September 2005 Archives

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the last decent album U2 ever made, 1991’s Achtung Baby:

You know, the more First Coffee^SM thinks about it, the more he wonders why, in the “multi-billion dollar scheme of things,” America’s troops in Iraq and Afghanistan don’t get some free calls home?

Yesterday, doing an article on military bloggers First Coffee^SM’s mild-mannered reporter alter ego ran across a good blog from an American soldier serving in Iraq, Baltimore’s very own Chris Whong, who wrote about calling home from Iraq that “when you pick up the phone, you get some kind of tone, which if you listen long enough sounds like ‘haha, you soldiers, we’re getting rich off you because every time you initiate a call on your phone card, it costs you 10 or 20 extra units’ or something to that effect…

“Maybe I am just silly,” Whong continues, “but it seems like it wouldn’t cost that much money in the grand, multi-billion dollar scheme of things to provide free phone service to troops serving overseas.” As Whong says, $10 an hour to talk on the phone “kind of sucks, especially when the service cuts out whenever it feels like it.”

Would it work, giving free calls to soldiers? Of course it would. Instead of 40 soldiers using up calling cards at once on 40 different phones, give ‘em all Uncle Sam’s number and PIN and set the timer for half an hour – as someone who calls home from overseas himself and who was, ah, friends with a lady living in a different country for years, First Coffee^SM knows even those who miss each other most ardently kind of run out of meaningful things to say after, oh, half and hour (unless the entire twenty-odd Rizzucci or O’Malleyghan or Jones clan is clustered around, grabbing for the phone saying “Me next! Me next!”) and search around for things like “Yeah, pretty hot here. So, getting any good deals on lawn fertilizer?” to keep conversations going.

Set whatever rules you want, have a sign-up sheet, monitors, trap doors that open at a set time, however you want to police call length. Distribute cards each week good for one or two hours calling anywhere in the world, and not only create an instant non-cash currency on the base – in those old World War II movies soldiers used cigarettes as currency, now they could use calling time for Texas Hold-‘em stakes.

Let’s consider possible reasons why they don’t get free calls now:

International carriers would lose money. No they wouldn’t, the Army would pay them. “Oh, think how expensive that would be…” Please. They’ve already killed the stupid $9 billion Crusader artillery system which nobody in the military actually wanted and scuttled the $30 billion Commanche attack helicopter program, you’re saying they can’t find a million here and there to pump back into the American economy?

Buy two fewer useless V-22 Osprey helicopters and save $160 million right there, as well as save servicemen’s lives from future crashes. Buy one fewer F-22 and save $257 million. Knock General Dynamics down to $850 instead of $1,000 on the toilet seats and you can pay for every American soldier serving in Iraq and Afghanistan to talk to their hearts’ content at the most usurious rates international carriers can dream up.

Remember that stupid Bridge To Nowhere in Alaska some hog-snouted congressman slopped out of the pork trough, costing $223 million to connect Ketchikan, Alaska (population 8,900) to Gravina Island, population 50, so residents don’t have to suffer through a ten-minute ferry ride? Wonder how many phone calls that’d pay for?

Besides, if you get a really, really bright procurement officer, some guy sharp as a tack, he might think to say to bidding carriers “We’d like to give all that business to one of you guys. Put your best rate in writing now.” Maybe not all the carriers around the table would charge rack rate, y’know? Throw in a couple VoIPers to really stir things up, maybe they’d give the Pentagon, like, um, what’s that called when you buy a lot of something and get a cheaper rate per unit… oh yeah, a “bulk discount.”

Plus First Coffee^SM’s heard of this great new thing called VoIP, where it really doesn’t cost all that much…

Everyone would want to be on the phone all the time. Sure they would, but that’s why in the army you have these things called “discipline” and “rules” and “KP duty.” Do they still put soldiers on KP, peeling potatoes for breaking rules, like making unauthorized phone calls, or has First Coffee^SM been watching too many old World War II movies? Whatever, certainly there’s a modern-day equivalent, swabbing out the latrines, reading Maureen Dowd columns or however they punish the truly henious rule-breaking.

Friends, we’re talking about soldiers serving in the army in a war zone, it’s not like guys are hanging around all day looking for something to do, oh, phone calls are free? Great, think I’ll spend the next four hours on the phone, hey you guys go on patrol without me.

Those are all the only two semi-rational reasons First Coffee^SM can think of for not letting soldiers make free calls home from Iraq and Afghanistan, of course this being the military no doubt there are many “reasons” which First Coffee^SM can’t even conceive of, but which make perfect sense to whoever’s in charge of making sure soldiers aren’t getting free phone calls home.

Now why would it make sense? The list here begins and ends with the only real consideration that needs to be, uh, considered:

Boosts morale. Believe me, this would be a major, major morale booster for our servicemen and women in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the relatively little it would cost, for an organization with a $400 billion dollar-plus budget – not even including the Iraq and Afghanistan operations – Whong’s “grand, multi-billion dollar scheme of things” – it’d be a heck of a deal.

Let’s review a bit of classic Customer Relationship Management for a minute, this (ostensibly) being a CRM blog. What’s the #1 priority for the army as far as their relationships with their soldiers – employees – goes? Loyalty. The army needs loyal soldiers the way companies need loyal employees. Companies who know what they’re doing go to great lengths to secure employee loyalty, without which they know they’ll never get any customer loyalty.

Think of all the perks and freebies companies give valued employees to curry loyalty. Why can’t an hour or two of free calls home be included in the soldier’s perks? God knows they’re not exactly rolling in perks over there, and this is the one they really want, it’s relatively inexpensive to provide, and what a morale boost, knowing that the country values the job they’re doing over there so much they let them call home for free so they can hear from those they love best how much their sacrifices are valued.

The soldiers want it – an Air Force Chaplain Assistant with the pen name “Airmen in Iraq,” wrote in a Sept. 10 posting on the blog http://thewann.blogspot.com/ about what Americans can send service members in Iraq, “I was talking to some of the chaplains about care packages. We have tooth brushes, toothpaste, shampoo, razors and all of that stuff. At this moment the only thing we can think of would (be) calling cards. I don’t think we can have too many calling cards!”

Can you come up with a more cost-effective way to boost the morale of those doing in the most dangerous jobs America asks its citizens to do? If so send an e-mail, First Coffee^SM’d love to hear it.

Look, bottom line here, folks, it’s just the right thing to do. Isn’t it the least we can do for them – a couple free phone calls a week? Doesn’t “the least” pretty well cover it?

Imagine the P.R. coup a carrier would get – “We provided free calls to the brave men and women defending freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan,” never mind that they were paid by the Pentagon to the last penny.

Things like that stay with a soldier. The hundreds of thousands of Americans who served overseas in World War II came home hooked on Coca-Cola and Lucky Strikes, not in small measure because those companies made sure soldiers had them. That’s a pretty strong emotional attachment when you’re that far away from home, you remember what and who made you feel a little more at home.

So anyway, write your Congressional representative, senator, favorite four-star general, whoever, and ask “Why can’t we give our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan free calls home a couple times a week?” If any of them have anything intelligent to say please do let First Coffee^SM know.

And while you’re at it, ask “Why can’t First Coffee^SM get free French Roast beans?”

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 as the luck of the Five CD Changer Draw would have it, we’re listening to “Jack The Idiot Dunce” by The Kinks:

China Mobile, the world’s largest GSM operator, has selected Nortel to expand its digital wireless network in six regions under a series of contracts this year, collectively estimated at $150 million.

The work includes network optimization to improve China Mobile’s infrastructure and performance and to let the operator standardize service pricing across all regions.

China Mobile’s GSM network expansion in the six regions will increase subscriber capacity by 3.48 million to a total of approximately 18 million, and improve its chances of offering future 3G services.

Nortel has deployed wireless networks in 17 of China’s 31 provinces and municipalities, including GSM digital infrastructure equipment for China Mobile affiliate companies in the provinces of Hebei, Shaanxi, Tianjin, Xinjiang, Guizhou, Anhui, Liaoning and Hunan.
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After spending close to thirty seconds trying to make sense of the headline “UK Business to Pocket Marketing Hits the Mainstream With Radical New Service” – is “pocket” a noun or verb, is “Business to Pocket” a phrase – First Coffee^SM finally just had to read the article. Hate it when that happens.

It’s a re-announcement from SMS marketing company TxtLocal.com (see if you can figure out the URL) for a “pocket marketing” service for all UK businesses, large or small, “that could do for SMS mobile marketing what Hotmail did for e-mail,” company officials claim. At least they think big.

The original announcement a week ago claimed it was a “free text service” on the grounds that they give you a “a totally free mobile number and keyword” – while charging you 5.5 pence per call.

Backtracking on that claim, the company has carefully excised the word “free” from the latest announcement.

Evidently any business, service or community group can obtain a mobile number and keyword to publish on their stationery, marketing material and web site to “enable rapid collection of opt-in customers eager” – eager! – “to hear about news and promotions.” The business can then contact these people, sending them a text message, for just five pence ha’penny. Which, of course, adds up pretty quickly into some serious guineas.

“Many users report a 40 percent response to promotions and a 200 percent increase in sales,” claims TxtLocal creator, Alastair Shortland. He thinks it’s “so effective” because “advertising is aimed directly to customers who have requested it – straight to their pocket.” Ah, so that’s where that comes from.

SMS is becoming more popular in the United Kingdom as a business communication and promotional tool, and TxtLocal is trying to establish itself as a standard vendor for the market, fair enough. Its angle is offering a mobile number and keyword to facilitate the collection of opt-in mobile numbers.

Keith Milford, identified by TxtLocal officials as “a Chinese takeaway manager in Leeds,” what they probably mean is the manager of a Chinese takeaway, says his eatery publishes their number and keyword on menus and place a slip of paper into all orders saying “To hear about special offers text...”.

Milford reports that in the first week alone they got 80 customer numbers, and they’re up to a texting opt-in list of 400, to whom they send message offers weekly along the lines of “Show this message to get 20 percent discount on Wednesday,” and get “a queue of people going down the street.”

Jim Woods, a hairdresser in Derby has 300 customers on his list, and says “If we need to fill seats we send 100 messages offering a 20 percent discount if visit us before 6 p.m.”
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Persona Software, Inc., a vendor of SIP-based Personal Mobility Applications is announcing a new version of its Persona OnePhone for Fixed Mobile Convergence.

Persona OnePhone 2.0 provides support for an expanded range of dual mode (WiFi/cellular) handsets and operating systems including Symbian OS, used by many handset manufacturers. The latest version of Persona OnePhone adds some end user features, claims increased security capabilities and integration with the IP Multimedia Subsystem, which is the basis for FMC and future converged services.

“The FMC market is ready to explode,” says Rob Fuggetta, Vice President of Marketing and Chief Marketing Officer for Persona Software, who’s tired of people adding “boutit” on the end of his name. Fuggetta thinks the open SIP standard is the heart of next-generation IMS/3G networks.

Delivered on Persona Software’s SIP Application Server, Persona OnePhone lets mobile users to roam between WiFi and cellular networks with one phone, one identity and one phone number.

In addition to Symbian, the product also supports Windows Mobile 5.0 and Micro Linux Mobile.
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American service members deployed to Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom are some pretty serious bloggers, and a quick check of the blogs turns up a sure-fire, never-fail “we appreciate you and the job you’re doing” gift: calling cards.

An Air Force Chaplain Assistant with the pen name “Airmen in Iraq,” wrote in a Sept. 10 posting (http://thewann.blogspot.com/ ), “I was talking to some of the chaplains about care packages. We have tooth brushes, toothpaste, shampoo, razors and all of that stuff. At this moment the only thing we can think of would (be) calling cards. I don’t think we can have too many calling cards!”

