.com Dreamforce Global Gathering 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The party starts November 17th. 

DocuSign is presenting three conference sessions, including "DocuSign for Salesforce." 

Dreamforce Global Gathering 2009 is expected to host more than 12,000 attendees for four days of best practices, training, networking and "an entire community of Salesforce.com experts."

DocuSign is also launching products, including electronically signed quotes, automated proposal creation with routing and electronic signature functionality, smart electronic signatures for Salesforce CRM and integration with contract management products on the Force.com platform.

In collaboration with Apttus, the DocuSign Large Enterprise Track Session, "Electronic Contract Execution with Apttus and DocuSign for Salesforce," will demonstrate "the benefits of deploying an end-to-end electronic contract management and eSignature," company officials say.

"At DocuSign, we see Dreamforce as an opportunity to deepen our partnership with Salesforce.com, engage existing and new partners and come up close and personal with our DocuSign for Salesforce customers," says Ken Cavallon, market director at DocuSign.

...

Colin Taylor, The Chairman and CEO of The Taylor Reach Group, has announced that the Toronto-based contact and customer service consultancy has added Deborah MacAskill to its team of consultants:

"Deb adds more depth to the team. With twenty years of call center experience she provides hands-on center management expertise our clients expect from TRG."

Taylor says MacAskill has "a successful track record building and operating" customer service and operations centers, noting that prior to joining The Taylor Reach Group, she was Vice President Operations at Sutherland Global Services, a contact center/BPO outsource agency, where she was responsible for operating four outsourced customer support contact centers. 

MacAskill also worked for other outsourcers including Teletech, ICT Group and Resolve (formerly Watts Communications). At Resolve as Director, Atlantic Operations Deb oversaw three centers. 

Her career began at Bell and included a period at Register.com.

Taylor says TRG offers an ROI guarantee: "When we make a recommendation and our clients ask us to implement we guarantee a 300 percent Return on Investment. In four years offering this, we have yet to pay against this guarantee."

...

Tampa-based Ideal Dialogue has rolled out systems for improving call centers' customer satisfaction ratings.

Previously known as Quality 3, Ideal Dialogue is unveiling its new branding and releasing details of the research and development behind IDEAL systems on its site.

Company officials say it brings to the industry a "focus on the human component of customer service," and that the systems are designed to "refashion hiring, training, and performance improvement for outsourced and in-house call center operations."

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Aimee Mann's Live At St. Ann's Warehouse. Just about the perfect album to play in a home office doing business writing... for all of you out there in a similar situation...

 

Santa Claus could be bringing a lot more social networking and text messaging this Christmas.

The latest "Entertainment Trends in America" tracking study, published by the NPD Group, finds that many consumers expect to be spending the same amount on traditional entertainment categories during the Christmas season, "even as their participation in newer forms of entertainment continues to rise."

The study found the most notable increases occurring in social networking and text messaging: "More than a third (37 percent) of respondents reported visiting a social networking site over the prior six months, which is an increase of 11 percentage points since last year." Sixty-three percent reported sending and receiving text messages, an increase of seven percentage points over the prior year.

Only nine percent used Twitter during the same time period. Lumps of coal all around.

"With a host of new mobile devices and free mobile and Web entertainment applications now widely available -- and as adult consumers get more comfortable with these newer technologies -- we can expect to see further increases in these areas in the months to come," says Russ Crupnick, senior entertainment industry analyst for NPD.

The overall spending outlook for entertainment for the remainder of the year is still reasonably stable, the study's officials found, "considering that many consumers continue to have anxiety about the state of the economy and the employment picture."

In fact, in August fully 66 percent of consumers reported that they planned to spend the same amount or more on entertainment products and services in the coming 12 months than they did the prior year -- three percentage points higher than when the same question was asked last year. 

Interestingly the report found that sixty-three percent of men surveyed planned to spend more than they did last year on entertainment, versus just 37 percent of women who reported feeling similarly.

The study found the picture inconsistent across categories, with consumers more inclined to spend money on digital music and movies in the theater, and somewhat less willing to spend money on CDs and DVDs.

Of course the death of recorded music purchased in stores via CD has been predicted for a long time now. If these are, in fact, the death throes they're quite drawn out.

"Although CDs have been facing challenges for years, our research shows that video games, home video and other categories will benefit from releases that consumers really want at prices they perceive as offering a good value," Crupnick notes. "Consumer sentiment can shift quickly with the release of powerful titles like Halo or Transformers."

And once again First Coffee is embarrassed that he needs his eleven-year old son to fill him in on what Halo and Transformers are.

...

According to the latest forecast data from Pyramid Research, Ringtone isn't where you want to be in Latin America.

Pyramid, the telecom research arm of the Light Reading Communications Network, found that Ringtone's revenue falls short in Latin America as mobile Internet access will account for almost 79 percent of all non-messaging mobile data revenue by 2014.

The glass is half full: Pyramid's third quarter 2009 Latin America mobile data forecast found that 11 percent of total mobile data subscribers will be ring tones users by year-end 2009. The glass has a crack in the base: The same study found "deeper opportunities for network operators clearly lie in mobile Internet services."

The increasing importance of mobile Internet in the data revenue pie is "a clear trend in every single market, growing the fastest in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and Mexico," writes Cesar Jimenez, in Pyramid Point's "LA Mobile Operators Turn a Deaf Ear to Ringtones," adding that in his estimation, by 2014, "mobile Internet access in Latin America will account for $16.5 billion, or almost 79 percent of all non-messaging mobile data revenue, whereas ring tones will make up four percent."

Written by Pyramid analysts, Pyramid Points are complimentary online notes on market, business, and regulatory developments in the global telecoms industry.

...

ShareMethods has announced the availability of ShareSpaces for AppExchange on the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

 

"We are thrilled to launch ShareSpaces for AppExchange," says Eric Hoffert, CEO of ShareMethods. "We look forward to delivering benefits to customers with the launch of ShareSpaces for AppExchange."

ShareSpaces officials bill their products as letting companies "connect everyone in the sales and marketing value chain -- prospects, customers, salespeople, partners, and marketing teams -- into social workspaces."

ShareMethods' other AppExchange offerings include ShareNow for document sharing and collaboration, ShareOffice for document creation and electronic signing on-demand and ShareSpaces, for "private ad-hoc sharing spaces." 

ShareSpaces' three-step wizard lets users set up brand-specific ShareSpaces by "creating document categories and inviting users with defined roles for collaboration," company officials explain: "Content can be copied and distributed between ShareSpaces, allowing companies and partners to create hierarchical and interconnected networks of social work spaces."

The product also has support for document versioning, workflow, and such community features as rating, reviews, and tagging. Documents in ShareSpaces are accessible from Salesforce CRM. It's available immediately and is priced on a cost effective per user per month basis.

...

Sydney-based Contact People, a specialist contact center consultancy in recruitment and home agent managed services, says with the "predicted recruitment boom next year," now's the time to get your ducks in a row.

"Contact centers are going to experience increasing difficulties to recruit quality agents which could ultimately effect customer service levels and higher customer churn," company officials warn.

Company officials cite research from callcenters.net reporting that Australian contact centers are now spending 69 per cent of their available budgets on human resources, including salary, benefits, recruitment and training costs -- with four percent going to rent. Is it all that much better where you are?

Callcenters.net reports that flexible work arrangements are the most effective strategy currently used to retain employees in a contact center: "The benefits of home agents are undeniable," says Paul Smith, Managing Director, Contact People. "Contact centers can access a far greater pool of quality agents that offer the flexibility and scalability to ramp up or down based on demand."

Smith says he sees the advantages of the home agent workforce in a flexible workforce "which often begins with the onset of the holiday season and the need to staff up."

Smith points to Aussie online retail and auction company GraysOnline, which sells in excess of 120,000 items of all kinds each month to both consumers and businesses. On average every month its contact center handles 12,000 voice calls and 6,000 e-mails. Such a company has used their services, he says.

...

Infusionsoft, which sells automatic follow-up software for small businesses, has announced the creation of a Business Development department "aimed at cultivating strategic partnerships," company officials say.

Dave Lee, an Infusionsoft veteran, was appointed as vice president of the newly-created department and Tyler Garns as vice president of marketing. Lee, a 15-year veteran, previously served as vice president of marketing for five years and Garns as director of marketing.

Clate Mask, CEO and co-founder of Infusionsoft, said the move was an effort to "broaden our partnership program with the creation of the Business Development department."

As vice president of business development, Lee's team is tasked by Infusionsoft with "forging relationships through the company's existing Partner Program and with new partners."

Marketing and business growth expert -- and Infusionsoft partner -- Dan Bradbury calls strategic partnerships "key to business success and momentum in today's environment, and this represents a competitive move from a smart company." 

Garns will focus on "building the Infusionsoft brand via marketing, communications and social media," company officials say.

...

Ottawa-based QNX Software Systems, The Company That Can Always Google Itself, has announced that its QNX CAR application platform is powering the ng Connect Program's LTE Connected Car concept vehicle.

QNX officials say this demonstrates how Long Term Evolution 4G networks can bring video-on-demand, Internet radio, and other wireless broadband services to the automobile. 

The QNX CAR application platform provides the software foundation of ng Connect's LTE Connected Car concept vehicle. The platform provides all of the car's system software and infotainment applications, including the real-time operating system, touchscreen user interfaces, streaming media players for YouTube and Pandora, navigation system with Google local search.

It also offers Bluetooth and portable device connectivity, multimedia playback, hands-free integration, climate controls, Adobe Flash games, application store technology, and a virtual mechanic.

 

QNX is a Harman International company and vendor of operating systems and middleware for the in-car infotainment market. The vendor has licensed its software technology for more than 12 million in-vehicle systems worldwide. 

The auto application platform has attracted more than 50 technology partners and automotive customers, including Adobe, Cisco, Daimler, Delphi, Freescale, General Motors, Google, Gracenote, IBM, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, Panasonic, Pandora, and Volkswagen.

Recently, the QNX CAR application platform was noted with an Adobe MAX recognition for its use of Adobe Flash technology.

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is R.E.M.'s Lifes Rich Pageant. One of First Coffee's favorite albums, but we get this sneakingly guilty feeling we should like R.E.M. more than we actually do:

Chelmsford, Massachusetts-based Aspect, a unified communications products vendor, has won the 2009 PilotHouse IP Contact Center Award based on a customer survey report from Nemertes Research. 

Companies responding to the survey "praised Aspect's customer service as the highest in the call center industry," research officials said.

"More than 1,300 individuals participated in the survey," according to Nemertes officials, who said Aspect garnered a 4.48 overall score on a five-point scale, bettering whoever was in second place in the IP contact center market by more a half-point. 

Katherine Trost, research analyst, Nemertes Research, said the results can be seen to "validate the company's unified communications strategy and direction. More than half of the IT practitioners we work with plan to bring unified communications capabilities into their call center operations."

Customer comments in the report singled out Aspect's unified communications vision as noteworthy, Nemertes officials said, adding that the company's product integrations with Microsoft Office Communications Server and Aspect's UC services practice also impressed users. 

Jim Foy, president and chief executive officer, Aspect, said "from virtualization capabilities, to unified communications tools, to system integration services, our customers' feedback is evaluated and incorporated into our product road map and corporate strategy."

...

Ufone -- which of course you recognize as PTML, or Pakistan Telecom Mobile Limited -- has signed an agreement with Teradata Corporation to expand its Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse.

Abdul Aziz, chief executive officer, Ufone, said they want the Teradata technology to "better understand our customers and gain insight into their needs, and to be able to respond with matching services and offerings at competitive prices."

Since 2001 Ufone has used analytical products from Teradata to store information and analyze their information reserves.

Khuram Rahat, managing director, Teradata Pakistan said the agreement with Ufone should help the telecom "carry out detailed analysis and to make strategic and timely tactical decisions that better serve their customers while achieving optimal efficiencies in their operations."

PTML is a wholly owned subsidiary of Pakistan Telecommunication Corporation that started its operations in 2001 under the brand name Ufone. With PTCL's privatization, Ufone became a part of the Emirates Telecommunication Corporation Group in 2006.

Ufone has a subscriber base of over 20 million, network coverage in 10,000 locations and across all major highways of Pakistan. It currently caters for International Roaming to more than 260 live operators in more than 150 countries,and offers Pakistan's largest GPRS & BlackBerry Roaming.

...

Dublin, California-based Sybase 365 has announced the release of its mobile banking application for the iPhone available to financial institutions worldwide through the Sybase mBanking 365 platform. 

The app is intended to serve as a turnkey mobile banking product for financial institutions, helping them roll out banking capabilities to their customers "with Sybase 365 managing the entire infrastructure," vendor officials say. 

Sybase 365 also announced BBVA Compass as one of the first adopters of the app.

"It was most efficient for us to turn to Sybase 365 to manage the entire project and deploy all of the technologies," said Chris Causey, Vice President, Internet Banking Department BBVA Compass.

With the app BBVA Compass customers can now check balances, view posted and pending transactions, transfer funds between accounts, and interact with bank representatives using their iPhone. The Sybase 365 works with 800 mobile operators around the world.

"Mobile banking allows banks and financial institutions the ability to interact with their customers on the one screen they carry with them all day - their mobile device," says Matthew Talbot, vice president, mCommerce for Sybase 365. 

BBVA Compass is a subsidiary of Compass Bancshares, a wholly owned subsidiary of BBVA, a financial services group with more than $750 billion in total assets, 48 million clients, 8,000 branches and approximately 108,000 employees in more than 30 countries. BBVA ranks among the top seven largest financial institutions in the world based on market capitalization and 13th in Global Finance magazine's list of the "World's 50 Safest Banks" for 2009.

...


 

Yes, admittedly it's still a small portion of the total mobile market, but according to ABI Research practice director Dan Shey, business customers offer between 20 percent and 80 percent greater ARPUs than the average mobile consumer in emerging markets. 

The research firm also thinks mobile business customer revenues will grow over the next five years "from one to four percentage points more than the overall mobile services market."

