July 2005 Archives

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Best of 1968-1973 by The Steve Miller Band. I’m a joker…

Datamonitor is predicting that North America's $458 million hosted and managed speech services market “is tipped to exhibit an aggressive 15% year-over-year growth rate through the next four years.”

Their report, “Voice as a Service,” says growth is being spurred by a saturated hosted/managed DTMF market forcing hosted IVR providers in North America to sharpen their focus on speech services to arrest the precipitous slide of their revenues and create new revenue streams.

“In tandem with this,” they say, “smaller providers that specialize in hosted speech services are gaining greater momentum and credibility among enterprises and service providers.”
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NCO Group, Inc., which sells business process outsourcing services, announced today that during the second quarter of 2005, it reported net income of $14.1 million, or $0.42 per diluted share, as compared to net income of $14.4 million, or $0.43 per diluted share, in the second quarter of 2004.

Their revenue declined – in the second quarter of 2005 they got $247.2 million, a decrease of 3.2%, or $8.1 million, from Q2 2004’s revenue of $255.3 million.

NCO’s operations are organized into four market specific divisions that include: Accounts Receivable Management North America, Customer Relationship Management, Portfolio Management and Accounts Receivable Management International. For the second quarter of 2005, these divisions accounted for $192.5 million, $43.8 million, $27.8 million, and $3.3 million of revenue, respectively.

For the second quarter of 2004, the ARM North America, CRM, Portfolio Management and ARM International divisions accounted for $185.0 million, $59.4 million, $24.1 million and $3.5 million of the revenue, respectively.

The decrease in revenue is being pinned on the loss of a telecommunications client within the company’s CRM division. “While the implementation of newly committed client contracts is progressing on schedule, the revenue from such opportunities has not yet had a meaningful impact on the company,” officials say.

Michael J. Barrist, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer said “During the quarter our CRM division continued both the planned exit of a large telecom client and the implementation of several new client opportunities.”

NCO also announced that it continues to expect earnings per share to be approximately $1.70 to $1.80 per diluted share for 2005.
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This came out late yesterday afternoon, so if you, like, knocked off early or something you missed it. FrontRange Solutions USA Inc., which sells service management, CRM, and voice application products for the enterprise market announced the availability of IP Contact Center 5.0 to the Communication Management product group.

The new version of FrontRange’s Voice Over Internet Protocol-based software suite features Quality Management and integration with other FrontRange product “families,” including the company’s HEAT, GoldMine Corporate Edition and the new IT Service Management modules.

IPCC is being pitched as having relatively painless integration to industry-leading business applications, which is a selling point for the target of “contact center managers [who] scrutinize and manage costs meticulously,” according to company officials, as it’s engineered to reduce implementation as well as ongoing costs.

There are also features like the optional module Quality Management, with which a supervisor can record calls with server based recording and call rating. Recording can be activated by schedule, call scenario or upon supervisor request.

It has business application integration reducing the need for middleware or professional services, and hey, those Russian and German versions are ready, too.
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You may have seen this yesterday, First Coffee^SM missed it, so here it is – London-based Voipfone – guess what line of business they’re in – has added a Virtual PBX service aimed at small business to its range of self-service Voice over IP products.

Voipfone’s Self Service PBX is being pitched squarely at small businesses, trumpeting “features and functionality of telephone systems that were previously only affordable by large corporations,” according to company officials.

It’s actually a fairly sophisticated call system, suitable for an ordinary office, a virtual office, several offices in several locations and even the home, if you’re more into techy-toy phone systems at home than First Coffee^SM is.

“The new service costs less than £1 (about a buck-thirty) per extension per month; there are no set-up costs and no contracts,” officials say. Translation: “We want small businesses to have no excuse not to buy this.”

All extensions have a full PBX suite of features, including the obligatory Call Conferencing, Call Transfer, Voice Mail, Music on Hold, Call Waiting, Call ID, Three Way Calling and free calling between offices and homes.

As sophisticated and low-priced as it is, what really gets it in the door with small businesses is how easy to set up it is, since it’s all preconfigured and web-based. “The features just work –  you don’t need to spend days with a telephone expert to use it. It’s as simple or as complicated as you want it to be,” company officials promise.

Colin Duffy, CEO of Inet Telecoms Ltd (Voipfone) said with modern IP technologies, “our customers no longer need several incoming PSTN and ISDN lines and complex and expensive hardware just to make and receive phone calls within their offices. Nor do they need a trained telecoms engineer to set it up and maintain it – Voipfone’s Virtual PBX does all that for you.”

“All the calls within our network are free, no matter where they are made to,” Duffy promises. “It means that you can have one number for your customers to dial and it doesn’t matter where your extensions are located; if you have home workers or a home office, a real office in the UK and another in France, it’s as though you are all in the same building.”

As Duffy says, “it sounds too good to be true, but for once, it isn’t.”

Infonetics has recently predicted that business-hosted VoIP service revenue will outstrip managed IP PBX services by 2006, “driven largely by uptake among SMBs.”
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Here’s an interesting bit: GMPCS, a provider of global mobile personal communications via satellite, is announcing that it has placed the first order for personal broadband satellite terminals for the Inmarsat Broadband Global Area Network service.

“Personal broadband satellite terminals” – sounds cool, doesn’t it?

“Why, yes, that’s my own personal broadband satellite terminal there in the Hummer.”

Or: “Hey, wanna see some etchings of my personal broadband satellite terminal?”

The order for 1,000 units was placed with Nera SatCom, a subsidiary of Nera.

The Nera WorldPro 1000 terminal, which is about the size and weight of a large and heavy cell phone, will enable customers of GMPCS to connect to Inmarsat’s BGAN service at speeds of up to 384 kbps – okay, we’re not exactly downloading streaming video right off the bat here – from 85 percent of the world’s land mass.

The service is scheduled for availability from the fourth quarter of 2005 and will let users “access both voice and data communications simultaneously from a single satellite terminal,” according to GMPCS officials.

It’s marketed specifically to military, aid and media users “who need instant access to broadband communications in areas with poor terrestrial communications infrastructure,” company officials explain. There are wireless and wireline options for connecting computers and voice handsets.

GMPCS Personal Communications is a subsidiary of the Norwegian public company Telenor Satellite Services, and raked in revenue of over $24 million in 2004.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the Miles Davis reissue The Complete Birth Of the Cool:

Always nice to hear about a company – although First Coffee^SM, a leading CRM columnist, wishes that every single company who has a product in a space would kindly stop referring to themselves as “a leader” in that space.

We haven’t covered Relationals before, evidently they sell hosted CRM, targeting the publishing and media industry – “completely focused on the unique requirements of the newspaper and media industries advertising and agency relationships,” according to company officials.

They’ve announced that Lee Enterprise’s Columbus Telegram has selected the Relationals CRM suite to “automate and simplify sales processes and improve advertiser relationship management.”

“It’s been a phenomenal tool. I wish we had put this into place 6 months or a year ago! We can track every call, every mailing, every sales visit. A year from now we will be able to go back and look at that same activity to make sure we don’t miss out on any opportunities,” says Shannon Brinker, Advertising Manager at the Columbus Telegram.

“The sales reps enjoy being able to track their own revenue on a daily basis and having a tool that helps me track activity for multiple teams has been invaluable. We’ve customized the system to track flight revenue and individual project revenue so that on a daily basis we know exactly how many calls have been made for any project we are undertaking,” Brinker said.

First Coffee^SM doesn’t normally reprint press release “testimonials,” but that just sounded so… enthusiastic about the product.
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SBE, Inc., a provider of IP-based networking solutions for next generation communications and storage systems, has announced completion of its acquisition of privately-held PyX Technologies, a supplier of iSCSI software products. Concurrent with the acquisition, the company completed a private financing raising gross proceeds totaling $5.15 million.

The acquisition of PyX technologies “opens a whole new market for SBE,” according to SBE officials. Specializing in advanced IP storage solutions, PyX Technologies’ flagship iSCSI Target and Initiator software represent a standards-based, fault-tolerant and cost-efficient method for transporting data to and from networked storage, and the PyX iSCSI products enable location-independent data storage and retrieval, featuring full error recovery, load balancing, and multi-path capabilities “previously available only in costly fiber channel architectures,” SBE officials say.
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Nice Systems, a provider of products that help organizations analyze interactions is announcing an order from Monitronics to adopt its contact center product.

Monitronics will apply Nice’s contact center interactions products in an effort to increase the quality of customer interactions through improved agent monitoring.

Monitronics officials say they’re interested in Nice’s capabilities for monitoring of customer interactions by using targeted, as opposed to random, agent monitoring. “Security has become a much greater area of concern for both businesses and homes over the last few years,” said Michael Meyers, CFO, Monitronics, adding that he was impressed with Nice’s “capabilities to improve agent performance and streamline customer interactions processes.”
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Jacada Ltd., a business process software vendor today reported financial results for the 2005 second quarter.

Total revenues for the 2005 second quarter were $5.5 million, up from $4.0 million in the 2005 first quarter and $4.9 million in the second quarter of 2004. Software and products revenues were $2.0 million in the 2005 second quarter, up from $0.8 million in the 2005 first quarter and $1.3 million in the second quarter of 2004.

Service and maintenance revenues were $3.5 million in the 2005 second quarter, compared to $3.2 million in the 2005 first quarter and $3.5 million in the second quarter of 2004.

Gross profit for the 2005 second quarter was $4.5 million, or 82% of total revenues, compared to $2.6 million, or 66% of total revenues, in the 2005 first quarter. Operating loss for the 2005 second quarter was $410,000, compared to $4.3 million in the 2005 first quarter. Net loss for the 2005 second quarter was $233,000, or $0.01 per share, compared to a net loss of $4.2 million, or $0.22 per share, in the 2005 first quarter.
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As an Official Member of the Anti-Idiotarian Blogosphere, First Coffee^SM notes an Associated Press article today, “Rail Tunnels Pose Dilemma In Terror Fight:”

The London bombings have focused attention on train security, but largely lost in the discussion of how to keep bombs off Americans rails is the potential danger from the nation’s antiquated network of tunnels.

