March 2006 Archives

By David Sims

david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Tim Hardin’s “If I Were A Carpenter:”

Eye-opening stuff here in the news this morning:

PHILADELPHIA - The Justice Department is demanding internal files from dozens of Internet service providers and other technology firms as it seeks to defend a controversial Internet child protection law.

The subpoenas are similar to one given to Google Inc., which waged a partially successful battle over the government’s request for millions of pieces of information about search engine requests and Web site domains.

InformationWeek magazine unearthed subpoenas that show the government also demanded information from at least 34 other companies, including Internet service providers such as Comcast Corp. and EarthLink Inc., security software firms and other technology companies.

The subpoenas, which the magazine obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, show the Justice Department preparing for an October trial in Philadelphia over the 1996 Child Online Protection Act. It is not clear which companies are complying, and to what extent.

“That money could be spent so much more wisely on giving software away to parents that are having these problems,” Dan Jude, president of Security Software Systems, said of the litigation costs.

The 12-person firm, which makes filtering software, spent more than 40 hours trying to comply with the subpoena, he said. The company refused to provide some information on proprietary grounds, fearing it could make its way into the court file.

“If that information gets out in the public, we’ve just lost our competitive edge,” Jude said Thursday. The subpoena also sought information the company does not keep, such as customer satisfaction, he said.

Department of Justice spokesman Charles Miller did not immediately return a message Thursday afternoon.

The subpoenas also went to companies including AT&T Inc., Cox Communications Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Symantec Corp…

Can you believe that? I mean, what are they thinking? They don’t keep customer satisfaction information? What is wrong with these people? I don’t know what industry secrets they’re keeping under wraps, but admitting that they don’t care about keeping customer satisfaction records is far more damning and destructive than showing anything they could be hiding.

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Yesterday I published an article titled “Outsourcing? Watch For These Pitfalls” under my mild-mannered reporter alter ego on the TMC site, and today I received an apt correction from TMC’s very own Pop Culture Maven Tracey E. Schelmetic.

As usual Tracey was a half-step more awake: “I think that author must have meant George Hamilton, rather than Harrison. I never really took George Harrison for a Botox-type guy. As for Barry Manilow, it’s always been painful to watch him. It makes me think of his music, and well... that just stops me from smiling.”

Hey, you know what they say, Trace: Can’t smile without you.

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Database Solutions, Ltd., a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) vendor to the insurance industry, has announced the release of Agent Intelligence Version 3.0 On Demand Software.

Agent Intelligence v.3.0 on demand software includes numerous new features such as a expanded commission system, expanded print functionality and client search capabilities. The company’s Agent Intelligence on demand software has met company expectations, and “the development of AI v.3.0 was strictly based on how the insurance industry manages its business,” company officials say.

Agent Intelligence v3.0 on demand software incorporates features based on feedback from current AI users. Agent Intelligence is built specifically for the life insurance industry.

The Agent Intelligence Technology is a proprietary browser-based software and was designed specifically for the insurance industry to provide backend administration of insurance policies, client tracking and client marketing/selling strategies for an entire insurance brokerage or insurance company.

The company’s family of products includes a comprehensive suite of CRM applications. By automatically tracking all events along the lead development process an agent and/or manager is able to see any weaknesses in an agents selling process. Agent Intelligence is 100% browser based and requires no hardware or software installation.

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Sitel Corporation, a vendor of outsourced customer support services, has announced that, due to the continuing investigation of certain irregularities at one of its international subsidiaries and to allow KPMG LLP time to complete their audit of the Company’s financial statements, it has determined that it will be unable to timely file its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2005.

The company is continuing to work to complete the restatements of its previously issued financial statements for the fiscal years 2000 through 2004 and potentially for each of the three-month periods covered by the interim quarterly reports for the fiscal year 2005 determined necessary as a result of the investigation.

The company intends to complete the restatements and to file all required SEC reports as quickly as practicable but cannot predict a precise date at this time.

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Jacada Ltd., a vendor of application integration and contact center products, has announced a contract with GISS, the IT Department for the Social Security of the Spanish Ministry of Labor.

GISS will be using Jacada HostFuse (formerly Jacada Integrator) to improve and simplify processes supported by GISS applications. The project will help Social Security employees to access all of the ministry’s resources and applications and automate cumbersome service and administration processes.

Jacada HostFuse is part of an integration and process optimization platform called Jacada Fusion. The Jacada product will help GISS integrate existing back office systems and streamline the Spanish Social Security’s business processes, improving both efficiency and accuracy.

The fact that Jacada Fusion supports web-services and open application development standards further supports a strategic initiative at GISS to adopt service-oriented architectures.

The contract was signed in conjunction with Selesta S.p.A., a player in the Spanish and Italian IT software market. Selesta S.p.A has recently expanded its partnership agreement with Jacada to supply Jacada Fusion products to the Italian and Spanish customer service market.

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 Short, Sharp, Shocked by Michelle Shocked:

The last total eclipse of the sun as spectacular as the one yesterday was in November 2003. That one was best viewed from Antarctica, said Alex Young, a NASA scientist involved in solar research, according to the Associated Press.

God was a little kinder to the scientific set this time around, though, as the eclipse was best viewed in Antalya, a comfortable resort on Turkey’s beautiful Mediterranean coast.

Talk about timing: First Coffee lives in Istanbul, but until this past December lived in Antalya. I kid you not when I say that two years ago – two – we were getting e-mails from our friends in America to come and, well, gee, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen you guys, so why don’t we come to visit, oh, let’s say end of March 2006, how does that work for you?

You think I’m exaggerating. Last summer, as soon as we told our friends we were moving to Istanbul – not on the eclipse path – they suddenly had all kinds of unforeseen scheduling problems, maybe next year?

But here in Turkey, the eclipse was not looked forward to by certain members of the population. In 1999, six days after a solar eclipse, a vicious earthquake killed 17,000 people. In the hard-hit region of Tokat in northwestern Turkey people have been busily putting up tents and makeshift shelters in preparation for the earthquake to follow this one.

My wife and mine’s best friends here in Istanbul, the South African couple pastoring the International Church here, went to Cappadocia in central Turkey to view the eclipse. She’s a scientist. He’s along for the ride.

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Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. is announcing the launch of its voice and video software engines, the “eSound” and “eVideo.” These software engines support triple play communication, according to company officials, “delivering excellent video and voice quality for conversations over full IP broadband networks.”

Oki is marketing these engines to the telecommunications, digital home appliance, in-vehicle system, and security system markets, which are increasing their use of IP.

Telecom infrastructure at homes and enterprises that are based on PSTNs and mobile communications, are being consolidated into Fixed Mobile Convergence-based IP networks, which Oki officials call “the ideal Next Generation Network that Japanese telecom carriers have been seeking.”

What this means is various terminals that had been connected through conventional networks will now connect through an IP network. This is the market need Oki’s selling its eSound, with high quality VoIP technology and eVideo, the high quality video codec.

Katsuyoshi Koide, President of Multimedia Messaging Company at Oki Electric said that while IP video and phones are known to dramatically reduce communication costs, quality degradation caused by packet losses and jitter that can occur over an IP network is still an issue.

He says Oki took that into account: “Because we have made the engines compliant with several coding methods, they can be installed in various applications, enabling users to enjoy video or phone conversations with as strong a sense of realism as if they were talking in person.”

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Stockgroup Information Systems Inc. has announced today the appointment of Susan Lovell as the Chief Financial Officer.

Lovell brings to Stockgroup over 10 years of senior management experience, including six years with Crystal Decisions, a business intelligence software which was acquired by Business Objects in 2003.

Lovell was also the former Controller of GaleForce Solutions, a vendor of CRM software for the financial services industry.

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DataDirect Technologies, a vendor of data connectivity and mainframe integration, and an operating company of Progress Software Corporation, has announced that Flagstar Bank, the largest publicly held savings bank in the Midwest, will be using DataDirect’s premier data connectivity components as the foundation for building an enhanced data mart for better customer relationship management (CRM) capability.

Distributed Database Consulting, a database and systems integrator assisted the company with its CRM project and recommended DataDirect Connect for ODBC to them.

The deployment will use DataDirect Connect for ODBC, a suite of ODBC drivers for all major databases, to serve as a foundation for linking data housed in multiple sources across a variety of platforms.

Flagstar officials say they want to linking disparate data across the enterprise to improve operations at two major divisions at Flagstar, Mortgage and Banking.

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McGraw-Hill Construction has announced that it is working with Oracle to integrate Oracle’s Siebel CRM OnDemand into the McGraw-Hill Construction Network platform, helping Network subscribers manage their lead pipeline.

This effort will improve McGraw-Hill’s ability to identify and prioritize people and projects, track bid status through the sales cycle and maximize their personal productivity through integration with Microsoft Outlook and PDAs.