But in what ABI officials say is "one of the most important statistics from analysis of the mobile business customer in emerging markets," about 72 percent of all mobile business customers are self-employed or work in businesses of fewer than 100 employees. 

This, they say, "presents great opportunities for mobile operators." As Shey explains, smaller businesses in emerging markets "still have relatively simple computing and connectivity needs, but these will evolve and become more sophisticated as the regions' economies grow. Operators in the emerging markets have the opportunity to become the primary providers of telecommunications and data services for a vast majority of companies in these regions."

The analysis also found that data services for emerging market mobile business customers will command an even greater portion of revenues than those in developed region markets, "growing to as high as 59 percent of total mobile services revenues by 2014."

Mobile broadband services connecting computing devices such as laptops, the study found,  will in most emerging market regions provide more revenue than messaging services by 2014.

...

New Global Telecom, a vendor of wholesale hosted IP Telephony Communication products, has certified the Cisco SPA500 series of IP phones "for use in conjunction with NGT's managed VoIP services," company officials say. 

NGT and Cisco plan to jointly market Small Business VoIP services and equipment to partners and end user businesses.

John Guillaume, senior vice president of sales and marketing for NGT, said Cisco's phones and "approach to the SMB space" were attractions for NGT, saying his company would "promote a series of Webinars, field events, and co-marketing engagements for potential resellers and agents."

The Cisco SPA500 phones comes with full duplex speakerphone and enhanced speech technology including support for HD voice (G.722). The phones are Cisco XML enabled for integration with applications to the device.

NGT provides cable operators, VARs, agents and resellers with tools for adding hosted and trunk-based VoIP and communications to their service offerings. NGT's Private Label and Agent offerings are turnkey, company officials say, and include the "elements to deploy VoIP and unified communications." 

Interested partners may sign up for the agent program and training.

...

And from Jakarta, Indonesia comes the news that Smart telecom, a national cellular operator, and Research In Motion have launched the EVDO-enabled BlackBerry Curve 8330 smartphone in Indonesia.

Smart will offer the BlackBerry Curve 8330 smartphone with two service plan options, Smart officials say -- Smart BlackBerry Hemat monthly for IDR 140,000 and Smart BlackBerry Hemat daily for IDR 5000.

The subscription allows customers unlimited Internet and e-mail access on Smart's network. The service also allows subscribers unlimited video streaming, access to instant messaging services such as BlackBerry Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger and Google Talk, and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

Activating BlackBerry service from the BlackBerry Curve 8330 requires users to send an SMS to 2233 with the text "ON Hemat30" for monthly service or "ON Hemat1" for daily service. To deactivate, users can send an SMS with the text "OFF" to 2233. 

Smart officials say there is "no condition on subscriber type, prepaid and postpaid customers" are welcome.

CDMA customers "in our country, for the first time," will get the BlackBerry platform "on our network," says Tom Alamas Dinharsa, Head of Device Technology & Special Projects, PT Smart Telecom.


 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is an iTunes shuffle of The Kinks. First Coffee agrees with the considered opinion of sportswriter Peter King, who saw the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame show in Madison Square Garden recently with an all-star lineup, including Kinks frontman Ray Davies schooling Metallica on "You Really Got Me" as part of the show: "We've forgotten how great The Kinks were:"

Intermedia, a vendor of Microsoft Exchange hosting, will offer free migrations to its hosted Exchange 2010 customers when the service debuts. If "free" fits into your budget you might want to take a look.

Company officials hope the free migration offer is of particular interest to SMBs looking to upgrade from Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003. Jonathan McCormick, chief operating officer, Intermedia, said the migrations will be handled to "minimize disruption to their business and preserve the value of their existing Exchange set-up."

 

The vendor's Exchange Concierge team will perform the migrations using proprietary tools for hosted Exchange 2003 and 2007: "The tools are being readied for use with hosted Exchange 2010, in part through the hosted Exchange 2010 beta Intermedia launched in May 2009. Exchange 2010 is not yet available for sale from Microsoft," they explain.

You can get the free migration if you're a new customer or existing customer upgrading to an Intermedia Exchange 2010 hosting plan. And because Intermedia's Exchange 2010 beta is hosted, no software downloads or installations are necessary, of course. .
...

Salesforce.com has announced, much to everybody's surprise, Dreamforce 2009, modestly billed as "the cloud computing event of the year."

Benioff's Merry Band does have a truly impressive special guest, General Colin L. Powell, USA (Ret.), the 65th U.S. Secretary of State as a speaker.

 

They're evidently expecting over 12,000 attendees this year. So if you're not doing anything from November 17-20 and you happen to find yourself around the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. drop in since they're offering "free keynote and expo passes" to Dreamforce. Hit the link for details.

According to Salesforce.com officials, Dreamforce 2009 will focus the Sales Cloud, the Service Cloud and the Custom Cloud. "In addition, attendees will meet with Salesforce.com product teams, hear from more than 300 users at customer and partner companies, get hands-on training" and hear best practices and strategies for cloud computing.

There's also quite a push for nonprofits -- "more than 800 nonprofit attendees are expected at Dreamforce this year," company officials say, adding that through the Dreamforce Gives Forward program, "nonprofits will be matched with attendees for pro bono technology assistance."

...

AT&T Business Solutions, the business unit within AT&T selling services for business customers, completed the third quarter 2009 'highlighted," company officials say, by an "outreach to small and midsize businesses that included new offers and customer support programs."

The company pointed to their small business efforts, "driven by a series of announcements that emphasized the company's efforts to embed AT&T's 3G wireless technology into netbooks and laptops from device manufacturers."

AT&T also announced that in the first half of 2010 it will offer remote access support services built on Intel vPro technology.

The business unit rolled out several support programs during the quarter, including the introduction of Tech Support 360 Desktop Helpdesk Minutes, an expansion of the popular Tech Support 360 service that is now available to midsize businesses with an average 15 to 50 employees.

 

The service is described by company officials as offering "remote online computer support, installation assistance and PC performance tune-up 24 hours a day, seven days a week via any high speed Internet connection."

The quarter also saw an expansion of AT&T Small Business InSite, an online portal for small business owners, with a series of free "how to" articles, podcasts, Webinars, and videos.

Other business unit highlights during the quarter included a $45 million Networx contract with the U.S. Department of State, an agreement with Barnes & Noble to provide complimentary in-store AT&T Wi-Fi service to any customer that visits a Barnes & Noble bookstore nationwide, the expansion of AT&T's Wi-Fi presence in Europe and China, bringing its global Wi-Fi footprint to 125,000 hotspots, and the expansion of its managed security services to India.

...

HarperCollins and Skype have created "Cecelia Ahern's Virtual World Tour," an event to promote the publication of Ahern's latest novels, The Book of Tomorrow and The Gift around the world.

 

Ahern is evidently one of the UK's best selling authors. You may have heard of PS: I Love You. Maybe you saw the movie voluntarily. Maybe you were more or less dragged to the movie.

Book tours are a staple promotion tactic for many authors, but Ahern can't tour due the arrival of her first baby. So hey -- enter Skype.

 

HarperCollins and Skype are bringing the author to fans through real-time Skype video: "Ahern will join events live from her home in Dublin, and will appear on screens at selected retailers in central city locations. Events will range from celebrity-hosted evenings to invite-only retailer events."

 

The publishers says some fans will be able to speak to the author and buy signed copies of her new books. The tour kicks off with an event at the new Liverpool Waterstones store on Friday 13th November -- Cecelia's not superstitious, evidently -- with further events scheduled in Frankfurt, Johannesburg, Sydney and Singapore.

Cecelia Ahern has sold 12 million books in over 48 countries in only five years. At 28, she is one of the biggest success stories in commercial fiction. She is also the creator of the TV drama series, Samantha Who?

Jonathan Watson, Skype's marketing manager, said he hopes "this is first of many virtual book tours we will facilitate with Harper Collins."
...

CyanGate, a McLean, Virginia-based media technology company, has announced their newest application, S-Drive.

Company officials say it will be usable by CRM vendor Salesforce.com's professional and enterprise edition customers to "store and share their files without any storage limits."

S-Drive uses Amazon's storage cloud for file management while providing an interface within Salesforce.com platform. Bulent Dogan, Senior Solution architect at CyanGate, says companies using Salesforce.com CRM platform will be able to store and share their sales and marketing collateral, product documentation, customer documents and even any type of media files via S-Drive:

 

"Companies can allow their customers to upload and download case files, product updates and documentation directly from Salesforce.com's customer portal without file size and storage limitations," he said.

Salesforce.com have released a new Adobe Flex Builder recently to go with their Internet application initiative. S-Drive is being marketed by company officials as "a showcase for these type of applications that will enhance the CRM experience for companies," and allow applications to be built on the Salesforce.com platform.

Since the launch of S-Drive's newest edition on AppExchange, customer feedback supports that this application is easy to use and is an improvement to Salesforce.com's document management. To get started companies need to sign up for a single company account from AppExchange.

...

Following its launch of the new Cloud Gateway v1.0, Gladinet has released Cloud Desktop v1.3.

 

The update "adds AT&T Synaptic Storage to the list of cloud services the cloud storage client supports, as well as Amazon S3, Google Docs and EMC Atmos.

 

Jerry Huang, co-owner of Gladinet, said the newest version of Cloud Desktop will "essentially make AT&T Synaptic Storage a virtual drive or folder on the user's computer and allow both drag-and-drop and set-it-and-forget-it file backup to AT&T Synaptic Storage."

 

Company officials see the appeal of Cloud Desktop v1.3 to SMBs in its ability to integrate multiple third-party Web services into users' individual desktop operating systems on an open platform.

This means, they say, that cloud services like Amazon S3, Google Docs, Google Picasa, EMC Atmos, EMC Atmos onLine, Box.net and now AT&T Synaptic Storage "no longer require users to manage numerous accounts and interfaces; instead, each can be mapped as a network drive directly accessible from Windows Explorer."

 

In addition to support for AT&T Synaptic Storage, other tweaks to Cloud Desktop v1.3 include the new Gladinet Online service, which encrypts and stores user profiles online for access from multiple computers running Gladinet Cloud Desktop.

The news as of Halloween, and no we're not listening to "Monster Mash." Okay, granted it's the greatest Halloween song ever recorded. I mean, there's nothing else remotely in its class. Nothing. But it's just that... after the 10,872nd time you've heard it a bit of the charm begins to wear off:

Qwest Communications has reported financial results for the third quarter 2009, announcing net income of $136 million and earnings per share of eight cents, which was equal to prior-year results.

 

The third quarter saw net operating revenue of $3.1 billion, including 36 percent growth in IP services. Overall reported revenues declined ten percent compared to the prior-year period, and excluding the effects of the company's transition to a new wireless business model, revenue declined 7 percent year over year.

 

Total operating revenues declined 1 percent sequentially.

In the quarter, adjusted EBITDA increased 1 percent from the year-ago period as substantial cost improvements offset lower revenue: "Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter of $1.1 billion includes nearly $60 million of incremental non-cash pension and OPEB expenses compared to the third quarter 2008," company officials say.

 

For the quarter, adjusted free cash flow was $428 million and year to date, adjusted free cash flow totaled $1.4 billion, compared to $846 million through the third quarter 2008.

Qwest officials said fiber to the node was deployed to more than 500,000 additional homes during the quarter, and that during the quarter 71,000 customers added broadband services that use the fiber network. Company officials also announced the company will begin developing backbone facilities with Alcatel-Lucent.

 

Operating expenses in the quarter were $2.6 billion, a decrease of $356 million, or 12 percent, year over year.

...

Solutions Group has announced the retention of World Market Media to lead the company's social media marketing efforts.

Ronald P. Russo, Jr., Founder & Social Equity Officer -- there's a job title one doesn't see every day -- pronounced World Market Media "delighted" that Solutions Group management team "has engaged World Market Media to design and implement their social media distribution plan and platform."

Solutions Group sells managed engineering services, integrating regional design centers in North America with its lower cost off-shore engineering locations in Romania and Mexico to provide "blended pricing" products and "reduced product design cycle times."

 

The firm uses its core engineering competencies in other areas, including "royalty partnerships, intellectual property creation and selective acquisitions. SGI's customers currently include major Fortune 500 companies, small and mid-range OEMs and early stage product companies," company officials say.

...

Every once in a while one hears news that demands, yes, demands to be covered, however tangentially related to CRM or communications. Such a news item has crossed First Coffee's desk, and will be covered:

 

Famous Dave's Utah Barbeque recently selected Telesphere, a Phoenix-based managed telecommunications and Internet services provider, to provide fully hosted voice and data services to their Salt Lake City call center.

 

That's right, Utah barbecue. Two words that go together like "Relaxing" and "New York City," "Polite" and "Paris" and, oh, "Utah" and "Jazz,"right? First Coffee calls Virginia home when he's in the States, and has not had much call to sample barbecue outside of the Smoky Pig out Route 1 in Ashland, as it's difficult to imagine any could be all that much better.

 

But evidently Dave has some idea what he's doing: Famous Dave's of America has 178 locations in 38 states -- "including Times Square in New York City," company officials say, as if that's anything to be proud of when it comes to barbecue, seeing as how New Yorkers know about as much about barbecue as they do about harvesting wheat.

 

Now if they had said they have managed to stay in business in any North Carolina city outside of Charlotte or the Research Triangle, okay, First Coffee's impressed.

 

The Telesphere Complete product with Call Center application selected by Famous Dave's provides an all-in-one smart fully managed and hosted private data connection, hosted VoIP with Quality of Service, business-class IP phones and installation, "the latest in user and system features" as well as 24x7 support and a call center application with call monitoring and controlling features, cole slaw, hash browns and biscuits 'n' gravy with sweet iced tea.

"We were most impressed with the call center application. It will allow our remote restaurants to forward all catering calls to one location," says Scott Morton, Area Director for Famous Dave's, noting that this year, Famous Dave's Utah Barbeque has increased their catering volume "well beyond expectations."

...

Avaya, a vendor of enterprise communications applications, systems and services, has announced that it will launch the Avaya Virtual Partner Conference on November 10, 2009.

