By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and we have a
good ol’ classic rockfest on the CD changer, the Stones’ Exile On Main Street, Neil Young’s Live Rust, The Allman Brothers’ Eat
A Peach… about as good as rock got before it died in the ‘90s:
Living here on the Mediterranean has its advantages, one of
which is, well, the Mediterranean Sea
itself.
First CoffeeSM usually preps for the day by doing
laps in the pool, but today went along
with a good friend to some rocks overlooking the sea, jumped in – scariest
part of the whole day – and did some serious swimming, watching fish – a school
of flying fish took off right in front of First CoffeeSM and his
friend, trying to get the watches snagged on rocks in the shallows and
swallowing salt water.
First CoffeeSM swam in college, so chlorine’s a
daily nutrient as far as he’s concerned, but if there’s any more of this ocean
swimming in the future his freestyle breathing motion needs to be adjusted so
not quite as much salt water’s ingested.
It is great not to have to stop to flip turn at the pool
wall, just swim as long as you can. Disorienting at first not to have the blue
stripe at the bottom of the pool to follow, to have to reckon by the coast
line, but a great morning.
…
First CoffeeSM will be in San Francisco in
September for salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event – yep, get the beer cold,
Andrew – but wishes he could be there,
flowers in his hair, for the “madhouse” that is TMC’s VoIP Developer Conference.
“TMC’s
VoIP Developer Conference is a madhouse. It truly
is,” says Rich Tehrani, TMC’s president. “The conferences started about 20
minutes ago and we have been scrambling to get more chairs to put into the
sessions to keep up with all the people. We have
been overwhelmed with traffic.”
Word
is one session had chairs out in the hall to accommodate attendees and people
standing behind the chairs. First CoffeeSM’s pretty sure that was
the “Rich Tehrani/Al Bredenberg/Robert Liu/Tracy Schelmetic Hip-Hop Dance
Contest” session. No word yet on who won.
As
Greg Galitzine, editorial director of Internet Telephony magazine says, “If this
is a sign of things to come, the next three days are going to be
gangbusters. If you are in the area, you absolutely need to get down
here.”
…
Boy, go from being introduced to a company to seeing them
everywhere… First CoffeeSM wrote on Relationals last week upon
hearing about them for the first time, and now sees where they’ve signed up Knight-Ridder’s Charlotte
Observer for their hosted CRM suite to accelerate the sales process,
improve sales collaboration, and improve advertiser retention.
The company describes themselves as targeting the publishing
and media industry – “completely focused on the unique requirements of the
newspaper and media industries advertising and agency relationships,” to be
exact.
Susan Gagnon, Recruitment Advertising Sales Manager at the Observer – what a great name for a
newspaper – says with the Relationals tools, “we now have sales management
capabilities to improve our revenue forecasting and business planning… [and] a
central point for all customer information,” which gives secure access to
customer contacts, new opportunities, prior purchase, and campaign history.
…
This got surprisingly little play when it was announced
yesterday – First CoffeeSM saw it on the invaluable Line56
– but research firm IDC has announced a new study, titled “Worldwide CRM Applications
2004 Vendor Shares: Let the Games Begin” showing that Siebel, Oracle and SAP were #1, #2 and #3
respectively in CRM in 2004.
2004 itself was a good year for CRM, IDC
says, noting that the sector grew about nine percent. Its research estimates
that “Siebel had 10.7 percent of worldwide CRM applications software
market share, with Oracle moving up to number two, with 6.8 percent. SAP,” which
AMR Research pegged as having overtaken Siebel to capture the CRM lead last
year, “is in third place, barely behind Oracle.”
Competing analyst results. Caveat emptor, friends.
But the market’s still pretty fragmented – these top three
vendors, combined, account for under 25 percent of the total market. Altogether,
the report mentions 153 vendors.
The report also found that on-demand products, such as those
offered by salesforce.com and RightNow Technologies, have “generated
significant revenue and will continue to become a greater factor in the market
going forward,” according to IDC officials.
CRM implementations now often involve flexible business
process flows versus discrete functional implementation, a trend IDC thinks
will continue for the foreseeable future. And “analytic capabilities embedded
within CRM applications” leads the top of the functionality “must have” list.
The report addressed the fact that everyone seems to think
Siebel’s an also-ran, but that’s mostly because “they had the market share to
lose.” IDC found, after sifting
vendor-reported and observed trends, 2004 license and maintenance revenues, and
in-depth vendor surveys and analysis that they’re still the big dog. Maybe not as big as before, but currently
there ain’t no one bigger.
…
A tip of the coffee pot to Deborah A. Branch, just named Vice President of Finance at SER
Solutions, Inc. SER sells software for contact center, data capture and
search and retrieval. Ms. Branch has over 20 years of experience in finance,
and will manage the overall direction and control of all financial matters in
support of the company’s strategic business objectives including accounting,
credit and capital expenditure, reporting, planning, and cost analysis.
…
The Auto
Channel is reporting that iCarMagic, a web-based CRM services company
targeting automotive dealers has
finalized an agreement with MyCarLink.com to acquire that company’s assets in a
private transaction:
“Effective immediately the company’s entire product line
will be incorporated into the iCarMagic suite of dealer products which now
include CRM, BDC, Internet Lead Management, Inventory Control, Websites and
Service Department CSI systems. The consolidated operations for MyCarLink.com
will be out of the new iCarMagic corporate headquarters in Novato, California.”
…
Faced
with a population increasingly reliant upon cell phones,
pagers and Black and BlueBerries,
these devices may soon replace CNN and
the radio at the cutting edge of terrorism prevention and response efforts,
emergency preparedness expert Michael J. Hopmeier told a recent NATO
conference on risk assessment and risk communication related to bioterrorism
held in Ein Gedi, Israel.
Hopmeier said during a crisis authorities must “educate, inform and direct the
public to ensure that situations of chaos do not result,” and that “any
communications strategy should have as its goal, an en masse public response that is logical, predictable and benefits the
most number of people.”
Hopmeier, president of Unconventional Concepts Inc., a Florida-based
engineering and scientific consulting firm specializing in crisis management
and integrated federal/civilian disaster response, suggested that “terrorism’s
randomness and uncertainty also requires that authorities use those
technologies that reach the greatest number of people in the least amount of
time.”
Such as the personal communications devices listed above,
which can be “easily targeted,” Hopmeier says. Running alerts on Google and
Yahoo! wouldn’t be a bad idea either, First CoffeeSM supposes.
“There is an almost 60 percent penetration rate of cell phones in the U.S.,
reaching up to 100 percent in countries such as Britain and Italy,” Hopmeier
said.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.
