By David Sims
[email protected]
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 CoffeeSM
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 CoffeeSM 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.
…
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.”
…
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?
…
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.”
…
An interesting company on First
CoffeeSM’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.
…
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 CoffeeSM
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 CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.