 

Company officials say the event will offer a combination of "on-demand training, live question and answer sessions and key reference materials."

 

The conference is designed to provide Avaya's global channel partners with in-depth details on Avaya's business strategies, product and service road maps, and information on critical tools to improve their company's effectiveness and overall success.

Patti Moran, senior director, Worldwide Channel Marketing, Avaya, said the conference is intended to let associates at our partner companies "hear and understand the new Avaya Connect program, our road map. The format allows partners to attend the live session or opt in at a time that is more convenient for them."

The conference will launch via Web cast at 9:00 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, November 10. It will feature several video presentations wherein Avaya executives address channel initiatives and explain the proper care and feeding of the Avaya Aura unified communications architecture and new service options.

 

There will also be in-depth discussions on the new partner program, Avaya Connect, and the streamlined competency model, company officials promise.

The Avaya Virtual Partner Conference website will also feature a Resource Center with presentations and relevant documentation and Virtual Briefcases that will allow partners to save pertinent resources for later use.

...

More good news: Overall customer satisfaction with residential high-speed Internet service providers has increased from 2008, "primarily due to improvements in performance and reliability," according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2009 Internet Service Provider Residential Customer Satisfaction Study released today.

The study measures customer satisfaction with high-speed Internet service based on performance and reliability, cost of service, customer service, billing and offerings and promotions. It found that overall satisfaction with residential high-speed Internet service is 639 on a 1,000-point scale--"an increase of 22 index points compared with 2008," officials said.

The study also finds that customer satisfaction with performance and reliability averages 687 in 2009--a 43-point increase from 644 in 2008.

 

Why the improvements? Power officials point to the decrease in the percentage of customers who report experiencing service outages, as well as improved customer perceptions of connection speed.

"In many instances a household's Internet connection acts as the backbone of its voice, video and information services," notes Frank Perazzini, director of telecommunications at J.D. Power and Associates. "As households become more dependent on services provided via the Internet, eliminating outages and providing consistent connection speeds will become necessities in Internet service providers' business models."

Among customers who bundle services from their Internet service provider, the most popular option is a combination of video and Internet services, chosen by about one-third of customers who bundle their services. The percentage of customers who bundle voice, video and data services has increased from 16 percent in 2008 to 19 percent in 2009.

 

The proportion of customers who indicate they "probably will" or "definitely will" bundle their Internet service with other voice or video services in the next year also increased to 52 percent in 2009 from 43 percent in 2008.

As far as trends go, the study found that the proportion of high-speed Internet service customers who indicate they are loyal to their provider has increased by two percentage points from 2008, to 32 percent in 2009. Additionally, 66 percent of customers state they "definitely will" or "probably will" recommend their provider to others in 2009--an increase of four percentage points, compared with 2008.

And the strikingly good news: Among customers who contacted their service provider to resolve a problem or question, average hold times have decreased by nearly 30 seconds in 2009, compared with 2008.
...

Another one of those silly bets politicians and businesses make whenever the local boys are in a Super Bowl or World Series:

 

After winning last year's World Series bet with a Tampa-based company, Philadelphia-based Alteva, an enterprise hosted VoIP and unified communications provider, has bet Philadelphia pretzels against New York bagels with Stage 2 Networks, a New York-based vendor of hosted PBX and converged network tools.

This year there's a humiliation factor -- the 2009 loser will also don opposing team's fan wear and have a photo session with a banner acknowledging the winner in front of either New York City's Times Square or the Rocky statue in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

"After winning bushels of Florida oranges last year, we bought a juicer and got accustomed to drinking fresh squeezed orange juice at breakfast meetings... the only thing missing is a good bagel," says William Bumbernick, CEO of Alteva in an incredibly sly reference to Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez's admission that he was using banned steroids, or "juicing." "We enjoy doing things like this as its fun for the company, overall morale and we get to show our support of our home team."

Joseph P. Gillette, CEO of Stage 2 Networks, notes that the only previous Yankees-Phillies World Series was played back in 1950, "so we're looking forward to going head-to-head almost 60 years later. We're also looking forward to eating lots of Philly pretzels."

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the sounds of of the Yankees getting started against the Phillies, particularly the Yankee Stadium fans riding Pedro hard here in the bottom of the first. Gotta love New York fans. Promise that won't affect the column, though:

Okay, you wanted some good news, we have some good news for you: Global management consulting firm Booz & Company's fifth annual analysis of global innovation spending finds that the world's 1,000 largest publicly traded corporate research and development spenders increased spending on R&D in 2008.

 

Yes, this is in the face of a global economic downturn. If you're really looking to read the tea leaves you can see this as an affirming the importance of innovation to corporate strategy. Plus Matsui just got a hit, the first against Pedro so far, so that's a good sign.

 

R&D outlays for these companies rose by 5.7 percent to $532 billion, a sizable sum almost equaling Alex Rodriguez's contract with the Yankees, even as sales were up only 6.5 percent. While the increase in 2008 R&D spend was less dramatic than 2007's gain of 10 percent, Booz analysts found, "it was just slightly less than the 7.1 percent global five-year compound annual growth rate for R&D."

It's not just deep spending, it's wide as well: "Overall, more than two thirds of companies maintained or increased their R&D spending in 2008, despite more than a third (34 percent) reporting that net income plummeted last year," according to the study.

 

More than a quarter of companies decreased their R&D allocation in 2008, but we won't talk about them.

In a particularly striking metaphor Barry Jaruzelski, Partner at Booz & Company, who's obviously been reading a bit of Sun Tzu on the side, said "Reducing efforts on innovation would be similar to unilateral disarmament in wartime. Now is an opportune time to build advantage over competitors, especially weaker ones that may have to skimp on R&D for financial reasons."

In another bit of news that bodes well, the study also found that according to senior managers and R&D directors seven in 10 companies are now adjusting their strategies to better capture changing customer requirements.

And this'll shock you: No industry felt the pain more than auto, with nine out of the top 10 R&D spenders in the category cutting their innovation outlays in 2008.

...

A new Web-based iPhone app to locate property for sale or rent around certain physical locations was launched in the United Kingdom today.

Propertynearme.comUnited Kingdom first then in Germany, Italy and Spain over the next couple days. Plans are in place to launch an Australian version in the very near future. And you don't even need to download an app, since its Web-based. It's developed by mobile developers Internetics.

Internetics Director Clive France, showing that necessity is, in fact, the mother of invention, calls the app "a dream come true for property hunters. I was driving through an area a few months ago, liked it and thought wouldn't it be useful if I could simply click a button on my iPhone and see what property was for sale around me."

And hey -- it's free of charge to use. Stand next to Buckingham Palace and see if Her Majesty's looking to find a new crib.
...

Chinook Hosting, a white label hosting company, has gotten together with VoIP app vendor BroadSoft to demonstrate a new enterprise-class customer relationship management app for SMBs.

The product itself is built by implement.com and uses Microsoft's business productivity apps integrated with BroadSoft BroadWorks VoIP application platform. Chinook officials say the idea is to show how BroadSoft Xtended, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 "work collaboratively to retrieve customer contact information based on the caller ID or other call parameters."

UC integrates the components of VoIP, mobile voice, IM, presence and video. Steve Schwartz, president and CEO of Chinook Hosting, maintains that approach helps the product "interact seamlessly with hosted business applications to enable collaboration across the whole organization. This type of integration clearly validates the business value of UC."

Leslie Ferry, vice president of marketing at BroadSoft, pitches the partnership with Chinook Hosting as demonstrating how hosted UC "can be integrated with business applications," to let service providers deliver this offering to the SMB market "without a massive investment." is designed to show what properties are available around your current geographical position. Just stand in a neighborhood and dial up the options. This is one of the first Web-based property apps to use the "geo location" awareness feature of the iPhone.

The site launches in the

...

OneBill Telecom, a British business telecoms service provider, has announced the expansion of its online services for customers.

 

As part of the expansion customers get better "My Account" features, intended to allow for "easier and more efficient management of their accounts online."

The way it works now, logging in to the "My Account" section of the OneBill Telecom site lets OneBill customers access a new account overview page, giving them "a snapshot of important information, including a rundown of past invoices, a summary of their most recent bill and their account history."

 

From there, customers can make payments online, download and print past invoices and customize their account features, company officials say, "opting, for example, to single out calls made to certain destinations and monitor calls according to price."

 

James Wilson, Marketing Manager of OneBill Telecom, said they think customers prefer to manage their communication costs online, "rather than rely on paper-based invoices. Indeed, the recent postal disruptions have only accelerated the interest in -- and usage of -- our online customer service facilities."

 

Through the My Account service, customers "can instantly know what their communication costs for the month have been," Wilson added.

OneBill was founded in 1999 and now has over 25,000 customers, the majority of them small businesses.

...

ClickFox, which sells customer experience analytics products, has announced what company officials call "the expansion of their deployment" with a telecommunications organization to include "all customer interactions across all of their interaction channels."

The coyly-unnamed wireless provider will use both existing and new interaction analysis to "further improve operational efficiency, customer retention, revenue generation and customer satisfaction."

Marco Pacelli, chief executive officer of ClickFox, notes correctly that the telecommunications industry has "steep competition, high customer churn and highly publicized customer satisfaction issues." Amen, that last one goes double.

 

Fascinating question, isn't it? Which came first -- the lousy customer service, high churn or stiff competition? If customer service were better would churn decrease? Is such a thing possible? What would it look like -- increasing the quality of customer service to the point where it actually reduces churn? Interesting question, somebody get Paul Greenberg on it right away... well, when the Yankees game's over.

 

These issues need to be constantly monitored and analyzed, company officials say, adding that limited analysis doesn't always cut it when it comes to getting insight.

ClickFox officials are trying to position CEA as a counterpoint to what they call "traditional business intelligence and data warehousing approaches," touting their ability to deliver "enterprise-wide investigative insight into customer experience and behavior." If you're looking for a one-sentence differentiation, well, First Coffee supposes that's as good as any.

...

VeriSign, which sells Internet infrastructure services, says German multichannel bank Postbank, is "bringing trust and reassurance" to its iPhone-equipped mobile banking clients through VeriSign's Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layer Certificates.

Postbank has used VeriSign EV SSL since October of 2007 on its Web site. Evidently it's a happy customer, as it's now extended the service to its iBanking offering. Evidently it works for iPhone users who access its iBanking service via Safari mobile browsers, according to company officials.

The reason for putting the VeriSign EV SSL brand name on an iBanking site, according to Postbank officials, is that it offers a "recognizable visual cue" that tells customers "they have reached a site whose authenticity has been verified by VeriSign."

 

When Postbank customers reach the authentic iBanking site, their Safari browser's address bar turns green. Evidently this is the signal that aforesaid customers can "conduct their transactions with confidence and that all data transmitted to the site will be encrypted."

Why a green address bar? VeriSign officials say it's because identity thieves use phishing schemes to lure banking customers to look-alike Web pages, designed to steal account numbers, passwords and other sensitive information: "Even the most convincing fraudulent pages, however, cannot replicate the color of the browser's address bar."

 

"Yet," First Coffee can't help but think.

"Postbank has offered mobile banking services to its iPhone-equipped clients since Apple launched the iPhone in 2007," according to Michael Heinen, business unit manager of Direct Banking at Postbank.

...

Consumer debt is at an all-time high. As a result, according to officials of CRM and other business technology vendor SAS, financial institutions are being pressured to reclaim unpaid debt to rebuild cash reserves in a tightening market.

 

Now collecting this debt requires resources to execute the collection process. And it's not as easy as sending Vito and Guido around to inquire about the health of someone's knees and use the opportunity to show off their nice new Louisville Slugger. Things are much nicer these days. And probably as effective.

 

"Financial services institutions must re-gear their analytic techniques to adapt to a new playing field," says Brian Riley, Research Director of Bank Cards at TowerGroup. "Rising unemployment, coupled with a protracted recession and increased credit costs make existing tools obsolete. Successful lenders that apply advanced analytics to optimize their strategies experience particularly strong results." 

Debt collection, according to SAS officials, is "delicate. Customers are sensitive to how, when and why they are contacted." In their view, most debt collection approaches fail to identify who best to contact or which channels to use.

 

First Coffee knows what you're thinking: "Call centers." Yes, that is often the most effective communication method - are also the most expensive. SAS says using predictive analytics helps companies make effective use of their call centers and alternative methods of communication (SMS, IVR, e-mail) that may also achieve successful results at low costs. 

SAS officials say that using their approach, collection managers can plan and prioritize outbound communications, "balancing the organization's capacity with the likelihood that customers will respond."

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Rod Stewart's Every Picture Tells A Story. Before he was a socialite, a disco act or a crooner, in the early '70s Stewart was one of the greatest bluesy-folk rock performers in the game. Here he is at his absolute "Maggie May" and "Reason To Believe" best on one of the very, very few truly indispensable rock albums:

"Customer experience systems" vendor Amdocs has announced the acquisition of jNetX, a privately-held service delivery platform provider, for $50 million net of debt and cash, subject to post closing adjustments.

 

Amdocs officials say the acquisition "accelerates" their position in the SDP market, since it combines jNetX's offering with Amdocs' CE products and service delivery.

The SDP market is estimated to grow at a 14 percent to $6 billion by 2013, according to industry analyst firm Analysys Mason in a study concluded a couple months ago. It's seen as a way of "enabling faster time-to-market and the monetization of services."

 

Amdocs and jNetX share a number of customers, including Vodafone Group, British Telecom and Mobilkom.

 

In explaining the market opportunity they see, Amdocs officials contend that "today," service providers "are seeking to move their businesses from predominantly subscription-based access services to include rich content, applications, and other offerings." Therefore, the combination of Amdocs and jNetX products will, in their view, "allow service providers to expose both Telecom and IP components in the network to offer convergent network, IT and Web-based services."

 

Amdocs is evidently hoping to distance themselves from other SDP vendors supporting services solely on IP-based networks: Jim Liang, senior vice president strategy and corporate development for Amdocs, underlined the "technological combination" of the acquisition.