“The combination of these two offerings delivers a powerful, comprehensive product to members of the design and construction community,” said Norbert W. Young, Jr., FAIA, president, McGraw-Hill Construction.

The McGraw-Hill Construction Network, and its newest addition, the McGraw-Hill Construction Network for products, is an online, integrated marketing and sales products platform.

Siebel CRM OnDemand is a Web-based, hosted CRM offering that delivers complete sales, marketing, and service functionality, built-in customer analytics and embedded best practices based on over 10 years of CRM experience and nearly 4 million users worldwide.

In addition to managing leads passed directly from the Construction Network, Siebel CRM OnDemand can integrate with a subscriber’s existing systems to extend the reach and value of the McGraw-Hill Construction offering within their organization, enabling the unification, tracking and management of all customer-facing business processes.

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Epicor Software Corporation, listed on Nasdaq, a vendor of enterprise software products for the global midmarket including CRM and ERP, has announced it will be added to the Standard & Poor’s SmallCap 600 Index.

According to a list of changes issued by Standard & Poor’s, Epicor will be added to the index on a date to be announced later and will be classified under the Global Industry Classification Standard economic sector “Information Technology” and GICS sub-industry “Application Software.”

The S&P SmallCap 600 covers approximately 3 percent of the U.S. equities market. The S&P SmallCap 600 is designed to be an efficient portfolio of companies that meet specific inclusion criteria, including U.S. company status, market capitalization in the range of $300 million to $1 billion, financial viability, adequate liquidity and reasonable price, public float of at least 50 percent, sector representation and an operating company status.

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 Best of MFO, the band MFO being not only the best Turkish rock band ever, but for my money the best non-Anglophone rock band I’ve ever heard. Think The Kinks with stronger vocals for an approximate comparison, a good pop/rock sound with a few elements of traditional Turkish music used as part of the overall sound, not tossed in gratuitously to say “ethnic.” Their haunting ballad “Bodrum” is one of the best songs I’ve ever heard anywhere.

Trillium Software, a division of Harte-Hanks and a vendor of Total Data Quality products, has announced that it is to provide its TS Quality enterprise data quality software to global telecommunications provider BT on an enterprise-wide license basis.

The software is support for BT’s customer relationship management installation by Siebel, one of the most sizeable CRM implementations anywhere in the world.

The agreement extends an existing license based on user numbers, to permit BT unlimited, worldwide use of TS Quality as part of its Total Data Quality drive for continuous improvement in customer service and business performance.

“Customer name and address information is an extremely valuable BT asset,” said James Gault, program director, product and customer data platforms. “We must manage the quality of that data with strategic intent in all corners of the organization.”

According to Gault, TS Quality enables BT to standardize source data formats, to recognize and handle duplicates, and to mold fragmented records into linked information. Across multiple systems, BT officials expect this data quality regimen to benefit “hundreds of vital business processes.”

One such vital business process is regulatory compliance with undertakings agreed with OFCOM’s Telecomms Service Review, to ensure all service providers have transparent and equal access to the nationwide local BT network.

OFCOM is the United Kingdom Office of Communications, the regulating agency of UK telecommunications services.

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Today In Business History: On this day in 1886, John Pemberton perfected a headache and hangover remedy he had cooked up over a fire in his backyard, according to Writer’s Almanac: It contained coca leaves and extract of kola nut, and he advertised it as an “Esteemed Brain Tonic and Intellectual Beverage.”

He had been making something called “Pemberton’s French Wine Coca,” but Atlanta had just passed a prohibition law, and he had to come up with an alcohol-free formula. He sweetened the new elixir with sugar instead of wine, and his bookkeeper suggested he name the beverage “Coca-Cola.”

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Think of a company whose business it is to help people track down old tableware patterns, complete sets and find particular antique pieces. Images of lacey old ladies sitting around polishing the tea service, right? Actually, try a highly-sophisticated information technology operation.

Founded in 1981, Greensboro, North Carolina-based Replacements, Ltd. is the world’s largest retailer of old and new tableware, including china, stoneware, crystal, glassware, silver, stainless, and collectibles. In 1984 the company deployed its initial IT system.

Today, the company stands at approximately 550 employees with 300,000 square foot facilities – roughly five football fields – housing an inventory of 10 million pieces of tableware in over 200,000 patterns.

The company uses extensive, internally developed inventory, sales, and CRM systems, including an enterprise grid computing infrastructure built using Oracle 10g software.

By switching from UNIX servers to four HP ProLiant DL 385 servers with AMD Opteron processors running Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Real Application Clusters, and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, company officials say, Replacements, Ltd. has increased its IT performance, automated their data center operations and reduced related costs.

Since upgrading to a clustered Oracle database environment in September 2005, Replacements, Ltd. has improved application availability and performance – four to five times faster than before. This move to a clustered environment has “virtually eliminated user complaints about the hindered performance of their previous single-server implementation,” according to Replacements officials.

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Good Australian CRM observer Iain Ferguson writes today that Charles Lawoko, the former head of Australia National Bank’s CRM operation, “is in the very earliest stages of building his newly-created CRM consultancy, styled Insight2Action.”

Lawoko tells Ferguson that the shift gave him a chance to reassess his life’s goals and directions, which “could best be realized outside of a large corporation.”

He described his passion as helping companies who do not fully use, or know what to do with at all, the data they gather on their customers to deliver better offerings more efficiently, Ferguson says.

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TMOne, an Iowa direct marketing firm, has announced that it has acquired its 250,000th competitive telecom subscriber for providers in the local exchange carrier, internet service provider and VoIP space.

The company has been specializing in the telecom vertical since its inception in 2002 and recently expanded its contact center division to a 300 seat, 27,000 square foot facility formerly managed by the Mass Markets division of telecom giant MCI, now Verizon Business.

Specializing in B2B and B2C sales and marketing for the VoIP space has been a focus of the company and “a catalyst for ongoing success,” according to TMOne officials.

With VoIP penetration growing by the minute, company officials say, the race between voice over broadband providers and multiple service operators has picked up speed.

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For the contact center market experiencing strong growth in Latin America, etalk, a vendor of contact center quality management and speech analytics software and services, has introduced its Qfiniti Enterprise suite of call center applications in Portuguese and Spanish.

By offering its marquee product in the native languages spoken in Latin America, etalk expects to spur further growth in an already burgeoning contact center market.

Etalk’s regional sales increased by 54 percent in 2005. In addition, the number of contact center agent positions in the region is expected to increase by 17 percent annually to reach 730,000 in 2008, according to Datamonitor, an independent marker research firm.

Qfiniti Enterprise is, etalk officials claim, “the industry’s first unified call recording, agent evaluation and advanced speech analytics product for the growing contact center market.” Qfiniti Enterprise delivers services on a single platform that allows contact center users to simply log in with the language of their choice. In addition to the user interface, the speech analytics capabilities are also localized, so searching and script analysis occurs in the user’s preferred language.

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Oh, hey, and happy birthday, Eric Idle, wink wink, nudge nudge.

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 Arlo Guthrie’s “Last To Leave:”

Cognos, a business intelligence and corporate performance management (CPM) vendor, has announced the latest version of Cognos 8 Business Intelligence.

This new version of Cognos 8 BI includes new search and reporting capabilities to extend the reach of BI to more users, and expanded enterprise-application and data support.

Leah MacMillan, vice president of product marketing said the additional support for enterprise applications in Cognos 8 BI is engineered to help companies get more out of their ERP investments “by providing ways to measure, monitor, and analyze business information.”

Cognos 8 BI delivers a simplified, zero-footprint interface for all users, authors and administrators. New capabilities announced include:

BI search. Cognos Go! Search Service, a new BI search capability, lets users find enterprise information available through Cognos 8 Business Intelligence. It uses a familiar, browser-based search that ranks results based on user priorities.

Extended Cognos Office Connection. In addition to the ability to embed refreshable reports within Microsoft Excel, users can now view, interact with, and refresh Cognos 8 BI reports, analyses, and metrics within Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel.

Access to mySAP and Siebel. The new Cognos 8 Report Packs for mySAP FI/CO (for SAP R/3 data) and Siebel CRM let users combine, in one report or dashboard, historic data from the data warehouse with current data in mySAP and Siebel CRM transaction systems without additional coding. It also delivers pre- defined content for more than 60 commonly used reports to provide immediate access to mySAP and Siebel CRM data.

Certified SAP NetWeaver support. Cognos 8 BI received updated certification for SAP NetWeaver, allowing customers to access data in the SAP Business Information Warehouse, deploy Cognos 8 BI on the SAP Web Application Server, and display information through the SAP NetWeaver Portal.

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A recent Forrester Research report recognizes Oracle’s Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite as having the strongest product offering in the latest Forrester Wave Evaluation: Enterprise Marketing Platforms, Q1 2006.