Many tunnels, some of which are at least a century old, are basically unchanged from the time they were dug. They are poorly ventilated and escape routes tend to be narrow and difficult.

“We’re faced with how to best prevent a nefarious incident from happening, but what if one does happen?” said John Tolman, spokesman for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. “What’s the best escape route? God forbid there was a fire underneath, what do you do?”

Older tunnels tend to be deep and snug. Brian Jenkins, a counterterrorism expert with the think tank Rand Corp. said that makes an explosion even deadlier.

“The blast has nowhere to go. It’ll run back and forth through the carriages and cause the greatest number of casualties,” Jenkins said.

First Coffee^SM wonders if it’s really a good idea to tell the enemy the best places to attack us for maximum casualties in a time of war. It’s one thing to draw attention to problems, it’s another to provide terrorists with ideas and specific operational intelligence.

During World War II the Japanese floated incendiary bombs on balloons over America’s West Coast. Some landed – one made it as far as Detroit – and a few exploded, killing a total of six people, but the Army asked journalists not to say anything “lest the enemy get the idea that they had a good thing going,” according to a fine history of the effort.

And certainly nobody would have dreamed of publishing something like “I just hope them Japanese don’t release balloons in the Santa Ana winds in early May, that’d take those suckers right into downtown L.A.”

The media, a much more sensible adult in those days, agreed and the Japanese, carefully monitoring the American media, abandoned the plan, convinced it was having no effect. Would that today’s American media had the same sensibilities.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content. 

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Uncle Kracker’s 2002 No Stranger To Shame:

First, a correction from yesterday. First Coffee^SM received the following e-mail concerning an article his mild-mannered reporter alter ego wrote:

I work in NetSuite Public Relations and noticed your article titled “SAP’s Hosted CRM: Ten Things You Need To Know” has a misleading statement that reads “…..Oracle baby NetSuite….”

Oracle and NetSuite have no affiliation. Larry Ellison has personally funded NetSuite and is a majority stockholder and sits on the Board but that is the extent of his relationship.

At one point we had a co-branding agreement with Oracle for our Oracle Small Business Suite but that has long since passed. Would you be able to issue this correction to read something like “…Ellison baby NetSuite…?”

First Coffee^SM agrees, if someone’s personally funded a company they’re the majority stockholder of and on that company’s board, that qualifies as their “baby,” and after such rigorous paternity testing hereby declares the father to be Larry Ellison, not Oracle.
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The Oki Electric Industry Co., Japan’s oldest telecom is announcing the development of “Visual Contact Center,” a demonstration system using the videophone function on 3G mobile phones.

Japan and Korea are years ahead of the rest of the world in their adoption of funky personal technology, and right now 30% of mobile phones in Japan have become 3G. Naturally, with such market penetration there’s a raft of new services such as videophones and video downloads becoming more and more popular.

The trend is hitting Japan’s contact centers, which are figuring out ways to use videophones in addition to traditional voice. “This is Japan’s first contact center system to utilize NTT DoCoMo’s FOMA Videophone,” said Katsuyoshi Koide, at Oki Electric. He explained that with this system communication can include video and pictures which will, as he says, “release the stress and frustration many people experience when calling voice-only contact centers.”
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Envision Telephony, Inc. is announcing a 44 percent increase in second quarter revenue for 2005 over the same period in the prior year.

Revenues for the first half of 2005 exceeded 2004 by 49 percent. Total revenue for the last twelve months increased more than 40 percent over the preceding twelve months. Envision is a privately held, Seattle-based vendor of contact center recording, coaching, workforce optimization and business intelligence software.

This is a company to watch. During the second quarter of 2005 they added twelve new customers around the world in several industries, including retail, outsourcing, utilities and telecommunications. It’s also getting major expansion orders – always a good sign – from a customer in the financial industry as well as a large software companies.

It’s also one of nine companies recognized by Washington CEO magazine as Washington’s best companies to work for. What’s not to like?
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Good piece over at Wired on Phil Zimmermann, creator of the popular Pretty Good Privacy e-mail encryption programs, and what he thinks he can do for VoIP security.

According to the article, he’s “developed a prototype program for encrypting voice over internet protocol, or VoIP, which he will announce at the BlackHat security conference.”

Phil, how necessary is security for VoIP? “The PSTN is like a well-manicured neighborhood, (while) the internet is like a crime-ridden slum,” Zimmermann tells Wired. “To move all of our phone calls from the PSTN to the internet seems foolish without protecting it.”
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An interesting company on First Coffee^SM’s radar is CobbleSoft International, privately held by majority shareholder President Pamela Follett and CEO Richard Stevenson, a Brit transplanted to New York’s Finger Lakes region who also brews a mean cup of java. Yes, (some) Brits know decent coffee, too.

They’ve released Version 3 of their flagship product, COIGN Enterprise, a web-based helpdesk and service management software product. It focuses on Information Technology Infrastructure Library best practices for internal and B2B support.

What’s new about Version 3 is its “User Footprints” capability, enabling a full transactional user audit trail. Technicians can track the details of end-user self-service sessions to see what searches and downloads were tried before a ticket was logged.

According to Stevenson, it eliminates the “is it plugged in?” sort of time-wasting: “Every step a user takes through COIGN Enterprise is tracked, which means technicians can drill down and see what exactly they’ve done, what they’ve tried, what they’ve searched for in the knowledge base, what they’ve downloaded etc. This eliminates the ‘is it plugged in’ standard first questions scenario.”

Stevenson says once technicians have this knowledge, they can provide more “informed and pro-active support, resulting in greater speed and accuracy of resolution.”

They’ve improved the graphical user interface to support virtual security throughout the enterprise, “enabling personnel to easily segregate access between internal and external users… enhanced content management capabilities in the solutions center, knowledge base and portal further benefit from the configurable security.”

There’s also an updated service portal extending group messaging and alert capabilities, allowing clients to configure individual display components such as quick links to the top ten downloads or surveys. In-Bound E-Mail now allows the creation of tickets from e-mails, letting users configure multiple, unlimited e-mail accounts.

COIGN Enterprise is billed by Stevenson as “the industry’s first and only web-based solution that automatically and transparently scales to meet client requirements through their deployments of GRID, RAC and SOA technologies.” It was developed to work best with the Oracle Database and Apache on Linux, Unix and Windows platforms. It starts at $4,995 for a site-wide license.

Not $5,000, now, $4,995. Only five bucks, you say? My friend, that’s enough for a large Half-Moon Mocha, a latte with white and dark chocolate, or a Snapping Turtle – extra-shot latte with caramel and chocolate at the excellent Coffee Creek there in Phelps.
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Got an interesting article forwarded my way by TMC Head Cowboy Rich Tehrani yesterday about tech etiquette. According to a new survey by market research firm Synovate, 70% of the population polled nationally observed people using technology in a manner that is disrespectful to others at least once a day.

David Butcher did a fine article on the same study yesterday. First Coffee^SM loves where the survey found the majority of Americans would “die” without their favorite tech toys, and Butcher sniffs “Please. If you really believe that, feel free to prove it.”

It brings to mind the invaluable Judith Martin, a.k.a. Miss Manners’s observations on the same topic, that frequently the rudest behavior is directed against not innocent bystanders, but the targets of the technology, such as cell phone victims:

“I worry about the person who is being called,” Martin says. “When you hear these conversations being shouted in the street – and by the way, there were always etiquette rules against shouting – what do they consist of? ‘I’m crossing the street now, the light changed, I might get a cup of coffee, looks like rain.’ Somebody has to listen to this drivel! There’s always been a rule in place against boring people senseless, but this is a new way to do it.”

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

Hendriz Inogacia Santos, the UAE’s number one barista.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Kinks’ 1975 album Schoolboys In Disgrace:

Interesting news about SAP’s decision to offer hosted CRM after saying no, we have no plans to do so.

At the US Sapphire user conference in Boston a couple months ago SAP talked a lot about its CRM version 5.0, which you’ll see in the third quarter of this year, but quashed talk of a hosted product offering.

First Coffee^SM doesn’t see it as a coincidence that the announcement came after SAP announced their second quarter results, which showed that the CRM division was the only one where revenues stayed flat.

But as he had to, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann “denied a link between the CRM application’s below-par performance and the tactical volte-face,” according to Pete Swabey at Infoconomy. The service is scheduled to launch later this year.

“We are in preparation [for hosted CRM],” Kagermann said, according to Swabey. “You’ll see something soon. We’re making our business models right at this time.”

It took Siebel longer than most companies to catch on to hosted CRM, it took SAP a little longer. Maybe it was seeing the likes of RightNow, salesforce.com and others – seeing archrival Larry Ellison bankrolling the successful NetSuite must grate back in Walldorf – doing brisk business that finally convinced SAP that’s where the future is.

Kagermann defended SAP’s CRM strategy in talks with analysts, saying that sure, CRM had dipped for this quarter, but maintaining that one slower quarter does not indicate a trend, according to ComputerWire, which speculated that the low second quarter sales could be the result of everyone waiting for a rumored hosted application.

ComputerWire thinks the move is a “complete change of strategy.” Evidently back in May at the European Sapphire conference “Peter Kirschbauer, head of business solutions, said the company had no plans to release a hosted version of its CRM product because although SAPs platform-and-service approach would make it technically feasible, it would not fit with the company’s CRM strategy.”

Today on-demand is very “siloed,” Kirschbauer told ComputerWire back in May. “If it was only used that way it would not be difficult but customers are looking for ways to integrate data across the enterprise. You need a safe and secure way to communicate with systems that are out of your control.” That’s… changed, evidently.

Other hosted CRM vendors are beings sporting about it. Salesforce.com, with whom SAP will butt heads sooner rather than later, is taking the official line that it’s “fantastic” because it “endorses on-demand as what customers want.”

We’ll see if such pleasant toasts last much longer. First Coffee^SM isn’t betting on it.
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57% of SMB owners are “apprehensive” about the reliability of Voice over Internet Protocol service providers available today, according to a recent survey by PBX vendor Switchvox, who sells PBX phone systems to SMBs.

