First Coffee for 1 February, 2006

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

First Coffee for 1 February, 2006

By David Sims

[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Gustav Holst’s The Planets:

Japan’s Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. today announced the expansion of the mobile Centrex system delivered to Itoki Corporation. The system, based on Oki’s IP Convergence Server SS9100, provided to Itoki’s Tokyo headquarters since 2005, has been expanded to the Osaka area.

Both the Tokyo and Osaka headquarters also function as a showroom for the general public, where visitors can see what Itoki officials are calling the “non-territorial office,” the “next generation office environment, allowing employees to pick their own desk every day.”

I guess First CoffeeSM’s question is, why is it necessary to open up another whole avenue of conflict in the work place? Pick a new desk every day? What about those of us who have enough trouble simply making it to the same old one every day?

What is the possible business benefit to have people scheming and scrapping over the fact that two people in the Munich office would like the desk next to the heater, one got there and put her bagel and coffee on it while she went to hang up her coat and “fix her makeup,” and while she was gone someone else claimed it in the rather more dynamic fashion of actually occupying the chair?

Woman #1 comes back, “That’s my desk.”

Woman #2, plugging in laptop: “Sorry, I’m sitting here today. You should really be more non-territorial, Helga.”

Woman #1: “But I put my bagel and coffee on it.”

Woman #2: “Oh, were those yours? I didn’t know if you’d just put them down for a minute or what, but there wasn’t anybody sitting here, no laptop or anything. But as you can see I’m all plugged in now.”

Woman #1: (Angrily taking up coffee and bagel) “Just wait until your first bathroom break, sister.”

And of course production suffers because Helga spends all morning surveilling Rickie’s desk, and misses the Marrakech call, and of course the more and more Rickie needs that bathroom break she dare not take her production suffers. “Territorial” office workers don’t have that problem.

The expansion of the mobile Centrex system was deployed at the Osaka New Office Gallery, Itoki’s Osaka headquarters, which functions as a business hub in Kansai and a showroom, where visitors can see how this system is operated. It includes 35 FOMA Wireless LAN Dual Network Handsets controlled by the SS9100 installed in the Tokyo Showroom. SS9100 is connected with Presence Management System developed by Itoki, which lets users indicate their presence status on the screen whether they are in or out of the office.

Users can use the handset as a mobile phone when outdoors, and a wireless extension handset within the offices. In addition, Itoki installs 170 units of “eSound” (excellent sound) technology IP phone, Oki’s multimedia IP telephony that ensures high voice quality, enabling a comfortable voice communication between Tokyo and other offices.

With this expansion, Itoki will have a total of 200 sets of FOMA Wireless LAN Dual Network Handsets, 1000 fixed IP telephones, becoming a large-scale mobile Centrex system. Nippon Telegraph and Telephone East Corporation will be in charge of system construction.

PacificNet Inc., a CRM vendor as well as merchant of call center, Interactive Voice Response services and Value-Added Services in China, announced today that it has completed the acquisition of a majority interest in Guangzhou Wanrong Information Technology Co., Ltd., a value-added telecom service provider in China.

The acquisition is expected to be accretive to the Company’s earnings in 2006.

Since its inception in 2003, Guangzhou Wanrong has sold its VAS including SMS, WAP, JAVA, MMS, IVR, multimedia entertainment download services, media interactive products, mobile email services, life, sports, entertainment, and business information services.

Guangzhou Wanrong was granted nationwide SMS service numbers “2388” for China Mobile and “9928” for China Unicom. Wanrong’s integrated value-added mobile services system can be used for PacificNet’s “iPACT” program, a standard service-mark for PacificNet’s VAS profit-sharing alliance partnership program.

The purchase consideration for 51 percent of the equity interest of Guangzhou Wanrong is approximately $1.4 million, which represents about five times the anticipated future annual net income of Guangzhou Wanrong. The purchase consideration is payable entirely in restricted shares of PACT valued at $8 per share, or about 173,000 restricted shares.

Under the purchase agreement, Guangzhou Wanrong has made a guarantee to generate $500,000 in annual net income. In the event of a shortfall, the purchase price will be adjusted accordingly. PacificNet will also invest approximately $370,000 in Guangzhou Wanrong for general corporate purposes. The purchase price is payable upon achievement of certain quarterly earn-out targets based on net income.

Han Zhixin, CEO of Guangzhou Wanrong said with China being “the largest and fastest growing telecom market in the world, with over 400 million mobile subscribers, 75 million wireless XiaoLingTong subscribers, and over 350 million fixed-line phone subscribers, we believe our services will help China’s telecom operators improve their Average Revenue Per User based on VAS product offerings, while contributing positively to PacificNet’s bottom line.”

The GlobeTel watch continues, as GlobeTel Communications Corp. today announced that it has extended by 30 days the payment deadline for LLC Internafta to present its first payment “so that lawyers and bankers for the parties may continue to work on structuring the payment to be in compliance with banking and currency transfer regulations in the United States and Europe.”

GlobeTel CEO Timothy Huff released an official statement saying “This is a highly complex international transaction on which all sides continue to work together in good faith. There are numerous legal and regulatory issues that must be resolved and those steps require time and specialized expertise.”

GlobeTel has retained the law firm of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP to represent it in Moscow.

Just for the record, First CoffeeSM has requested an interview with Huff, who has yet to respond.

Dicom Group plc today announced several installations of Topcall International AG's (Dicom Group's wholly-owned Austrian subsidiary) enterprise software MFPConnect, which Dicom officials claim have generated “significant return on investment for the company's customers.”

MFPConnect is designed to let multifunctional peripherals send and receive business-related documents, and maintain a complete audit trail of all organizational communications. MFPs -- products that combine printers, copiers, scanners and fax machines -- are usually not included in an organization’s communications infrastructure and, therefore, the information that passes through them is not secured. This makes compliance with regulatory requirements such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Basel II tricky.

MFPConnect, along with the TOPCALL Communication platform, guarantees the central archiving, monitoring and recording of all document transmission from an organization’s MFPs. It works with VoIP as well.

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



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