 

The combination is also an excuse for punching up Amdocs CES Portfolio. The vendor has enhanced their convergent charging offering by providing service control and service brokering capabilities, and are touting "closer integration with the Amdocs App Store to expose network services to developers."

Amdocs does not expect a material impact from the acquisition of jNetX on fiscal year 2010 non-GAAP earnings per share, which excludes acquisition related costs and equity-based compensation expense, net of related tax effects. The impact on GAAP results will be finalized after Amdocs completes the purchase price accounting for the acquisition.

...

IT Structures has the idea that trying out enterprise IT can -- darn it, should -- be as simple as browsing iTunes.

 

To that end, company officials say they've created a platform that lets companies share "fully functional" IT environments in the cloud with their "Try I.T. Now" button.

 

The button allows any software or appliance vendor let their sales teams, prospective customers or partners "take the product for an instant test drive, in a monitored and controlled way," company officials say: "Companies can post the button on their Web site," and users are spared "having to install or download anything."

This approach "goes beyond basic Webinar or virtual lab offerings by letting customers create production-grade replicas of their existing IT," IT Structures officials contend.

Taking note of what they see as "the rising popularity of on demand and SaaS software applications" leading to "an increase in cloud-based business tools," IT Structures officials say there is increased pressure to provide sales prospects with a true user experience without ever leaving the office.

"When we say 'try it now' we mean that literally," says Zvi Guterman, CEO of IT Structures, adding that since "we're living in a 'try & buy' world" anyway, the concept isn't foreign.

 

The vendor's also offering the option to customize the button to reflect corporate branding.

...

Indianapolis-based consulting firm Walker Information is offering an iPhone application to provide its users "fast and easy access to customer feedback," company officials say.

Walker Link for iPhone was created to complement Walker Link -- an online application linking account managers to feedback provided by customers. With the new iPhone app, account managers can access that customer information.

Mike Grindstaff, Walker's IT product portfolio manager, said Walker Link for iPhone "provides access to the most recent feedback from customers."

So from an iPhone, an account manager can get the feedback from a company or individual contact, see which contacts have responded to a survey, and send survey reminders: "Walker Link for iPhone allows people to have a meaningful dialogue with their customers," Walker's Chief Information Officer Brian Kovacs says. 

Walker is a privately held consulting firm.
...

Emobus, a vendor of "mobility management" services and software, has formed an advisory board to serve as "a representative sounding board to provide strategic insight" to the company. Advisors include Aris Kekedjian, Philip Dodds, and Sean Murphy.

 

Company officials say the board will help Emobus with customer development and product development efforts so their products and vision "remain closely aligned with customers' business objectives."

Kekedjian is Managing Director & CEO, GE Strategic Development & GE Capital, Middle East/Africa. He's expected to provide Emobus with insight into selling to large corporations and financial strategies.

 

Dodds, chosen to provide Emobus with database and business intelligence insight, has worked in a variety of roles in the last 15 years: CTO of DevZuz, Co-Founder of Unity Systems, and consultant to various global banks and multimedia companies.

Murphy will provide Emobus with "strategic insight into marketing and scaling a new technology," company officials say. Murphy has worked in a variety of roles in the last 25 years -- software engineering, engineering management, business development, and product marketing at companies such as Cisco, AMD, MMC Networks, 3COM and VLSI Technology.

Emobus officials claim their products help clients "slash direct carrier billing costs," via not only selling them software but letting them "offload their enterprise cellular challenges."

...

Salesforce.com has announced that 20/20 Companies is running its growing business on custom applications built on the Force.com cloud computing platform.

 

The vendor works in the marketing and sales contracting industry. It used Force.com for custom application development to manage orders, invoicing and payroll, as well as employee time-tracking.

The need for custom applications arose when 20/20 officials got tired of their sales reps manually entering order data into one system, and then manually reconciling with their client's systems, as well as internal company financial, payroll and reporting applications. You can guess the result, of course: Time-consuming busywork, just the sort of thing sales reps thrive on, with errors and inconsistent information.

Fort Worth, Texas-based 20/20 Companies officials figured they could develop custom applications on Force.com at 25 percent of the time and cost required to build the same apps on-premise with .NET, according to company officials.

The firm now has an application to manage the order-to-invoice-to-payroll process, described by company officials as "a central point for the sales team to track orders," and one where information is "shared across 20/20's business applications and with clients." They also have a time-tracking system for staff to log in and out "with the assurance that their hours will be paid accordingly, whether regular, overtime or holiday rates."

...

Warp 9, which sells e-commerce platforms and services, has announced that customer ShapeFX, a Spiegel Brand, was featured on the The Today Show with Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira.

Hey we know. Not everything here at First Coffee is hard news. Gotta relax and have fun every now and then. We like a little showbiz glitz as much as the next guy.

Warp 9 officials are proud of the fact that they've had customers featured on national television programs like NBC's The Today Show and Oprah before. And for good reason -- "The surges in traffic and sales that accompany these appearances are quite amazing. These are great opportunities for clients to boost brand and product awareness, sell a lot of product, and acquire a large amount of new customers."

As well as maybe get a chance to meet Tom Cruise! After the caffeine buzz has worn off!

"Because of the benefits of these opportunities, it is important that these experiences go extremely smoothly for our customers. These large spike factors are figured into the capacity and resource planning we do," notes Harinder Dhillon, Warp 9's CEO.

The ShapeFX.com site runs Warp 9's ICS Enterprise E-Commerce Platform. Enterprise ICS sites are served by, on average, 15-20 enterprise-grade servers. A typical Warp 9 Enterprise ICS site, company officials say, is capable of 1200+ orders per hour.

 

One wonders how many an Oprah appearance generates.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Leo Kottke's One Guitar, No Vocals. It's a fine album for someone who doesn't like jazz (First Coffee does, but we're just saying) and who wants good music at work that's not soporific wallpaper:

ILinc, which sells Web and video conferencing software and services, has announced that iLinc for Salesforce had been named the "App of the Week" by Salesforce.com.

 

This is a designation given to a Software-as-a-Service application that integrates with the Salesforce CRM platform. You can get it from the Force.com AppExchange.

 

The software vendor noted that iLinc for Salesforce app integrate Webinar data with existing Salesforce CRM data, with the ability to launch virtual meetings directly from Salesforce Lead and Contact records was also a key feature.

James M. Powers, Jr., President and Chief Executive Officer of iLinc, described the product as combining a Web conferencing platform with real-time data management, letting companies deliver "high-impact Webinars, sales demos and product training sessions while keeping the sales and customer support teams informed."

The idea behind this, company officials say, is that by moving Webinars and online training sessions to the iLinc platform, customers get to integrate two business systems as well as "the visibility into online event intelligence that they need."

Built using the Force.com platform, as well as the native Apex and Visual Force languages, iLinc for Salesforce is available for test drive and deployment on the AppExchange.

...

Here's a rhetorical question if First Coffee's ever heard it: "Many of us get frustrated when dealing with contact centers - but do you ever find yourself swearing at the agent, or simply hanging up?"

 

We'd like to see the honest hand of anyone except our dear saint of a mother (mutterings after hanging up pleasantly don't count) who can truthfully -- truthfully -- answer "no." Now we find that's maybe because First Coffee's mother isn't Scottish. Or Welsh.

New research by Corizon reveals that among Brits, "Scots are the most likely to use 'inappropriate language' when talking to a contact center agent (15 percent), while the Welsh are the most prone to hanging up in frustration (49 percent)." 

Corizon describes its business as "bringing together elements of other software applications in 'enterprise mashups'" for contact centers.

Conducted during August 2009, the study of 90 contact center managers and 2,100 consumers found that Scots are the most likely to use inappropriate language (15 percent), followed by Londoners (12 percent), and that 18-30 year-olds are the most likely age group to use inappropriate language. First Coffee supposes that a "London-dwelling 23-year old Scot!" is a term of particularly scathing opprobrium among call center agents.

 

Welsh people are most likely to hang up on an agent (51 percent), followed by Easterners (49 percent), while Midlanders and Southerners are most likely to hang up before speaking to an agent (61 percent each).

First Coffee would have guessed the Irish for most likely to use inappropriate language -- and they very well may be. Based on First Coffee's recent trip to the Emerald Isle he would have no problem believing that the only reason the Irish don't rank first is because nobody can tell what the heck they're saying when they're riled up.

Men are more likely than women to use inappropriate language (12 percent compared with 7 percent) -- shock shock there -- but in a genuine surprise, women are more likely than men to hang up before speaking to an agent, although not by much -- 60 percent compared with 57 percent.

 

The survey, a joint project of Corizon and YouGov, found that there is, to use the technical term, "plenty" of frustration with contact center technology, at both ends of the telephone line -- nearly 75 percent of contact center managers said their agents use an average of five different software applications in a typical working day, with one claiming to use as many as eighteen. That's right -- 18.

 

Corizon is headquartered in London. They presumably avoid hiring 18-30 year old Scots who live locally to man the phones.
...

 

Staying on the Salesforce and British themes today, Admiral Technology officials say they're focusing the company's attention on the Small and Medium Sized Business (SMB) market by providing enterprise class consulting to the Salesforce.com community "without attracting the traditional software consultancy price tag."

 

First Coffee saw where the New England Patriots poleaxed the Tampa Bay Buccaneers 35-7 at London's Wembley Stadium yesterday, evidently in an effort to show Brits that we Americans can offer sporting events as dull as 1-1 soccer ties as well, maybe that's where all this Anglophilia comes from.

Is First Coffee the only one who thinks it rather droll that the NFL sends a team named "New England" to Ye Olde England, and one named the "Patriots," defined as "the guys who kicked you out of America?"

In announcing "RapidForce," which Admiral describes as "a range of fixed fee, fixed scope implementation and support packages to bridge the gap between the desires of companies to improve their customer relationship management (CRM) strategy," company officials say it comes in "a number of formats, starting with a One Day Quick Win option."

Nigel Fisher, Director at Admiral Technology, says their Bronze, Silver and Gold packages "reflect the different editions of Salesforce.com," touting their "predictable outcome and cost."

 

With more than 16 years in the European JD Edwards community, Nigel Fisher launched Admiral Technology to "concentrate on Software-as-a Service," he says: "It is clear that management have a desire and a need for alternatives to traditional on-premise software solutions to run their businesses. The current economic climate means that everyone wants to generate and hold on to as much cash as they can."

Subscription-based products, he says, fit this bill since they "do not require capital intensive investments in architecture and support personnel."

And of course the fact that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' owners, the Glazer family, also own Manchester United is purely a coincidence.

As Fisher observes correctly, SMB's face a lot of the same problems and issues bigger companies do with CRM-related issues, and Fisher thinks they may even have an advantage: "They can make the decisions and take the actions to get things done. They are often more flexible and less bureaucratic and this in itself makes them more responsive."

...

Net-Results, a company with no discernible overt connections to Salesforce.com or Britain, in the business of selling sales and marketing software products, has released the 2.4 version of its proprietary marketing automation platform.

 

Company officials say it uses social media applications to help convert prospects and leads into customers.

The product's tracking capability and incorporation of social networking tools "allows users to understand the interests and focus of prospects at an individualized level while maintaining the service's trademark usability," company officials say, referring to the fact that its Visitor Center and Contact Profiles now include integration with such apps as Twitter, LinkedIn and Jigsaw.

"The Net-Results platform is all about listening to prospects and customers, understanding, and responding intelligently," says Net-Results Founder and CEO Michael Ward. 

As described by company officials, the product "listens" as prospects and customers interact with Web sites and marketing campaigns i"n real time, providing actionable information at the individual level."

 

One of the benefits of the 2.4 release, they point out, is that users can hit a given prospect's LinkedIn profile and recent Twitter updates, thereby finding out all about how funny their cat is, what they're watching on TV, having for dinner and how many times they laugh out loud in any given 20 minutes.

Founded in 2003, Net-Results' product starts at $99 per month.

...

Oh here we go, back to Old Blighty: From London comes the news that CRM vendor StayinFront has announced that Euphony Communications, a telecom vendor, has deployed the latest version of its flagship product, StayinFront CRM 11, across their European offices.

Euphony initially launched StayinFront CRM 11 in its Benelux operations. Evidently things went well enough there -- hey if it flies in Belgium it'll fly anywhere -- to where Euphony has adopted StayinFront CRM 11 as the platform for sales and customer service management throughout their operations.

Euphony's core business is the resale of land line (CPS) telephony, Internet access (dial-up and ADSL), pre- and post-paid mobile, and energy services, such as gas and electricity. The company likes to focus on residential consumers and the small business sector in Ireland, U.K., Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Portugal and the Czech Republic.

The StayinFront CRM system has also been integrated with Euphony's back-office systems that manage provisioning, billing and finance, according to company officials.

Nigel Huxtable, vice president, Sales EMEA of StayinFront -- "Nigel" does appear to be a fairly beloved name over there, doesn't it? -- says Euphony benefits from the fact that StayinFront CRM 11 combines CRM and analytics into one system making business intelligence data readily accessible, "without the monetary investment and time requirements of configuration."

Headquartered in Fairfield, New Jersey, StayinFront has offices in Illinois, the United Kingdom, Ireland, India, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand.

...

It's a well-established policy here at First Coffee that if you're a tech firm doing something good to "give back to the community," as the saying goes, we'll give you a bit of a shout-out here. To that end, then, a tip of the coffee pot to Tahitian Noni International, whose sales and service operators have been raising money to help Community Action Services of Provo, Utah, which offers local food bank services for Utah, Wasatch, and Summit counties. 

Many groups do special projects to help people in need around Christmas, so in October they tend to stock up, "leaving donations in October far short of what food banks need," according to Tahitian Noni officials.

What is "noni," you ask? First Coffee didn't know either, but according to What Is Noni? it's a natural white fruit about the size as a potato which "has a bitter taste and doesn't smell good."