The online survey found that 33% of SMBs are “concerned about the quality of calls” when using VoIP services. 76% of respondents were open to testing out VoIP, “as long as a service level guarantee was in place.”

The need for VoIP providers offering reliable, quality services was a recurring emphasis in the study results, given that SMBs don’t have a lot of time or money to spend fixing such problems themselves.

Joshua Stephens, CEO of Switchvox said his company has come up with “some key items to look for and be aware of before switching to a VoIP system:”

First, find a reliable VoIP provider. Look for carriers that are responsive when contacted and will offer a service level agreement guarantee.

Secondly, know your bandwidth capabilities. One rule to use is that each call will use 100 kilobits of bandwidth.

Thirdly, get a static IP from your ISP. This is necessary for such tasks as peering two offices together for free phone calls, or having remote extensions for offsite employees.

Fourthly, investigate quality of service. QoS is the ability for a router to prioritize certain types of traffic (like phone calls) over other traffic (like big downloads).

And get the right equipment. Make sure that any new VOIP-enabled PBX purchased can work with existing phone services – Stephens says a system that allows you to migrate to VoIP slowly, rather than jumping in all at once is preferable.
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First Coffee^SM notes that yesterday mobile marketing vendor CellStory announced the beta release of CellStory for Realty, a mobile CRM product realtors can use with a camera phone to “build professionally designed web pages on-the-fly from any property location and deliver them via their mobile phone directly to buyers and online property listings.”

Basically it lets real estate agents take digital pictures, add video and audio and, following a series of prompts on the cell phone, use plain English to build a snazzy listing while still on the property and send the listing in standard web-based format to potential buyers and partners. They can simultaneously send the property listing to multiple listing sites, including their own.

It costs thirty bucks a month now, and it’ll go up to fifty soon. A 30-day free trial is also available at http://www.cellstory.com. The beta version is compatible with all Series 60 Nokia camera phones. Announcements for support for PalmOS, Java, BREW and Windows Mobile phones will be made in Q3 2005.

Just sounded like a cool idea.
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First Coffee^SM’s glad to see RightNow Technologies has posted good results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2005. They’re reporting consolidated revenue of $21.1 million for the second quarter of 2005, an increase of 43 percent from the second quarter of 2004 and the 30th consecutive quarter of revenue growth for RightNow.

Net income in the second quarter of 2005 was $1.6 million, or $0.05 per diluted share, compared to net income of $634,000, or $0.02 per diluted share, in the second quarter of 2004.

For the six months ended June 30, 2005, RightNow reported revenue of $39.4 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.07, as compared to year-ago revenue of $27.6 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.03.

Businesswise they’re a smart company selling a good product, and their rock-solid corporate integrity is a welcome presence in the business world today. You’re not going to see CEO Greg Gianforte haled before any SEC hearings or pleading in court, there isn’t going to be any whistle-blowing on corporate malfeasance out there in Bozeman, Gianforte and the top management he’s surrounded himself with simply have too much personal integrity for such garbage to happen and it’s refreshing to see that in today’s business world.
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A tip of the coffee pot to Mr. Hendriz Inogacia Santos, pictured above, Lead Barista at Dubai World Trade Center who was declared the UAE’s number one barista in the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf’s 2005 Champion Barista competition.

Santos will enter the next round of competitions to be held in August in Malaysia for the CBTL Asia Pacific regional competition, the winner of which competes at the international Olympics of coffee blending in Los Angeles.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a bootleg of Bob Dylan’s historic electric set at the Newport Folk Festival, forty years ago today, which ripped both folk and rock music wide open:

First Coffee^SM isn’t a conspiracy theorist – he’s one of two or three people alive who believes the Warren Commission’s report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which found that Lee Harvey Oswald was a disturbed wingnut who acted alone. But he does note this morning that his beloved Mozilla Firefox browser can’t access Web sites which the clunky old Internet Explorer can access with no problem – well, no more than all the usual problems which led First Coffee^SM to ditch it in favor of Firefox in the first place.

Any other Firefox users out there having unexplained trouble? Again, we’re not proposing any nefarious conspiracy, just noting that it’s curious there’s all of a sudden this accessibility problem with one of the most serious threats to Microsoft’s ham-fisted browser hegemony?
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Somewhere Malcolm Gladwell smiles. “Wireless messaging and corporate application access have finally reached the ‘tipping point,’” said Terry Austin, President Worldwide Marketing and Sales, Good Technology.

Gladwell, of course, is the author of 2002’s The Tipping Point, a “facile piece of pop sociology,” according to one reviewer, contending that trends – such as wireless messaging – spread like viruses. Whatever the merits of the book it has introduced the term “tipping point” into common usage.

(First Coffee^SM’s brother-in-law once observed that certain books such as The Tipping Point should have stayed magazine articles.)

What Austin meant was that CIOs now “feel confident making enterprise-wide decisions thanks to the flexibility enabled by industry standards-based handhelds” and their usability, management and security.

Good Technology has announced that they’ll participate in the Palm Mobile Solutions 2005 Conference. Good joined Palm in Singapore and Hong Kong this past week and will be finishing the final leg of this tour tomorrow from 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Sydney time the Tattersalls Club in Sydney, Australia.

Good Technology’s GoodLink wireless messaging is an intuitive, Outlook-like user-interface, carrier-agnostic service on handheld computing devices such as the Palm Treo smartphone. Today 6,500 enterprises run GoodLink on more than 120 carriers in 60 countries around the world.
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First Coffee^SM isn’t a scientist by any stretch of any imagination, and can’t comment expertly on the science behind the following news piece, which does sound cool:

A team of researchers from the Centre of Ocean Technology, University of South Florida is trying to use wireless wi-fi to monitor research buoys, ROVs [?] and various research vessels on the open ocean.

Providing wireless signals across water is difficult, due to the highly reflective nature of water, especially in choppy or wavy waters. Pragnesh Bhanushali, Microsystems Electrical Engineer University of South Florida Centre for Ocean Technology “sought out the newest available antenna technology from Wifi-Plus antenna to address the known problems on the water,” according to a news advisory from Wifi-Plus.

“We had one of our nodes set up on a Coast Guard range marker forty feet high and seven miles away from the shoreline tower at the University building,” Bhanushali said. “We had a number of sensor nodes on buoys and a few mobile platforms including an ROV and boats as clients to the remote node.”

Bhanushali said they were able to monitor all their data and remote devices from the university building on shore real time: “The multi-polarized antennas worked great even in a difficult ocean environment out performing higher gain antennas. The received signal strength was consistently stable.”

Evidently this had not been accomplished before with standard available antennas. “This will open a new form of communication for ocean going and shoreline applications, such as providing internet for small vessel that may not have radar for weather updates,” Bhanushali said.

It might broaden capability in remote ocean sensing, environment monitoring and other navy and port security related applications, according to Bhanushali, who said his team is currently engaged in scaling up the existing network using mesh topology.

Dennis Broderick, president of Wifi-Plus said their antenna can be used to install wireless services to hotels, RV parks, marinas and “anyone else who is finding wireless difficult to deploy due to the obstructed nature of the world we live.” He claimed the results accomplished in Bhanushali’s trial add to “the credibility for Multi-Polarized antenna technology.”

Wifi-Plus, Inc. designs and manufactures MP obstruction penetrating antennas and holds exclusive patent rights on its proprietary antenna designs.
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Vicorp, which sells “Service Creation Software” technologies is announcing that Cable & Wireless have selected Vicorp’s xMP Service Creation Environment software to facilitate their new “self care program.”

Cable & Wireless will use Vicorp’s xMP service creation software to drive their customer self-care program, in the form of “faster, more flexible speech driven self-service applications to their large enterprise contact centre customers,” according to Country & Western – sorry, C&W officials.

The development of C&W’s self-service interactive voice response will, company officials hope, enable C&W to “effectively package IVR services for smaller companies who require dynamic control of their IVR.”

Vicorp’s xMP software offers a secure partitioned service that allows customers to make real-time changes to their customer self-service applications, which are then executed in the Cable & Wireless network. Speech-based services can be built and deployed with a standards based approach to service creation and through the use of re-usable software and components.

Vicorp’s xMP service creation is being used by C&W to present “next generation” speech and data services to the market in a way that, according to company officials, “enables both C&W and their customers to control the key service elements themselves, with less technical skills.”

Basically C&W are claiming the development of a unique set of creation tools which will let their customers move into speech-driven applications. These tools are integrated into their existing network-based contact centre portfolio.

Brendan Treacy, Vicorp’s CEO thinks this distributed service model will be a “compelling option for many organizations, as it helps to remove the capital barrier for improved CRM solutions and gives a very scaleable means of managing high peak demand.”
...

It was forty years ago today
Bobby Dylan taught the world to play
Pop music in a different way,
Rock’n’roll with something to say.

So let me introduce to you
The place where it all began…
The July 25 Newport Folk Festival!

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Steve Taylor’s six-song EP, I Want To Be A Clone:

A couple days ago First Coffee^SM’s mild-mannered reporter alter ego wrote about VTiger, the Indian company selling an Open Source CRM product using SugarCRM as the base. It’s raised interesting questions about the nature of Open Source.

They had announced a subscription model for customer support, with pricing starting at $149 for a single user pack, $699 for a five-user pack, $1,299 for a ten-user pack, $2,999 for a 25-user pack, $4,995 for a 50-user pack, and $8,995 for a 100-user pack. Customers also have an option of a one-time remote installation fee of $250.

“The software itself is available for free to download and install, with no complex licensing schemes,” says Mani, co-founder of vTiger.

VTiger describes its “mission” as being to “create affordable enterprise IT solutions in CRM, Groupware and other areas.”

Others thought they were pulling a fast one.

VTiger’s wholesale rebranding of SugarCRM as their own product has created “serious dissention within the Open Source ranks,” according to the Casey Software blog. “It appears -- I have NOT done a code audit myself to confirm this -- that they have taken the entire source to SugarCRM and simply rebanded it with their own logos, stylesheet, copyright notices and call it ‘vtiger CRM,’“ the blogger writes.