Forrester refers to this broader suite as the Marketing Technology Backbone and the application layer is the Enterprise Marketing Platform.

Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite was rated “Strong Performer” and was ranked first in the current offering in the Forrester Waves for B2C and B2B Marketing platforms. Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite was also ranked first or second in Marketing Planning and Resource Management, Campaign Management, Lead Management, Analytics and Reporting, Architecture and other vertical capabilities, including Loyalty Management and Trade Promotions Management products.

Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite also scored well for Application Usability and Interaction Management.

“Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite provides the broadest functionality in the market and is the best product for B2B marketers,” reported Forrester Analyst Elena Anderson. “Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite offers top-notch analysis tools and very strong campaign design and segmentation tools.”

To assess the state of the enterprise marketing platform market, Forrester analyzed strengths and weaknesses of the top enterprise eight CRM vendors across 168 criteria that incorporated current offering, strategy and market presence.

The complete Forrester Enterprise Marketing Wave report is available online.

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LLP KaR-Tel, a mobile operator in Kazakhstan and a VimpelCom affiliate working under the Beeline brand, and CRM vendor Amdocs have announced that KaR-Tel has deployed Amdocs CRM to improve its customer service and increase operational efficiencies.

KaR-Tel is also using Amdocs billing products for automated resource and inventory management to improve and simplify sales and provisioning processes of pre-paid and post-paid services.

Amdocs CRM enables KaR-Tel to centralize customer information and provide its customer service agents with a single view of the customer, according to KaR-Tel officials. Additionally, the operator can better manage incidents and problems via its contact centers across Kazakhstan, driving down call handling time.

The Amdocs CRM deployment is a collaboration of teams from VimpelCom and KaR-Tel, Arstel Consulting and Amdocs.

“With Amdocs we can now deliver an intentional customer experience, with a level of service not known before in the Kazakhstan marketplace,” said Ansat Zhabagin, chief financial officer at LLP KaR-Tel.

Amdocs CRM currently supports more than 150 KaR-Tel agents handling more than 10,000 customer calls per day. KaR-Tel plans to further expand the deployment to support its regional contact centers as well.

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Queue Associates, Inc., a Microsoft Business Solutions consulting firm based in New York, has announced the expansion of its operations into Europe with the opening of Queue Associates UK in London, England.

The company also announced that it has acquired the intellectual property for “Global Projects Suite,” an enterprise project management software enhancement for the Microsoft Dynamics SL product.

Queue Associates will implement the newly-acquired GPS technology in conjunction with the Microsoft Dynamics SL suite of project-management products. Global Projects Suite (GPS) consists of three separate components, including Global Project Extensions, Multi- Currency Expenses and Multiple Base Currency General Ledger, specifically designed to help international organizations manage their multi- currency, multi-office and multi-national projects while maintaining local responsibility.

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Bharti Tele-Ventures, an Indian provider of telecommunications services, has signed a five-year managed services agreement with Nortel to host contact center services for more than 19.7 million subscribers to Bharti’s Airtel GSM mobile, broadband and fixed-line services.

Nortel will create a Network Operations Center in New Delhi and provide network design, integration, support and maintenance services for Bharti’s contact center architecture.

A 24x7 virtual storefront voice portal based on Nortel’s interactive voice response product will be the cornerstone of Bharti’s new contact center operation. Calling a single number from anywhere in India, Bharti’s wireless and wireline customers will be able to speak in English, Hindi, or four other regional languages to complete routine transactions and subscribe to new services. Nortel has also designed the architecture for future interactive video response capability.

To simplify business, Bharti has designed with Nortel an innovative “per call” approach to paying for Nortel’s hosted services, linking its contact center cost structure to network traffic, service levels and customer growth.

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 Gustav Holst's The Planets:

Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. has announced the delivery of its IP contact center system based on Oki's computer telephony integration server, CTstage 4i for .NET, to Suruga Bank Ltd., a Japanese bank proud of its retail banking division.

Oki's contact center system" improves Suruga Bank's business efficiency and productivity by flexibility responding to changes and expansions, and connecting to the bank's CRM," according to Oki officials.

Operation for the 150 seats, out of 250 seats at Suruga's Direct Banking, starts from April 2006.

"We believe our contact center system can help improve business efficiency and simplify the business flow at Suruga Bank, who is known for their innovative approach towards retail banking," said Katsuyoshi Koide, President of Multimedia Messaging Company at Oki Electric.

Koide said Oki plans offer the system to customers "in the financial institutions in Japan" in need of strengthening their contact centers.

Suruga Bank will use the system to improve its inbound and outbound business efficiency, since the operators in charge can control the order of incoming calls and take calls by implementing the "free group" function. This means calls can be received from any group, having the appropriate operator skill level, which company officials say will also increases Suruga's close rate.

In addition, by seamlessly connecting the activities of receiving loan enquires, screening, and responding, the bank simplifies the enquiry flow and eliminates paper-based methods.

Phone calls received at branch offices will now be forwarded to the contact centers via IP networks, thus centralizing all inquiry handling. Going forward, Suruga Bank plans to increase the number of branch offices forwarding calls to the contact center, and increase the number of seats at the center.

Oki launched the CTstage in 1996 as a Computer Telephony Integration system to converge computer and telephony. CTstage 4i is the model launched in 2002 that provides a contact center product with softswitch and UnPBX architectures.

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Cellon International, a vendor of end-to-end design and systems integration services for the wireless handset industry, have announced an expansion of its development team through the establishment of Cellon Shanghai.

The expansion, accomplished by acquiring design operations, is a move to strengthen Cellon's China-based operations and broaden the company's capabilities to the full range of technologies in current wireless handset development.

The acquired design operations comprise approximately 160 engineers, and broaden Cellon's technology portfolio to include CDMA, W-CDMA and WiFi. That expansion gives Cellon proven expertise across all current major wireless standards, and company officials reckon it puts them in "an excellent position to remain at the leading edge" of future development.

The strengthening of Cellon's China-based design operations is in line with the industry's increasing concentration in China for handset development and manufacturing operations. With an eye to this lucrative market, adding Shanghai to Beijing and Shenzhen gives Cellon design and manufacturing support operations in all major handset development and manufacturing locations.

The company also announced the launch of Cellon Europe to strengthen customer-focused activities in the EMEA geographic area, registered in Paris. Cellon Europe will focus on marketing and sales, field services (validation and type approval) as well as nurturing existing partnerships with mobile operators.

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Happy birthday to author T.R. Pearson, born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina fifty years ago today. He's the author of eight novels, and his first novel, A Short History of a Small Place, published in 1985 when he was painting houses for a living is one of First Coffee^SM's three or four favorite postwar 20th century American novels. Others would be John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany, Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and, of course, Jerome David Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye.

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The Best Little Software Company In Redmond is previewing Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0, Microsoft's offering for providing what company officials describe as "next-generation business value to customers in the form of powerful role-based activity."

As a composite application, Microsoft Dynamics AX is engineered to enable the use of business logic and data from multiple systems to show a complete view of a customer's business processes, "keeping the focus on people and the work they need to do," company officials say.

Mark A. Jensen, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics AX for the Microsoft Business Products Group at Microsoft says the product's "extraordinary level of integration with Microsoft SQL Server," among other considerations, "will deliver a product that challenges the competitors by providing a true role-based composite application."

Microsoft Dynamics AX, formerly Microsoft Business Products-Axapta, is a multi-language, multi-currency enterprise resource planning (ERP) product marketed as addressing "intricate business scenarios involving complex collaboration within and across companies." Company officials say its core strengths are in manufacturing, supply chain management, wholesale and distribution, retail, government, and services industries.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0, available later this year, will allow customers to expand into global markets such as Japan and China, company officials say.

Greg Lush, CIO of The Linc Group Inc., says that while "acquisitions have created an environment with many systems," including Oracle-, PeopleSoft- and UNIX-based environments, "Microsoft can provide the entire platform with business applications, infrastructure and support.

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Tech research firm Frost & Sullivan finds that the U.S. IVR Systems market earned revenues of $564.8 million in 2005, and estimates it to reach $1.49 billion in 2012.   

By David Sims

david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Eric Clapton’s Timepieces:

Headscratching news item of the day, courtesy of Yahoo!: “Believe it or not, people who get only 6 to 7 hours a night have a lower death rate than those who get 8 hours of sleep.”

I had always kind of thought the death rate was pretty close to 100 percent no matter how much sleep you get, but hey, I’ve been wrong before.

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Xactly Corporation, an on-demand sales compensation management company, wants to take a page from salesforce.com’s playbook in succeeding with online CRM.

New board member Cindy Padnos, director, Outlook Ventures, said she’s excited to join the board of Xactly, since in her view “Xactly will be mainstreaming on-demand sales compensation management similar to how salesforce.com popularized on-demand CRM.”