 

But it's useful as a dietary supplement, evidently, and TNI was founded to "introduce the benefits of noni to the world outside Tahiti," according to company officials. The company itself was founded by two food research scientists in 1995. Headquartered in Provo, it has manufacturing facilities in the United States, Germany, Tahiti, Japan, and China and sales offices in more than 30 countries worldwide.

So the sales and service agents at Tahitian Noni International have been holding special activities for the last three months to benefit the local charity. August was their "money war" spare change challenge, company officials say, "where they gathered over a thousand dollars in mostly quarters, nickels, dimes and pennies."

In September, they raised an additional one thousand dollars by holding seven separate fundraising lunches at Tahitian Noni International Corporate Headquarters. October was "toilet paper" month, where they had over 1,000 rolls of toilet paper donated to the cause.

 

And it worked, we're happy to say. The money raised purchased 120 jars of peanut butter, 1,752 cans of food (vegetables, fruits, soups, tuna, beans and the like), 90 gallons of powdered milk, 90 quarts of juice, 117 boxes of cereal and 152 boxes of mac and cheese.

 

Hey toss in a few cases of beer and ramen noodles and you have a college student's yearly diet.

As well as the 1,037 rolls of toilet paper.

All of the articles were delivered to Community Action Services in Provo, but they're not done yet: "Sales and service agents are now looking at how they can help during the upcoming holiday season as well."

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the absolutely unique Miles Davis work A Tribute To Jack Johnson. Part jazz, part acid rock, part jagged glass fragments slicing through silk, it's like nothing else First Coffee's heard:

LeadMaster, a vendor of cloud computing products for sales lead tracking, lead management and online CRM, has announced a certification program for lead generation and lead providers designed to let users have sales leads flow in real-time into LeadMaster's Web-based, SaaS system.

 

They're inviting all lead generation companies to join the Lead Provider Integration Program for free.

To participate in the certification program, a lead provider will register and receive access to the LeadMaster system as well as instructions on integrating and sending leads, company officials say: "The lead provider will test the integration to complete the certification process."

 

The instructions are described by company officials as "straightforward, and most companies are certified in less than an hour." Heck, this Web app is so simple even your technophobe sales reps can learn to use it in about an hour, they say.

LeadMaster officials say the product can accept data from "every industry. In addition to the demographic fields lead providers have an unlimited number of user-defined fields available through the LeadMaster custom form technology."

 

With leads in the LeadMaster system, users get reminders to follow up. This is designed, obviously, to cut down on lost leads. As Andy Brownell, LeadMaster CMO notes, "you can't compete if you're still getting leads in a spreadsheet or via e-mail. You need a process whereby your sales leads drop into your lead management CRM system automatically."

Brownell says this will "turbo-charge" lead generation campaigns and "make it easier for companies of all sizes" to turn prospects into customers: "We've invested 12 years of development work into the LeadMaster lead management."

...

Kana Software has enhanced the social CRM capabilities of Kana 10, the company's service experience management platform.

 

Specifically, Kana 10's "collective intelligence capabilities" can be used to assist agents in navigating processes, optimize cross-selling and up-selling offers, enhance search results ranking based on common search patterns and build communities of customers with similar interests and orientations, Kana officials say.

 

As part of this enhancement, Kana officials say they've entered into an OEM agreement with Baynote to integrate Baynote's Collective Intelligence Platform with Kana 10, to "provide companies with predictive analytics based on the implicit patterns of customers visiting their Web sites."

 

Launched in June, Kana 10 is built upon IBM's service-oriented architecture frameworks.

Social CRM is based on the idea that it's possible to employ the "wisdom of crowds" to improve service delivery. The way Kana officials explain their approach, "as customers search, shop, browse and work in forums, that information found to be most pertinent can be used to drive success for those that follow."

To that end, then, there's the integration of Baynote CIP and Kana 10, which "allows Kana's clients to capture and analyze customer experiences, and then to use that information to enhance the service experience" depending in part on "the collective input and insight of the crowd."

Baynote CEO Jack Jia said there is "a natural synergy" between the Baynote CIP and Kana 10: "The Baynote CIP allows businesses to deploy personalized on-site recommendations and social search."

...

IBM and Canonical are introducing what officials of both firms call a personal computing software package for netbooks and other thin client devices "to help businesses in Africa bridge the digital divide by leapfrogging traditional PCs and proprietary software."

 

This is the first cloud- and premise-based Linux netbook software package offered by IBM and Canonical.

Part of IBM's Smart Work Initiative, the package targets what the partners see as "the rising popularity of low-cost netbooks to make IBM's industrial-strength software affordable to new, mass audiences in Africa."

 

The idea, IBM officials say, is that businesses which probably couldn't afford traditional PCs for all employees "can now use any type of device and low-cost software" regardless of the level of communications infrastructure.

 

According to AIB Research, netbook computer sales are expected to quadruple from 35 million in 2009 to 139 million by 2013. AIB Research predicts that Linux will outgrow Windows on netbooks by 2012. More than 30 percent of netbooks are sold with Linux, which reduces their cost substantially below the typical retail cost of personal computers running Windows XP.

 

IBM estimates that it costs about half per seat than a Microsoft-based desktop. A network of local service providers such as Inkululeko and ZSL is expected to extend the IBM Client locally throughout Africa.

The IBM Client for Smart Work is now available across Africa and is being piloted for other emerging and growth markets worldwide. It includes open standards-based e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, unified communication, social networking and other software. It runs on Canonical's Ubuntu Linux operating system, and provides the option to deliver collaboration through the Web in a cloud service model.

 

For those who want, this software bundle can be extended to virtualized work spaces using VERDE from Virtual Bridges, available locally through business partners and voice-based collaboration pilots through IBM Research.

The IBM smart client package is also being billed as a product to "help African governments deliver open standards using Open Document Format... The reduction of personal computing costs may enable governments to transfer information technology expenditures to fund mission-critical initiatives such as crisis management, education and health care."

...

Betting on mobile, especially text messaging, to reign as the communications method of choice, Premiere Global Services has integrated Clickatell's SMS-as-a-Service platform to provide customers with the option of "adding mobile text message alerts into all aspects of existing business communications," such as e-mail, voice, online, and physical mail communications.

Atlanta-based Premiere Global Services has "a presence" in 24 countries, PGS officials say.

The company say the idea behind the integration is to give customers the ability to use Clickatell's gateway to send SMS notifications to customers through an interface in Premiere Global Service's software, which also lets customers add and customize SMS distribution based on user preferences and opt-ins.

The partnership with Clickatell allows Premier Global Service's customers to offer such services as text-based flight status notifications, delivery reminders, trade confirmations, transaction alerts, appointment reminders, automated notifications to streamline accounts receivable, pretty much whatever clever, imaginative customers can think of.

Pieter de Villiers, Clickatell CEO, noted that, available on 4 billion-plus handsets worldwide, "SMS remains the most used mobile application -- over instant messaging, media rich MMS, mobile e-mail, and even voice in many regions. People simply prefer to be notified via SMS on their mobile phone."

The man's most likely correct: In Australia alone, according to proprietary research commissioned by Premiere, Frost & Sullivan reports that enterprise SMS message volumes will grow to 290.4 million messages per day by 2015 from 175 million messages per day in 2008.

David Adams, Premiere Global Services' Products Director, APAC, when asked why, replied "Because there is money in it. Our customers are trying to satisfy, retain and attract new customers while reducing operational costs. SMS delivery information directly to cell phones and it is exactly what people want -- text messaging remains the most common mobile denominator in terms of acceptance."

...

As a certified sucker for any headline including the word "infotainment," First Coffee was interested to read that Amsterdam-based TomTom GO I-90 a) wasn't a product based on the interstate highway, and b) doesn't stop at navigation - "it's a double DIN navigation and radio solution, integrating world-class navigation and in-car infotainment for all types of cars."

 

The device will be available to buy through '12V' specialist retailers throughout Europe from December 2009. The device will cost Є599 excluding installation.

Integrated navigation systems usually come pre-fitted in new cars, or so they tell us -- First Coffee prefers to stick with adopting Volkswagen Beetles and buses since he can operate a map and remember directions. Evidently this product is for those with an more, ah, vintage car who want integrated navigation.

It can be fitted into any car, company officials say, adding that it provides "full radio integration with the car speakers for high quality audio when using spoken instructions, or making hands-free phone calls."

 

Yes it's integrated, but the navigation device is portable so it can be used in other cars.

Giles Shrimpton, TomTom's Managing Director AUTO, noted that features such as TomTom Map Share -- allowing users to make instant changes to the map and share these with others through TomTom HOME and Safety Alerts -- let drivers "save on speeding tickets" and drive safer.

The device, which comes with maps of Western Europe pre-installed and offers hands-free calling, so drivers can make calls while driving.

It also comes with iPod capability, coming with a USB connection for an MP3 or iPod connection.

...

According to Yankee Group's research, the current $7.2 billion in stimulus funds earmarked for extending broadband service across the U.S. is "woefully inadequate," reaching "less than a third of the investment necessary to connect every U.S. household."

 

The group's report, titled "Ubiquitous U.S. Broadband Will Cost At Least Triple the Current Stimulus Package," analyze several scenarios and finds that "even the most bare-bones approach to extending broadband across the country will require funding -- and vendor cooperation -- far beyond what we see today."

Currently, about 12 percent of U.S. households, including those in some major metropolitan areas, have no access to broadband service, landing the U.S. 15th in broadband penetration worldwide.

 

The report examines four possible approaches to addressing the problem: an ultra-cost-conscious "Discount" option, a use-what's-in-place "Duct Tape" method, a "Pragmatic" middle-of-the-road approach and an all-fiber-to-the-home "Gold-Plated" scenario.

 

According to Yankee officials, all reach the Anywhere goal of at least one broadband connection per home, but "at a minimum, they all require unprecedented vendor cooperation and regulatory foresight."

Achieving ubiquitous broadband in the U.S. "will hasten economic recovery and put the nation back where it belongs in terms of technology leadership, but it will take a concerted effort on the part of all stakeholders," claims Vince Vittore, principal analyst at Yankee Group and author of the report.

 

Vittore said the research shows that "a minimum of $24 billion is required, and that's only if networks are deployed in the most efficient manner and much of the middle-mile infrastructure already is in place. While the stimulus is a good start, it's just that: a start."

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Bob Geldof's rather overlooked 1995 Vegetarians of Love. Not a great album, not even as good, maybe, as his unfortunately forgotten Boomtown Rats material, but a sturdy album, pleasant melodies and fun lyrics, a nice change of pace for a work morning:

"Hanging out" for teens today isn't what you and First Coffee remembered it as, where you actually, you know, saw people. Live people. Where you, like, talked and punched each other's shoulders. Today Facebook, instant messaging and texting qualifies as "hanging out."

 

Hey it's not all bad -- you don't have to wonder if they're out smashing up your car.

 

But they do tend to share personal information that makes them vulnerable for identity theft. "Scam artists are relying on teens to be impulsive and naive," say officials of National Protect Your Identity Week, who evidently have teens of their own.

 

To that end officials of N.P.Y.I.W. -- October 17-24 -- offers some safety tips for teenagers when online, to "protect their identity and their financial future when it's time to apply for that first credit card or buy that first car."

 

And to keep you from having to co-sign the loan:

First, don't give out your numbers. Social security number, driver's license number, debit card, phone card, insurance card, library card, medical ID card, or credit card, none. There's no good reason a friend needs to have this information transmitted online.

Don't post your personal information online. "Nearly 50 percent of Facebook users put enough personal information--including full name, full date of birth, address, phone number, or school--to enable thieves to fill out credit card applications," Week officials say.

Don't participate in e-mail or social networking quizzes. "These seemingly fun personality quizzes can access your personal profile information -- your religion, political affiliation, wall posts--that could be used against you," they warn. So just for the record, so you don't have to take them, you were Robespierre in a previous life, your ideal pet is a Golden Retriever, you're "Beat It" and if you were a cast member on Seinfeld you'd have been Kramer.

Don't be specific about where you are or where you are going. "Naming your school, sports team, clubs, or where you work could leave a trail for an identity thief," Week officials say.


 

Other Facebook tips: "Set your profile to 'private.' Be in control of who can view your content. Only add people you know to your Friends list. A friend of a friend might not be someone you know."

Week officials also recommend using a different, isolated e-mail just for social networking instead of the "trusted" e-mail you use to communicate directly with people you know you can trust.

They also recommend against accessing social networking sites or e-mail from public Internet connections or public computers.

 

And in a particularly wise piece of advice, they urge teens to "be selective about what pictures you text or post on your page. Is it a photo you would want your parents to see? Treat your Internet activity like a digital tattoo. Once you post something, it cannot be taken back. Even if you erase the posting, there are cached versions and backups on servers across the country."

 

Just imagine your Senate confirmation hearings. Would you want that picture to come up there?

...

CRM and ERP vendor Consona Corporation has announced the general availability of Consona Knowledge Management Version 7.3, described by company officials as "a KCS Verified v4 product featuring analytics powered by QlikView business intelligence software."

Most knowledge management tools are sold as modules, Consona officials note, saying "we built our product around that concept that knowledge shouldn't happen in isolation, or be an afterthought."

 
"In the past, Web transaction logs, especially from busy self-service sites, have made it virtually impossible to look at knowledge trends," Consona officials say, adding that knowledge management initiatives are "long-term programs -- you may achieve a fast return on investment, but they also grow, evolve, and even decline relatively slowly."

 

Tim Hines, vice president of product management for Consona's CRM products, says QlikView was developed "to make long-term analytics practical reality, even for the highest-volume customer support sites."

 

The result, Hines says, is "simplicity itself: visibility into data that gives program managers the ability to see the long-term trends with the ability to change their view in real time."

The tool can also analyze support cases and knowledge together, Consona officials say, explaining that v7.3 "combines customer self-service behavioral data, traditional knowledge management, and uses case tracking to answer questions.

QlikTech is a business intelligence vendor offering a BI offering that can be deployed on premise, in the cloud, or on a laptop or mobile device.


 

Consona is jointly owned by Battery Ventures VI and Thoma Bravo.

...