However, Christiaan Erasmus at LinuxToday writes “Recently vTiger took SugarCRM’s source code, stripped the logos, added an installer and released it as vTiger CRM. I am not a lawyer but it appears to be legal to do this under the SugarCRM Public Licence (SPL), which is an adapted version of the Mozilla Public Licence. vTiger then went further to ensure that they adhere to the SPL by publicly stating that it is based on SugarCRM code and kept the copyright notices intact.”

Yesterday Mani wrote to First Coffee^SM, a pleasant, professional e-mail which is reprinted below:

Thank you very much for covering vtiger PR in TMCnet. First, let me introduce myself. My name is Mani & I am co-founder of vtiger. Since you have covered about vtiger & SugarCRM, I would like to give you some
facts. This will help you understand our side of the story & give you
better understanding of vtiger vision.

1. vtiger was originally forked from SugarCRM with a mission to
contribute to open source. As our first contribution, we gave packaging
for easy installation for SugarCRM as we found the installation is
painful for a wonderful software application.We really found SugarCRM as
one of the great Open Source software application.

2. We gave enough credit to SugarCRM & we even offered to contribute
code to SugarCRM but we have been denied as they looked at us as
competition than contributors. They attacked us in our Forums & at first
it was “legal” threats and then it was the “spirit” of Open Source. But
now you can compare both vtiger & SugarCRM to understand the commitment
& dedication shown to Open Source by each one of us.

3. We forked from there and we added Outlook plugin, Office plugin,
Thunderbird plugin & lot more over SugarCRM Open Source (OS) version.
You can verify this for yourself & you can see that we are 90% different
from SugarCRM. FYI, we used their initial version source code & after that
they changed their licensing.

In the meantime, SugarCRM minimized their contribution in OS version &
started pushing Professional version to customers. They keep OS version
for Marketing & Evaluation & through the OS version they upsell
Professional edition ( that is one reason why they don’t like the
existence of vtiger as we made everything Open Source ). Also, we are in
the process of making vtiger Sugar free soon as already we use only
minimal portion of their code & for which we pay heavy price of
justifying our stands against Sugar.

We value your suggestions. Please feel free to let us know if you see
any moral issues in anything we have done sofar in vtiger. Our intention
is not to steal anyone’s lunch. Our intention is to offer affordable &
credible Open Source software to customers.

Once again thanks for covering our PR in TMCnet. Please feel free to let
me know if you have any comments / suggestions / advice to us. We are
open to correct any mistakes in our part.

Thanks & Regards,
Mani

First Coffee^SM isn’t up on the Open Source movement, the ins and outs and codes of chivalry and conduct, but can’t see anything VTiger’s doing that, say, Red Hat or Novell isn’t doing with Linux – give away the actual product, but sell the bells and whistles.

It reminds First Coffee^SM of the business model used to justify selling the Koran in Islamic countries. You don’t sell a Koran, of course, that’s wrong. So you give the Koran away free – and sell the covers.

But First Coffee^SM can’t see anything wrong that VTiger’s doing, although he can see why Sugar CRM’s hacked off even they don’t have a legal (or ethical, really) leg to stand on.

SugarCRM sees a bunch of guys making money off something they didn’t create. Well, that’s Open Source, sorry. If someone sends you the free case of beer count yourself lucky.  The way Mani’s explained it – we’ll wait for a rebuttal from the SugarCRM people – he has done nothing wrong, just been sharp about how he used a free product.

Anybody more up on the mores of Open Source is free to chime in.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Al Stewart’s A Beach Full of Shells, his new album and first in a few years:

It’s quarterly reporting season, and CRM vendor Amdocs Limited weighs in with a good one.

The St. Louis-based vendor, which is hitting the Chinese market hard, reported that for the third quarter ended June 30, 2005, revenue was $507.4 million, representing sequential growth of 3.9 percent and an increase of 12.7 percent from last year’s third quarter.

Excluding acquisition-related costs net of related tax effects of $1.7 million, net income was $78.8 million, or $0.37 per diluted share, an increase of $15.3 million, or 24.1 percent of Q3 2004.

The company’s net income was $77.1 million, or $0.36 per diluted share, over net income of $59.9 million in Q3 2004.
…

SAP didn’t do too badly either in their Q2 2005, slightly exceeding estimates. They’re reporting software revenues of 576 million euros… sigh, break out the calculator… okay, at 1.21 euros to the dollar, that’s… $701 million, up from $605 million last second quarter. That’s a 16 percent increase in any currency.

American license sales were up strongly, but the Walldorf, Germany-based giant is a little concerned over declining German license revenue.

Total revenues for second quarter of 2005 were euro 2.02 billion, or $2.46 billion, over 2004’s $2.19 billion, a 13 percent increase.

Software revenues in the U.S. – or, as SAP puts it, “money that didn’t go into Larry Ellison’s pocket” – increased 24 percent to euro 174 million, or $211 million for the second quarter of 2005, a tidy enough sum.

Software revenues in the EMEA region grew 9 percent to $351  million for the second quarter of 2005, an eight percent increase from 2004.

“Licenses looked good with 16 percent growth. Within this, Germany was the one question mark – licenses here were down 13 percent year over year,” analysts for Morgan Stanley told MarketWatch.

SAP blamed the poor German performance to “uncertainty surrounding the upcoming national elections and sales-force reorganizations,” and “expects the region to rebound next quarter,” MarketWatch says.
…

Meanwhile, things aren’t so hot over at Technology Solutions Company. You know it wasn’t the Quarter of Dreams when the report begins by saying that TSC “today reported that it has taken actions to improve results.”

The company announced headcount reductions and office closings, which they hope will result in “annualized savings of approximately $5.2 million and a charge to earnings of approximately $1.7 million in the second quarter,” results of which will be announced August 11. It promises to be a rather dreary day at TSC – among other things, the company will record a $0.7 million charge for impairment of goodwill and intangibles.

The company anticipates revenues for the second quarter ending June 30, 2005 to be in the range of $9.0 million to $9.2 million and its earnings results, which includes a $2.7 million gain on the settlement of a contractual dispute as disclosed in the Form 8-K dated May 13, 2005, to be a loss of ($0.06) per share.

The company previously had expected revenue of between $9.5 to $10.5 million and a loss between ($0.07) to ($0.10) per share.
…

Best Practices LLC is announcing a new report, “Managing Contact Center Reps for Maximum Productivity.” According to company officials, the report aims to help contact center managers finding the balance between challenging their representatives to achieve maximum efficiency “without pushing so hard that the contact center suffers from low morale and high turnover.”

This, the report finds, requires “knowing what expectations are reasonable, developing representatives to a level where they can achieve these expectations, and finally rewarding them for successfully attaining goals.”

The report presents research detailing “every step in the process of successfully managing contact center representatives,” company officials say. It has the specific performance metrics of 13 companies in the areas of employee productivity, turnover, company costs, and more, and “explains the training and development practices that leading contact centers are using to develop their reps to the point where they can handle twice as many calls as their competitor’s reps.”

One best-in-class hiring technique: Conduct a 4-stage interview process. Begin with an interview over the phone, follow that with basic skills testing, a role-playing exercise, and an interview where candidates visit the contact center floor where they would be working. Best Practices found this process “set realistic candidate expectations for the job, so that turnover due to poor job satisfaction was minimized.”
…

IP vendor ShoreGroup, Inc. and Prominence Networks, a vendor of real-time IP voice and video applications are announcing a partnership where ShoreGroup will OEM Prominence Networks MediaIP service delivery products.

The partnership combines ShoreGroup’s CaseSentry Systems Management product with Prominence Networks MediaIP service delivery products, said Sid Nag, Founder, President and CEO of Prominence Networks.

Nag said the new products will “specifically target the demanding availability, quality and performance requirements of today’s advanced IP Communication environments.”
…

A “startling study” conducted by Qpass of 100 U.S. and European digital content Websites revealed that “more than one third of the sites are unsecured, allowing users to ‘shoplift’ music tracks and download them as free ringtones,” the press release warned.

Oh my. First Coffee^SM supposes if he tried really hard he could give a damn.

“The extent of the problem in US may have already cost the mobile and music industries an estimated $40 million U.S. since the beginning of 2004, and a further $123 million U.S. by 2007,” according to Qpass.

$40 million. In other words, what Geffen grossed off two Hole CDs back in the ‘90s. We’re not talking the death of an industry here, folks.

Evidently when users preview music before they purchase it – “an important part of the customer purchasing experience,” according to the press release – they discovered that two-thirds of web sites tested offered preview music files between 15 and 30 seconds, “the perfect length to convert into a ringtone.”

Qpass tested 42 mobile carrier portals and 58 online entertainment and music stores offering full track music downloads. “Out of the sites tested,” they report, “40 percent of carrier sites and 31 percent of other portals such as online music stores and entertainment sites were unsecured.”

“This is the mobile and cyber-equivalent of test-driving a car and then not having to give it back,” said Steve Shivers, Senior Vice President, Corporate Strategy and Development at Qpass, trying desperately to create the perception of a problem a company might hire Qpass to solve. Snitching a thirty-second ringtone’s like stealing a car... one wonders how Shivers would react to a real problem.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Lyle Lovett’s Pontiac:

Plantronics is full of beans this morning, with press advisories about new headsets and a contest to win a place on a space flight.

As Plantronics notes today is the 36-year anniversary of the moon landing, and since Plantronics provided headset Neil Armstrong used to broadcast the “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” transmission from the moon in 1969, the company’s rolling out a “new brand identity and national advertising campaign,” according to company officials, replete with a new corporate logo and tagline – “Sound innovation.”

They’re also launching the “Plantronics to Space and Beyond” promotion, offering consumers “a chance to win a seat on board one of the first commercial flights to space,” according to the contest site. First Coffee^SM hasn’t checked the “full details,” but is sure there’s a list of qualifying details from here to the moon. If only you got miles…

So let’s get to the product announcements:

First up we have the CS55 and CS55 Micro wireless headsets, being billed by company officials as “the first all-wireless headsets in the US to use the new 1.9 GHz voice-dedicated frequency.” They’ll be available in October.