Using spreadsheets to manage sales compensation is a legacy approach that predates the Internet, Padnos says, adding “why would companies want to be held back when there’s an affordable, proven alternative product in Xactly Incent? It’s going to be the ‘next big thing’ in CRM.”

Xactly has announced that it has secured $8 million in Series B funding led by Outlook Ventures and Spinner Asset Management, LLC. In related news, the company also announced the appointment of Padnos to the Xactly board of directors.

Bay Partners and Rembrandt Ventures, the lead investors in Xactly’s Series A round, along with other Series A investors, also participated in the Series B financing.

The new financing will be used to increase Xactly’s sales and marketing initiatives, expand the service organization and accelerate market adoption of the company’s leading on-demand sales compensation management product.

Christopher W. Cabrera, Xactly founder, president and CEO, said he believes “savvy mid-size businesses are rapidly moving to our on-demand approach to automate sales compensation. These entities are realizing increases in top-line revenue growth, seeing quick ROIs as a result of rapid deployments, which range from 24 hours to two weeks, and ensuring that they meet various regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley.”

Cabrera said he also sees companies “able to shape behavioral changes in their sales forces to sell more of the right products.”

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UCN, Inc., a vendor of on-demand contact handling software and business telecommunication services delivered over the UCN national VoIP network, has announced that AnswerX, a provider of customized, hosted CRM products to the call center and telephone answering service industry, selected inContact to support its company.

AnswerX, based in Orlando, develops and hosts a customizable and flexible CRM product designed to support the specialized needs of its call center and answering service customer base. The AnswerX Intelligent CallCenter product integrates with database applications and virtual automated call distribution products, providing such features as screen pops, user interfaces for information handling, multiple messaging delivery options and case management tools.

In addition to its proprietary CRM software, AnswerX offers integration and support expertise in helping businesses convert their operations, teams and agents from a facilities-based operation to “the new age of virtual operations,” explained Richard Riga, director of technology, support and development for AnswerX.

The way AnswerX officials see it, they’re working with a virtual business model. “All of our developers, sales, support and business relationship specialists work primarily from home offices,” said Riga. Tweaking an on-site legacy ACD product to handle their virtual workforce needs didn’t work well, so they decided to go for a hosted contact handling product.

One of UCN’s big selling points, according to Riga, was the company’s flexible connectivity options. “UCN enabled me to integrate our existing telephony infrastructure with the inContact platform, saving us time and money,” said Riga. “Additionally, UCN is able to provision AnswerX customers with their own local inbound or toll-free numbers, allowing our customers to own and control those numbers, not AnswerX, which is exactly what our customers want.”

Implementation took only a week, after the scope of work was agreed upon. Setting up a team member took all of 20 minutes, according to Riga. Because of the way inContact was programmed to deliver a call – using a customized interactive voice response with database integration and flexible skills-based routing with preferred priority – overall talk time per call was reduced by 50 percent.

“Our average service level went from 70 percent to 100 percent. All calls are now answered in 30 seconds or less. With improved routing and database integration, overall, we are saving about a minute per call,” said Riga.

…

Alba Spectrum Group has announced its Oracle E-Business Suite customer support call center for the US, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America and Brazil Oracle customers.

One of the prioritized directions is Oracle Applications integration with Legacy System, Supply Chain Management, CRM, Warehouse Management, Barcoding, Transportation & Logistics, Manufacturing Oracle based and third party systems.

According to Alba Spectrum Group spokesmen Riccardo Lanzuolo and Sandro Marques, the new trend in MRP/ERP system market is heterogeneous systems (LINUX, Unix, Microsoft Windows, etc.) integration into one working ERP.

An Oracle E-Business Suite client might have already implemented SCM system with advanced Electronic Data Interchange features, and needs integration development and following support. Nowadays customers require advanced technical skills in system design, customization, extensions development and integrations, Lanzuolo says.

…

HickoryTech Corporation has announced the selection of Dale E. Parker as a director on HickoryTech’s 10-member board. Parker will fill the independent board position being vacated on April 24, 2006 by Robert E. Switz, president and CEO of ADC Telecommunications, Inc., and will complete the remainder of Switz’s term, which expires in 2008.

Switz stepped down due to ADC’s guidelines restricting the number of public company boards on which he may serve. Switz had been a director since 1999.

HickoryTech Corporation is a diversified communications company headquartered in Mankato, Minn., with approximately 460 employees in Minnesota and Iowa. In its 109th year of operation, HickoryTech’s Telecom Sector offers local voice, long distance, Internet, Broadband services, Digital TV, and IP networking.

The Enterprise Solutions Sector provides IP telephony, call center management, and data network products. The Enventis Telecom Sector provides IP-based voice and data services and network products on a state wide SONET-based network.

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 Pogues’ If I Should Fall From Grace With God:

Esmertec, a vendor of software and services for the telecommunication, interactive multimedia, and consumer electronics markets, will announce its client-server M2M product, OSVM Universe.

OSVM Universe contains features for the M2M market and is “suited for use in automation, fleet management, and vending machines,” company officials say, adding that it “can also be integrated to existing enterprise products such as ERP or a CRM system with a server-side plug-in.”

Using two-way wireless communication, OSVM Universe provides companies with a means to service and update devices deployed in the field. It also offers developers a tool for creating M2M applications, which can exchange application data between the device and the server.

OSVM Universe features a user-friendly integrated development environment, as well as what company officials describe as a “virtual machine-based embedded platform and a secure remote device administrator,” which enables remote, scalable and automated on-the-fly software upgrade for large numbers of M2M devices.

Lars Bak, Chief Architect of Esmertec describes OSVM Universe as “an M2M software product for devices with limited resources,” since it can be deployed on existing platforms and “enables cost savings in device management.”

…

Evidently NetSuite wants to follow in the footsteps of Salesforce.com, as the hosted CRM vendor plans to go public and establish operations in China before the end of this year, according to the company’s President and CEO Zach Nelson.

Industry observer China Martens is reporting that Nelson says he thinks he can match the “ten times revenue valuation” rival Salesforce.com got when it filed for an initial public offering in June 2004, Nelson said in an interview Wednesday. “Going IPO is more of a marketing event for us to increase our visibility and credibility,” he told Martens.

Martens says that while NetSuite had considered going public towards the end of 2005, they “decided waiting until later this year would give the company more of a chance of matching Salesforce.com’s IPO performance which valued Salesforce.com at over $1 billion,” citing comments from Nelson.

NetSuite racked up $70 million in revenue in 2005, and expects to do at least $100 million this year.

Nelson also told Martens that having set up a wholly owned subsidiary in Japan earlier this month, NetSuite now wants to tap the lucrative China market by working with local partners.

NetSuite’s hosted enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management products are aimed at the SME market.

…

Contact center equipment and furnishings manufacturer Pro Tech Communications, Inc. has reported net sales for the three months ended December 31, 2005 were $379,504, compared to $315,689 in the same period in 2004, an increase of $63,815, or 20.2 percent.

This increase was primarily due to contact center sales. Net loss for the three months ended December 31, 2005 was $623,648, compared to $511,569 for the same period a year ago, an unfavorable variance of $112,079, or 21.9 percent. This variance was primarily due to increases in engineering expenses in connection with new product activities.

Net sales for the year ended December 31, 2005 were $1,260,978 compared to $1,075,633 in the same period in 2004, an increase of $185,345 or 17.2 percent. The increase was primarily due to sales of consumer audio and contact center products.

Net loss for the year ended December 31, 2005 was $2,061,987 compared to $1,390,155 for the same period a year ago, an unfavorable variance of $671,832, or 48.3 percent. This increase in net loss was due mainly to increases in engineering and marketing expenses in connection with new product activities.

Pro Tech’s most recognized brands include the Apollo line of products for the office and call center, the ProCom line of headsets for drive-through restaurant personnel and the NoiseBuster electronic noise canceling consumer audio headphone and safety earmuff.

…

According to recent research from Best Practices, LLC, some companies are rethinking their “cheaper is better” approach to call centers.

“Although many companies see the instant gratification of outsourcing thanks to lower labor costs, drop in service quality, retention, product knowledge and customer satisfaction can eat up the profits from what seemed to be a wise investment,” the research firm concludes.

They point to a major computer manufacturer who recently chose to divert all support calls away from its contact center in Bangalore and towards its domestic call center in Texas. Costly, yes, but considered a necessity after corporate (note the adjective) customers kept complaining of low service quality.

…

Afni, Inc., a vendor of customer interaction products primarily in the communications and insurance industries, is announcing a brand of interaction outsourcing they like to call “upsourcing” with a product called OpenSpan.

The product allows users to integrate multiple desktop applications (i.e., WIN32, WEB, Green Screen, Java Swing, etc.) in minutes without coding or scripting.