But beware of what kind of card you send. “I received a regular phone card in a letter from home, which was supposed to have 60 minutes or something, but with the Kuwait-U.S. charges, it turned into more like 13,” another blogger, the Maryland Guardsman who blogs as “Chris Whong” (http://chris.whong.org/ ) wrote.

The best place to go to send cards to the troops is https://thor.aafes.com/scs/default.aspx, which is run by the Army & Air Force Exchange Service where you can buy the 550-unit cards for $40, which are the best value for talk time.

AAFES usually requires you to be in the military to shop online, but they now allow anyone to buy phone cards for troops overseas. So do it – www.aafes.org, or call 800-527-2345, ask for “Help Our Troops Call Home” phone cards and let the Red Cross, Fisher House or USO distribute it to “any service member,” unless you have someone specific in mind.

By the way, for some absolutely outstanding front-lines blogging, hit independent journalist Michael Yon’s “Gates Of Fire” at http://michaelyon.blogspot.com/2005/08/gates-of-fire.html as he goes on a raid, and ends up in the middle of the combat himself.

After the firefight a wounded American soldier is lying in a hospital bed practically next to one of jihadis who was trying to kill him. Naturally, as Yon says, “over lunch with Chaplain Wilson and our two battalion surgeons, Major Brown and Captain Warr, there was much discussion about the ‘ethics’ of war, and contention about why we afford top-notch medical treatment to terrorists. The treatment terrorists get here is better and more expensive than what many Americans or Europeans can get.

“‘That’s the difference between the terrorists and us,’ Chaplain Wilson kept saying. ‘Don’t you understand? That’s the difference.’”

Amen.

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 some Frank Sinatra album with “swing,” “dance” or “lovers” in the title – First Coffee^SM is quite fond of Sinatra’s music, but recognizes he didn’t have the most creative marketing folks naming his albums, as there’s Swing And Dance With Frank Sinatra, Sing and Dance With Frank Sinatra, Come Dance With Me, Come Fly With Me, Come Swing With Me, Swing Easy, Songs For Swinging Lovers, Songs For Young Lovers… no Songs For Flying, Swinging, Dancing Lovers that First Coffee^SM’s aware of.

Not sure about you, but when First Coffee^SM sees headlines such as today’s “Scientists Capture Giant Squid On Camera,” well, it’s hard to concentrate on work.
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First Coffee^SM hasn’t seen this reported on yet, it came out a few days ago, and it’s the kind of thing that shows how actual people use technology in real life. More importantly, it shows that Americans are wonderfully different from the rest of the world, so when it comes to marketing consumer technology, one size does not fit all.

Global Tech Insight 2005 surveyed 6,800 adults aged 16-49 who own either a mobile phone, PDA or laptop and who access the Internet every week. The study was conducted in 15 countries between 11th July and 15th August 2005.

The countries included in the study were Australia, Brazil (“metro” Brazil, or the parts with paved roads), China (metro), France (those not on vacation or cheering for Lance Armstrong to lose the Tour de France), Germany, Hong Kong, India (metro), Japan, South Korea, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia (metro), Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.

“Over 75 percent of mobile phone and PDA users in the United States rate ‘two-days of battery life during active use’ as the most important feature of an ideal converged device of the future,” according to a new study by TNS, a market information vendor.

Sure, you say. Makes sense to me. Well, this feature is considered more important to the respondents of only two other countries included in the study – Sweden and The Netherlands, “indicating,” as the study says, “the value that American technology users place on battery life.”

Doesn’t that tell you something about Americans as opposed to Europeans? Sure it does, it shows Americans are on the go, in cars and away from electrical outlets a whole lot more than Europeans are. Tech in real life.

The study wanted to find out what consumers want in future mobile devices, as well as benchmarking brand performance and use of existing mobile phone, PDA and laptop applications. One section of the study looked at consumer views on “converged devices,” something to replace the multiple devices which people carry around now for “all communication, information and entertainment needs.”

Oh, and it needs to be compact, have a mobile phone and high-speed Internet. Standard.

According to the study, after battery life the next most important features to U.S. users were high resolution camera and video camera, the availability of full versions of Microsoft Office applications on the device, and a device with 20 Gigabytes of memory.

“Two days of battery life during active use” was important to 14 of the 15 countries surveyed as well – China put “20 Gigabytes of memory” as their most important feature – but not quite to the extent it is in America.

Concern with using up the battery is one of the top reasons why consumers do not use games, music and TV applications on their mobile device more frequently.

In Brazil, a much higher emphasis was placed on video conferencing, with 53 percent of people identifying this as a key feature, compared to an average of just 25 percent across all countries surveyed. Now what does that tell you about ease and cost of travel in those countries?

The report shows that MMS is “now fairly common across the globe,” with 46 percent of mobile phone users interviewed saying they send pictures and photos via MMS, and 23 per cent saying they send video or audio clips through MMS. Sending photos and pictures via MMS is used most among mobile phone users in Japan (could you have guessed that? First Coffee^SM could have), France, Korea (the one not run by an insane little nuke-obsessed creep) and the United Kingdom.

Only 20 percent of U.S. respondents send video or audio clips through MMS, placing the U.S. among the lowest users of this technology in the world. What does that say about Americans? That we have more powerful PCs at home? Only 10 percent of U.S. respondents use their camera phone on a daily basis, and almost 70 percent of users never use a camera phone at all, and First Coffee^SM knows from personal experience that this is because high-quality digital cameras are a lot cheaper in America than they are in a lot of the other countries surveyed.

Some of the study’s finding simply stand to common sense reason. Internet telephony is used much more widely among laptop users in developing compared with developed markets such as Brazil, India and Russia – 44 percent, 30 percent and 22 percent of laptop users respectively use VoIP, compared to just seven percent in the U.S. and two percent in Japan and the Netherlands.

Now guess which countries have better infrastructures and more affordable telecommunications and win the kewpie doll.
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Yes, First Coffee^SM realizes he has an evil, wicked, twisted, warped sense of humor, but Mental Drippings’ list of the ten worst album covers of all time is one of the funniest things he’s ever seen online.
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Here’s a company to watch: Formula Telecom Solutions, Ltd., which sells convergent CRM and billing products for mobile, fixed-line, and advanced services operators, has been named to the Deloitte Brightman Almagor Israel Technology Fast 50, at #7 among Israel’s 50 fastest growing technology companies.

Each year, Deloitte lists and ranks 50 of Israel’s fastest growing technology companies, basing the rankings on companies’ percentage revenue growth over a five-year period.
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By the way, we’re all watching the security on our CRM systems, right? Because Engin didn’t: “One of its users made a post on broadband information site Whirlpool revealing how to obtain details of other customers’ orders over the Web.”
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ERSVP, a Web-based events developer and MPbid, an online meetings facilitator are partnering to offer each other’s products in a package of attendee management products and services for the meetings and events industry.

Under terms of the agreement, each firm will coordinate marketing and operations to provide clients with meeting consolidation and attendee management.

Originating in the early 1990s, the meetings consolidation trend has accelerated noticeably in recent years to cope with increasing logistical complexity of meetings and events, demands from corporate management for greater financial accountability, and new federal regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.
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First Coffee^SM’s found that these retail drug spammers are, for some wonderfully zany reason, inserting odd bits of prose in their spam e-mails.

One example: An e-mail picked at random from someone trying to sell drugs. After a few lines of sales pitch (“Yell not anymore to stomach upset”), there’s this:

“Dear me.” says Mr. Guppy. “Who’s that?”

fozzard foog flxdr n2 ferring filmgreviews “Miss Ada,” said Mr. Kenge, “this is Miss Summerson.”

She came to meet me with a smile of welcome and her hand extended, but seemed to change her mind in a moment and kissed me. In short, she had such a tee, captivating, winning manner that in a few minutes we were sitting in the window-seat, with the light of the fire upon us, talking together as dree and happy as could be.

How tee. Surrealism in every day life. We all need it. Surrealist joke: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? Blue.

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, the current CD of five in the changer, is the 2003 compilation Swing Brother, Swing of 30s-50s big band swing, with Frankie Swoonatra on deck:

Yesterday First Coffee^SM’s mild-mannered reporter alter ego wrote an article on speech recognition vendors Voxify, and their announcement that PhotoTLC will put Voxify’s Conversation Engine technology “at the disposal of” PhotoTLC’s more than 15,000 outlets at photo retail centers across the country.

This constitutes what Voxify officials characterize as an “aggressive push” into the retail sector, heretofore a sector not particularly targeted by speech recognition, which usually contents itself with asking you if you’d like your checking balance, a non-smoking room and wake-up call or aisle seat.

First Coffee^SM met with founder and Chief Technical Officer Amit Desai in San Francisco a couple weeks ago – thanks to Antenna Group’s P.R. Guy Andrew Pray for pulling it together – and heard about how eliminating the need for seasonal workers was one of the major selling points of the technology as far as companies are concerned. Seasonal help costs to train, makes rookie mistakes and, just when they have it down pat, the holidays are over.

So a mini-interview with Voxify’s Director of Marketing, Hollis Chin to follow up on their foray into retail:

With PhotoTLC you’re hitting the seasonal retail market, obviously. What other steps do you have planned in your “aggressive” marketing strategy?

We have plans to run campaigns for every segment. Retailers that are part of the Christmas holiday cycle were the focus of a Christmas in July campaign. We’re planning a campaign for January 2006 that will focus on retailers that have any spikes in their call volumes – Super Bowl, Mother’s Day, etc.

Are you ramping up for the seasonal bumps in the travel and hospitality industries as well?

Yes, in fact, we are in the midst of a campaign to travel and hospitality right now. The travel industry gets busy in spring and summer. Now is the time for travel companies to implement technology, in advance of their busy period. The window of opportunity for travel companies to implement is between now and February.

Is your move into retail, at this point, confined to seasonal, or do you anticipate “year-round” work?

We see retailers that are not part of the traditional Christmas holiday cycle. For example, retailers selling office supplies and equipment do not have the strong seasonal spikes. But these retailers receive millions of calls on a regular basis and need speech applications.

Are you creating special agents for retail, or tweaking your current ones?

Many of the Voxify Automated Agents for retail are existing agents that have been tailored specially for retail needs. A new one for retail is the Lead Capture Agent that captures the name and address of direct response leads. There is very high demand for this capability from retailers. We are able to offer this to other industries but retailers have traditionally run very large direct response programs.
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Evidently Dartmouth College has switched over to a campus-wide Voice over Internet Protocol telephone system, courtesy of Networked Information Systems from New (And Improved) England neighbor Woburn, Mass.

Dartmouth will, of course, be forever remembered for having rejected First Coffee^SM’s application for admission oh so many years ago, and for having suffered ignominy ever since on a par with the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers, who drafted some guy named Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan in 1984. The college has since been pressured to drop out of the Ivy League, seen its alumni contributions wither, watched its football team lose to Columbia, endured a plague of locusts and faded into academic obscurity.

It’s a 7,000 phone system – one of the largest deployed by a private, four-year college, Dartmouth officials claim. The college hopes it will thereby reduce its telecommunications costs “while increasing the flexibility and productivity of faculty, staff and students.”

The system merges voice and data traffic over the same backbone, according to NIS Co-CEO Robert Murphy. (“Co-CEO?” Ever heard of a “co-CEO?”)

Two years ago, according to Robert Johnson, Director of Voice and Data Converged Systems at Dartmouth College the school’s old TDM PBX was “nearing the end of its useful life. We decided that voice traffic could be provided more strategically and cost-effectively by converging our voice and data networks.”