The 1.9 GHz DECT standard frequency is a new voice-dedicated frequency, designed to get rid of interference from nearby Wi-Fi networks, cordless telephones, and other wireless office equipment common on other frequencies.

The headsets themselves, with small booms and weighing 24 to 26 grams and costing about $300, let users move up to 300 feet from their desks while still on a call.

The Pulsar 590 is a Bluetooth stereo headset that lets users listen wirelessly to music and movies and switch to mobile phone calls by pressing one button. Available with a universal Bluetooth audio adapter, the Pulsar 590 provides immediate wireless compatibility for any device with a headphone jack, such as laptops, home stereos, MP3 players, including Apple iPods, and multimedia devices, such as Sony PSP.

The Pulsar 590’s extended range capabilities let users listen to music or have conversations up to 33 feet away from their laptop, music device or cell phone. You can get the headband wearing style with pivoting ear cushions that provide all-day wearing comfort so you pretty much never have to actually talk to a human being all day.

There’s also an in-flight cable allows the headset to be used with the Bluetooth radio disabled, a requirement for most airline travel. It runs about $150 or $200 with the bells and whistles.

And for a nice gift for your friends in commercial aviation there’s a whole “new portfolio” of three headsets approved by the Federal Aviation Administration. In 1999 the FAA selected Plantronics to be its sole provider of headsets for Air Traffic Control, so they know the industry.

The hope is that these nifty new products will pull the company out of its earnings slump. Yesterday they announced quarterly profit fell 2.9 percent, from $22.3 million to $21.7 million on revenues of $148.9 million, up about 13 percent over the previous year’s quarterly revenue. The company blamed the dip in profit on weaker demand for their office products in Europe.
…

Never underestimate the benefit of a catchy opening line. Most press releases First Coffee^SM wades through – but hey, we do it all for you – are MEGO turgid affairs, along the lines of “Acme Anvils, a leading provider of roadrunner solutions, announces the Turbo-Rocket Powered Thingamajig upgrade to its award-winning suite of…” So naturally the following first line got the rest of the release read:

“For small business Davids competing against big business Goliaths, NetOffice has created the slingshot.”

A small thing to you, Dear Reader, who does not have to wade through stupefying obtuse prose every day to extract the nuggets, but much appreciated by First Coffee^SM and, hence, worthy of a few inches of mention as a reward.

NetOffice began in 2004 as a spin-off of an eight-year-old turnkey ASP and offers voice and data communications capabilities through a single point of contact – a Web page accessible through any Internet-connected Windows or Macintosh computer. You’re at the office whenever you log in.

NetOffice says they combine such telephony services as toll-free voice and fax numbers, auto-attendants, Touch-tone-controlled messages, call routing, and voicemail with data management tools such as e-mail, contact, calendar, task, and file management, CRM, file sharing and storage and e-mail marketing “for as little as 67 cents a day.”

“Its toll-free phone services route calls to any number to ensure no calls are missed,” company officials promise. With wireless modem cards, WiFi hotspots, and Internet access on airplanes, “NetOffice users can run their businesses from virtually anywhere.”

So grab your slingshot, David, go out there and put Microsoft out of business.
…

Epicor is announcing their Q2 2005 results, and the numbers are up. George Klaus, chairman, CEO and president of Epicor called them the strongest second-quarter results in the company’s 20-year history.

Total revenues for the second quarter were $71.0 million, compared with $48.6 million in the prior year’s quarter, for a growth rate of 46%. Revenues for the second quarter 2005 included $20.9 million for Scala Business Solutions. Total revenue growth excluding the contribution from Scala, for both periods, was 10%.

License revenues were $19.0 million for the second quarter compared to $12.2 million in the second quarter of 2004, up 55%. License revenues for the second quarter 2005 included $5.2 million for Scala and for the second quarter 2004 included $1.1 million for Scala. Total license revenue growth excluding the contribution from Scala for both periods was 24%.

Total revenues for the six months ended June 30, 2005 were $138.3 million compared with the six-month period ended 2004 at $92.0 million. License revenues for the six-month period were $35.8 million compared with $22.7 million in the prior year period.

Last week Supply & Demand Chain Executive magazine put Epicor on its fourth-annual listing of the Supply & Demand Chain Executive 100. The company markets CRM, ERP and supply chain management software to midmarket firms worldwide.
…

That whoop of joy you hear is coming from Starbucks headquarters in Seattle. Reuters is reporting that the U.S. daily consumption of coffee rose to 53 percent of the population in a 2005 survey, compared with 49 percent in a 2004 survey, according to National Coffee Association of USA findings:

“The annual survey, based on nationwide random-telephone interviews of nearly 3,000 people, found daily coffee drinking among those 18 to 24 years of age reached a record high 26 percent of the respondents, up 4 percentage points from 2004.”

Other age groups showed growth, but none came close to the all-important 18 to 24 demographic.

Daily consumption of “traditional coffee,” a category left unspecified in the news report, rebounded to 50 percent in 2005, snapping a six-year drop. Consumption of gourmet coffee stayed in the 15-16 percent range.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Dave Brubeck’s Time Out. Just never gets old, does it?

First Coffee^SM welcomes Bruce Cleveland this morning. Cleveland is Siebel’s new senior vice president of products, but he’s still running, as before, the company’s OnDemand hosted CRM product and the small and medium business division.

Cleveland graciously took the time to answer some questions First Coffee^SM had. Excerpts appear below, the entire Q&A will be in an article by First Coffee^SM’s mild-mannered reporter alter ego on the TMC site later today:

FC: Congratulations on your promotion at Siebel. Do you get a nicer office now, too?

BC: I’m in the same office, but I’m seeing even less of it than before!

FC: Your new position puts you in charge of products, as well as the on-demand business. What do you see as your top challenges in that position?

BC: Marshalling our resources quickly and effectively to gain the biggest wins the fastest is a critical challenge. Similarly, rapidly assessing areas for disinvestment is critical. [And] with our soon-to-be-introduced custom build CRM solutions, we are moving into an exciting new market.

Continuing to separate fact from fiction as it relates to our actual market and product leadership will be an ongoing challenge. Everyone likes to pick on the leader.

FC: The company that comes out on top in the on-demand CRM space will have done “what” that their rivals failed to do?

BC: Delivered business impact. Customers are beginning to recognize that on-demand is a deployment option and nothing more. It’s not a panacea to CRM success. For a prime example of this, look at the recent report by JMP Securities highlighting Salesforce.com’s failed implementation at Cisco.

FC: If you could wave a magic wand over Siebel right now, what’s the one thing you would change, company-wide?

BC: I think we’ve made our lives a bit too complex and unwieldy, which is understandable for any organization that grew as fast as we did. Our CEO, George Shaheen, has stated that simplifying our operations is one of his key priorities, and I agree.

FC: What’s the most interesting or important book you’ve read in the past year?

BC: Return on Customer: Creating Maximum Value From Your Scarcest Resource, by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers.

FC: You and I have spoken about the rivalry between salesforce.com and Siebel, which reminds me of a great sports rivalry, where one keeps forcing the other to get better. Naturally there’s emotion involved as well, and you mentioned some “creative things” Siebel could do in response to some of salesforce.com’s stunts. Any ideas?

BC: I’d prefer to surprise you, along with everyone else. But to be quite honest, we haven’t had to resort to anything trickier than delivering a solid product.

We are completely focused on sales, marketing and service success – not gimmicks. Our goal is to deliver honest value, not hype. We have taken the processes and templates used by some of the world’s most successful companies and built them into an affordable solution that anyone can use.

FC: What’s the next great innovation in the on-demand CRM space? Are you looking for it in pricing models, delivery or content?

BC: It could be all of the above. The most important take-away is that on-demand CRM is simply a deployment option. I don’t mean that critically. We take the on-demand market very seriously.

But overall, it’s like the old Maslow quote, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you will see every problem as a nail.” We are unique in providing organizations with every conceivable build and buy deployment option – not just hosted CRM.
…

A tip of the coffee pot to Ruth Habbe, just named Demandware, Inc.’s vice president of marketing, where she’ll concentrate on “building upon the company’s momentum in helping multi-channel retailers,” according to company officials.

Prior to Demandware, Habbe served as President at MediaMap, Inc., an application service provider delivering a CRM Communications Management application.
…

New research by independent market analysts Datamonitor and outsourcing advisory firm Everest Group this morning has found that the average size of IT and BPO services contracts almost halved in the second quarter of 2005.

Based on figures from Datamonitor’s “IT Services Contracts Tracker,” the average size of contracts announced by IT and BPO services vendors in the second quarter of 2005 fell to $56 million compared to $106 million in the year ago period, according to company officials. “This means that average deal size has now declined for four consecutive quarters,” Datamonitor concludes.

Datamonitor’s “IT Services Contract Tracker” tracks every new outsourcing, systems integration and consulting deal with a value greater than $1 million signed by major IT services vendors, and has tracked over 7,500 contracts during the last five years.

Datamonitor tracked a total of 447 deals during the second quarter of 2005, which represented a 7.5% rise over the 416 contracts logged during the year-ago period. However the value of deals fell by 43% from $44.1 billion to $25 billion.

Company officials say the decline in average deal size was “largely due to a fall in the number of mega-deals signed during the quarter.” Datamonitor tracked three deals with a value greater than $1 billion – two for IBM and one for BT Group, compared to six in the second quarter of 2004. The number of deals with a value greater than $100 million also fell to 49 from 70 over the same period.
…

NetSuite, Inc. is announcing this morning that Santa Clara-based Helio Solutions, “Sun Microsystems’ largest West Coast technology integrator,” according to NetSuite’s press release, has ripped out accounting software from Peachtree and a proprietary CRM package in favor of NetSuite.