 

United Marketing Group has opened a new Customer Service Operations Center in Itasca, Illinois described by group officials as a "secure, 63,000 square foot, 200 seat facility housing a secure PCI Level 1 Gateway" for payment card processing.

The call center was a joint investment by UMG and its sister company, Teleformix. It was designed from inception to be flexible and expandable, UMG officials say, adding that the facility was formerly occupied by GE Money, a retail finance program provider. 

The Customer Service Operations Center operates 24x7 and includes customer support, operations and network or physical security personnel. A call center application built by Teleformix records both the agent's voice and computer screen to capture the transaction for validation, evaluation, quality assurance and compliance: "Advanced call tracking provides agents with access to a complete customer transaction history" as well.

"Giving our customer service representatives this kind of information is the first and the best opportunity to make a good impression," says Alan Portelli, CEO & President of United Marketing Group.

A 2009 study by CFI found quick issue resolution is "paramount" to the success of the contact center. "Strong processes and highly skilled agents lead to resolved issues -- which makes for happier, more loyal customers," say UMG officials commenting on the study. 

"Many of our CSRs have been with the company for more than five years. All our customer service representatives are KPI managed using technologies that eliminate opinion and bias to maintain customer service," says Portelli.

...

Teradata has introduced a business product called Teradata Contact Center Intelligence for Telecommunications based on Microsoft's business intelligence technologies.

 

It's designed to bring together "the Microsoft family of business intelligence products" with direct connectivity to the Teradata enterprise data warehouse system, Teradata officials say, to provide "access to customer experience information and query response."

 

This new product lets contact center managers and business analysts examine company data from all service channels, outside vendors and other enterprise data sources to "understand both current operations and trends over time," according to company officials, who say it's designed to run on the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse, Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance, Teradata Extreme Data Appliance or the Teradata Data Mart Appliance.

"As customers continue to use more communications channels, carriers need help in integrating service information across those channels in order improve the customer experience. Of course, they have to reduce contact center costs at the same time," notes Sheryl Kingstone, senior analyst, Yankee Group. 

The cost of operating a telecommunications contact center environment can be significant, ranging from $100,000 to a more than a billion dollars annually. This being the case, company officials say, "even small performance improvements can have a multi-million dollar impact, resulting in a rapid payback on a carrier's investment."

"Contact center reporting has traditionally been provided by the operational systems in the call center. However, traditional methods of analysis are becoming obsolete as customers may try three or more channels before reaching an agent," says David Grant, vice president of industry solutions for communications, media, entertainment and utilities, Teradata Corporation.

...

Every once in a while along comes a company news headline that demands to be included in First Coffee. Today we saw another one: "Humans Replacing Computers."

Steve Levenson, founder of Global Telecom Testing, says that the idea for the company came when he heard that a global teleconferencing company was losing clients because the international numbers assigned to its customers were flawed.

 

He contends that most telecom companies rely on the local telephone companies in cities abroad to confirm numbers are operational, which is, he says, a bad idea: "More often than not, even though the overseas' local telephone company confirms a number is operational, the number doesn't work."

"GTT was founded specifically to address the lack of worldwide live in-country telephone number testing on behalf of telecom companies, before they release international numbers to their clients," Levenson said. "Only humans -- not computers -- can perform these tests by placing live, in-country,outbound originating calls to and from the exact numbers that the telco's clients will be calling."

The company's employees, located in 80 countries, test numbers before they are released to clients "to ensure they are operational," Levenson says, adding that they also "listen to the message participants will hear, note if instructions are in the appropriate language, and test the access codes and the quality of the audio."

 

What usually happens, Levenson says, is that if a telecom client needs international numbers in Singapore, a computer at a U.S. telecom company office tests the numbers from a switch in the U.S. to a switch somewhere close to Singapore. Then "if the switch-to-switch trial works, the numbers are released to the client. However, this rudimentary testing is inaccurate and not indicative of working numbers in Singapore."

The only way to 100 percent verify that international telephone numbers are functioning in any city is to perform live, in-country tests in those cities and locations, Levenson says.

Prospective customers get a free trial with live testing in two or three countries. "We're so confident in our services that we offer potential clients a two-day trial test to demonstrate the effectiveness of our comprehensive process."

...

Sorrento Networks, a vendor of metro optical access products, is releasing an 8Gbit/second Fibre Channel card for its GigaMux 1600/3200, an optical transport system supporting a variety of wavelength division multiplexing architectures.

 

The new card enables high-bandwidth connectivity of storage area networks between data centers and meets new bandwidth demands driven by cloud computing applications like storage virtualization.

"We're seeing an insatiable demand for I/O availability between data centers that only 8 Gigabit Fibre Channel and 10 Gigabit Ethernet can satisfy," said Jim Nevelle, CEO of Sorrento Networks, adding that the product is a way for their customers to "double their SAN connectivity horsepower without a major overhaul to their data centers."

By deploying 8Gbit/s Fibre Channel, IT managers can free up server interfaces that would otherwise be allocated for multiple 4Gbit/s or 2Gbit/s connections, Sorrento officials say, thereby "collapsing the number of servers needed to deliver the same processing power and connectivity. Fewer servers mean reductions in data center operations costs such as rental space and utilities."

The product also offers complete wavelength availability for XFP-based version, client-side interfaces based on SFP+ form factor for maximum SAN switch compatibility, full reshaping, regeneration and retiming capability for reliable transport of services. The card is fully supported in all GigaMux 3234, 3217, and 1608 chassis.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a nice discovery, Angela Easterling's Earning Her Wings album. Solid traditional country songwriting, a beguiling vocal and obvious passion in the performances. What more could a Friday morning need?

Thanks to Glympse, IPhone users can now "visually share their location with anyone around the globe" for free. Evidently the newest version of the app uses maps included in the 3.0 OS and a new Twitter feed sharing option.

Bryan Trussel, co-founder and CEO of Glympse, said that while other location sharing apps "require users to create another social network, which is unappealing to most people because the reality is there are very few people in our lives who we want to know where we are, all the time." The man has a point; supply your own hellish scenario here.

 

So with Glympse, users to define a limited time period of up to four hours during which their location will be shared, making Glympse appropriate not only for family and friends but also coworkers, existing social networks and even mere acquaintances."

And yes, Twitter junkies, you can post your location to your account. Relax.

All that is needed to receive a Glympse is a Web-enabled phone or computer. 

"The possibilities are endless," company officials say, suggesting that now when you let others know you're stuck in traffic and running late you can actually prove you're not lying. You can also "allow your teenager to check in on Friday night without feeling as if they are being followed," giving them another reason to "forget" their phone when they go out.

 

Glympse can be downloaded for free on the iPhone and iPod touch from Apple's App Store. Caveat: On devices without GPS, like the iPod touch and non 3G iPhones, the Glympse experience "can be less than optima," company officials say, "since it uses WiFi triangulation to identify location, which is typically less accurate than GPS and not always available."

First Coffee can vouch for that: We tried it on our iPod Touch here in New Zealand and it couldn't even locate us. No doubt it'll work better on a GPS -enabled device.

...

Jefferson County CYF, the division of Children, Youth and Families, a 24/7 investigator of child abuse and neglect allegations, estimates it will save more than $100,000 annually using TeleNav Track, a cell phone-based GPS navigation and tracking service.

In 2008, the organization responded to more than 6,000 calls of concern. Its social workers travel throughout Colorado, and appreciate the TeleNav Track's turn-by-turn GPS directions -- and being able to save the location for future visits.

Since implementing TeleNav Track and accessing the information directly on their mobile phones, Jefferson County CYF estimates that each caseworker is saving an average of one hour per week.

Prior to implementing TeleNav Track, Jefferson County's caseworkers would depend on calling local police within their jurisdiction to come to a location when a situation escalated. However, employees would often call for police support too late. The organization determined it needed a safety system put into place that would be appropriate and effective for situations a caseworker might face.

Jefferson County CYF officials say the system lets supervisors track the location of caseworkers, how long they were on each site, and their last location should the caseworker lose contact for an extended period of time. Caseworkers can easily report a problem by pressing designated "hot keys," generating emails that are issued to a pre-determined group alerting management that the employee is in trouble or in an uncomfortable situation.

...

SAP AG has reported an uptake of utility companies adopting SAP AMI Integration for Utilities software in 2009. The offering, introduced in May 2009, is billed as a tool to help utility companies integrate their metering processes with their back-end systems, "providing end-to-end clarity into energy usage patterns."

 

"The push toward smart grids by the utilities industry calls for new technology and IT infrastructure," SAP officials say, adding that the deployment of smart meters "will impact utility processes and require flexible business operations and IT systems that can adapt to changes."

The modernization of networks through deployment of smart meters "comes hand-in-hand with operational challenges," according to SAP officials: "SAP is addressing these challenges by linking metering, back-end operations, customer service and billing processes."

Using the system, smart meters provide real-time information about energy consumption and enable communication between a utility company and its customers. As for finding a way to make efficient use of the large amounts of data collected by the meters, the product lets utility companies integrate the collected data with business processes such as those included in SAP Business Suite.

...

Boise, Idaho-based CradlePoint Technology, which sells 3G and 4G networking products, has announced the launch of a new product line, the All Connected Business Series, aimed at the small to medium office market.

 

The debut product in the series is a new business-class router, the MBR1200 Failsafe Gigabit N Router, evidently named by a latent Guns N Roses fan, to provide availability to users of both traditional wired networks and wireless networks using 3G and/or 4G services.

As the name might suggest, the MBR1200 has a built-in failsafe feature that senses when the wired Internet connection has been disrupted and fails over to either a 3G or 4G service. Once the wired Internet service has been restored, the MBR1200 will then fail back to the wired Internet service.

The MBR1200 Failsafe Gigabit N Router is available now with an MSRP of $299.99.

...

Chicago-based Intelestream, an open source CRM consultancy and developers of intelecrm, has released a fully functional 30 day free trial of intelecrm.

Intelecrm is an on demand CRM product for small and medium sized businesses with a pricing structure which charges subscribers according to the quantity of records and data storage used, rather than the number of users accessing the system.

 

Intelestream has also used a "pay-for-what-you-need" approach, where customers are billed for only the features and add-ons they require. Obviously this is tailored for small businesses on a budget. Basic edition pricing for the product with unlimited users starts at $20 per month.

 

"Intelecrm is our response to what small and medium sized companies have told us was missing from the CRM market," said VP of Consulting Services for Intelestream, Ray Stoeckicht, a guy who has never heard "can you spell that, please?"

 
Intelestream was founded in 2006 by former employees of SugarCRM as a professional services firm concentrating on open source CRM implementations and customizations. 

"The application is designed as an affordable, turn-key CRM product that can be customized according to individual requirement," Stoeckicht said, adding that an Internet connection and Web browser are "all that is needed to use the application."

...

Peterborough, New Hampshire-based Kennedy Consulting Research & Advisory has released research detailing the failure of traditional Customer Relationship Management technologies to act as the proverbial silver bullet for improving customer interactions, and how that has led to the rise of Customer Strategy and Interaction consulting.

The report, "Customer Strategy and Interaction Consulting Marketplace 2009-2012: Key Trends, Profiles and Forecasts," defines the "burgeoning" CSI practice area as "the definition of customer-centric strategic goals and execution of operations processes that leverage information technology to capitalize on customer insight."

 

That and the desire to get a cool TV show named after it. "CSI - Peterborough!"

 

This services evolution is evidenced by consulting practices centered on the concept of the "customer," which include market strategy, customer insight, experience, and strategy and pricing and customer segmentation.

Clients pursuing these services, in particular, should check out capabilities before committing to a provider, company officials say: Erick Burchfield, Associate Director, Kennedy Consulting Research & Advisory and lead analyst, said as an emerging market, "CSI consulting comprises a relatively small portion of the global consulting market, yet demand is expected to grow approximately three times faster than the overall market over the 2008-2012 forecast period."

 

Kennedy's research found that the CSI consulting market is highly fragmented -- "one in which both large, multinational firms and niche firms have a stake. Larger firms tend to focus on customer-facing technology."

 

Research analysts say that there is "significant opportunity" for niche firms to capture market share from large, global practices, "particularly when it comes to the soft side of CSI, such as customer experience management."

Firms horning in on the CSI market include the usual suspects -- Accenture, A.T. Kearney, Bain, Deloitte, Fujitsu America, IBM, McKinsey & Company, The Boston Consulting Group, Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, et al.

The research also details the competitive landscape, including top-five ratings by practice type -- global, niche, customer strategy, pricing, customer interaction management, marketing sales and service management, customer-based IT enablement, and customer intelligence (data) services.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Sinatra's Swingin' Session!!!, the hardest-swinging record he made. You know that lost, weird feeling you get when you haven't listened to Sinatra for a few days? Me neither:

Convergys Corporation has announced that three global companies in the services and technology industries have renewed contracts for Convergys HR Solutions.

These "human resources outsourcing" contract renewals, Convergys officials say, range from one to five years in length, and during that period are expected to generate total revenue of more than $25 million.

According to the terms of the most involved deal, Convergys will continue to provide workforce management and HR administration services, including recruitment, on boarding, absence management, and leave administration for over 60,000 North American employees of "a business services company," company officials say,

Another deal covers benefits administration and support for a company with 70,000 employees, and the third is a one-year renewal for payroll technology and systems supporting 18,000 US-based employees of a global technology company.

 

John Gibson, Convergys President, Human Resources Management, described the contract renewals as "testament to the hard work and dedication of both our clients and Convergys employees."

Convergys has clients in over 70 countries and 35 languages and 70,000 employees of their own in 82 customer contact centers and other facilities in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, as well as global headquarters in Cincinnati.

...

 

Rocket Technology Labs, developer of the Rocketvox unified communications platform, has announced the release of Rocketvox Beta, available by request.

Company officials bill the product as "one place to view and manage all of your communications streams with channels for any POP or IMAP e-mail, VoIP, voicemail, visual voicemail, voicemail-to-text, Twitter, and Facebook accounts."

