By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Frank Sinatra’s weepy No One Cares. Might have to pick up the pace here soon:
C3i, a CRM vendor, today announced that a
specialty pharmaceutical company selected
C3i to offer end-to-end Siebel Pharma Services.
C3i will upgrade the life sciences customer’s CRM
application to Siebel 7.8 for its 750 U.S.-based sales force. Following the
upgrade, C3i officials say, they’ll provide global help desk support, and managed
services for Tier II and Tier III technical support.
C3i will also offer workstation engineering, tablet
deployment and hardware repair services for new tablet computers. The whole deal
includes roll-out training and new hire instruction to ensure end-user adoption
of the Siebel Pharma system.
Richard Matlus, research vice president at Gartner said
pharmaceutical companies rely on CRM more than some other firms do. “These
organizations require a support infrastructure that has world-class CRM implementation
and support experience that allows them to rapidly use and adopt CRM systems to
be productive in the field.”
Dave Hanaman, chief sales and marketing officer at C3i said
currently over 34,000 pharmaceutical reps use C3i’s support.
Interestingly, C3i offers global and seamlessly integrated
operations support from the United States, India and Bulgaria.
…
If your company’s unsure about e-mail and messaging compliance issues, you might want to check out
what Norada’s
offering, a “concise new micro-website at http://www.archivinge-mail.com,”
which according to company officials “helps businesses better understand the
issues and solution set surrounding e-mail archiving compliance.”
There are all the NASD, SEC, NYSE, NYPD, NFL and other industry regulators mandating
this and that for incoming and outgoing e-mail correspondence, how to archive,
how to monitor, which lame emoticons you’ll be fined for using, et cetera. If
you even do business with certain kinds of companies you may be obligated to
follow the same policies. E-mail archiving products and services provide
control, data storage, retention, and retrieval, which a lot of companies need just
to make sure they’re not going to be bitten on the butt by something a few
years down the road.
Since the size of an organization is not a factor as to whether or not
companies must adhere to the law and industry regulations, there is a understandable
concern among small and medium businesses on how they can meet the e-mail
archiving requirements.
“Some businesses operate under the misconception that by simply backing up or
saving e-mail they’re doing enough,” said Steve Ireland, President of Norada
Corporation, who claims that “traditional data backup processes or manually
archiving don’t even come close to meeting the new e-mail archiving policy
requirements.”
Norada Corporation’s e-mail archiving service is priced to be within reach of
small firms. It’s billed by the company as “a simple, inexpensive, and reliable
way to alleviate concerns posed by SEC & NASD rules, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA,
SOA, FSA, IDA, Investment Advisors Act, Legal Discovery and other regulations
and guidelines regarding electronic communication retention.”
Basically, with Norada’s e-mail archiving service all
incoming and outgoing e-mail messages are permanently preserved on a
non-erasable and non-rewritable professional grade CD-R or DVD-R media. It requires
nothing to configure or install, and service activation is fully transparent to
end users.
Ongoing archiving is fully automatic requiring no
involvement from end users, it captures a copy of both incoming and outgoing
e-mail transmissions, making it equivalent to a “flight-data recorder” for
e-mail thereby meeting the demands that are often imposed by a regulatory audit
or court action.
Norada officials say their customers can readily access
indexes and message archives and copy them to another application or storage
medium as required, and any archived messages can be accessed directly by
authorized end-users, such as compliance officers or corporate counsel, which “significantly
reduces the discovery cost and workload for staff.”
…
So how’s SAP’s
Enterprise Services Architecture going? The company says it’s gaining
traction, better than we anticipated, but CBR‘s
reporting that “to outside observers it is clear that the actual number of
customers who have signed up to the ESA vision is only a small part of the
overall SAP customer base.”
During 2005 NetWeaver software revenue amounted to $584
million, and 30 percent of that was from standalone NetWeaver sales, CBR cites
SAP CEO Henning Kagermann as saying: “In addition, he said the company has
logged 1,150 R/3 contract conversions.”
However, “those figures represent a tiny proportion of the
customer base of close to 30,000 and the company’s overall 2005 software
license revenue of $3.14 million.” SAP’s main challenge during 2006, as CBR sees
it, “will be to persuade more customers to start adopting the new technology.
The risk is that if adoption is slower than anticipated, it will give Oracle
time to catch up.”
…
Virtela today announced what company
officials are calling “the industry’s first
virtualized network-based SSL Virtual Private Network service tightly coupled
with a global MPLS network.”
The virtualized design, Virtela says, “lets small- and medium-sized
businesses worldwide… [get] the benefits of SSL-based remote access to their
enterprise network resources.”
Similar to Virtela’s existing Managed SSL VPN Services, the
new Virtela SMB SSL VPN service provides secure remote access to the corporate
network from any Internet web browser without the need for a pre-installed
client. Virtela provides design, implementation, 24x7 monitoring and management
of the SSL VPN infrastructure.
They’re going after the “largely overlooked” SMB customer,
calling the virtualized SSL VPN “ideal for smaller customers that are
especially sensitive to the expense of SSL equipment, as well as the added
costs of training and maintaining staff required to successfully self-manage
the service.”
To allay such in-house costs, Virtela hosts the SSL gateway
within the Virtela network, relieving customers of SSL equipment purchases and
ongoing management.
Oh large enterprises are welcome too, especially those also
using Virtela’s MPLS VPN services, who are encouraged to help themselves to Virtela’s
multi-carrier network architecture. Virtela’s Global Service Fabric routes
customer traffic over the best-performing path across multiple Tier-1 carrier
networks, with automatic failover to ensure the highest network availability.
SSL users can traverse the same architecture, and benefit from the same class
of service designations applied to the MPLS corporate network.
For example, SSL users could prioritize a higher class of
service for their bandwidth-intensive applications, such as VoIP or CRM
sessions.
According to Gartner, SSL VPNs have superseded IPsec as the
easiest choice for casual and ad hoc employee VPN access requests, and also for
business partners, external maintenance providers and retired associates.
Gartner forecasts that by 2008, SSL VPNs will be the primary remote access
method for more than two-thirds of business teleworking employees, more than
three- quarters of contractors and more than 90% of casual employee access.
For a limited time, Virtela is offering a Free 30-Day Trial
of its Managed SSL VPN Services to qualified corporations.
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