Helio has 60 employees, hitting NetSuite’s sweet spot of the small and medium-sized market. Still, they’re in the top half of the VARBusiness 500 list of the industry’s largest value-added resellers, with revenue of $88 million.
…

First Coffee^SM was in Ankara yesterday, a city with all the charm of a military airport cargo terminal, getting passports renewed and was a bit out of the loop. Catching up, it appears yesterday Tom Sanders wrote about IBM’s new set of tools “that allows enterprises to use blogs for collaboration, bringing enterprise class management tools to the world of online diaries.”

Corporate blogging. That’s one of those things that just sounds wrong, like “government journalist,” “The Anarchy Institute” or “Islamic rock’n’roll.”

“Blogging applications have so far catered to individuals who make postings without any support or management from a larger entity,” Sanders writes, doing a fine job summing up everything worthwhile and interesting about blogs in one sentence.

Monkey around with that and you’ll end up with something about as interesting as an “underground student newspaper” edited by the Dean of Students. Oh you’ll have a vehicle for integrating into your organizational communicational flow chart but it’ll have as much to do with “blogging” as N’Sync does with “punk rock.”

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

First Coffee^SM is in Ankara on Monday, getting two of his kids’ passports renewed at the American Embassy there. Unfortunately it’s not something you can do online. So apologies, and we’ll be back Tuesday.

Got this e-mail today from yet another wretched soul, Debby, who made the mistake of trusting Caiman.com. Debby writes:

I wish I had found this site BEFORE I ordered from Caiman! I ordered a game on May 27th and paid the extra cost for “expedited shipping”. On June 15th I sent an e-mail requesting status on my order. My order was shipped (finally) on June 17th.

I requested a refund for the expedited shipping cost, since they did NOT expedite. They are INSISTING that expedited shipping means that I should receive the order 3 to 6 business days AFTER they ship it. HUH? Expedited shipping, to everyone else on the planet, means the order should be SHIPPED faster than a regular order.

I’m planning on pursuing this as far as possible – it’s not the money now, it’s the principle.

First Coffee^SM has adopted it as his personal CRM In Real Life crusade to make Amazon.com aware of the terrible service, unfilled orders, misleading promises and other reasons why they should disallow Caiman.com from their site.

Call Caiman.com. Caiman.com’s phone number is (305) 262-4973, and Caiman.com’s fax number is (305) 468-3892.

Call Amazon.com. E-mail Amazon.com. If enough of us do it, they’ll have to listen. First Coffee^SM has no faith in Caiman.com, but does believe Amazon.com is interested in providing quality service, and thinks if they’re made aware of how badly Caiman.com treats people who order from them, they’ll take the necessary steps to correct the abuse.

Of course Martin Luther believed about Pope Leo X, too.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Sony’s compilation Pop Music: The Golden Era, 1951-1975 released in 1999. Nice variety of artists from Frank Sinatra to LaBelle, Louis Armstrong to Bob Dylan:

First Coffee^SM’s post on what terrible customer service online retailer Caiman.com provides gets another assent from yet another screwed-over Caiman.com customer.

Frankly First Coffee^SM’s wondering whether terrible customer service provided by such companies is a concern of Amazon.com or not. It’s time to find out.

Because it’s one thing to report on Customer Relationship Management news and issues, and offer insights and pointers on good customer service, that’s great and First Coffee^SM likes doing that, but there are times when something needs to be done in the real world, and it’s time for Amazon.com to do something about Caiman.com.

It started when Caiman.com promised a fictitious ship-by date on a CD First Coffee^SM mild-mannered reporter alter ego ordered from Amazon.com. Their customer “service” afterwards was insulting, canned and rude, so it made a great article, Three Ways To Lose Customers.

Reader Greg Veeser wrote in to say yup, same thing happened to me. Another reader wrote in to say she was jerked around, treated shabbily and rudely by Caiman.com. S Bagby wrote to say Caiman.com ignored their ship-by date – a common practice with them, evidently – and let him know they didn’t care. Here’s a thread on E6 Townhall showing the truth behind Caiman.com’s claims about what they have in stock.

On the Amazon.com site itself burned Caiman.com customers show how Caiman.com promises one thing and ships another. Another sadder but wiser online buyer says “Note: DO NOT BUY FROM CAIMAN.cOM… they are a huge hassel. I ordered two of these from them and they couldnt get the order right even after 8 emails and 3 months.” And pity poor Lacie, who made the mistake of ordering from Caiman.com.

Again, the point is not to be perfect. Nobody’s perfect – not Caiman.com, First Coffee^SM not any online retailer. The point is a) to be truthful about what you have and when you can ship it, and b) when customers complain, be clear and courteous in resolving their problem. That’s what Caiman.com should be doing that they’re not doing.

Lu is but the latest victim of Caiman.com to write to First Coffee^SM. “I got little comfort from hearing that I’m not the only one who has experienced the terrible service from Caiman,” Lu writes. “Please find below the exchange from Caiman after we have been trying for MONTHS to get hold of one CD for my boss – I think this will speak for itself. Amazon should have nothing to do with these guys when the customer service is this poor.”

Here’s Lu’s first e-mail:

RE: CD to be purchased, Order Date: 31 Mar 2005
--------------------------------------
to:XXXXXX@caiman.com

Dear Sir/Madam,

Despite ordering this item a few months back, we are yet to receive the item. Please could you let me know the status of this order?

Kind regards,

And Caiman.com’s canned reply:

Dear Customer,

We regret to inform you that at this time, the item XXXXX you ordered is in back order. It will take 2 to 3 weeks to ship. If you wish, we can cancel your order or keep it open. Please let me know. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Lu sends back a nice e-mail saying “please keep our order alive thanks – (would appreciate updates if the items take longer than a couple of weeks yet to ship.)” Caiman.com responds “Thank you for your patience. We will continue to process your order until further notice.”

All very nice. Then, weeks later, this from Lu:

Well, I think you have had more than 2 to 3 weeks on this now – please can you tell me the REAL status of my order,

Thank you,

Caiman.com’s incomprehensible response:

Dear Customer,

Per your request, we have canceled your order:

We are processing a refund immediately but it can take up to 72 hours to have it complete. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Sincerely,

What? Lu’s bewildered e-mail back:

Dear Caiman,

I never asked for this order to be cancelled - I just wanted the CD - what are you people doing?

Get your act together and tell me if it is possible to get this CD or not - I have been waiting on this order since MARCH, and what’s more, I had no idea that you had charged me BEFORE you even knew if you could get the item!

If you don’t give me a pertinent and clear explanation of your actions, I will be calling both your boss and Amazon to tell them all about the quality of service that you guys are giving your customers.

Your extremely angry customer,

And Caiman.com’s effort to placate their customer and save the relationship:

Dear Customer,

Unfortunately, we will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on these matters.

There. Dear Customer: Screw you, idiot. It’s your fault for trying to do business with weasels like us. Sincerely, Caiman.com.

First Coffee^SM’s gotten more than one complaint about Caiman.com from readers after telling of his own terrible experience with this thoroughly untrustworthy company – their “thanks for your patience” followed by “we’ve cancelled your order” e-mail diptych is the same one reader Greg Veeser reported.

First Coffee^SM is going to send these customer complaints to the appropriate person at Amazon and see if we can improve the overall customer service at Amazon.com. If Caiman.com needs to be dumped over the side to protect the integrity of the “In Stock” claims other Amazon.com vendors make, and to maintain the reputation of Amazon.com itself, so be it. CRM in real life.

Because if jerks like Caiman.com are allowed to operate with impunity on Amazon.com, why should we trust any of their vendors?

We’ll keep you posted on whether or not customer service is a priority with Amazon.com or not.

By the way, anybody else having trouble with Caiman.com, call ‘em up: (305) 262-4973 or send a fax to (305) 468-3892.

If  read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Primal Scream’s 1994 album Give Out But Don’t Give Up:

A tip of the coffee pot to Lawrence “Larry” Asten, who’s being given the position of vice president, worldwide sales and business development at Excel Switching Corporation, a vendor of carrier-class, open services platforms, media gateways and media servers.

Asten’s a respected industry veteran who has about as many years in telecommunications sales and business development as First Coffee^SM has on the planet. He’ll lead Excel’s global sales effort.
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Market analyst Datamonitor is releasing a report this morning examining “the drivers affecting U.S. banks’ distribution channel strategies and the resulting technology implications.” It gets worse.

Regular readers of this space know that First Coffee^SM casts a colder eye on studies purporting to know to decimal places how much money’s going to be spent on this or that a few years off in the future, since the one thing you can always, always count on is that current trends will not continue as neatly as they’re graphed out. But it is nice when you can at least discern what the report is saying.

The report, “Distribution Strategies In U.S. Banking,” rubs a sleeve on the crystal ball and predicts total channel technology spend by year end 2008 will increase by $3.3 billion on 2004 expenditure, creating a $16.5 billion opportunity for vendors.

“Investments will be directed towards optimizing the distribution channel mix and the functionality of individual channels as U.S. banks cut back on aggressively targeting new customers and focus on retaining and cross-selling to more profitable existing clients,” says Clare Buckmaster, financial services technology analyst at Datamonitor and author of the study, who probably doesn’t talk like that in real life.

Giving the ol’ BuzzWord Rand-O-Mizer^TM a spin, Datamonitor officials say the report finds that “banks hoping to differentiate on seamless customer service must integrate channels to support customer relationship management sales and service tools and capitalize on synergies.”

They also report that “by investing in process-centric multi-channel architectures and gearing functionality towards channels’ strengths, US banks can offer seamless customer service across channels, in addition to improving cross-sell rates and leveraging process synergies to reduce costs,” whatever the hell any of that means.

The study uncovers the fact that – you may want to find a chair – “it has become apparent that, rather than commit to anyone [sic] channel in particular, many customers are choosing to make use of the full range of channels available to service their accounts, be it to perform basic transactions or research and buy new products.”

Yew doan say.
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Jason Stamper has a good interview with salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff on ComputerWire this morning. Turns out even back in 1999, when he left Oracle to start salesforce.com, Benioff was already looking past CRM.

“We always set out to create an integrated platform for all sorts of hosted applications, not just CRM, but I didn’t know how to do it. So I thought I’d do an application first to learn what customers want,” he tells ComputerWire.