Murphy noted that Dartmouth, located in scenic Hangover, New Hampshire, already had a Cisco Systems data network in place, which “made the transition to a fully converged network relatively straightforward.” NIS installed nearly 200 additional Cisco switches with Power Over Ethernet to ensure voice availability during a power outage, and made sure that within the converged network voice had priority over data.

The project included installation of a 7,000-user voice mail system supported by five Microsoft Exchange Servers and a high-end Cisco Unity Server. Murphy claims the new voice mail system “has dramatically reduced the maintenance and support outlays they endured with their old system.”

“Initially we had some concerns about the quality of service and reliability we could expect from a VoIP network,” Johnson said. But after Dartmouth ran some production pilots to ensure that their network could support a “five-nines” application like voice, they decided to deploy the system in stages over a two-year period to avoid disrupting faculty, staff and students during the school year.
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If you want to see how the obsolete, bankrupt politics of the labor union movement are crashing to bits on the rocks of reality check out S. Srinivasan’s piece on the failures to organize outsourced call center workers and software programmers in India.

Union Network International has been trying to get India’s back-office workers to “see” that they’re the sweatshop labor of the Internet economy, working long hours for low pay, and that their only hope is to let UNI organize them, strike for wages similar to those paid to American workers and watch their jobs go to the Philippines. Indians blessed with common sense aren’t buying it.

Of 350,000 IT workers in India, only 500 have joined a union. “A union would make sense if there was no job security,” K.V. Sudhakar, who does technical support work in IBM’s offshore outsourcing center tells Srinivasan, showing and a greater grasp of economic reality than the union. “Here jobs are more, people are less – companies are trying all means possible to keep employees happy so that they won’t leave.”

In America labor unions, having won all their real battles years ago, are flailing around desperately to justify their real business anymore, which is vacuuming dues out of the pockets of working people. Hey guys, you won, game over. Declare victory, go home and find a genuine injustice to fight. You got the eight-hour day and five-day week, minimum wage, workman’s comp, OSHA, overtime pay, sick pay, paid vacations, what more do you want? Limos and free beer?

The Indian average income is $500 a year. Beginning pay in call centers, before the standard raises, is five times that, “roughly twice the pay of first-year teachers, accountants or lawyers,” Srinivasan reports, “and [they] work in air-conditioned offices, many of which have health clubs and well-stocked cafeterias.”

Ruchinder Singh, who works for GE Capital International told Srinivasan he can take any issues straight to his company’s chief executive, who listens, so “why do I need union?” And H.S. Sudarshan, who left a call center job to become a recruitment consultant said it’s not like there are no options for unhappy workers: “There is opportunity everywhere, a new job is a better solution than a union.”

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 Frank Sinatra's underrated 1960 album Nice ‘n’ Easy. Just a warning, readers should probably prepare for a good bit of ol’ Blue Eyes this week, First Coffee^SM’s finally caught a bit of why so many people proclaim him the greatest singer of popular song of the 20^th century:

Thanks to salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff for taking the time, between travels to Costa Rica and parts unknown, to answer some questions.

Hi Marc, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Tell us what pleased you about the public reaction to the Appforce vision, and what you think people still don’t “get” about it.

When you introduce as idea as big as the AppExchange, you know that you are going to have to be patient – a concept this big won’t sink in overnight. Yet the uptake has been overwhelming. So many customers have come up to us, eager to upload apps. And developers are blown away at how quickly they can bring their products to market. Everybody is blown away at how this expands opportunities around our applications.

And yet we are still beginning. We think AppForce and the AppExchange are changing the way applications are developed, distributed, and deployed. And along the way, we are going to change the very idea of who can be a developer. By democratizing the tools and the distribution, we are unleashing what we believe will be a new generation of creativity and innovation.

What’s the best music to listen to at work?

I keep a collection of ukuleles in one of my home offices, so I am fairly partial to Hawaiian music.

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer recently said they were going to give salesforce.com a run for their money. Sweating bullets yet?

Microsoft has really let this industry and its customers down. Where is the innovation? While we are preparing to release the 19^th generation of our on-demand service, they are struggling to release their second. And this is true across many product areas that are popular with businesses and consumers today. Google, RIM, eBay and Apple all thrive today because Microsoft has failed to innovate.

In some ways it sounds like salesforce.com is interested in moving beyond not only software, but CRM itself, to bigger stages. Over the next five years how will salesforce.com’s priorities for what you guys actually make and sell evolve?

We are following the call of the customer. That’s a major advantage of being an on-demand service provider. You really can understand exactly how customers are using the applications and platform, and you can easily see where you need to go. And customers are telling us that they want to take the success that they have achieved in salesforce automation and extend it throughout the enterprise.

So we are going to continue to improve our products so that our customers can take our application to places that we can’t even imagine. The AppExchange is going to be a major leap forward in that.

Spiritual integrity is a big priority for you, that a person’s life works together in harmony, and no important parts, such as giving back, are left out. Is it too much of a stretch to see this same belief in what Appforce wants to do for business applications – let each individual or business find their own “fulfillment” or “harmony” without leaving any important parts out?

That’s an interesting concept. I think that the ultimate goal here is that when a customer uses our application, they see their business reflected accurately in it. One of our customers said it best: “Why should I change my business to suit my software?” We completely agree.

Appforce was built, as you’ve said, on the eBay, the iPod model. It’s a great model – but what limitations in that did you see that you’ve structured Appforce to overcome? In other words, where is Appforce improving on that basic model?

I think that we are all going to learn from each other here. Ebay and Apple have pioneered some amazing consumer to consumer and business to consumer models. Now we are talking about a business to business model that combines the strengths of both. And as always, our customers will be very clear about telling us what they like and what they don’t.

A few years ago people were writing about UpShot and MyNetSales as your competitors, these days it’s RightNow or NetSales or Siebel OnDemand. What’s the next level of competition you’re looking forward to?

I recall that back in the mid-90s, Andy Grove was asked a similar question about the microprocessor market. And he considered the “competition” the millions of people who hadn’t bought a PC yet. I think the same can be said for on-demand, and we are clearly in the early days. There are still many companies who haven’t investigated the benefits of this model. So that’s really where we have our sights set.

Do you believe that great athletes, great competitors need a great rival to push them to their utmost, and do you think salesforce.com has that these days?

A few years ago, I would have said Siebel. In our early days, it was certainly useful to have a rival that had such a negative reputation with customers. But the sun has set on that company now, and the lessons loom large for all enterprise software companies: ignore your customer at your own peril.

With Appforce are you worried more about competitors developing a better mousetrap, like Google did to the other search engines, or that the idea simply won’t catch on the way you’re betting it will?

Arrogance is the Achilles’ heel for any company, particularly in technology. So we are going to be relentless in our pace of innovation. I think a major factor in our favor is that we have democratized the tools and opened up the platform so that our customers can take advantage of the incredible creativity of our community.
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Is this as, well, slightly creepy to anyone else as it is to First Coffee^SM?

A recently-released study called the Speech Recognition Insights Report found that almost three out of four Britons “are now talking to machines on a regular basis” for such tasks as paying gas or electric bills, inquiring about bank balances, booking train and coach tickets, and even ordering pizza.

Hey First Coffee^SM’s all for voice recognition technology, no Luddites here, keep the technological innovations hummin’, that’s what we say, but… three-fourths of all Brits talk to machines on a “regular basis?” Seems a bit much, what?

But what’s really interesting is that the report, sponsored by speech recognition vendors Fluency Voice Technology and Call Centre Focus magazine, looked at the voices that best suited different sectors. It found that voices conveying “efficiency, reliability, intelligence, credibility, calmness and being straight to the point” are considered the most desirable for a company.

The most popular voice chosen from a given sample for the travel sector is an age 30's woman with a “London Estuary English” accent, whatever that is, which those surveyed took to be “competent, well paced and professional.” For retail substitute 50s for 30s in age, and for utilities interactions the preferred voice is a 20-year old woman with a “strong, husky and independent” tone to her voice.

However, in financial services, the most desired sound is that of a 30s man with – for whatever reason – an Irish accent, conveying a “warm, smooth and authoritative” feel.

Oh, and for travel companies, the survey said one of the most desirable celebrity voices – evidently they do that in Britain – is that of Michael Palin, a former Monty Python who has since made a career out of going to weird places and telling others about them.

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 your second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is Billie Holiday’s Lady In Autumn: The Best Of the Verve Years:

New Yorkers, understandably, have been jumpy ever since the London subway was bombed by terrorists, so it was probably inevitable that they’d install some sort of video surveillance system like the one used to identify the London bombers. MSGI Security Solutions, Inc., a provider of proprietary security products and services is announcing today that it has begun to install a subway video surveillance system as part of a pilot program for the New York City Police Department.

The program features covert wireless video surveillance engineered by MSGI to observe criminal activity underground.

Multiple subway locations in the Borough of Manhattan will be monitored over the course of the next 60 days, based on historical crime statistics, and the NYPD will also use the new system as a counter-terrorism tool in high profile areas. MSGI’s secure, covert technology has already been deployed in three undisclosed subway locations – which has led, company officials say, to two arrests within the first hour of operation.
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Not only have the Federal Emergency Management Association and numerous charity relief organizations learned how to cope with mega-disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, businesses, especially telecommunications firms, are picking up a few lessons, as are left-wing moonbat groups, which have already written press releases blaming President Bush for everything bad that might happen as a result of Hurricane Rita, leaving blank spaces for body counts, homeless figures and whether more Hispanics or African-Americans will be affected.

T-Mobile USA, Inc. has announced that it is preparing for the potential impact of Hurricane Rita. The T-Mobile Disaster Recovery Team has established several “command centers” within close proximity of the areas expected to be hit hardest -- enabling teams of technicians to mobilize, as soon as conditions permit, to work to restore service to cell sites that may be affected by the storm.

In the event of widespread power outages throughout the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast, T-Mobile has more than 10,000 gallons of fuel accessible and ready-to-roll into the affected areas to power cell site generators and company repair/transport vehicles, and for other emergency circumstances. T-Mobile also has on-demand access to thousands of gallons of additional fuel from suppliers.

To help protect its core network, T-Mobile has fortified its network switch operations serving the greater Houston market, and continues to reinforce its switch in New Orleans, which remained operable through Hurricane Katrina.

Microwave equipment has been trucked into the region to facilitate data communication from the cell sites to T-Mobile’s network switches, as backup, in the event T1 fixed line service fails. T-Mobile has dozens of generators and several Cells-On-Wheels (unlucky acronym there) on standby to support wireless communications to areas hardest hit by the storm.
...

Qualcomm Incorporated, a developer and innovator of Code Division Multiple Access and other wireless technologies, is announcing that its Mobile Station Modem chipsets will support Philips’ wireless local area network module.

This will offer connectivity to WLAN networks as well as to existing cellular networks and will feature compatibility with 802.11b and 802.11g protocols on both CDMA2000 and WCDMA (UMTS) networks.

The WLAN product allows mobile handsets to use high-speed wireless local area networks when available for connections of up to 54 Mbps. Initially supported on the MSM6550 chipset, according to a product description, the 802.11b/g-compatible broadband capabilities enabled by Philips’ WLAN module are scheduled to be commercially available by the end of 2005.

WLAN technology offers support for applications such as voice over Internet protocol, voice calls with simultaneous data transfer and other data-intensive applications.
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Tired of Ikea and The Sharper Image? Oregon Scientific, which bills itself as a “creator of personal electronics for today’s lifestyles” is hosting a grand opening celebration, inviting you to “experience how the company’s SmartLiving products meld innovative technology with fluid design,” according to company officials.