Mike Garner, Vice President Call Center Services says OpenSpan comes with “a team of people with ‘what if’ and ‘can do’ attitudes.”

Outsourcers have the difficult task of needing to integrate desktop applications, Garner says, “but typically without access to those applications running on the desktop. Before OpenSpan it was either too costly, too complicated or not possible to integrate applications in many contact centers.”

…

And a happy birthday to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, born today in 1919, a poet and proprietor of City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, the cynosure for the Beat movement in American literature in the 1950s.

He published Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” in September 1956. When a shipment of the book was seized by customs officials in San Francisco for being lewd and indecent material Ferlinghetti was sued. He won the case and all the publicity made “Howl” into a best-seller. Ferlinghetti said the San Francisco customs office deserved a word of thanks, since “it would have taken years for critics to accomplish what the good customs office did in a day.”

In 1958 he also published his own collection of poetry, A Coney Island of the Mind, which had twenty-eight printings and sold 700,000 copies in the United States alone, making it easily the best selling book ever published by a living American poet.

Whatever you think of the embarrassingly overrated Beat movement or Ferlinghetti’s poetry itself, you have to at least respect the fact that the guy’s a businessman who does honest work: He’s one of the few poets in the United States of any importance who has never held a job at a university, never received government funding, never attended an MLA conference, and never won a Pulitzer.

For the record the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for poetry went to Robert Penn Warren, author of All the King’s Men, one of the greatest 20^th century American novels and certainly no second-rate poet, for his Promises: Poems 1954-1956.

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 Swing Brother, Swing, a great three-CD collection of classic Big Band, current selection Benny Goodman’s “Don’t Be That Way:”

If at first you don’t succeed, keep it simple the second time around: The Chinese company CDC Corporation has announced that CDC Software, a wholly owned subsidiary of CDC Corporation, has presented a new proposal to the board of directors of Onyx Software for a strategic transaction that would combine Onyx Software with CDC Software.

CDC Software management is now awaiting a response of Onyx’s board of directors. Onyx said it would review the proposal.

Under the terms of CDC Software’s new proposal to Onyx, each Onyx shareholder would have a choice to receive, for each Onyx share, consideration consisting of either all-cash, or cash-and-shares in CDC Corporation.

In the event an Onyx shareholder elects to receive all-cash consideration, such shareholder would receive, for each Onyx share, $4.57 per share in cash. Such a price per share, CDC officials claim,” would represent a premium of approximately 20 percent from a recent five-day trading average for Onyx shares.”

In the event an Onyx shareholder elects to receive cash-and-shares, such shareholder would receive, for each Onyx share, $4.78 per share comprised of 50 percent (or $2.39) in cash and 50 percent (or $2.39) in registered Class A Common Shares of CDC Corporation. A $4.78 price per Onyx share would represent a premium of approximately 25 percent from a recent five-day trading average for Onyx shares.

John Clough, chairman of the executive committee for CDC Corporation and vice chairman of the board for CDC Software, said CDC Software still really, really wants to acquire Onyx, particularly for its Pivotal CRM division.

“The benefits to shareholders and customers are clear and substantial,” said Clough, ticking off complementary industry specialization, products, geographic markets, sales channels and marketing strategies: “On virtually parallel paths, Onyx and Pivotal pioneered the mid-enterprise CRM markets and by joining forces, we have the opportunity to become an even more significant force in the industry.”

While CDC Software was disappointed with Onyx’s response to CDC’s original proposal in early January 2006, CDC Software say they have been “even more surprised by the lack of interest” it has received from Onyx since then. “In January, we stated that CDC Software remains flexible and open to discussing alternatives to our original proposal,” says Clough.

Hong Kong-based CDC had offered to combine all the assets of CDC Software with Onyx, and $50 million in cash, for a majority of Onyx’s common stock, keeping Onyx a publicly-listed company. Onyx’s management announced right around New Year’s Day 2006 they were rejecting the deal.

At the time the Puget Sound Business Journal reported “Onyx officials gave a variety of reasons for turning down the offer, including: CDC Software assets are performing poorly; CDC lacks a sustained history of profitable operations and has a poor record of delivering shareholder value; and synergies between the Onyx and CDC product lines are limited.”

Specifically, Dow Jones reported, Onyx said on Jan. 5 its board unanimously rejected CDC’s offer for being “highly dilutive” to Onyx shareholders. Plus they didn’t think there would be anything but “limited synergies” between the companies. And they didn’t like CDC’s idea that Onyx pay a premium for CDC Software division assets.

“One of the big benefits of an enterprise CRM product is the ability to access vital customer data, regardless of device or locale,” noted Todd Chambers, Chief Marketing Officer at Onyx.

Two days ago CDC announced they were forming a new board of directors, separate from the CDC Corporation board, to “focus on key growth initiatives and help the organization to become an independent, standalone company,” CDC officials said.

Peter Yip, vice chairman of the board for CDC Corporation will serve as executive chairman of the CDC Software board. John Clough, a board member and chairman of the executive committee for CDC Corporation will serve as vice chairman of the board for CDC Software. Additionally, “the company is in discussion with US-based board member candidates with deep enterprise software experience,” officials say.

…

And today, in 1857 in Boston was born a woman who would change the face of the American publishing industry, who would save countless marriages and answer even more prayers: Fannie Merritt Farmer, the person who wrote the first cookbook in American – probably world – history.

While working as a housekeeper and cook, one of her jobs was to take care of a young girl named Marcia Shaw. She taught Marcia how to cook, and wrote down simple, precise cooking instructions to help her remember.

“At the time,” Writer’s Almanac says, “writing down recipes was almost unheard of. People learned to cook by doing. Measurements were also inexact. Everything was made with a pinch of this and a dash of that.” But after attending the Boston Cooking School, Fannie Farmer realized that a book full of precise instructions on how to prepare a wide variety of dishes “might help many young women become better cooks.”

So she compiled all the recipes she had ever learned, along with advice on how to set a table, how to scald milk, to cream butter, to remove stains and to clean a copper boiler.

At first, “all the publishers turned her down because they reasoned that these were all things young women could learn from their mothers. Finally, Little Brown agreed to publish the book if Fannie Farmer would pay for the printing of the first three thousand copies.”

The book sold over four million copies.

…

IBM has announced that it has signed a long-term contract with Solectron Corporation, a vendor of electronics manufacturing and integrated supply chain services, for indirect procurement services across 17 countries.

The value of the contract is not being disclosed.

IBM will manage more than $1.2 billion per year of indirect spend in areas such as temporary contract services, office equipment, utilities, and telecommunications. Core to the project is the implementation of IBM’s complete Procure-To-Pay procurement product that will be integrated with Solectron’s internal systems and controls. IBM’s product will enable web-based requisitioning as well as efficient procurement and supplier payment.

Elements of the overall procurement product include IBM commodity experts, a global contact center and an accounts payable processing center supporting Solectron suppliers and employees around the globe. Solectron will also have access to a full range of transformation and maintenance services from IBM.

The hosted Procure-To-Pay environment and business operation will go live in the autumn of 2006 in North America and will then be fully deployed globally by early spring 2007.

...

“Heated debate was ignited last week when researchers dared to suggest that RFID was vulnerable to viruses,” reports trade journal ContractorUK.

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 Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy,” proudly downloaded from iTunes just this morning:

The only really truly important fact you need to know in this whole iPod-iTunes flap in France is the following, from Piper Jaffray senior analyst Gene Munster:

“We estimate that approximately 20 percent of iPod and iTunes sales occur outside of the U.S. The French market alone is likely less than 2 percent of iPod and iTunes business.”

France’s lower house of parliament has passed a law requiring not only Apple, but all those who sell downloadable music in the country, to provide compatibility – all downloadable music must be playable on all devices, be they Apple, Sony, whatever.

On the one hand this looks fair, but seeing as how Apple has over 80 percent of the market it’s obviously targeted to knock down Apple’s market share. It’s an extraordinarily badly-written law, as almost all laws trying to impose wishful thinking on market forces are, so much so that even Apple’s competitors in the market are wary of it.

So is Apple going to trash their exclusivity for the sake of two percent of their market? First Coffee^SM doesn’t think so, friends. Bet on Apple to simply pull out of France and create a thriving black market for iTunes in France, rather than comply with the law and create a thriving black market for French iPods in the rest of the world.

Not to say I’m surprised by what France is doing. A country which has always idealized farming and treated business with disdain and lightly-concealed suspicion, which has long ago given up on market innovation, will try to legislate the heck out of those who are still capable of it.

“These clauses, which we hope will be taken up by other countries, notably at the European level, should prevent the emergence of a monopoly in the supply of online culture,” Richard Cazenave and Bernard Carayon, National Assembly deputies from the ruling UMP party, said in a statement.