In other words, your one-stop shop for all your "social media." What a boon for ADD Web surfers out there, sharply reducing mousewear. There's also a cross channel address book for "the Internet and mobile devices."

Rocketvox Beta's user interface is being released as an Adobe AIR application that runs on Mac OS, Windows, or Linux. To deliver voice apps the company has partnered with VoIP and voicemail providers Ribbit and PhoneTag for their platforms. Rocketvox Beta comes with encryption, back up, and non-repudiation into Rocketvox Beta.

...

Boomi and Model Metrics, a vendor of cloud computing services, have announced that they have helped Global Forex centralize its customer data from disparate systems.

Global Forex, a financial services company, used Boomi AtomSphere, an integration Platform-as-a-Service, to -- wait for it -- integrate customer data from its customer-facing Web services to Salesforce CRM.

 

Global Forex chose Boomi because of its "ease-of-use, speed of implementation, cost effectiveness and the advantage of being connected to the AtomSphere network," according to Boomi officials.

Tom Fox, Salesforce Operations Manager, Global Forex, cited the advantages of Boomi's "single dashboard of customer data... with AtomSphere, we were able to eliminate 95 percent of our previous ongoing integration costs, and we now have a transparent platform that lets us analyze customer data in real-time."

Model Metrics implemented the project between Boomi and Global Forex, connecting the Boomi AtomSphere to migrate data from Global Forex's Web services and on-premise applications to Salesforce CRM. This involved thousands of transactions managed by Excel spreadsheets and transferred manually between systems -- "a process that drained resources and prohibited in-depth analysis and planning," Model Metrics officials said.

...

Elizabethtown Gas in New Jersey has dedicated its new Customer Care Call Center with a ribbon cutting ceremony and tour of the facility. The Center, located on Green Lane, in Union, N.J., brings more than 50 jobs to the area.

Jodi Gidley, president, Elizabethtown Gas, said the center "reinforces our commitment to the community by adding jobs to the local economy."

 

Yeah First Coffee realizes this flies dangerously close to P.R. fluff, but anybody creating 50 jobs in today's economy, with unemployment flirting with ten percent, gets a shout-out. You go, Elizabethtown Gas. Anybody else who creates 50 American jobs in this sector who wants a tip of the coffee pot please, feel free to let us know. We like to Do Our Part.

The new Customer Care Center will serve the utility's more than 273,000 residential, commercial and industrial natural gas customers.

In addition to the new Customer Care Call Center, Elizabethtown Gas announced the donation of $120,000 to energy assistance programs. The money will be available through various social service agencies to help qualified customers pay their winter heating bills.

Elizabethtown Gas, in operation since 1855, is a wholly owned subsidiary of AGL Resources and sells a natural gas delivery service to approximately 273,000 residential, business and industrial natural gas customers in New Jersey. Atlanta-based energy services company AGL Resources serves approximately 2.3 million customers in six states.

...

Infusionsoft, which positions itself as a vendor of automatic follow-up software for small businesses, has announced that its all-in-one marketing automation tool will be part of the "Start, Run & Grow Your Business" package from Palo Alto Software.

The package itself is billed as a way to enable entrepreneurs to build and grow their businesses "from the ground up."

Basically the product lets users put their marketing and customer follow-up on "autopilot," company officials say, for those who think that's a good thing, so that they can "focus their energies on growing their business."

 

The tool does this by combining sales and marketing technologies into one automated system geared to small businesses with 25 employees or fewer, including e-commerce, CRM and e-mail marketing: "Entrepreneurs with new businesses will be able to set up a streamlined, efficient system for automated marketing, interacting with prospects and eliciting customer feedback about their products or services," company officials say.

Dave Lee, vice president of business development at Infusionsoft, said the company offers marketing suite "for the true small business, and we have over 400 customers."

Sabrina Parsons, CEO of Palo Alto Software, said they'll include Infusionsoft with their "packaged array of best-of-breed products."

Other programs in SRG include software for bookkeeping, timesheet management, project management, storing passwords, creating press releases, doing payroll and taxes.

"Start, Run & Grow Your Business" is available now in Target stores nationwide. It will be available at Amazon, Fry's, Costco.com, J&R, Apple and other retail outlets soon.

Infusionsoft is a privately held company based in Gilbert, Arizona and funded by Mohr Davidow Ventures and vSpring Capital.

Marketing and small business insight from the Infusionsoft team can be found on the Infusionsoft blog at and the Infusionsoft Twitter feed at www.twitter.com/infusionsoft.

...

Advebs, Inc. -- wonder what my spell checker's going to say about that one -- which sells cloud platform applications for sales and marketing applications, has announced the launch of Flowlett, described by company officials as a cloud-based Proposal Management System.

It's designed to bring together features of various systems -- document management, workflow management, project management, electronic signatures and Facebook-style commenting into a single system needing "little to no training requirements."

Company officials say the product can route proposals to recipients for reviews, comments, online approvals and electronic signatures: "The routing can be in any order -- one person after the other, many simultaneously or any combination thereof. This routing can also be changed while the proposal is en route to recipients."

It can keep track of deadlines and do follow-ups automatically. All proposals are stored in a secure vault and access to them is logged in an audit trail log.

"It's vitally important now more than ever, to continually stay on top of proposals that are in the pipeline, and to reduce any logistical friction that may exist for customers to accept proposals," says Ramesh Pai, founder & CEO, Advebs.

Flowlett is a stand-alone product, but it can "complement and extend the functionality of traditional CRM systems like Salesforce.com, Oracle's Siebel and Microsoft CRM," company officials say, with its REST-based APIs. Plays well with SharePoint too.

Pricing starts at $15 per user per month. There are no contracts with the Standard Plan and all new Accounts get a free 30 day trial.

Fonded in late 2008, Advebs is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. and has a presence in London. It's currently seed (angel) funded.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is an iTunes play list arising from a Facebook discussion as to what the most listenable songs in our collections were -- the ones you can listen to over and over and over until your wife slams your office door shut. First Coffee came up with twelve. Current song: Bob Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again." Last song: Brook Benton's "Rainy Night In Georgia." Next song: The Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset," quite possibly the most beautiful song written in the rock era. On deck: Mundy's "Galway Girl:"

Calgary-based Cognera, which sells billing and customer management tools, says more companies in the utilities industry should consider the Software as a Service model.

 

More widely accepted in industries outside utilities, particularly prevalent in industries like telecom and financial services, the SaaS model is good if you want an IT that can both quickly adapt to tech upgrades and demands without large scale infrastructure investments.

"Many utilities are cautiously awaiting direction and regulation from Washington regarding technology upgrades, particularly in the area of helping consumers understand behavioral best practices for cleaner energy consumption," says Frank Hoogendoorn, Executive Vice President of Business Solutions for Cognera. "We are offering a solution to small to medium sized utilities who are not dealing with large capital upgrade budgets, but are equally concerned with meeting technology requirements."

 

In other words, nobody has any idea what new regulations are going to come sailing down the pike, so a tech model where there's not a whole lot that'll need to be ripped out and replaced should a senator decide to vote this way or that might be a good bet.

According to tech research firm Gartner, quoted by industry tech analysts the way fantasy baseball geeks quote Bill James, SaaS offerings are emerging as important security tools, "especially for cost-sensitive and highly distributed business and computing environments." That's from their "Cool Vendors in Software-as-a-Service Security, 2009" report, by Ray Wagner, et al, March 17, 2009.

 

SaaS products do give a company reliable cost forecasting, immediate access to the latest 'n' greatest upgrades, bells and whistles, but they're mostly making money because many companies simply don't want the hassle of maintaining an in-house IT department. It's one of those "if you don't have to, don't bother" decisions.

...

InContact, which sells on-demand contact center software and agent optimization tools, has announced that a provider of performance products for the casualty claims industry will be using inContact's product "with Salesforce.com for its multiple call centers."

"More and more companies are seeing the benefits of layering the inContact product over their existing phone system and using the inContact integration with on-demand CRMs like Salesforce.com," says Paul Jarman, inContact CEO. With the performance and enhancements these two products and companies bring to one another, we expect to see more and more customers utilize the integration."

The integration of the two products is supposed to let agents and managers work through a single user interface to resolve customer calls and run reports. And because both applications are cloud-based technologies, InContact officials maintain, companies using inContact and Salesforce.com "see a minimal cash outlay, a quantifiable return on investment, a reduced maintenance burden and a pay-as-you-go model."

...

Quantivo, a vendor on-demand Behavioral Analytics, has announced that the company's SaaS application is powering Behavioral Analytics across 7.6 billion transaction records for a single customer.

 

The odds that yours are in there somewhere: High.

 

Evidently that's some sort of milestone marking Quantivo's "ability to deliver answers for unrestrained ad-hoc analysis," according to company officials.

"We are proud to see a customer analyzing this vast amount of data," says Paul O'Leary, CTO at Quantivo, noting that his company's approach to analytics is used by their customers who are "analyzing anywhere from 10 million to more than seven billion records."

With more business data being generated every day, especially from Web sites, social networks, and online marketing activities, it is becoming even more difficult for companies to pick out the important trends amidst the mountains of data, to separate the wheat from the chaff and put the beer and diapers together.

 

Companies' data analysis appetites can no longer be satisfied with costly, decades-old relational database technologies," declared O'Leary.

 

Quantivo officials say they use the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure, which is used by retailers, media companies and B2B corporations to try to get answers to customer behavior questions. "

...

SafeHarbor Technology has said that SmartSupport, its managed Web Self Service contact center product, will come with a Return on Investment Guarantee.

 

"There are so many priorities in business, and so few guarantees that a product will perform," correctly notes Dianne West, Vice President Sales.

 

Through December 31, 2009, SafeHarbor Technology officials say, they will guarantee "a complete return on investment within 12 months of deployment" or they will refund the difference.

 

In order to qualify for SafeHarbor's guaranteed ROI program, customers must meet minimum contact center volumes and mutually agreed upon key performance indicators.

"SmartSupport is one of the best products on the market. Over our ten year history we have consistently delivered a positive ROI to our customers in the first year. None of our competitors, such as RightNow or InQuira, are able to offer such a guarantee," says Greg Clark, President of SafeHarbor Technology, talking smack and naming names.
 
SafeHarbor Technology Corporation, founded in 1998, is a Washington-based corporation with clients such as American Airlines, IBM, State of Washington, SunTrust Banks, Sprint, TiVo and T-Mobile.

...

That WiMAX has struggled to establish a foothold in the mature broadband markets of Europe, North America and Asia is probably too well-known to need a rehash here, and a recent study explores the question of whether there might even be a chance for WiMAX in the emerging markets.

In Ovum's recent report "WiMAX in emerging markets: the opportunity assessed," Ovum finds that "the confluence of several factors including technology cost, coverage, vendor support and service provider choices will limit WiMAX to only a niche technology in the emerging markets."

 

Seeing so many reports whose sunny outlooks aren't always equally merited by the actual research, it's refreshing for First Coffee to see a report examine an issue and say you know, this might not work out the way you want. Adds a bit of credibility, you know?

 

Basically Ovum sees WiMAX's meal ticket as being part of established fixed and mobile operators' broader broadband access portfolios, never the main course.

Angel Dobardziev, Ovum's Practice Leader, stresses that there will be lots of WiMAX networks, however low the uptake: "Two thirds of the 300+ WiMAX networks globally are in the emerging markets of Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Latin America," she points out.

 

Dobardziev says WiMAX will remain a niche broadband technology in emerging markets -- "we forecast that WiMAX will account for less than five percent of the 1.5 billion fixed and mobile broadband access connections in emerging markets by 2014."

 

The stubborn fact remains that emerging market WiMAX operators still count their subscribers in thousands, or tens of thousands, rather than the hundreds of thousands they planned to have at this stage. Scartel in Russia is the first WiMAX operator in the emerging markets to even hit 100,000 subscribers, and second place, Packet One in Malaysia, has but 80,000.

 

Why is this? Dobardziev suggests that WiMAX is not competitive against fixed or mobile broadband alternatives in most urban areas of emerging markets -- where virtually all existing WiMAX rollouts are -- on either coverage or price.

 

It's certainly not a mass market-affordable technology either: "On a non-subsidised basis, it is currently priced and positioned as a broadband option only for businesses or wealthy consumers," Dobardziev says, citing the cost of customer equipment "where both DSL and HSPA outperform WiMAX with significantly greater economies of scale."

Ovum expects the growth, funding and margins pressures to lead to large-scale consolidation among WiMAX service providers in the next two to three years as well.

...

TargusInfo, a caller name provider, has announced that Onvoy Voice Services, a Zayo Group company, has renewed a multi-year agreement to provide caller name services.

 

The agreement provides Onvoy with both CNAM services and storage, company officials say, adding that the idea is to make CNAM listings more accessible to nationwide providers.

"Offering caller identification services with the widest coverage and accuracy is a necessity for providers of all types and sizes," says Fritz Hendricks, president, Onvoy Voice Services. 

"For many providers, attempting to keep up with the rapid changes in CNAM data in 2009 is like trying to take a sip from a fire hydrant through a straw," said George Moore, CEO and chairman, TargusInfo, adding that their CNAM repository of more than 410 million CNAM records sourced by telecommunications companies allows such benefits as standardized display, flexible pricing model and multiple connectivity options.

TargusInfo is a privately held company headquartered in Vienna, Virginia. Onvoy Voice Services is headquartered in Minnesota.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Miles Davis's mind-blowing Tribute to Jack Johnson. Music biz rumor is that Davis wanted Jimi Hendrix as guitarist for these 1970 sessions, but it's hard to imagine he could've done much better than John McLaughlin did. The producer grabbed Herbie Hancock, who just happened to be walking through the building on other business that day, to play keyboards, and the first track that appears on the album is the one where Davis himself showed up at the studio after the other musicians had started playing:

Cherwell Software, a vendor of ITIL and Pink Elephant Verified IT Service Management software, has announced what company officials are calling a "unique and innovative guarantee and licensing structure."

 

And there you thought you'd seen all the guarantee and licensing structures there were.