It’s offering six “lifestyle collections” which, company officials claim, are designed to “create a bridge between people and technology, helping focus on the enhancement of our daily lives through health, enjoyment and an understanding of the environment.”

The Portland, Oregon-based company will also be demonstrating the new StyleFi personal audio line, featuring the dubiously-named iBall, as well as Music Element, and Music Sphere.

So if you’re around Palo Alto’s Stanford Shopping Center Pavilion tomorrow from 1 to 3, drop in, tell ‘em First Coffee^SM sent you.

There will be speakers to “share their views on fashion, technology, and design,” promised are DailyCandy.com founder Dannielle Romano, Dwell Magazine president Michela O’Conner Abrams, WIRED Magazine editor Brian Lam. In addition UltraMarathonMan Dean Karnazes will “share in his unparalleled experiences of mind and body achievement,” and participate in a book signing.

Unfortunately First Coffee^SM will not be speaking, but be sure to attend and take in the talking pedometers, waterproof digital media and Smart clocks.
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And First Coffee^SM readers in South Africa, cellular network Vodacom is offering BlackBerry Connect for the Motorola MPx220 and the Sony Ericsson P910i, as well as BlackBerry Built-In for the Siemens SK65, for the first time in South Africa.

BlackBerry Connect and BlackBerry Built-In enable users of the Motorola MPx220, Sony Ericsson P910i and Siemens SK65 to use BlackBerry services operating on the Vodacom network.
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Nokia has signed a contract for the delivery of the Nokia Connect eRefill to Chinese mobile operator Jiangxi Mobile Telecommunication Co. Ltd. This product lets the operator offer account top up via SMS and balance transfer for its subscribers.

Nokia Connect eRefill lets the operator implement micro prepaid services for its subscribers, allowing mobile users with tight budgets to recharge their accounts and call more often. The service will cover the Jiangxi province.

The contract between Nokia and Jiangxi MCC is the first delivery of the Connect eRefill solution to the Chinese market. The deal includes systems integration services as well as servers, software, comprehensive customization, and Nokia NetAct Network and Service Management System -related features to which the Connect eRefill solution will be connected.
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And kudos to Cisco Systems, Inc., which is announcing the sale of its six-millionth Internet Protocol phone worldwide, to Westpac bank in Australia.

Over 300,000 of the devices have already been sold in Australia.

Cisco Australia and New Zealand managing director Ross Fowler told media and industry analysts at Cisco’s Australia and New Zealand Networkers event on the Gold Coast today that Westpac bank had taken possession of the six-millionth Cisco IP phone.

Westpac, which has deployed more than 3000 Cisco 7970G color phones to date, joins a long list of major global customers, including Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Boeing, and Ford Motor Company.

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

This morning First Coffee^SM casts a few two-cent pearls on a good idea kicking around the contact center world these days. The Patsy Cline CD’s finally off the stereo here at the First Coffee^SM world headquarters campus, and ‘40s big band swing is on instead.

Do they still call it a “stereo?” First Coffee^SM’s father still calls it a “hi-fi,” no doubt First Coffee^SM’s slipping into the Outmoded Expressions phase of life as well.

(“‘40s big band swing? Surprised the guy doesn’t call it a ‘Victrola…’”)

As First Coffee^SM’s read all the Dick Francis, John Grisham and Carl Hiaasen novels to be had at the lending library of the St. Paul Cultural Center here in sunny Antalya, this morning he was perusing the “Economic Review, 3^rd Quarter 2004” by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City – hey, it was either that or Maeve Binchy, What Would You Do?

Anyway, there was an article titled “Can Rural America Support A Knowledge Economy?” by Jason Henderson, an economist at the slightly condescendingly-named Center for the Study of Rural America at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, and Bridget Abraham, a former research associate there.

There’s always the slight flash of exasperated anger whenever First Coffee^SM sees something implicitly assuming that people are different in rural America than in the rest of it, but of course, unfortunately, in fact it’s true: rural Americans are nicer, more honest, brave, thrifty, trustworthy, loyal, reverent, clean, obedient, knowledgeable about NASCAR and more willing to stop and help somebody who needs it. Oh, sorry, different study.

Henderson and Abraham find that given certain conditions, namely those which make parts of rural America more like parachuted enclaves of downtown San Francisco or Manhattan, yes, it’s actually possible to build businesses and offer jobs in rural America which do not involve slopping hogs.

As a matter of fact, after some pith-helmeted exploration they find that there are, believe it or not, “highly skilled labor” and “colleges and universities” out there in flyover land. They also discover “vibrant business networks” and actual “infrastructure.”

We’ll skip over their definitions of “knowledge-based” businesses, suffice it to say their listing, pace Beck’s 1992 book Odelay – no, actually Shifting Gears: Thriving In The New Economy, of “High-Knowledge Industries” is pretty much what you’d expect, plus they toss in “funeral service and crematory,” “guided missiles,” “child daycare services” and “advertising.” After a few pages, charts and graphs – these are economists, remember, the kind of people who’d marry Juliette Binoche for her money – they establish that generally these sorts of jobs are More Desirable and Pay Better than hog-slopping. It also worked over the obvious fact that there are more of these sorts of jobs, in fields like guided missiles and advertising, in metro America than rural America.

But what struck First Coffee^SM, and the reason the Federal Reserve study wasn’t ditched after a few pages in favor of learned analysis for just how the Chicago White Sox are disintegrating before our very eyes as they blow a 15-game lead after the All-Star break, were the factors the study laid out as conducive to knowledge industries in rural America, and how much they resemble those which give rise to contact centers in India.

Which brought to mind a project called Rural Sourcing, begun by Kathy White, who as CIO of Dublin, Ohio-based Cardinal Health was tired of hiring people who’d stay a while, not do good jobs, and quit. So she arranged with her alma mater, Arkansas State University, for an outsourcing summer internship program.

White knew she was getting kids who’d do a good job and keep their word about when they’d be at work, and they benefited from the experience of the sort of job one typically doesn’t find in rural Arkansas. It worked so well she founded Rural Sourcing as an information technology outsourcing company last summer. It now has five locations across Arkansas and North Carolina, 35 employees and some solid clients, such as Cardinal Health and Mattel.

She firmly believes in this – she’s put $2 million of her own money in it. Because with her it’s greater than just business. As an article in Southern Growth Policies Board’s journal says, “RSI seeks to redirect some out-sourcing back into America by locating high quality IT centers in rural communities that are served by a strong university… The initiative allows new college graduates interested in IT employment to remain in the South. RSI’s work has also caused experienced technology workers to return to their rural hometowns.”

She plans to open 50 centers over the next five years.

First Coffee^SM’s all in favor of companies finding the cheapest quality labor they can, since it all results in greatest efficiency all around and lower prices for Joe Consumer, but agrees with White that while outsourcing to India and other foreign locales has its place, American companies selling products to American consumers should at least consider hiring Americans to work IT and contact centers.

Cost is, of course, India’s great advantage. White’s own numbers show that Indian outsourcing costs from $18 to $30 an hour, and even White can’t touch that, she has to put her rates between $38 and $48 per hour.

But her argument – and it’s a compelling one – is for that extra ten or twelve bucks an hour a company doesn’t have to worry about the “total cost of working with different languages, cultures and time zones,” as she tells Jessica Marquez.

Tim Boehm is president of a company called CiberSites, which is doing what White’s doing, offering low-cost IT work in bigger cities like Oklahoma City and Tampa. He tells Marquez what he finds is companies are leery of offshoring portions of their businesses because of data security or intellectual property concerns, citing a couple clients of his who “joined CiberSites after sending some work offshore and finding that the cost savings were not worth the hassle.”

The Federal Reserve Board study didn’t list contact centers as “high-knowledge” businesses, which First Coffee^SM thinks rather misses the point: Do not some high-knowledge new college grads work in them? They do, as they work in Starbucks and Barnes & Noble as they try to figure out what they want to be when they grow up.

So why not, First Coffee^SM asks, locate call centers and homeshored IT in university towns in Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia which are, in fact, relatively easy places to move into from other parts of the country, are inexpensive places live, fun places to live, and are close enough to metro America to catch concerts and museums for day trips. They already have the built-in culture college grads like anyway.

Now it’s one thing to put a new college grad in Los Angeles or Chicago, highly desirable locations but expensive as all. But it’s quite another to put contact centers in the middle of Nevada or Oklahoma and hope to attract bright, hard-working young people. Better to serve in Seattle than rule in Scalped Rock, Wyoming.

It’s possible to find fun, inexpensive and scenic places to live, places attractive to new college grads – and with a built-in supply of spouses of new college grads looking to earn extra income. Greg Gianforte reports great success getting brght people to come work in the 365-day a year playground known as Bozeman, Montanta. Great college town.

Forget places like Charlottesville or Chapel Hill, they might as well be Honolulu for all the economic advantage they give you, but why not Lexington, Virginia? Morgantown, West Virginia? Johnson City, Tennessee? Locate homeshored contact or IT outsourcing centers a little farther out, get a lot of college grads looking for things to do after work and the Starbucks – or, even better, a funky locally-owned coffee shop – will follow, as will some rat hole venue for local bands, which, don’t forget, is how Greenwich Village got started back in the 16^th century, as a place for Indians disgusted with the high prices of Manhattan Island – twenty-four dollars! Highway robbery! – went to live more cheaply.

White’s onto something. There are plenty of smart, capable people in America’s rural areas who can do the sort of IT and contact center work being outsourced to India and who, as a matter of fact, rather like the sleepy, safe small-town lifestyle. Give them a nice place to work and you’ll have a loyal employee for a long time.

Anyway. Just an idea.

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 we can’t seem to get Patsy Cline off the CD player here at the First Coffee^SM world headquarters campus. Imagine that, ain’t that a laugh? Crazy.

Devonport, Tasmania-based (almost worth covering anything just to get to write that dateline) Sitel Australia, a business unit of Omaha-based Sitel Corp. has acquired two new clients.

Sitel Australia has been awarded CRM, BPO and technology hosting business from Acreis, an Australian financial services company. Sitel will manage inbound sales and customer service calls as well as back-office support, including application processing, correspondence, email and fulfillment for Acreis.

The service will be delivered from the Devonport, Tasmania center from January 2006 and expand throughout the year as the company’s needs grow, according to company officials. In addition, they say, Sitel Australia will deliver a long-term 40-seat inbound customer service program from the Burnie, Australia center. The client was not identified.

Russell Just, COO of Sitel Asia Pacific says they have been working with Acreis to develop CRM systems using Siebel contact management system “and integrating the solution with Genesys, a contact interaction management system.”
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The Associated Press is reporting that cases of food, clothing and tools intended for hurricane victims were found yesterday at the home of Cedric Floyd, the chief administrative officer for the New Orleans suburb of Kenner.

He’s not the only one, either. There have been many complaints, according to the AP, of city workers helping themselves to donations for hurricane victims. Floyd, at least as of the time of the raid on his home, runs the day-to-day operations in the suburb of Kenner and is – hopefully “was” – in charge of distributing the goods.

Police plan to seek a charge of committing an illegal act as a public official against Floyd, the AP reports, and more charges against other city workers are possible, police Capt. Steve Caraway told the news service.

The donations filled a large pickup truck four times. “It was an awful lot of stuff,” Caraway said.

First Coffee^SM long ago stopped donating to anything the U.N. runs because corruption, inefficiency, waste and general stupidity are so common there, as their heartbreakingly inept “response” to the tsunami shows – the only victims who were actually helped in the aftermath of the tsunami were helped by the American and Australian navies operating independently of the U.N.

