First Coffee for July 27, 2005

David Sims : First Coffee
David Sims
| CRM, ERP, Contact Center, Turkish Coffee and Astroichthiology:

First Coffee for July 27, 2005

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.



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