First Coffee for July 28, 2005

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

First Coffee for July 28, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

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 CoffeeSM, 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 CoffeeSM doesn’t normally reprint press release “testimonials,” but that just sounded so… enthusiastic about the product.

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.

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.”

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.

As an Official Member of the Anti-Idiotarian Blogosphere, First CoffeeSM 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 CoffeeSM 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 CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content. 



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