That’s the real damage inflicted by Cedric Floyd and his ilk – if people lose faith that their donations will be used honestly, they simply aren’t going to donate anymore, and relief agencies have less to work with and fewer people get helped.

First Coffee^SM can recommend from personal experience Mennonite Disaster Service as a completely ethical, highly efficient organization fully deserving of your hurricane relief donations – either Katrina or the upcoming Rita donations. They work hard, they work well and they spend their money wisely.
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Business process management vendors Lombardi Software has announced a “strategic alliance” with Computer Sciences Corporation, a global information technology services company.

The firms will combine advisory and consulting services from CSC’s Global Health Solutions practice with Lombardi’s TeamWorks BPM platform.

Patrick Retif, Partner and Director of Life Sciences CRM solutions with CSC’s Global Health Solutions practice said they were looking for “an alliance member that delivers successful BPM deployments in the life sciences and healthcare industries and can keep pace with the rapidly expanding BPM market.”

CSC and Lombardi have already worked together on projects in the pharmaceutical industry.
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If you were wondering who was going to end up dominating the Internet – Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, HotSexyChix.com, call off the dogs. According to Rupert Murdoch, it’ll be Rupert Murdoch.

According to Asia Pulse the maverick Australian global media tycoon is “steaming ahead with plans to dominate the Internet, telling investors to expect his strategy for conquest to be unveiled within weeks.”

The chairman and chief executive of News Corp. told a US investors’ conference overnight that “the Internet was still his number one priority and that its revenue potential was enormous.”

Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen told Asia Pulse that Murdoch expected News Corp’s Internet revenue to grow from $100 million this fiscal year, to between $500 million and $1 billion in five years.

The 74-year-old Murdoch will unveil his strategy for entering Internet search and voice markets soon – “a matter of weeks” on whether News Corp will acquire or license/partner for search and voice over Internet protocol capabilities, Ms Reif Cohen wrote in a research note obtained by Asia Pulse:

“Also undetermined at this time is whether News Corp will pursue a portal strategy versus focus on each internet asset individually; although Murdoch stated he does not feel that a portal necessarily helps Internet expansion.”

Murdoch has said News Corp. will spend $2 billion on the effort. In July it bought the owner of myspace.com, Intermix Media, for $580 million. In August it snapped up Scout Media, “the parent company of the number one US independent online sports network, and Scout Publishing, producer of 47 of the most widely read sports magazines in the US,” Asia Pulse says.
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E-Glue Business Technologies, which sells real-time adaptive products for customer interaction, has announced the release of e-Glue Focus. Focus is a new software platform made for contact center supervisors.

It builds upon e-Glue Direct, formerly known as Guideline, the company’s flagship customer interaction management product for contact center agents. Focus brings real-time monitoring to supervisors, alerting them to the calls that require their immediate attention.
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Quote of the week, from Minnesota Vikings coach Mike Tice on the team’s 0-2 start: “Any sucker can pilot the ship when everything’s smooth, and the sun’s out, and you’ve got a pina colada in your hand with sunglasses and a Cuban.”

Sounds like ol’ Mike’s wistful for a little bit of that these days, doesn’t it?

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 Miles Davis’s Birdland 1951 radio broadcasts, which have circulated as bootlegs for years but which Blue Note cleaned up and issued officially last year:

Elvin Monteleone, senior vice president of Sage Software and the resident mid-market CRM guru, was kind enough to take time out of his day to answer some questions for First Coffee^SM. Thanks to Ryan “Stones Man” Zuk for helping facilitate:

Hi Elvin, thanks for taking the time to talk with us today. What’s the best music to listen to at work?

Hello, David, thanks for having me. I am quite fond of the vintage big band sound; just enough energy to stimulate you while working yet with a dose of serenity to balance everything out.

Your new position with Sage focuses on the mid-market for CRM. What are the two or three functionality areas you think the entire mid-market vendor community could do a better job providing for these businesses?

Two things come to mind. The first is enabling companies to tailor their CRM solution to accommodate their unique way of doing business. Delivering a feature-rich CRM application for use right out of the box is definitely necessary, yet the true measure of CRM depth is the ability to easily configure or customize it to the exact needs of the user, their industry, their business processes, and how their customers want to interact with them.

Sage believes the only way to accomplish this is through the expertise and local touch of our extensive business partner channel. Our business partners have years of vertical industry expertise and understand that a CRM system tailored specifically for each of their customers can provide those customers a significant competitive edge.

The second involves providing options and flexibility to potential customers. We call it “freedom of choice,” but no matter how you define it, customers want and deserve a CRM solution that “fits.” This is especially true in the mid-market. Some mid-market companies favor the ownership and control that an on-premise CRM solution provides, while others favor the ease of implementation and financial flexibility that on-demand CRM solutions provide. Sage offers both types of solutions and enables companies to easily migrate from one to another as their business requirements change.

There is a viable sense of reliability and trust when a customer can identify with a vendor that isn’t trying to make them fit their business to a single CRM solution. I found Sage to be unique in this way. No other vendor is offering this range of CRM options, designed specifically with mid-market companies in mind.

In your experience, what are the two or three most important functionalities mid-market firms consider when buying a CRM product?

I think many mid-market companies searching for CRM begin with the essentials of contact management and sales force automation. After all, meeting revenue goals is a critical objective of all mid-market companies. Growing sales is the first step, but in order to foster long-term, profitable relationships, delivering quality customer experiences across all of your interactions with customers becomes a requirement for success.

This is why we often see customers expand their CRM initiatives to include marketing, customer service and support automation initiatives. Of course, as companies mature, integration with accounting and other business management applications becomes a requirement.

In the end, mid-market CRM purchase decisions are made to solve mission-critical business problems. It’s our job to be ready to address each of them as a customer brings them to the table.

I see you went to LSU, miss anything about Louisiana?

David, as an LSU alumni and avid sports fan, I do have high hopes for my Tiger football team again this year. And New Orleans, where I was born, has one of the most unique cultures in the country. The food and music are both outstanding and the people are a friendly, caring, fun loving bunch. Hurricane Katrina certainly has been a setback for that region and it will take time to recover fully. But I believe that an even “better” New Orleans will emerge.

Geaux Tigers, sorry the Dolphins poached Nick Saban. Obviously Sage brought you aboard to change the direction of their mid-market CRM efforts, what do you see as the biggest change you want to make?

Expanding the CRM product portfolio is the biggest opportunity. Our ongoing mission is to address every functional level and requirement SMBs need. By this I mean different price points, deployment methods, levels of customization and, in many cases, great out-of-the-box systems that can plug in and start delivering ROI.

Mid-market customers really cross a wide spectrum of industries and company profiles when you stop and think about it. Sage Software has a complete CRM product portfolio that attracted me, ranging from the simplicity of the packaged ACT! contact management product to the highly customizable SalesLogix CRM Suite.

More recently we announced Sage CRM and SageCRM.com to introduce the “freedom of choice” philosophy. You can deploy this on-premise or on-demand as a hosted offering, with the ability to migrate from one to the other with no disruption to your business.

What’s your opinion of hosted CRM as a long-term solution for mid-market firms? What do you see in Sage’s future for hosted?

Software as a service is gaining popularity in many application segments. It makes sense that it has made inroads in the CRM market as well. We look at our on-demand offering as a viable option for customers who do not yet require the advanced levels of customization and integration that an on-premise solution is best capable of providing. These customers are often price-sensitive and risk averse as they begin their CRM journey, so a hosted implementation can make a lot of sense up front.

As their requirements grow and change, the on-premise model often begins to be more attractive from functional and financial perspectives. Ownership, customization and integration are key reasons. Thus, we believe there will be a long-term market for both deployment models, and that Sage is uniquely positioned to provide SMBs just what they need.

In the long run, we see our CRM solutions taking on a hybrid role where business processes are fused together through seamless on-premises and hosted access points. That’s a story for a future day, although our new Sage CRM offering is a great first step towards the hybrid philosophy. We offer a rent-to-own model with the ability to move from hosted to on-premise as users reach the appropriate stage of CRM maturity. They can apply 50% of their first year’s hosted fees towards the on-premise transition.

What are the main reasons CRM fails in mid-market firms, and do they differ from enterprise failures?

Lack of user adoption is the main reason we hear. Users need to perceive an immediate as well as a long-term return on their investment. If I’m a sales rep being told I have to use a new CRM system, it has to help me out with my daily work. Yes, the rollups and management reporting is good for everyone, but a user needs to see it affect them personally in a positive way.

We believe strong user adoption is best encouraged by a combination of an intuitive user interface, but more importantly by our business partners who deliver a level of customization unique to how each business wants to work, along with the training to coincide with a successful CRM implementation.

You can give one piece of advice to a mid-market firm buying CRM software. Other than “Buy Sage!,” what would it be?

Look past the hype for CRM that truly fits your needs regardless of the label. Branding is good, but not at the expense of a CRM system’s real substance. Today’s CRM buyer is very pragmatic and, as vendors, we need to respect this by clearly conveying our value-add to them as opposed to wrapping them up in a hype cycle.

This market is being pounded with success stories that sound great on paper but offer little in the way of sustained customer success. It is worth doing your homework to find a CRM provider that can offer you a variety of choices to fit your present needs and continue to meet your requirements as you grow.
…

Thanks to Overcaffeinated Reader^SM G.J. Berg, who wrote in to point out that “The September 16, 2004 to July 22, 2005 labor stoppage of the NHL was an owner lockout, not a player strike.” So nice to have readers who write in to correct mistakes. Every… single mistake. First Coffee^SM will just avoid writing about hockey for a while.

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

Yes, that’s right campers, an Extra Special edition of First Coffee^SM, because… well, didja hear the one about the guy who wasn’t allowed to board an American Airlines flight from San Francisco to New York WHICH WAS NOT FULL, so he had to… oh, you have?

The music is the greatest rock album of all time, The Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main Street, which sounds like a runaway freight train joyriding between Chicago and New Orleans at night with Hank Williams, Keith Richards and Robert Johnson passing a whiskey bottle around the locomotive as the ghosts of Mississippi Delta blues guitarists and white Southern Baptist gospel shouters trade off at the throttle.

“What? How can that clown say…” Okay okay, insert any caveat or disclaimer you want here. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is much more important and influential (sitars, anyone?). No album in rock can touch Dylan’s Blood On the Tracks for songwriting. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds is the only note-for-note perfect rock album. The Clash’s London Calling set the new rules. Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells A Story is the most honest rock record ever made.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. When Charlie Watts kicks in his killer snare about the fifth measure of “Rocks Off” all argument tumbles away like drunken bums off a speeding freight train.

Exile On Main Street is British lovers of American music sloshing around the back roads of America buying drinks for every backwoods shouter and picker they see. It’s a freeway crash of rock, country, blues and gospel at the Wild Turkey distillery with a whiskey bottle smashed over a guitar amp turned up to eleven.

It’s proof that Americans need outsiders to interpret our own musical heritage, to help us stop treating it as museum pieces and Ken Burns documentaries but more like guys you’d like to have a drink and jam with at the after-hours club out Route 27. It’s being taken to see what Mississippi Delta Sunday morning gospel musicians do in the juke joints on Saturday nights. It’s the song of the sinner who’d want to be a saint if only the music were better, the girls prettier and the communion wine stronger. It’s the old, weird America, a tanker-truckload of the Rev. Billy Joe’s Kentucky Rock And Roll Gospel Whiskey.

But mostly, it’s kids in Kalamazoo and Connecticut, California and Kokomo cutting the cellophane and realizing an hour later that you don’t have to be the most talented, the most professional, the most technically adept, the most showy or the most trendy to rip true joy out of this life, that the secret is just to do what you love doing because that’s what you do, thrash away and not worry as long as you’re sure you had fun doing it.