Right. Substitute the word “wine” for “online culture” in the above quote and see how “principled” these politicians get. In other words, we are incapable of producing online culture that people prefer to Apple’s, so we’ll just force them to give us what they’ve accomplished.

Must be nice, having your own country where you get to write your own laws. And don’t think the French are opposed to de facto monopolies, they run plenty of them in Africa themselves, they’re just opposed to ones they don’t run – try buying a beer in Francophone Africa that doesn’t put money in the Castel Group’s pocket.

Apple itself notes, probably correctly, that “The French implementation of the EU Copyright Directive will result in state-sponsored piracy. If this happens, legal music sales will plummet just when legitimate alternatives to piracy are winning over customers. IPod sales will likely increase as users freely load their iPods with ‘interoperable’ music which cannot be adequately protected.”

If there is a case to be made for the law, it’s made as well as it’s going to be by online commentator Leander Kahney, who raises some of the right questions – “Why should the French government help competitors like Microsoft or Sony to get a foothold in a market they have proven incapable of competing in?” – and offers something of an answer by arguing that it’s not good for one company to dominate online entertainment the way Microsoft’s dominated desktop computing.

Unfortunately Kahney then loses the plot and spends a great deal of time detailing what a great job Apple’s doing breaking the Microsoft monopoly, meandering in and out of this musing and that and doesn’t really address the French law question again before slapping himself awake near the end of the column with “ Apple will become more and more powerful as the gatekeeper to this content. And it will behave like every other big, powerful global corporation – as a predatory monopoly.”

And Kahney fails to recognize the difference between Microsoft’s monopoly and Apple – what Microsoft monopolizes you can’t get anywhere else, and you can’t get around it. Apple does not monopolize music, it creates no music, it simply offers a way to purchase and listen to it. You can easily get around it by downloading it to your computer and changing the format to whatever you want.

But this subjective conjecture about Apple-as-monopoly is as good as the anti-Apple types get. BusinessWeek more trenchantly observes that “The French have done it again. In an attempt to update copyright laws for the 21st century, lawmakers in France have thrown a giant spanner in the works of the nascent online digital music business,” and could “torpedo an industry that is on just now getting off the ground after years of inaction and a massive wave of illegal sharing of unprotected digital music.”

This is partly because France itself is eye-openingly naïve when it comes to business issues, especially high-tech. Having someone else pay for your defense for the past sixty years so you can subsidize aromatherapists and set exotic restrictions on your wine industry will do that for you. Recently the French have taken to the streets in protest – no, not to burn cars, that was the previous protest, this latest protest was against a law saying employers could fire under-26 year old employees in the first two years.

That’s right. The way things stand now if you have a job at a company in France you’re pretty well set for life. It’s hard as heck to fire someone, you have to do a really bad job instead of the acceptably moderately lazy job which’ll allow you to keep your paycheck until you retire, at which point the state will take over funding you. Great system if you already have a job, terrible system if you’re a young person looking for one.

Because what happens is that employers simply avoid hiring people in the first place, since once you hire ‘em you’re stuck with ‘em, friends. They get by with minimum staffs, which means there’s very little innovation or risk, which means they depend on countries which do innovate thanks to flexible employment laws (America and… uh… let’s see, there’s…), which means they’re left to grumble in their wine during their lunch hour and a half about how those furriners are running their economy and didja see that there’s a sale on iPods at Carrefour? Let’s go, call in sick the rest of the day, who cares? We won’t get fired.

Hence youth unemployment is over 20 percent because companies, quite sensibly, refuse to hire anyone they don’t urgently need and think they’ll urgently need for the next 20 years. So the French government suggested a change to France’s employment law to allow companies to hire young people with the understanding that they could be let go in the first two years if need be. In other words, how America got to be the unchallenged world leader in innovation and growth, not only in technology but movies and music and any other industry which requires creativity, innovation and risk.

Because even with liberal firing laws American unemployment is under five percent, and nearly double that in the coddled economies of Europe, France included. Think there’s a cause and effect here, folks? Think high-tech companies take risks here because they can? Steve Jobs never would have gotten Apple off the ground in France, but the fact that he had the option of firing people if things didn’t work out allowed him to ultimately provide thousands upon thousands more jobs in the end.

You’d have thought the French government was proposing a ban on wine, cheese and pointlessly obnoxious griping about America the way the French took to the streets, burning cars, tires and whatever else, attacking policemen and shutting down Paris streets. The government still hasn’t exactly caved in but are unfolding the white flag.

In such an environment unrealistic laws are inevitable. Face it, Apple built a better mousetrap – the fact that they’re the market leaders and not monopolists Microsoft should tell you something, that an outside vendor can beat the monopoly provider. For this, cracking the Microsoft monopoly, they get punished?

If the law passes the upper house in May as it’s expected to do, and Apple simply shutters its French operation as it’s expected to do, what would the result be, aside from the thriving black market that develops whether Apple leaves or knuckles under?

One hopes a result is more European innovation in high-tech. It isn’t that Europeans, even the French, are incapable of market-winning innovation – the guillotine, brie, even the heavily-government subsidized Airbus is a step in the right direction – it’s just that they haven’t had to. If that changed, well, who knows what they’re capable of?

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 Come Fly With Me album:

SAP AG has announced that Swiss Army Brands, Inc., distributor of Swiss Army timepieces and Victorinox multi-tools, cutlery, travel gear and apparel, has selected SAP products to optimize business processes and drive the expansion of its business lines.

The distributor decided to retire its Oracle/JD Edwards legacy system and turned to SAP, specifically, the integrated SAP Apparel and Footwear application.

In the apparel industry, company officials say, businesses need to react within days or even hours to changes in consumer behavior and customer demand. Swiss Army Brands (leave it to the Swiss, even their military is a profitable enterprise) say they chose SAP AFS as it “features a flexible master-data structure that represents sizes, colors and styles at the stock keeping unit level and gives planners up-to-the minute visibility into daily activities,” to improve on-shelf availability.

Tom Hennigan, senior vice president and chief operating officer, Swiss Army Brands, Inc. said his company views the implementation of SAP as “essential for us to provide our customers with the same service levels that much larger brands provide.”

Swiss Army Brands will use SAP CRM, ERP and supply chain management products to integrate its global distribution operations and standardize information on an enterprise level. They’ll also get rid of incompatible legacy systems, using SAP NetWeaver platform to enable “smooth system integration,” according to company officials, “across the organization’s distribution facilities, which will help streamline operations and improve financial management controls.”

Under the agreement, Swiss Army Brands will implement a full range of SAP products including enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) in a phased rollout for approximately 200 users.

Swiss Army Brands, Inc., a subsidiary of Victorinox A.G., headquartered in Ibach, Switzerland. It expects to go live with the software in the third quarter of 2006.

…

EVergance, a vendor of end-to-end consulting services for CRM and Web self-service, today announced its partnership with The Winters Group, a consulting firm that works with companies’ contact centers.

This partnership is structured for eVergance to bring call center operational perspectives to client engagements. The Winters Group offers eVergance’s existing service lines with call center-specific offerings including revenue generation, outsourcing strategy design, contact channel management and due diligence.

…

Compass Global, Inc., an operator of IP-based international voice and data communications networks, has announced it will use Sansay’s VSX VoIP session control systems.

Compass officials say the move is an effort to minimize operating costs while improving the quality of service to hard-to-reach destinations.

Compass Global builds and operates international communications networks between the United States and destinations with underdeveloped telecom infrastructures in South America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, partnering with in-country carriers to build routes and reselling minutes to global service providers.

Compass Global says it has already migrated 95 percent of its wholesale traffic and virtually all of its retail traffic to IP. The company now averages 75 million minutes of traffic per month.

Dean Cary, founder and CEO of Compass Global says they had been “originally looking to complement our TDM switch with VoIP, but it quickly became obvious that the world was moving toward a global VoIP to VoIP infrastructure.”

Good customer service helped swing the contract: “In talking to another session control company we felt like we were talking to our TDM switch vendor again; like it would be very difficult to get anything customized,” Cary says.

As a result of converting to an IP based infrastructure based on Sansay systems and integration with their in-house “Global Traffic Management” software, Compass Global says it has seen ROI, Cary says:

“Before we migrated to Sansay, our TDM switch alone cost between $75-90K per month for power and other environmentals, with DS3s, SS7 links and other facilities adding another $100K. With the new IP infrastructure we can replace what used to take up 2500 square feet with four Sansay units the size of DVD players and consume less power than a hair dryer. We’re saving $180-200K each month and our quality improved dramatically by eliminating conversions of voice traffic between TDM and IP.”

Compass Global is a privately held international telecommunications company headquartered in Woodcliff Lake, N.J., which builds and operates international voice and data networks between the United States and many destinations in South America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

…

According to a new report, “Strategic Analysis of IPTV In Europe: Telecom Operators Strategies” published by research firm Frost & Sullivan, the ongoing deregulation of the European telecommunications market and the subsequent entry of alternate service providers means incumbent telecom operators are witnessing a sharp decline in revenues from traditional business streams.