Consumers got the first clear indication of that with the launch of Summer ‘05, which introduced Multiforce 1.0, which lets customers write all kinds of applications on the Multiforce platform, sharing the salesforce.com data model, security and user interface.

He sees it all as a way of knocking Microsoft down to size, responding to suggestions that Multiforce is a nascent virtual operating system a la Microsoft’s Windows with “we had to do this because Microsoft has let us all down. Excel has not changed dramatically in 20 years – it’s ridiculous.”

For Benioff, it all comes down the platform. Control that and you control everything – “If you focus on an application you will win for a while but you will not win forever. What wins is the platform,” he tells ComputerWire.
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Digital voice recording manufacturer Wygant has announced Interactive Personal Score Cards, a new feature of Portfolio, its reporting and analytics package, itself part of CenterPlus, Wygant’s Quality Monitoring and Analytics product, which enhances its voice logging and quality monitoring systems.

The main selling point of Personal Score Cards appears to be the ability to drill down from performance summaries through the categories and questions and on to the original forms and underlying recordings. This can help contact center quality monitoring and agent coaching.

Wygant president David Lezak himself says “the most significant feature of these Personal Score Cards is the drill-down capability,” saying it lets the agent and coach “move smoothly among different levels of detail.”
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Everybody’s oohing and aahing about China’s immense potential, which they’ve been doing approximately since Marco Polo laid eyes on the place 750 years ago, how they’re going to kick America’s butt in everything and take over the world along the way, but First Coffee^SM’s money is on India in the Next Great Thing sweepstakes.

The three main reasons, of course, are that India is a) a widely Anglophone democracy operating under the rule of law, b) serious about protecting property and intellectual rights, and c) highly entrepreneurial and geared to the private sector. China is none of those nor ever will be, and you can’t name a significant long-term world economic power in the last hundred years who’s not at least two out of those three.

Also right now China’s making all the mistakes Japan made back in the ‘80s, getting suckered into paying grossly overinflated prices for essentially symbolic, threadbare businesses such as Maytag and Unocal (Firestone Tire at $80 a share, anyone?).

Indians are under no such cultural pressure to prove their manhood internationally, not saddled with the demands overinflated national pride places on countries like Japan and China they’re free to work in objective clarity, another huge advantage.

Also a piece in the IndiaDaily this morning, reporting on a McKinsey report saying there will be 4.1 million outsourced jobs to developing nations in 2008. Great, India thinks – “rejoices,” according to the article, since of course it’ll get the lion’s share of those.

However, the article says “the real story is China and India will face massive unemployment and staggering inflation as Robot [sic] take control of factories and intelligent configurable new generation software replaces IT programmers.”

Right now China’s only true economic advantage is that it pays its labor force nothing, so can afford to sell products cheaply overseas.  IndiaDaily’s right that if robotics take over factory production China will be “totally redundant,” although First Coffee^SM doesn’t think that will happen to such an extent, since there’s handwork that needs to be done which robotics will never quite get the hang of.

“Intelligent software applications make programming software obsolete. That takes care of Indian IT boom,” the article frets, adding that “the web based online help and political backlash takes care of call center operations,” and the fear is India’s back to the dirt-poor, squalid pre-Raj days.

Actually China has far more reason to worry about factory automation, since they can’t pick up the services or IT, biotech or any other business as easily as India can. Plus India shows a much greater talent for innovation and competitive advantage than China, which depends heavily on cheap exports –10 percent of India’s economy is dependent on export, compared to 50 percent of China’s. You can have the state-controlled Chinese hare, First Coffee^SM bets on the free market-responsive Indian tortoise.

Now if India would only welcome direct foreign investment...

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content from India, China or anyone.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Tom Waits’ Meisterwerk, 1985’s Rain Dogs:

Global IP Sound is announcing an OEM license agreement with Microsoft for voice processing products which “improve PC-to-PC voice quality” to be used with MSN and Microsoft Office Real-Time Collaboration, according to Global officials.

The MSN Service, which has more than 165 million active users each month, supports not only text instant messaging but also PC-to-PC voice and video services. MSN will use GIPS VoiceEngine, while RTC will use GIPS Acoustic Echo Cancellation and GIPS Auto Gain Control high quality VoIP functionality.

Gary P. Hermansen, President and CEO of GIPS said there are over 200 million downloads of their software currently in market today.

GIPS VoiceEngine is a packaged VoIP product created specifically for PC or PDA applications to improve sound quality in Internet telephony, simplify the integration of speech codecs, communication with sound cards, real-time performance, RTP protocol handling and other voice-related tasks. GIPS AEC is used to eliminate echo caused by acoustic feedback in real-time communications in a PC environment.
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First Coffee^SM is glad things are going so well for the University of Arizona that they need to use CRM to handle all their applications.

The U is using edGenuiti’s Multi-Channel & Multi-Campus CRM for Higher Education to automate much of the University of Arizona’s inquiry and application process, allowing their study abroad staff to manage a record number of applications last year.

Prior to edGenuiti, the study abroad office used separate databases to track different stages of the enrollment process – inquiry, applicant, accepted, rejected, etc. And to make things interesting, the databases were only available via one computer in the office. Their CRM package, in addition to automating their student recruitment communications, let the university consolidate all their student recruitment information and make it accessible to their staff anywhere.

“Our data access is now transparent and available to all users regardless of their physical location,” explains David Wright, Director of the U’s Study Abroad Office.
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It’s Quarterly Report Season, and First Coffee^SM noticed yesterday that CRM and voice apps vendor FrontRange Solutions had a decent quarter, reporting an increase in revenues and profits for the quarter ended April 30, 2005.

Total revenue for the quarter increased to $21.6 million, an increase of over 14% from the $18.9 million for the three months ended March 31, 2004, including an increase in license revenue of more than 22% over the same period of the prior year.

In addition to an increase in revenue, FrontRange also reported an operating profit of $2.3 million, an increase of 30% over the three months ended March 31, 2004. They also signed 33 customers during Q4, with 13 customer transactions in excess of $100,000.
...

They’re a privately-held company so they’re out of all this quarterly report swirl, but TouchStar Software Corporation is a young company on the rise: The Denver Business Journal has named TouchStar a finalist in its annual Fastest Growing Large Private Companies competition.

TouchStar Software, a contact center dialer software developer, was cited for its consistent, steady growth over the past four years. They’re headquartered in Denver with sales offices in Denver, Atlanta, Tampa and Jacksonville.
…

Israel-based ECI Telecom is announcing that it has implemented the XDM Multi-Service Provisioning Platform in Astral Telecom’s network.

Astral Telecom, of course, is one of the most significant national providers in Romania of analog and digital cable TV, Internet, and voice services.

The XDM MSPP is already installed in Astral’s national 10 Gbps (STM-64/OC-192) SDH backbone network and connects all the major cities in Romania. The contract is specifically designed to provide Astral’s customers with next generation services.

Astral likes ECI’s Build-As-You-Grow approach, which provides Astral with cost savings and ease of integration, and the additional capacity needed for leasing lines to other carriers and for cross border interconnection – as they can afford it.

Astral’s also planning to use the XDM MSPP platform to migrate to DWDM as the network grows, without changing the existing platform. Eli Peled, President of the Eastern Europe business unit at ECI Telecom says the firm has been getting some serious traction in eastern Europe.

Astral Telecom has 800,000 cable subscribers in over 170 locations. It upgraded its network infrastructure and has now, in most of the cities it operates, broadband optical fiber networks capable of providing the full package of services including video, Internet and telephony/voice.
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Another company new to First Coffee^SM, VoIP software manufacturer Brekeke Software is announcing the release of its upgraded OnDO PBX, an SIP compliant IP-PBX with what company officials promise is “increased call control performance.”

OnDO PBX v1.4 is an office telephony system billed as providing “robust, high-performance, and intelligent IP-PBX functionality.” This IP-PBX software supports Session Initiation Protocol and is designed for scalability from smaller to larger offices.

The new features in version 1.4 include call conferencing and call recording. OnDO PBX is compatible with most any SIP phone in the market.

There’s also a bandwidth saving option. OnDO PBX supports multi-platform (Windows, Red Hat Linux, and Solaris) operations. There’s a trial version available for free.
...

The Washington Post writes of a way to upgrade employee loyalty and increase productivity at the same time: Give them good coffee.

K12 Inc. is a McLean, Virginia-based publisher of print and computer-based curricula with a staff of 200-plus employees. Its director of procurement and administration, Fran Roman, buying Starbucks coffee for the office four months ago. Employees “flooded her with grateful e-mails,” she told the Post, and management got more of their time.

To avoid the usual burned office swill, K12 employees had organized a coffee club. Heather Charles, senior finance manager, says twice a day one member of the club would fight Northern Virginia traffic to make the run to a Starbucks drive-through.

“I was spending $6 a day for coffee,” Charles told the Post. When the office began providing Starbucks, Charles said, “it was like getting a raise.”

The Post reports K12 management found “in-house Starbucks is paying for itself in increased productivity.” Charles’s boss, finance chief John F. Baule said “I was losing up to 40 minutes a day of Heather’s time. I couldn’t afford that.”

In fact, multiplying the time lost going out to Starbucks by employees shows that providing it on site is quite an efficient idea. Because let’s face it, a lot of us run on caffeine at work, and good coffee is much more important to Americans. The burned no-name stuff our parents put up with at the office isn’t cutting it any more.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content and brews the good stuff.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the ol' iTunes shuffle, current selection "Jesus Walking On the Water" by The Violent Femmes:

Here we go again. Another highly slanted crap “study” purporting to show how dangerous it is to talk on the cell phone while driving. Cue the Moron Choir’s tired, scratchy refrain about how cell phone usage in cars should be banned.

First Coffee^SM will listen to pleas to ban cell phone usage while driving once roadside ads, rubbernecking at wreck sites, drive-through fast food, driving while tired, driving after taking prescription drugs, car audio systems, talking to passengers, looking at scenery and loose objects in cars, easily distractable and generally flat-out stupid people driving are all banned, since every honest study that’s ever been done shows all of those cause far, far more accidents than cell phone usage.