And that, my friends, is what rock’n’roll is all about.
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By the way, anyone who wants a trenchant, well-informed and well-written – ah ye stars, how infrequently do those two go together – opinion on the Siebel/Oracle merger and the general state of Big Software need look no further than new SoundBite veep Chris Selland’s excellent blog entry. First Coffee^SM hopes his daughter Zelda is as cute as Chris’s, and if she ends up looking more like her mother than her father she has a decent shot at Terminal Cutehood.

You know, actually, First Coffee^SM hopes Zelda grows up looking like the back side of an Iowa barn after a mud storm, let Chris deal with (wait until you see the picture) what will obviously be a gorgeous 16-year old daughter. Fathers of attractive teenage girls understand.
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Legerity, Inc. has announced its new VeriVoice Test Suite software for the VE880 VoicePort Series of devices.

In combination with the VE880 VoicePort products, Legerity’s new VeriVoice Test Suite – a subscriber line test software package for VoIP equipment – is a product for VoIP line test and self test, which company officials claim “minimizes the cost of ownership for service providers.”

Since, as company officials point out, “VoIP service providers are expected to provide traditional carrier class voice quality and reliability to consumer equipment in a wide geographical distribution,” Legerity is marketing the automated, remote testing capability of the VeriVoice Test Suite as eliminating “the need for costly truck rolls, which minimizes maintenance costs, improves reliability of service, and decreases the mean time to repairs.”

The VeriVoice Test Suite software currently consists of two distinct test packages corresponding to two different levels of coverage. The first test package consists of outward looking line tests, while the second test package consists of both outward looking line tests and inward looking self tests. The outward looking tests, or drop tests, are intended to check the customer equipment and copper pair leading to it while the inward looking self tests check the VoIP equipment itself.
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Integrated circuit vendor Infineon Technologies AG has announced that its revenues in VoIP Customer Premises Equipment products grew at the rate of 300 percent from 2003 to 2004, which is, admittedly, much higher than the 70.2 percent average for the total market of $102 million.

Okay, so that’s about what a .293 career hitter signs for, still, it’s a growing market.

The worldwide number of residential VoIP users is expected to be approximately 5 million in 2004 and to increase to 200 million subscribers in 2010, Infineon claims in the most optimistic claim First Coffee^SM’s seen. Experienced in Plain Old Telephone System applications, Infineon ranked as the world’s fifth largest supplier of VoIP ICs in 2004, up from number 10 position in the previous year.
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Industry observer Jennifer Hagendorf Follett is reporting that today Microsoft said it is jumping into the hosted VoIP arena through a new partnership with Qwest Communications International that “will create a suite of services aimed at the SMB market.”

She says Avaya is teaming with Sprint to develop and deliver hosted VoIP services to North American businesses, while “AOL said it is launching VoIP services for consumers.”

Microsoft’s deal will combine their Solution for Enhanced VoIP Services with Qwest’s OneFlex VoIP services “to create a bundle of VoIP, e-mail, Internet access, collaboration, presence, IM and desktop services,” the companies said.

Follett cites Michael O’Hara, general manager of service provider business at Microsoft who says the two companies are now “working to develop a channel strategy and training efforts around the service suite, which is expected to debut in early 2006.”

In related news, AOL is readying the launch of its consumer-focused TotalTalk VoIP services on October 4.
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This is all over everywhere right now, First Coffee^SM saw it from Peter Sayer that Opera Software is finally giving away a genuinely free PC version of its Web browser, Opera, without any licensing fee or even forcing users to watch banner ads.

It’s now as free as Mozilla Firefox, First Coffee^SM’s preferred browser. Thank you, Michelle, for turning First Coffee^SM on to that.

So no more paying $39 to not have to watch the ads, although the premium support still does cost $35 a year. Maybe now Opera will increase on that one percent of the PC market they command, huh?

Not to poke fun, since the Norwegian-made Opera is great as a mobile browser. It’s used by Nokia and Motorola, as well as several Japanese and Chinese phones. It might well be the most widely-used mobile browser in existence.

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

Welcome to a special edition of First Coffee^SM, seeing as how we missed a couple days last week lost in a hellacious odyssey beginning with spending the night in the San Francisco Airport, pre-boarding pass because a certain airline which we won’t mention (but whose name rhymes with American Airlines) refused to let First Coffee^SM board the 10 p.m. flight to JFK airport WHICH WAS NOT FULL instead of the 7:45 a.m. next morning flight, the result being spending the night in the San Francisco airport’s unsecured area with shady, disreputable types slinking about, suspicious characters eyeing my luggage hungrily, the sort of street life one gets at an airport’s unsecured area at three in the morning, as well as some people who weren’t journalists at Dreamforce ‘05, and then on the New York – Istanbul leg stopping to deplane some ill woman at Shannon Airport (guess which country that’s in? Finland? No, sorry, try again.).

Oh the deplaning took all of five minutes, but we were sitting on the tarmac for a good two hours, presumably the pilot had always wanted to see County Cork where his potato-eater ancestors came from, who the hell knows? Fortunately First Coffee^SM was on Turkish Air by then, a civilized airline where the stewardess lets you have two bottles of red wine with dinner – still complementary, Turks have far too much class to ask customers to pay $5.00 for a box with a couple cookies and chips – and another one if you tell her you need it to sleep (not a complete lie), and another one just because you asked and, well, there might have been a fifth one too or that might have been when you realized they give away free Scotch too.

So it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, it could have been an American airline where they come around and ask all passengers for $10 to help cover that day’s rise in fuel prices, but it still caused First Coffee^SM to land at Ataturk Airport at 2:00 and miss his connection from Istanbul to Antalya. The guy at the Turkish Air counter said no, sorry, the 2:20 flight to Antalya’s full, but there’s one at 5:30. Fine, I’ll take that one. Right, here’s your boarding pass sir, iyi yolculuklar. Yeah, same to you, buddy.

Get to the gate where they’re boarding the 2:20 flight, and remember in a past First Coffee^SM column where it was imparted that no sporting event is ever really sold out? There’s a corollary: When you feel like you’ve been traveling since the first Clinton administration and you can’t sleep on the road or in planes and you have no real solid idea what day it is, no flight’s really full.

First try to board as if it’s your flight. Hey, worst they can do it say no, sorry, sir, your flight’s the 5:30 one. Pretend chagrin, the upside is you don’t have to fake the befuddled, haggard look, ask if there’s any seat open on this flight? No sir, (like I know the guy at the counter told you, I was practically reading his lips) it’s full. Oh really? Golly, whaddya know? Well how about if I wait here to see if I can get a seat on this flight which is the last one that’ll get me home in time to see my baby daughter before she dies of pediatric renal failure?

Hang around by the gate, make your carry-on seem four times heavier than it really is – it feels like it’s three times heavier by now anyway, fake the last one-fourth – smile at the gate attendant, pull your baby daughter’s picture out of your wallet and squeeze an onion under your eyes and sure enough, the guy waves you into the Last Open Seat and you get home.

So, this special edition:

Sun has announced the first public demonstration of its upcoming Netra advanced telecom computing architecture blade server powered with the multi-core AMD Opteron processor-and running Solaris 10 Operating System in Boston.

Sun’s ATCA blade platform will be able to support both SPARC and AMD Opteron processor-based blades in the same chassis with choice of operating systems, including the Solaris OS and MontaVista Linux.

The ATCA blade server with the SPARC processor is scheduled for release at the end of 2005 with the AMD Opteron processor-based blade scheduled for release at the end of the first quarter of 2006.

For those customers who require carrier grade Linux on Sun’s ATCA blade platform, Sun is announcing support for MontaVista Carrier Grade Edition (CGE). Monta Vista is currently working on an optimized port of its Linux environment for Sun’s ATCA blade platform and multi-core AMD Opteron processor-based blade server.
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Kayote Networks, Inc., has announced the launch of its flagship hosted VoIP traffic management solution, FronTier, designed to let carriers and internet telephony service providers deploy VoIP networks. It will be commercially available in Q4 2005.

Companies spend “small fortunes” setting up their own VoIP operations “which require elaborate Session Border Controllers and routing engine hardware, software licensing agreements, and expensive support contracts,” a Kayote company spokesman said.

Kayote’s FronTier is being marketed to combine “the features of an SBC and routing engine with robust management and reporting tools, all within a secure environment.” It’s engineered to handle the technical intricacies associated with VoIP networks, and according to a company spokesman eliminate the need for carriers and ITSPs to train and maintain complete VoIP network technical teams.
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Empirix Inc., a vendor of testing, monitoring and management products for VoIP, voice and Web, has announced the launch of a new version of its Hammer XMS next-generation monitoring system for VoIP service providers.

Hammer XMS 1.4 contains new features, including support for new protocols including H.323, ISDN, TCAP; improvements to Hammer XMS’ media analysis capabilities with new RTP statistics and improved diagnostics; new Error by Type Report; and enhanced call correlation to better handle NATing in Session Border Controllers.
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Acme Packet has announced that Internet service provider EarthLink has deployed Acme Packet’s Net-Net session border controllers to support the delivery of EarthLink’s upcoming voice services.

These services include EarthLink trueVoice, the next generation of its residential VoIP service, which enables consumers to make local and long distance calls to regular phone numbers using a high-speed data connection. Features included are call waiting, call blocking, call forwarding, caller ID with name, voicemail, three-way calling, and low-priced international rates.

Other services include EarthLink’s Vling, now in beta, the next generation of EarthLink’s free online calling service that features instant text instant messaging from buddy lists using a personal computer.

EarthLink will also roll out EarthLink Line Powered Voice, which will begin market trials in San Francisco, Seattle and Dallas in late 2005.
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LineSider Communications, an IP voice/data management and converged communications vendor, has announced the availability of SecureVoIP, what company officials are hailing as “the industry’s first policy-based VoIP security service.”

The SecureVoIP product is being marketed as providing the enterprise customer with a policy-based security management and network control capability to automatically provision, implement and manage VoIP communications, to the device and user application level.
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Juniper Networks, Inc. has announced that Sterling Internet Solutions, an Internet service provider for corporations and small businesses, has chosen the Juniper Networks integrated firewall and virtual private network product as the backbone for its voice over Internet protocol offering.
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Ever been to Boston in the fall? Hear it’s nice.

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 Definitive Collection: Patsy Cline. First Coffee^SM had wondered why she remains so popular, but now realizes she never sings a line that a guy wouldn’t want to hear a girl say to him:

Thanks to salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff for sending First Coffee^SM some info [read: riposte] regarding Siebel VP Bruce Cleveland’s letter referenced in yesterday’s column.

“Regarding some of the points made in Cleveland’s note,” he writes, “He said: ‘Siebel Systems has added more than 500,000 “live” users of its CRM applications since the beginning of 2005, while salesforce.com has added approximately 100,000 subscribers.’

“However, apples-to-apples, Siebel added only 11,000 subscribers to its on demand product in the same period, and has a signed up a total of 39,000 subscribers over the last few years, compared to salesforce.com’s 308,000 at the end of Q2.

“IDC estimates salesforce.com’s share of the on demand CRM market at more than 50 percent, compared to Siebel’s 14 percent.”

That’s always the sticky wicket with these two: Of course Siebel’s the bigger overall CRM company, but when you focus just on the hosted market, salesforce.com’s bigger. Now can we all agree on that and move on?

“Cleveland’s note alluded to a press release that said over 100 companies have switched from salesforce.com to NetSuite,” Benioff continues. “What the press release actually said was: ‘To date, more than 100 companies have switched from salesforce.com and other legacy accounting applications such as Intacct, Great Plains, QuickBooks and Peachtree to gain the cost savings and productivity benefits of NetSuite’s One System for CRM, ERP and Ecommerce.’”