And that means technologies such as VoIP and broadband over cable modem are starting to make their presence felt.

The report sees VoIP and broadband as “contributing to this trend,” and says to offset this decline, as well as to reverse the downward trend in their customer base, telecom operators are beginning to focus on delivering bundled services that provide higher revenues and growth, such as IPTV.

What makes IPTV an attractive defense strategy against the entry of cable operators in the telephony business is its ability to provide on-screen programming information, time shifting features, and multiple camera angles.

IPTV can do this thanks to the two-way communication capability of the broadband connection and the point-to point distribution, the report explains: The two-way communication capability allows for interactivity between subscribers and the network, and the point-to-point lets each viewer watch individual broadcasting such as video on demand.

It’s not all roses: “IPTV involves not only network upgrades, but also securing premium content for distribution, resolving operational, billing and management integration issues as well as providing a satisfactory user interface, among other concerns,” notes ICT Senior Industry Analyst Fernando Elizalde in the report. “All these represent significant challenges to telecom operators entering an unfamiliar territory, such as the distribution of entertainment content.”

Notably, market participants consider premium content in the distribution business the most important element in the delivery of television over digital subscriber line. Service providers will have to invest considerable time and effort in procuring content as well as exclusive sports material from major studios and producers.

IPTV may not be an immediate success throughout Europe, and the success of this offering will be different in each country, depending on specific country and regional characteristics.

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 Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark… nah, save that for the white wine with the wife after the kids are in bed tonight, the working music is Ike and Tina Turner’s 18 Classic Tracks:

Clearing off the news from last week, First Coffee^SM would like to note the release of Bridgedexchange Version 3.6, web-based CRM.

There’s a pretty good, detailed description the company sent along of what the product does, and as it sounds like it serves as a good primer for how these kinds of products tend to work, there are differences, but basically it’s a good example of how on-demand CRM works, so we’ll go over it in a bit more detail in case you’ve never seen one explained and frankly wonder what it’s like, and don’t want to appear more ignorant than you have to at cocktail parties and in front of consultants who might then get dollar signs in their eyes when they realize you don’t know stuff like this:

Users of the system can manage the layout, customize web based forms, search for contacts in the system, manage documents, and tracking e-mails with a customized template. The information’s stored on another server not in your building, you simply access it via browser the way you hit Google and the Victoria’s Secret site.

The system lets users track their own sales progress, and lets managers track it as well. The sale cycle can be customized in the MYpreferences area. The CRM administrators can add or remove sales steps to help manage the sales cycle. This additional feature also allows the managers of the CRM to evaluate the sales representatives progress through the sales cycle by reports generated in the MYreports section of the application.

Each user within the system has the ability to upload and store documents only if they have a valid e-mail address within the system. The folders and directories on the server are built to separate documents based on the employees’ group identification and the e-mail address of the user in the system. If the users’ information is adjusted in the system and the e-mail address changes, the folder name will be automatically updated and therefore the documents stored in that folder will remain.

The MYLayout area allows each employee to customize the location of different blocks that appear within the application. The first step is to select the section to customize using the drop down menu with the provided sections. Once the section has been selected, the new page will allow you to pick from the assigned locations of each block.

Quick Views are the upper left side of the application, which include the Calendar, Events, Contacts, and Clients. The lower left portion is for the Add Events, Add Contacts, and Add Clients. The right half of the page shows only one block with the exception of the MYhome tab.

Each drop down menu assigns a default tab to be displayed every time the selected block loads. So if the selected block is turned off by default, the block will not load in that particular tab. This setup is good for users with a dial up connections or slower connections, which would otherwise spend too much time loading the components all onto the page at one time.

The layout, or appearance, can be adjusted as many times as you like but won’t affect the functionality.

The “generate code” icon is + symbol, that allows users to create the HTML code to cut and paste into a web HTML document. This code will have all the required information to submit the data properly into the application and will store the information into the database as a contact. And during the building phase of the form, you can pick the categories, status, and assigned employee to be automatically be assigned every time the form is used.

Even if the same form is used on many different web pages across different domains, the information will still be collected and assigned to the designated places within the application.

First you assign the basic required information to the form you’re building. This information is presented to the user when entering this part of the application. A form has title, lead description, phone, e-mail, status, and categories, and you can assign it by any of those criteria in the system. When this information is filled out in its entirety, you click the “create form” button which adds the newly-created form to the main list of forms.

To add or create fields within the new form simply click on the “edit” icon. The form fields are created to collect the information from the web page, in the same order in which the user selected the form fields.

For example, usually the first field assigned to the form is the person or company name. This is represented as a textbox field and can be selected from the drop down menu and then clicking the “Add Form Field” button. This action will reload the page and ask the user to describe the text placed as a question before the textbox when presented to the user on the page. In this case you can use a sentence or just one word. When the word or sentence has been finished, click the “Create Textbox Question” button to save and add it to the end of the form list.

Each field type has instructions on building and selecting different types of form elements. Once the form is completed the generated code can be cut and pasted into the HTML document. Once the form is located inside an HTML document, the order can then be changed by an experienced HTML designer or programmer.

Oh sure, the form will work right out of the generate code page, but for further customization the code may be changed, the vendor can help you with that part.

Once leads or contacts enter the system using the online form generated through the MYforms area, the leads are then saved in at the bottom of the each contact page as an original version. Customized versions of forms can actually drop the data into specific fields based on the requirements of the client.

Advanced searches include the date range search mentioned above, but also allows users to search by additional parameters such as the status of the contact, keywords that match the contacts data, the assignment to a specific employee, multiple subcategory assignments, and even the number of contacts per page. Basically it’s just ways to find a contact quickly. You can click on the link “check all” or “un-check all” and automatically check every contact on the page and select actions from drop-down lists.

This is helpful for re-assigning leads to an employee, converting all the contacts over to clients, or simply re-assigning the leads to a specific status.

If properly set up, this can show returns on investment using Pay Per Click engines and link advertisements. The tracking file is provided in the MYdocuments section of the application. When placed in the top level of each directory of the site, the tracking script will track the users coming into the site and will save the keyword and search engine data used. The data is then stored and related back to the incoming contact as a stats report.

Forms can be set up on the system using the MYforms section. This allows users to build forms for website(s) to collect leads. The tracking script is used for external websites, not the internal use of the CRM application.

Shared documents are displayed to the every user on the system and cannot be deleted once shared. All users can view documents at the same time. Downloaded documents cannot be changed and updated on the system without uploading a new version. All documents must be downloaded onto the local computer system and then re-uploaded to the server in order to make changes.

All documents can be stored in a secure directory to allow each document uploaded to the system to be separate from other users. All documents uploaded to the account can be deleted from the directory using the delete link.

Contacts that have an e-mail address within the system can be sent a custom HTML template e-mail by clicking on the e-mail icon located in the E-mail column of the MYcontacts listings page. Users can provide a custom built HTML header and HTML footer to within the e-mail. Attached files can be sent to help in the sales process. The e-mails are then logged to show the current e-mail list that has been sent out.

That’s the basic plumbing of how these things work. This is Bridgedexchange’s particular version, but the idea’s not too different across vendors.

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 “Delta Dawn” by Tanya Tucker, whose career was one of the most stupendous voices pressed into service of some of the most underwhelming material in history. But not here, baby, not here:

According to a new study by analyst firm Dittberner, three categories of Fixed Mobile Convergence services will be the most popular in the near future, potentially competing with “all mobile” solutions (Fixed mobile substitution).

Specifically, Dittberner likes:

Services based on dual-mode terminals (3G and WLAN),

Set or programmable automatic call forwarding (“Follow-me”), and

Home-zone pricing schemes.

Dittberner addresses the various business and marketing issues pertaining to fixed-mobile convergence in this comprehensive study, which concludes that “FMC services are unlikely to generate any sizable incremental revenue particularly for full service carriers.”

For example, carriers advertise services based on dual-mode handsets as providing convenience to users (i.e. one phone, one number, one address book, one voice mail box, one bill, one point contact), but “remarkably also emphasize the cost benefits to clients because calls made and received via the home, or office WLAN will be billed at the fixed wireline tariff, which is usually lower than the mobile tariff.”

Dr. Alain Thiney, vice president at Dittberner says that in his estimation, “revenues to be derived by full service carriers from converged fixed-mobile services will probably pale in comparison to fixed and mobile video services revenues for example.”

He added that the development of IP-based high value-added services delivered via fixed and mobile broadband access networks “will be the real revenue generators, as FMC provides added convenience for which users will not be willing to pay a premium.”

However, the study concludes, FMC could provide integrated fixed-mobile carriers a significant competitive tool to maintain or increase their market share, helping customer retention, and even helping capture new mobile customers.