Prescription drugs alone cause one-third of all accidents. One third! That’s the same percentage caused by people under the influence of pot, coke, heroin and alcohol combined. You’d think people more interested in auto safety than political agendas would be clamoring to ban prescription drug usage while driving, an activity which is perfectly legal in all 50 states. No protest on the horizon that First Coffee^SM can see.

But that isn’t as sexy for cheapjack politicians and bureaucrats angling for face time on the local news, or the prune-lipped safety Nazis who dream of laws prohibiting motorcycles, bicycles, driving, eating, walking and breathing.

The Associated Press article reporting the “study” starts out “Drivers using cellular phones are four times as likely to get into a crash that can cause injuries serious enough to send them to the hospital, said an insurance study released Tuesday.”

Note that, “insurance study.” Can you guess what the “study” will “find?” Let’s continue.

Second paragraph: “Research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety suggests that using a hands-free device instead of a hand-held phone while behind the wheel will not necessarily improve safety. The institute [an organization completely funded by the auto insurance industry, a fact the reporter doesn’t point out] said it was the first attempt to estimate whether phone use increases the risk of an injury crash in automobiles.”

My, my. Everybody stop using cell phones in the car, right? Let’s read on.

Further down we find that the “study” was published in the British Medical Journal. But… this did study Americans, right? That’s why it was conducted by an American institute, fobbed off as being relevant to American cell phone usage and given big play in the American media, right?

… counting down, eighth, ninth… tenth paragraph, long after most readers have moved on to the sports page, we find the “study” examined “456 drivers in Perth, Western Australia, who owned or used mobile phones and were in a crash that put them in a hospital emergency room between April 2002 and July 2004.”

Ah. As we all know, of course, western Australia is so like urban America the study’s results can be assumed to be identical to a similar study conducted here, right? Puh-leeze. And see if this methodology makes any sense to you, First Coffee^SM can’t figure it out:

“Each driver's cell phone usage during a 10-minute interval prior to the accident was compared to use during at least one earlier period when no accident occurred. Each driver, in effect, served as his or her own control group in the study.”

What that seems to be saying is that of some drivers who had crashed who happened to be talking on cell phones in the ten minutes prior to their crash, these same drivers at earlier times were not talking on the cell phones and didn’t crash… no indication of how frequently they drove talking on the cell phone without crashing, or how many crashes overall are caused by cell phone usage, which to First Coffee^SM would be two salient point of any worthwhile study.

First Coffee^SM is also curious how studying people who crashed once while talking on cell phones after not crashing while talking on cell phones before leads to the conclusion that talking on cell phones makes one “four times” as likely to crash. Where did that number come from given the methodology – “his or her own control group,” remember – used?

Much further down in the article, three paragraphs from the end, where nobody except columnists fisking the article read, we find “Many studies examining cell phone use in vehicles have been based on police reports, but critics say the records are unreliable because it is difficult to corroborate whether a driver was using a phone.”

The critics have a point. Police reports from the Florida state highway patrol show that 1 in every 700 crashes is due to cell phone usage, a statistic nobody on either side of the debate believes, but that’s what the police reports say.

The article does mention the intriguing stat that “a survey released earlier this year by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that 8 percent of drivers, or 1.2 million people, were using cell phones during daylight hours last year. It represented a 50 percent increase since 2002.”

It’s not mentioned whether there’s been a corresponding increase in accidents, or how many of those 1.2 million got in wrecks because of their cell phone usage.

First Coffee^SM would bet not many. A HealthScout study done in 2001 found the following ranking of which distractions caused accidents:

1. Outside distractions, such as a eye-catching advertisement or eyeing another accident, 19.7 percent.
2. Eating and drinking, 18.8 percent.
3. Fiddling with the car audio system, 11.4 percent.
4. Chatting with other passengers, 9.4 percent.
5. Trying to retrieve loose objects rolling about the car, 3.2 percent.
6. Cell phone usage, 1.5 percent.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Best of Tony Bennett:

A tip of the coffee pot to Dan Taylor, just appointed to Scribe Software Corporation’s board of directors. Dan’s the founder and former CEO of ManagedOps.com and The Taylor Group, and the author of Integration Manager, the original standard for integration with Microsoft Great Plains that is now part of the Microsoft Great Plains offering.
...

It’s nice to get a different-sounding news advisory once in a while, and Business Signatures Corporation is announcing that today they’ve “emerged from a four-year stealth phase” to “unveil an innovative software solution called Business Signatures Customer Intent Suite.”

A four-year stealth phase! That’s a lot more bracing than the usual “Acme Anvils is announcing the release of the revolutionary innovative earthshattering epochal XP-49 Roadrunner Crusher dashboard add-on solution…” drone.

Based on what BSC claims is “new data management technology,” it’s “designed to help companies discern the intent of their online customers in real time – and act upon it immediately.”

Business Signatures was founded in 2001 by three ex-Oracle guys who set out to solve what they identified as “the three biggest challenges facing online businesses today” – managing IT infrastructure for the best possible customer experience, preventing online fraud and maximizing customer profitability through personalized customer service.

To do this, company officials explain, they “focused on the one problem not currently addressed by existing solutions: understanding customers’ online interactions as they happen, at scale and at the individual customer and transaction level.”

The product BSC is hawking here is designed to give companies an “instantaneous” view of customer intent: what online customers are trying to do in the moment. They think this will allow companies to “act immediately to service, protect and, ultimately, retain their customers.”

Peter Relan, founder and CEO of Business Signatures says discerning actionable customer intent in the online channel is a lot harder than it is in a store, where you can watch the customer pick up a paintbrush, a roller, drop cloths, price blue paint and scrapers, discern he’s going to paint his back porch and go over and offer painting tips and suggestions and sell him some extra sanders and a stepladder and keep him coming back as a Satisfied Customer.

Can’t do that online. So BSC has developed the Business Signatures Intent Processor, based on a new data management technology called “streaming query.” Instead of the traditional “store first, query later” approach, it takes a “query first, store later” approach that can “rapidly convert the massive volumes of HTTP data streams generated by a transactional Web site into chunks of immediately intelligible information,” according to company officials.
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A while ago First Coffee^SM wrote about The Customer Care Institute’s invitation to North American contact center managers to participate in “a survey designed to capture information for the ‘internationally renowned’ Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report by visiting www.customercare.com before July 31, 2005.”

CCI Managing Direct Roger H. Nunley says that “U.S. benchmarking alone is no longer enough,” what with offshoring and all “best practices contact centers can be found in growing numbers of countries around the world.”

Reading between the lines of their latest plea, the response has been slightly underwhelming. They’re offering a free copy of the $1,500 in-depth 2006 report, which is supposed to provide managers with a set of benchmarks with which to measure contact center operations.

Just a friendly reminder.
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Everon Technology Services LLC, a vendor of managed IT services to small to medium size businesses, will be conducting a series of free webinars aimed at helping SMB’s use technology.

This webinar, “7 Technology Habits of Highly Successful Small to Medium-Size Businesses,” will be conducted nationwide via the Internet.

“Most SMB’s may be under-utilizing the capabilities of their technology by as much as 50%” say Michael Cooch, co-founder of Everon and one of the presenters. The webinar is designed to show viewers “how to get the most out of their technology to increase productivity and revenue,” according to Everon officials.

Non-profit technology experts David Liniado and Michael Cooch, founders of Everon Technology Services, will provide specific examples, tools, and recommendations for using technology. Attendees of this webinar will also receive a free Systems Inventory Report, giving business leaders a snapshot of the health and effectiveness of all their technology.

The Webinar runs July 19, 2005 at 2:00 p.m. EST and July 21, 2005 at 2:00 p.m. EST. Bring your own doughnuts.
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Nasdaq-listed Internet Gold is claiming this morning that it’s become the first Internet Service Provider in Israel “and one of the few ISPs in the world” to support IPv6, the Next Generation Internet Protocol.

Having completed a year-long infrastructure upgrade process, officials say, “the company has now begun supporting the use of state-of-the art IPv6 services and devices by its business customers and will soon extend the same support to residential customers.”

Internet Gold has deployed IPv6 on existing networks in parallel with IPv4, the legacy protocol. Generally ISPs will simply install separate new networks for IPv6. Arik Alster, Vice President of Technology and Service of Internet Gold says IPv6 provides improved IP addressing, routing and autoconfiguration capabilities, improving such offerings as Multicast and Anycast.

One of the primary advantages of the IPv6 protocol is its transition to a 128-bit IP address from the 32-bit address currently used by today’s IPv4 protocol. This is expected to help cure the expected shortage of IP addresses, allowing for a virtually unlimited number of IP addresses in the future.

It also is one step closer to the geek heaven of “connect everything” applications, such as the hellish “Smart Home” concept only a true technonerd would think at all desirable a concept, where refrigerators communicate through the Internet with supermarkets and appliances communicate with maintenance services.
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It’s Amazon.com’s tenth anniversary, and they’ve listed their 25 top-selling authors. First Coffee^SM will ruin the suspense and reveal that J.K. Rowling is the #1-selling author – who’dja think? – but the list is heavily salted with business and motivational authors. Matter of fact, at #2, snugly between Harry Potter’s creator and Nos. 3 and 4 Nora Roberts and Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code), is Spencer Johnson, author of Who Moved My Cheese? and The One-Minute Manager.

Holding down #10, between Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye (the Left Behind series) and Dr. Phil, is Jim Collins, author of Built to Last and Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make The Leap… And Others Don’t. Ken Blanchard, Johnson’s co-author of The One-Minute Manager is at #15 and Stephen Covey checks in at #17.

Marcus Buckingham, the employee productivity expert is at #19, bookended by children’s authors May Pope Osborne and Lemony Snicket (the good Dr. Seuss is #5). Leadership speaker (12 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership) John Maxwell is at #21, and Rich Dad, Poor Dad author Robert T. Kiyosaki is at #23.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content. None, zip, nada.