Benioff also included First Albany’s analyst report on Oracle’s takeover of Siebel. The analyst, Nitin Doke, writes that the move will have “little impact near term as SEBL’s OnDemand offerings may take a backseat while ORCL focuses on big revenue generators for Project Fusion.”

On a conference call “yesterday morning [Sept. 12],” Doke writes, “ORCL stated that it will invest heavily in SEBL’s OnDemand offerings and that it was ‘one of the key motivators for us to do the deal.’ On the one hand, one could argue that SEBL’s OnDemand product is now placed into the distribution muscle of a software giant with a massive global footprint, and this could enhance the uptake of the SEBL OnDemand platform.”

This jibes with what Cleveland said in his letter, that Larry Ellison had committed himself to investing in Siebel. However, Doke writes, “Why would ORCL focus resources on the small OnDemand product line, with very little associated revenue? Near term, we see little adverse impact for salesforce.com.”

There’s also a question of whether Oracle’s interested in paying royalties to IBM for the use of the middleware and DB2 databases Siebel uses for their OnDemand product. Transitioning over to Oracle stuff while it’s operative would be a difficult feat to pull off. Nevertheless First Coffee^SM believes Larry Ellison when he says he has no plans to axe OnDemand, or that Oracle Co-President [sic] Charles Phillips is talking through his hat when he says OnDemand is “one of the jewels of the acquisition.”

Few thought Siebel’s on demand CRM product would throw salesforce.com out of business and chase Marc Benioff back to mai-tais on Maui, certainly salesforce.com is the 800-pound gorilla in the room when it comes to on-demand CRM, with RightNow Technologies and NetSuite already in the field anybody would have had a hard time racking up significant numbers, and actually 14 percent of the market’s pretty good, given the late ramp-up Siebel had.

It also points up the fact that while Benioff can claim a moral victory over the company he personally wanted to beat the most – between Siebel and salesforce.com it was always personal – he hasn’t lost his most formidable competition for the years ahead. He might not be “running scared,” as Cleveland suggested, but he knows there be monsters here.

Few figured Siebel would swagger in hosted CRM and take over the show. There’s nothing but respect from First Coffee^SM for how hard they worked at it, however, and as all great competitors need someone to push them – Evert and Navratilova, Bird and Magic, Frazier and Ali, the Beatles and the Stones – Siebel certainly pushed salesforce.com to be better.

Yet their failure to make much more of a dent than that bodes ill for the other big boys looking to piece off some of the market – SAP and Microsoft especially. If Siebel, arguably the legacy vendor best positioned to succeed in on demand couldn’t do it, who else would you bet on?

If all Microsoft’s huffing and puffing can’t blow down Intuit’s house, for heaven’s sake, they have no chance against a trio of well-established, smart and trusted vendors in hosted CRM, especially when they’re having such a struggle defining their own CRM identity.

The simple fact is that the on-demand market’s too small to warrant the sort of major cultural revolution at a place like SAP or Microsoft would have to have. To succeed in on-demand CRM they’d have to gut profitable operations, shift significant internal resources, irritate currently profitable partners and irk Wall Street, all for the opportunity to lose lots of money for the foreseeable future in the hosted CRM space with no guarantees. That’s not something First Coffee^SM sees them as willing to do.

It’d be like Tom Cruise turning his back on Hollywood and $20 million paydays for a couple months’ work on the next Mission: Impossible installment to work his way up to become the biggest star on Broadway and make $75,000 a week in The Producers.

Not that the on-demand CRM market is chump change – First Coffee^SM would take $75,000 a week, in case anyone was considering offering. Benioff’s clearly looking beyond it with the announcement of AppForce last week, and he’s said that CRM was a way to start, not an ending point for him and his company.

No, hosted CRM isn’t Hollywood, it’s not the be-all and end-all of the business software world, it might be too small a market for SAP and Microsoft – and, soon, maybe for salesforce.com as well – but for those who want to be there, it’s still a great place to be.
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Correction: Yesterday First Coffee^SM called San Jose the largest American city without a major pro sports franchise. A reader from San Francisco wrote in to point out that there is, in fact, the San Jose Sharks of the National Hockey League.

Plain fact is, First Coffee^SM simply forgot about the Sharks, who started out as a really cool logo in search of a team, but is hockey a “major sport” in the United States? Word is the NHL isn’t on strike anymore, but did anybody south of Buffalo care when they went on strike or notice that now they’re not on ice but back on ice? (Rim shot)

According to a recent Harris poll 30 percent of Americans say pro football is their favorite sport. After that there’s a huge drop-off to baseball and college football at 15 and 11 percent, then men’s pro basketball and men’s college basketball statistically intermingled with auto racing.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the current iTunes song is “Six Months In a Leaky Boat” by the late, lamented, underrated New Zealand popsters Split Enz:

First Coffee^SM doesn’t know about you, but he feels a whole lot safer this morning, reading that North Korea’s “promised” to give up their nuclear program. Hey, they promised, this isn’t the same empty-promises-for-fuel scam President Clinton fell for. Come on, they promised, cross their hearts hope to die.

But seriously folks, kudos to Kabul and the rest of Afghanistan for holding meaningful, free elections for the first time in many a crescent moon. President Bush still hasn’t gotten the credit he deserves for that.
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Etalk, a division of Autonomy, is announcing the latest release of Qfiniti Enterprise, a unified call recording, agent evaluation, and advanced speech analytics product for the contact center market.

It delivers a scalable and centrally-managed enterprise platform that allows international, multi-site customer service operations to, in company officials’ words, “monitor, measure, improve and understand relevant customer interactions.”

Scott Shute, president of etalk, notes some of the new features and functionality of Qfiniti, such as what the company’s claiming is “the first fully integrated recording, evaluation, and speech analytics offering for quality monitoring, logging, and VoIP-based call acquisition that does not use third-party analytics technology.”

The new interface is an operational and visual improvement over what went before, and supports language localization, which company officials hope will open up more international opportunities.

The theory behind a lot of what Qfiniti’s engineered to do is that a lot of the information that circulates in a contact center – the audio recordings, documents, web pages, e-mails, what have you – is unstructured, in that it resides outside of a normal structured database. Lots of valuable info there, but it’s tough to manage efficiently.

Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer (known by its acronym “Billy”) technology is designed to make sense of this disparate information so companies can use it all, not just the information that fits neatly into fixed database boxes. Qfiniti Enterprise has embedded the IDOL engine into the Qfiniti platform, with the result that every recorded voice transaction and its elements are searchable.
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If First Coffee^SM’s ever acquired by a rival columnist he wants Siebel’s Bruce Cleveland, Senior Vice President, Products in his corner. Perhaps you’ve seen Cleveland’s feisty open letter to “Friends and Colleagues” in the wake of salesforce.com’s gloating over Siebel’s being acquired by Oracle.

 No need to fisk the whole thing, but some points stood out:

In keeping with his company’s Dreamforce theme, Marc seems to be dreaming big, hoping that the fabricated tales he spins become facts. Sadly, for him, they’re simply not true. Let me illustrate.

Marc Benioff, California dreamin’? Perish the notion. But as Cleveland says:

Siebel Systems has added more than 500,000 ‘live’ users of its CRM applications since the beginning of 2005, while salesforce.com has added approximately 100,000 subscribers. And our win rate in OnDemand software versus salesforce.com was approximately 58 percent in our most recent financial quarter.

Of course the differentiation between hosted customers and on-premises customers is the point of contention here, if Siebel signed up exactly one on-premises customer they’d beat salesforce.com in that category. But Cleveland notes that the customers salesforce.com’s been poaching from Siebel are largely SFA deals, “not Business Analytics deals, or self-service deals, or customer order management deals, or customer data integration deals.”

One thing First Coffee^SM found amusing at Dreamforce this past week was the ubiquity of the word “SOFTWARE” under the red circle and slash. “The end of software” was repeated frequently in presentations, as Cleveland says, but First Coffee^SM noted that not many Dreamforce expo hall reps from companies who make their living selling software were wearing that particular lapel button.

And it is worth noting, for however seriously one reads takeover announcements, that while Benioff says Oracle will “kill” Siebel CRM OnDemand, during the acquisition announcement September 12^th Larry Ellison did say “we think OnDemand is going to be increasingly important. We think the Siebel OnDemand products have – are improving at a very, very rapid rate and we intend to invest in them heavily.”

Again, take that as you will. It might be instructive to look back at what Ellison said when Oracle acquired J.D. Edwards and PeopleSoft, which are currently being dismembered and digested into the still-amorphous Fusion.

And Cleveland can’t help pointing out that last Monday, “NetSuite put out a press release announcing that more than 100 companies have switched from salesforce.com to its products.” Didn’t hear much about that at Dreamforce.
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An entity new to First Coffee^SM called bNet Software, which describes itself as “a web-based eCommerce” vendor, is announcing “the completion and launch to the public of Tablet Authority's eCommerce website.”

Evidently bNet was asked to build a site for Tablet Authority to resell Motion Computing Tablet PCs. “In less than a month,” bNet claims. “Tablet Authority had the site they needed: a complete sales, service and marketing solution that included everything,” including scalable backend eCommerce software, site launch services, design and site setup. The site was built to eliminate paperwork from the fulfillment process, put complete customer histories online and launch integrated opt-in e-mail.

Um, good job guys.
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Contact Center World has something from Xceed touting, of all places, Egypt as a hot (literally) new call center outsourcing option.

This is news to First Coffee^SM, and probably is to you as well. Nevertheless they point to a recent Datamonitor report predicting that “demand for Egyptian outsourced offshore call centers” will grow by 50 percent by 2009 – no indication what the hard numbers now are – due to the country’s “competitive advantages” such as; “lower-value cost of labor, multilingual skills, neutral accents, advanced state of commercial development, government incentives, friendly investment environment.”

“Neutral accents?” Egypt?
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Read in the Baltimore Business Journal that Microsoft’s looking to open an office in that fair city. What, they’re allergic to blue crabs? Is it startling to anyone else that a $40 billion company has never opened an office in the country’s 18^th-largest city?

Or is it more startling that from 1990 to 2004 Baltimore lost approximately 12 percent of its population, easily the biggest loss among the top 50 cities, falling from 12^th to 18^th below non-NFL, non-MLB cities Memphis and Columbus, Ohio?

And they can’t blame Washington, D.C. for that, as former D.C. resident First Coffee^SM knows Baltimoreans are fond of doing, since the District itself lost 5.7 percent.

Maybe they can both blame Phoenix, which grew 34 percent and jumped from 10^th to 6^th. And the fact that San Jose, the largest city in America without a major pro sports franchise, ranks ahead of San Francisco in population is a great bar bet for the impoverished yet thirsty.

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… well, now, here in San Francisco for Dreamforce ‘05 First Coffee^SM’s just going to post as needed, next week we’ll be back on the early-morning stuff.

Oh, the music? That’s one of the great things about being back here in America, the CD selection. First Coffee^SM picked up, among others, Al Green’s Greatest Hits, Duke Ellington’s underrated Blues In Orbit and The Definitive Collection: Patsy Cline:

Quote of the Day, from somebody yakking away on a telephone here at the Moscone Center where they’re holding Dreamforce ‘05: “I fell off the idiot train about 500 miles ago.”

Lord I’m one, Lord I’m two, Lord I’m three, Lord I’m four, Lord I’m five hundred miles from where I fell off the idiot train…
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First Coffee^SM had a chance to sit down with the affable Jim Steele, president of salesforce.com. “I don’t really care about the title,” Steele said, noting that he considers himself more of a chief sales officer.