The vendor's offering both the SaaS on-demand and the on-premise options, both allow multiple users to access the licenses. In addition, the software has the ability to reserve licenses for specific individuals for continual access.

"We've found our customers have a hard time determining the number of concurrent licenses they may need because the industry has long had a restrictive and costly 'named license' approach," says Vance Brown, Cherwell CEO, adding that his company's approach of "concurrent licensing combined with our 60-day guarantee, allows an organization to find the optimal ROI balance of needed licenses in the first 60-days of deployment." 

Headquartered in Colorado Springs, Cherwell Software was founded and is run by the former CEO of FrontRange Solutions, the former Chief Architect of FrontRange's HEAT and ITSM product lines, and the original founder and past CEO of the Help Desk Institute.

...

Good news or bad news, depending on your point of view: A study recently released by the Partnership for Public Service finds there will soon be "a considerable increase" in new government jobs.

 

The study attributes the coming increase to a variety of factors including stimulus spending, turnover and "increased demand in expanding areas such as homeland security."

 

The study thinks there'll be 273,000 new hires in positions deemed "mission critical" by the fall of 2012.

Evidently government "medical jobs" are going to lead the way, as the study's calling for 54,000 over the next three years. Overall, however, there will be taxpayer-funded sinecures for paralegals and biological science experts, border patrol agents and engineers, IT experts and accountants.

Taxpayers are also going to be on the hook for loan repayment of up to $10,000 per year (totaling $60,000 in exchange for a minimum of three years of service) for the expansion of the government payroll, recruitment bonuses, and relocation incentives. 

The Partnership for Public Service is a Washington, D.C.- based -- surprised? -- group founded in 2001 by Samuel J. Heyman "in an effort to restore prestige to government service."

...

Telecom New Zealand has recently gone live with a product from Opengear letting them access and manage network and telecom equipment in their Network Integration Lab in the national capital, Wellington.

 

It includes a couple console management appliances, Opengear KCS6000 and IM4200, deployed as two distributed clusters, supporting access from up to 1000 external specialist engineers and administrators.

Telecom officials say Prophecy Networks and Opengear worked with them to "fine-tune" the product, "something that was not forthcoming from the vendor" of the previous management product."

"Although the Opengear did not initially fulfill our needs out-of-the-box, their engineers were dedicated to modifying the operational software" for Telecom's requirements," said Dave Shaw from the Network Integration Lab, "at a reduced cost when compared to the existing vendor."

Telecom's Network Integration Lab in Wellington is used for the creation and testing of new products such as routers, switches, DSL concentrators or VoIP gateways, as well as voice, data, and video services prior to release onto live networks. It's also used by its vendors to undertake proof of concept testing against models of Telecom's networks.

The Telecom NIL is used by our vendors to undertake proof of concept testing against the model of the network, allowing for rigorous testing of concepts before releasing them live on a network. The sales teams can also use The NIL as a demonstration and sales support center.

...

NewBay has announced LifeCache Smart Address Book 2.0, what company officials are billing as a "converged social address book offering for carriers."

 

It's basically a white-label address book that syncs, merges and updates contacts and dynamic content from multiple sources, storing it in the cloud. It "creates a single unified view of everyone you know -- including all phone contacts, e-mail addresses, instant messaging buddies and social networking friends," according to New Bay officials.

 

"Interacting with contacts becomes an engaging experience for the user, resulting in increased voice and messaging traffic for carriers," said Nagappan Arunachalam, CMO at NewBay Software.

 

First Coffee isn't sure how it normally is for others, but would classify interaction with contacts as engaging enough with the current technology. Ah, maybe we just don't know what we're missing.

 

"We believe carriers are positioned to provide the social address book service... and a range of communication options and ensure that users on any connected device are only a click away from their digital lifestyle cloud services," New Bay officials say. The product imports contacts from multiple sources including Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, LinkedIn, and consolidate contacts into a single view.

LifeCache SAB 2.0 also has a Web-interface and "handset client experience."

...

G2iX has unveiled the Morph CloudServer, described by company officials as an appliance using open standards to create custom Platform as a Service environments -- for "developing and deploying software on a massive scale."

The idea, company officials say, was to give businesses a way to "pilot new ideas, facilitate global expansion, and decrease time to market." The market opportunity they see here is the one Gartner Research VP Phil Dawson talked about when he said "for now, private cloud computing will not just be a viable term, it will be a significant strategic investment for most large organizations" recently.

 

"Cloud computing for the enterprise is about efficiency," says Winston Damarillo, founder and CEO of G2iX.

 

According to Dawson, through 2012, "more than 75 percent of organizations' use of cloud computing will be devoted to very large data queries, short-term massively parallel workloads, or IT use by startups with little to no IT infrastructure."

The Morph CloudServer is a customizable private PaaS that can be tailored to match and support different development languages and frameworks. Company officials say it's designed with "a philosophy of fault tolerance, not fault avoidance."

 

"Cloud computing technology, such as the Filipino co-developed Morph CloudServer, provides emerging countries with affordable access to world-class ICT infrastructure," said Secretary Ray Anthony Roxas-Chua, secretary of the Philippines' Commission on Information and Communications Technology.

...

OpSource is crediting the "enterprise demand for cloud efficiency" for "accelerating momentum for OpSource Cloud." The product was in private Beta until early October.

 

Emphasizing security, company officials say OpSource Cloud provides every user with a Virtual Private Cloud within the public Cloud, "allowing them to determine their own degree of Internet connectivity." 

 

"Virtual private clouds for the first time allow enterprises to put computing in the cloud and expose as little or as much of their virtual cloud domain as is appropriate to their needs," said Phil Wainewright, CEO, Procullux Ventures.

"The opportunity that exists for elastic cloud computing offerings to redefine the manner that users purchase and consume IT resources is huge," said Ted Chamberlin, research director, Gartner. "Enterprises have long realized that paying full price for an underused asset does not make financial sense and does not match the scale needs of many applications."

 

The idea behind infrastructure utility and cloud based offerings, Chamberlin explained, is to provide user control and flexibility to "change the enterprise mindset away from deploying capital to buying infrastructure services."

OpSource Cloud is designed to "allow IT departments to manage their security as they would within their internal IT infrastructure," company officials say, explaining that upon sign-up, each customer receives a Virtual Private Network and sets the degree of public Internet connectivity they wish to grant, from totally private to fully available.

 

Addressing security, Antonio Piraino, Research Director, Tier1 Research claims "there has been little evidence to date of cloud providers that are able to show that they can offer adequate levels of control and performance while at the same time offering the same or better levels of security than their current operating environment."

"Unlike the alternatives, OpSource Cloud enables enterprises to not only have cloud computing on their own terms, but have it in the cloud too."

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is that great old reliable standby, Creedence Clearwater Revival:

Nearly two in five employed U.S. online adults work from home at least one day a month, according to new research in the "The Telework and the Technologies Enabling Work Outside Corporate Walls" from the Consumer Electronics Association. 

 

First Coffee's a perfect one-for-one on that score.

 

The same study also found that "most teleworkers plan to spend at least $925 over the next year on technology products to help them work from home."

 

If that includes coffee and Diet Coke, then okay, we're jake there, too.

 

More than 38 million employed U.S. online adults, or 37 percent of the total U.S. workforce, work from home at least once a month, the study found, adding that "focusing on tasks without disruptions" and "running a business from home" are the top reasons given by employees for teleworking. 

 

The top benefits include flexible hours, reduced travel time and costs, fewer disruptions, greater productivity and "nobody checking up to see how long I play Minesweeper or goof off on Facebook." 

 

Ninety-eight percent of teleworkers use computer/IT technology such as PCs or printers. Ninety percent use communication technologies like cell phones and fax machines, and 75 percent use CE accessorie including surge protectors or laptop docking stations.

 

Only 98 percent? First Coffee would like to see a telework job that doesn't require a computer.

Working from home, according to Steve Koenig, CEA's director of industry analysis, means "employees believe their performance is enhanced and their quality of life improves."

According to the CEA study, teleworkers are often purchasing their own technology equipment required to work from home: "Only a third, 34 percent, have access to an employer-provided computer or other IT technology at home, and less than a third, 31 percent, have access to an employer-provided communication device, such as a phone or fax machine."

The "Telework and the Technologies Enabling Work Outside Corporate Walls" study just published was fielded in July 2009, and is free to CEA member companies. Non-members may purchase the study for $699.

...

Voice CRM has added and certified Google Voice to work with the namesake CRM software system at www.VoiceCRM.com. 

 

"Now," company officials say, "Google Voice users will be able to use the CRM system fully integrated with their virtual Google Voice number, automating calls, and adding features such as scheduling calling and group or conference calling via the Voice CRM system."

 

Voice CRM officials argue that the use of VOIP, CRM and Google Voice all in one system "is a time save and can save money over traditional business phone systems or VOIP alone." Paired with the power of a fully functional CRM system with Google Voice automates sales, marketing and customer service.

The new voice integration was made through their technology partner, Telesocial, using the BitMouth application gateway and API, company officials say: "By adding the BitMouth gateway services from Telesocial, FreeCRM.com is able to use advanced voice and mobile technologies and extend these features to our existing CRM user base."

...

Ignify, a CRM and ERP consulting firm and Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle Partner has announced an enhanced Contact Center platform for Microsoft's CRM Call Center Agent Desktop.

The new platform allows "customer service agents using Microsoft CRM to prioritize incidents and escalate those incidents for resolution with just one mouse click," company officials said, adding that "this capability greatly enhances first contact resolution while reducing cost per incident and most importantly improving overall customer satisfaction.

The contact center extension offers an approach to increase sales and handle greater client workloads without the need for additional personnel, company officials contend, by providing customer self-service capabilities and "an integrated agent desktop that ties together different applications and voice, chat and CRM information."

The extension integrates into existing Microsoft CRM deployments, with one touch management to the platform's core features, including "automatic classification of accounts to multiple tiers based on past sales volume, visualizing a sales funnel through probability and accurately forecasting future sales and assigning contacts and customers to various marketing lists among many others," according to Ignify officials.

...

Ribbit, a BT company into communication services, has announced its Ribbit for Oracle CRM On Demand is now available via a public beta. 

 

In 2008, Ribbit was selected as a participant in the Oracle Inner Circle Program. Ribbit for Oracle connects mobile phone, Oracle CRM On Demand and e-mail with voice to text conversion. 

 

Officials at Ribbit feel, most likely correctly, that customers who use CRM to manage their business are "becoming even more dependent on" -- read: addicted to -- "mobile devices," so in their view it's "imperative that these sales and service organizations are empowered with technology to sell more and type less."

 

"Sell More, Type Less" -- First Coffee doesn't know a single sales pro who can't get behind that slogan.

With the Ribbit for Oracle product, calls, voicemail and voice memos flow into Oracle CRM On Demand along with text transcriptions. Users call in notes rather than type them. Inbound voice messages are organized into a user's CRM application so they can be managed like e-mail, "without wasting time dialing in to listen or worrying about messages being deleted."

...

Microsoft has announced that several global enterprises have selected Microsoft Dynamics CRM for their relationship management, including Barclays Bank, Booz Allen Hamilton, the City of London, Hard Rock International, Maccabi Healthcare Services, Polaris Industries and Vodafone Iceland.

"In these challenging economic times, businesses need customer management that are fast, flexible and affordable, and that help them build stronger and deeper relationships with their customers," said Brad Wilson, general manager, Microsoft Dynamics CRM in a quote he could have lopped the first five words off. My friend, at all times those are pretty much the customer management products we need.

Barclays Bank, a consumer banking division in the United Arab Emirates, has seen a 15 percent improvement in customer satisfaction and has attributed Microsoft Dynamics CRM for a 22 percent drop in service costs per customer incident.

Booz Allen Hamilton, a strategy and technology consulting firm that licensed the 1 millionth Microsoft Dynamics CRM seat, is standardizing Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a platform to deliver relational line-of-business applications across the organization.

The City of London in the U.K. uses the power and flexibility of Microsoft Dynamics CRM as an xRM development platform for services such as event planning and voter management it provides to citizens, businesses and visitors.

Hard Rock International, home of the only decent burger this reporter was able to find on his last trip to Munich, uses Microsoft Dynamics CRM to reduce its customer inquiry response times from four days to just a few hours. Wonder what music they play when they put you on hold.

Maccabi Healthcare Services, a health care organization located in Israel, has implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Microsoft Office SharePoint as the center service application to provide response and information to its members.

Polaris Industries, a manufacturer of all-terrain vehicles, deployed a dealer self-service portal and realized efficiency gains up to 35 percent compared with previous processes.


 

And Vodafone Iceland exceeded its own first-time call resolution rates expectations of 95 percent while also increasing sales by 20 percent since implementing Microsoft Dynamics CRM for its sales and service teams.

...

Cabinet NG, which sells document management and workflow software, has announced a partnership with Tigerpaw Software, a developer of IT business management software, to provide small and midsized companies with a way to manage business processes. 

 

Implementing Tigerpaw's CRM+ software and CNG's Shared Access Filing Environment offers a filing approach that provides "a comprehensive paperless office that scales with business growth," according to company officials.

Tigerpaw's CRM+ lets companies "across a wide spectrum of industries" track customers, streamline sales, improve marketing, optimize service, better control inventory, and more, company officials say: "This integration moves documents between CRM+ and CNG-SAFE without the need to keep and connect manual paper-based processes."

 

It's billed as a way to "transform disjointed documentation into efficient electronic workflows for any project."

 

As part of the process CNG Synchronizer adds and updates folders to an existing cabinet in CNG-SAFE by monitoring the Tigerpaw database for additions or changes to an account. When a new account is added in CRM+, a corresponding folder is automatically created in CNG-SAFE. 

 

Thereby folder index data is also updated in the event a change is made in Tigerpaw. "For example," company officials say, "if a customer gets a new phone number in CRM+, Synchronizer updates the corresponding CNG-SAFE folder index."

CNG Retriever monitors the "Account View" panel in CRM+ and allows the user to access documents filed in CNG-SAFE directly from the Tigerpaw application.