When he first heard about the idea of renting software online via the hosted model, thought the product wouldn’t work for anyone but small companies. Oh “the whole idea sounded great for SMBs,” he said, but not for any company of any real size, of course. He couldn’t imagine why a company big enough to afford to buy the installed software would take on the hosted model instead.

Steele was working for IBM was when the whole ASP thing came out, and IBM did NetGen, basically to jump on the ASP bandwagon. Steele, as well as anyone else with a pulse, noted that the ASPs by and large failed to deliver on the promise. Then about three years ago, when he got the call from salesforce.com, he said, “I thought, ASPs haven’t done that well, what’s the difference, Marc?” It still sounded like the same thing.

Benioff emphasized to him that software and service are connected, and they weren’t talking about selling third-party stuff, because – as Steele thought – if someone’s buying software hosted, and it’s the same as the installed model, why would I buy it from anyone other than who made it?

So he was intrigued, and when he talked to customers he found they were happy with it, they liked it. So his question to Benioff was “Marc why do you need me?” Benioff said “You’re my enterprise experiment.”

Steele thought that sounded kind of weird, he didn’t want to be anybody’s “experiment,” but Benioff said that while salesforce.com was seeing some results in the SMB space, “if we can sell to big and small companies alike, we’ll be the first to do it.” And “that challenge drew me in,” Steele said.

During the conversation First Coffee^SM asked why there was so much resistance to the hosted model from established vendors such as Siebel. Steele explained that Benioff and Tom Siebel had worked together before Siebel started Siebel and Benioff started salesforce.com, and had something of a friendship. As a matter of fact, Benioff was one of the early investors in Siebel, but he took the money he made investing in Siebel and used it to start salesforce.com, something to compete with Siebel.

So Tom Siebel really wanted to cut Benioff and his upstart company off at the knees, it was personal at that point. And then of course Tom Siebel issued a string of death pronouncements on salesforce.com, saying next year salesforce.com won’t exist, and the next year he said in twelve months that company’ll be gone, this goes on for years and finally he turns around and buys UpShot, to compete with this company he couldn’t believe would last until Christmas.

“We were worried for a while,” Steele said, because salesforce.com saw UpShot as a product that could be serious competition. All water under the bridge now, of course. And one wonders how Oracle is going to keep Siebel intact, now with all the CRM products they have there.

Steele sees the fact that the CRM market right now is split between the legacy guys like Oracle, SAP and Microsoft and the on-demand guys influences the ways companies go about selling their products. The way the legacy guys, the Oracles and SAPs sell is they go into their existing customers and say buy our CRM, to complete your suite, and the customers say it’s not that good, so the Oracles and SAPs basically give them the licenses free to keep the competition out.

The legacy guys are into maintaining their software businesses, “left to their own devices they’d sell software all day long,” and the way Steele sees it, they’d have to cannibalize their businesses to become an on-demand company. He doesn’t see that happening, obviously, so he’s not overly concerned that Microsoft or Oracle is suddenly going to run salesforce.com or the other hosted CRM guys out of business.

One of the big advantages of the on-demand model, that First Coffee^SM heard from exhibitors at the expo, salesforce.com execs and customers is that the model forces the CRM vendor to prove their worth every month, or else it doesn’t get renewed – “We’re the most paranoid company in existence,” Steele declared at one point, “we never take out customers for granted.”

First Coffee^SM also heard this from Bonnie Crater, the vice-president and general manager of salesforce.com’s customer support division. Before working for a hosted vendor, at a previous company, Crater says “we were pretty much guessing what features the customers wanted.” Having a customer pay you every month, they let you know what features they want pretty clearly. And you don’t say “Oh, that’ll be on the .6 release next year,” given salesforce.com’s model they can be constantly upgrading.

The big guys, when they go in to a 1,000-seat company they’ll say hey, better buy 2,000 licenses at this special lower price for when you grow. “We start small,” Steele explained, “and say ‘let’s get it started in this one department, only buy what you need now,’ they see it works, and they expand it.”

So why is it so hard for the on-premises vendors to simply add hosted as an option? “It’s not in their blood. It’s not their passion, you can’t have two religions, you can’t have two passions, and our passion, our religion is hosted, it’s about the user experience, not the IT experience,” Steele thinks. When you sell someone service instead of software, “it’s not about speeds and feeds, it’s not about features and functionalities, it’s about the user experience.”

When he was at IBM as the client-server computing model was taking root Big Blue was in the glass house, Steele says, “protecting the Alamo of our mainframe business. You didn’t get fired for losing business to the client-server guys,” their concern was losing business to the other mainframe makers. So there we were, he says, defending the mainframe business “when the real battles were being fought all around us.”

He sees Siebel’s being swallowed up by Oracle not as a huge surprise, and he gives Siebel its due as “the ones who invented CRM, they certainly made our success possible, they had the vision and the dream, but they fell short in the execution.”

Asked what the biggest public misperception of salesforce.com is, he thought and said the days of CFOs coming in to look at their books to make sure they were a viable, solid company are over, but the one misperception that lingers is how people don’t realize “how operational Marc is.”

Benioff is seen as the Big Picture Guy for salesforce.com, the visionary, but as Steele says, “He knows all the numbers, he’s up on the details of the company, yes he’s the idea guy, the visionary, but he also really understands the inner workings of the company. He has the flair but he’s also shrewd about running the company internally.”

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… well, now, here in San Francisco for Dreamforce '05 First Coffee's just going to post as needed, next week we'll be back on the early-morning stuff:

One thing to realize: There is never, ever such a thing as a sold-out sporting event. Went to SBC Park here in San Fran yesterday with a great old friend from the Chicago area, as the Chicago Cubs were in town to play the Giants. Bought, ah, secondhand tickets out in front of the stadium during the second inning, $50 club seats for $25. Great game – the Cubs won – great seats, great day, great stadium, great beer, great kickoff to San Francisco.
...

Thanks to W. Sibusiso "Sibu" Tshabalala, President and CEO of Pro-SAAP Solutions, LLC who First Coffee^SM mentioned in a piece a while back, who wrote in to say “You are correct; I 'never' have to spell my name over the phone (smiley face).”

Might as well change it to John Smith, right?
…

As one can imagine there was quite a bit of tittering over Oracle buying Siebel here at salesforce.com’s Dreamforce. Referred to simply as “the news this morning,” salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff’s keynote address a couple hours ago led off with that. You might have seen this by now, but here’s the full text of his internal memo on the subject:

Oracle put Siebel investors out of their misery today. We have been doing that for Siebel customers for years. Our announcement today at Dreamforce will accelerate that. It’s the end of software. Client/Server software is being consolidated by Oracle just as mainframe software was consolidated by Computer Associates. Oracle’s strategy is simple, instead of innovating, buy as much installed software as possible, call it all Oracle Fusion, and make sure it all uses Oracle’s database.

Now, the same thing that happened to Peoplesoft will happen to Siebel, it will die. Customers will look for new solutions and new providers. Employees will look for new employers. Siebel on Demand, a joint venture between Siebel and IBM, will be the first to be buried. Siebel on Demand is written exclusively on DB2 and Websphere and runs in IBM data centers. Oracle will kill it. Oracle does not sell DB2.

Now, the opportunity to be the global leader in the CRM market has opened for salesforce.com. Our dream is becoming a reality as the world will move to new on demand solutions. Already the fastest growing public CRM company in the world, with over 50% market share in On Demand CRM, salesforce.com is well poised to become the world’s new global CRM leader.

It is auspicious that this is the very day that we are announcing our new strategy at Dreamforce with AppExchange and our Winter ’06 release.

Aloha, Marc

Certainly this doesn’t reflect the sheer glee and sense of triumph that Benioff certainly feels at seeing Siebel go under. There was business competition between the two, certainly, as there is between anyone in the space, but with these two it was always personal. Tom Siebel mercilessly blasted salesforce.com when they came out with the idea of on-demand CRM software, saying things like that company won’t be around in a year, and of course salesforce.com is known for their vicious jabs at Siebel over the years.

All to say the salesforce.com people have an extra spring in their step this morning, sparkle in their eyes, and, in their estimation, one whopping validation of the entire hosted model.

The keynote this morning focused on… drum roll please… AppExchange, salesforce.com’s vision to be the eBay of enterprise software.

“Calling all developers,” Benioff said in the keynote. Their idea is to let anybody and his brother write applications that run on the salesforce.com platform, list ‘em all and anybody who wants to, can download them and use them, paying whatever price the developer wants.

It’s so key to what salesforce.com wants to be when it grows up that Benioff said the name of the salesforce.com platform going forward will be AppForce.

Benioff said salesforce.com won’t even take a cut of everything that gets posted. Not now, anyway, First Coffee^SM’ll be surprised if this hands-off policy lasts.

There’s a certification process you can go through if you want to, and whether your stuff is certified or not will be noted on the site, but according to Benioff it’s not necessary to actually have the certification to post your stuff. Caveat emptor, baby.

You can test-drive the apps before buying, though.

When it went live this morning there were 35 apps provided by salesforce.com to seed the directory, and 35 apps written by development partners. Benioff said he wants it to be as easy to download apps as it is to download iTunes to your iPod, in service of what he calls “breaking the applications backlog.”

It is a great idea, First Coffee^SM agrees, to be able to create and distribute applications with no software, no hardware, and no IT complexity, as Benioff said. If you have a Web browser and you know how to operate it, you’re good to go.

As Woody Driggs, Accenture’s Systems Integration for CRM head, said during the keynote “This is the first time I got my head around an open-source environment in business applications.” He went on to say that frankly he was a skeptic that his biggest customers would take up the on-demand world, but he was wrong – “They’re asking us to implement this,” he said.

So salesforce.com is hewing closely to the eBay model – eBay doesn’t guarantee that the CDs you buy from their site won’t be scratched and unplayable, but as that vendor sells crappy things her feedback’ll reflect that, and basically Benioff sees the AppExchange environment as self-regulating through such methods.

EBay, iTunes – there are worse business ideas to emulate in delivering business apps.

Questions of liability – if you download an app through the system, it destroys your entire server and wipes out all your company data, can you sue salesforce.com? – weren’t addressed. First Coffee^SM imagines Benioff’s had lawyers working on that question and others like it, however. Smart guy, Marc Benioff.

Although, as an industry friend of First Coffee^SM’s said at the press-investors-analysts luncheon afterwards, he kind of misses the Hawaiian shirts Benioff used to sport, he kind of misses the irascible temper and flaming darts he used to throw a lot more frequently. He wondered where were the kind of jokes about the Oracle-Siebel acquisition like "Whaddya get when one dinosaur mates with another dinosaur? Two dead dinosaurs," that Benioff'd crack out in the past.

As Benioff was describing salesforce.com’s strategy for using CRM as an app to get into a company, and once you’re in there cross-sell more stuff, he said to First Coffee^SM that was “exactly Siebel’s strategy.”

There were flashes of the old Marc Benioff: Talking about Microsoft’s threatened entry into the hosted CRM market Benioff dismissed it, saying that while they “are a huge monopolistic factor in our industry,” drawing a laugh from the audience, he’s not extremely concerned since “they’ve somehow misplaced Version 2.0 of their CRM product,” moving straight into Version 3.0, which’ll be released… sometime. “Microsoft still has that early-90s idea of how computing was,” when everything was proprietary, that Benioff sees as so passé.

Salesforce.com does practice “co-opetition” with Microsoft, basically, Benioff said, whatever they do we have to acknowledge and find a way to make that work for our customers. He’s realistic.

One just hopes he isn’t growing up.

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