The report includes a comprehensive FMC revenue simulation model and several business cases illustrating the positive impact of FMC on revenues.

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Yes! Finally! The Pogues’ If I Should Fall From Grace With God is available on iTunes! ‘Bout time! Now get Abbey Road, guys.

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Thinking of whether or not you should go with Microsoft Dynamic CRM 3.0 or not? I.B.I.S., Inc., a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner helped DMB Financial, LLC, a debt settlement and credit restoration financial services vendor, do so.

DMB Financial recounts that it was “struggling to manage its day-to-day operations” using antiquated systems and methods. Daniel Kwiatek, Chief Operating Officer for DMB Financial, said they had no visibility into their sales pipeline and “forecasting was nearly impossible.”

They knew they wanted a tool to help improve operational efficiencies, and Kwiatek says installing Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM helped them to “immediate improvement in our telesales, leads tracking, and management reporting operations.”

Prior to the installation of Dynamics CRM, the company was investing significant marketing dollars to generate leads that could not be effectively tracked, compiled, or reported upon. Any reporting that was in place was being managed through diverse Excel spreadsheets requiring extensive manual intervention.

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Calling all call centers.

Business research firm Prosci Research is announcing the launch of its 2006 Call Center Best Practices Benchmarking study. The online study is sponsored and conducted by Prosci Research and co-sponsored by Strategic Contact.

The companies are undertaking the study with four primary goals: to uncover the most effective management practices in call centers today, to understand how companies are using today’s technologies, to reveal the most current performance objectives and results for call centers by industry, and to identify the operational and technological changes that have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction, call center efficiency and revenue contributions.

Participation is free, and each participant will receive a free copy of the published study results report.

The 2006 study is the fourth in a series of research projects Prosci has conducted in the call center field. In its 1999, 2001 and 2004 Call Center Best Practices Benchmarking studies, the company collected data from over 650 organizations in 50 countries.

“This study is our most comprehensive to date,” said Jeff Hiatt, president of Prosci. “The data collected will provide managers with a wide view of the changing call center environment and how to optimize their performance.”

The 2006 Call Center Best Practices Benchmarking study has two components, the Call Center Management and Operations study and the Call Center Technology study. Participants can contribute to both.

Participants in the Call Center Management and Operations study will contribute information on their management practices, including performance objectives and results, workforce management, hiring and recruiting, training, outsourcing, agent motivation and other relevant topics.

The Call Center Technology study focuses on technology changes and their impact on performance.

“We believe this study will drive out important information contact centers everywhere are craving – what works and what doesn’t, what is hot and what isn’t and what they can learn from other centers – to help optimize their technology and operations,” said Strategic Contact president Lori Bocklund.

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Japanese hardware firm NEC Corporation’s unit NEC Solutions Brasil aims to grow 30 percent to $37.8 million in 2006 over 2004, NEC Solutions Brasil managing director Silvio Kiyoharu Maemura told BNamericas.

NEC Solutions Brasil, a subsidiary providing IT and communications, will be boosted by demand for new technologies such as VoIP, IP and data services this year, Maemura says.

The operation aims to grow around 70 percent in the VoIP segment and IP telephony in relation to 2005, Maemura said. Two years ago, the company’s revenues were split 90 percent voice and 10 percent data. In 2005, the profile switched to 75 percent voice and 25 percent data solutions.

In 2006, NEC Solutions Brasil aims for an even split, with 50 percent voice and 50 percent data, such as VoIP and IP telephony. “We have competence in voice and data,” Maemura said.

NEC already has a 12 percent share in the market for medium-sized and large companies and has a base of 4,000 enterprise clients. Of these customers, over 150 have VoIP networks and close to 30 will implement IP telephony convergence projects, according to Maemura.

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.. oh, let’s dig out something Oirish in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, which is virtually ignored in Ireland as it’s always been much more about the American Irish experience (the name “Erin” originated outside of Ireland, among expats), bunch of Irish getting together in the pub in Boston, New York and Chicago to drink Guinness, sing and reminisce about the stories Gran’ma told about the Auld Sod… what’ve we got here… okay, The Dust Rhinos’ “Wild Mountain Thyme.” Yeah it’s Scottish, but close enough, the Rhinos – great band – are certainly mick through and through, and it’s still the best song ever written about trotting off into the hills for a little afternoon delight. Yee-ha, Erin Go Bragh:

This summary is as good as any:

“St. Patrick was born around the year 385 in a village in Wales. When he was sixteen, a group of Irish pirates raided his village and took many of the young men back to Ireland to work as slaves. Patrick worked for six years as a herdsman in the Irish countryside. In his sixth year, he escaped and made his way back to Wales.

“But, according to his autobiography, soon after he got back home he heard a voice telling him to go back to Ireland and convert the Irish to Christianity. That’s eventually what he did, but first he went to France to visit monasteries and study religious texts.”

It’s actually a point of contention whether or not Christianity had already been introduced into Ireland or not by the time Patrick went, but if it had observance was negligible.

“After twelve years in France, he went back to Ireland, where he founded monasteries, schools and churches, and converted much of the island to Christianity. Patrick transformed many pagan traditions into Christian ones.”

In Thomas Cahill’s delightful book How The Irish Saved Civilization, he notes that Patrick was the first confirmed Christian missionary to ever take the gospel beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire, St. Paul never trod a non-Roman road in his life, the tradition is that the apostle Thomas went to India but there’s no evidence of that.

Ireland was a completely – completely – foreign land, in every sense of the word, when Patrick went. His work stands as one of the most amazing accomplishments in world history, secular or sacred.

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Another useful report from Forrester, this time on how to select a CRM service provider, How To Select a CRM Professional Services Provider. First Coffee^SM’s thanks to the author, analyst William Band, for sending it along.

Burning their usual copious amounts of shoe leather, the researchers find that “although enterprises place high importance on the quality of the firm that they engage to support CRM projects, four out of 10 would not recommend their CRM PSP to others.”

Okay, so bearing in mind that four times out of ten a recommendation from another firm on their CRM service provider is an attempt to sabotage your company, how does one go about picking up quality help?

Forrester identifies a handy twelve-step program for doing so. Number One is to get in a circle and repeat “Hi, I’m Acme Anvils and I need CRM.” Then – what? Oh, sorry, wrong twelve steps.

First off, service providers don’t need to sweat. Forrester finds that enterprises continue to invest heavily in CRM-related capabilities, expecting enterprises “to spend about $3 billion worldwide on new CRM software licenses in 2006.” They say total spending with CRM application vendors, including vendor services and maintenance, “will exceed $8 billion.”

Yes, the consultants will get their slab of all that cherry pie: “Expenditures on new CRM software licenses are only a small portion, perhaps 25 percent, of an enterprise’s required investment to implement new CRM technologies,” Forrester finds. “Worldwide expenditures on CRM consulting and systems integration are likely in the range of $6 billion per year.”

And this figure doesn’t even include the large sums spent on outsourced CRM services providers in the contact center and direct marketing sectors.

Forrester breaks down their twelve recommendations for how to find a good professional service provider into three areas:

Competence. The most essential evaluation criteria for evaluating CRM PSPs are their knowledge and skills pertinent to the problems facing the enterprise. Is the PSP highly knowledgeable about the needs and requirements of your specific industry? Does it understand the specific business processes related to the scope of your CRM technology implementation?

Relationship. Will the PSP be easy to do business with after you have contracted its services? Will it help you find ways to lower your total cost of ownership for the CRM software technologies to be implemented? Will it adhere closely to the agreed budget?

Results. Will the CRM PSP help you quickly realize value from the CRM applications? Will it provide good value for investing its services to formulate and implement CRM strategies, processes, and technologies?

Forrester recommends making sure your PSP is at least able to walk and chew gum on three areas: Demonstrable knowledge of the technical characteristics of CRM application, demonstrable knowledge of the requirements of the industry and demonstrable knowledge of business processes.

Watch that last one – Forrester found that over thirty percent of all companies thought their PSPs lacked that crucial knowledge.

Lots of other actionable advice, the entire report’s well worth the price. In the end, Band boils it down to four main points:

Your PSP’s CRM technology skills must be solid, since, well, competence in the technical nuances of the CRM products is kind of what you’re paying them for. Make sure that the consultants assigned to your project are certified by the vendors.

Seek a partner that you can work with easily. You need a consulting partner that can work effectively with your people.

Require – don’t ask, require – that your budget be respected. Consultants now have deep experience about the costs and benefits that can be achieved in given circumstances. Insist on fixed-price contracts to ensure that the consultant bears its fair share of the risk for project delivery.

Demand value from your consulting partner. Find a CRM professional services partner that can provide references attesting to business results they have achieved. Redefine project success metrics to include not only cost and schedule milestones, but also to include business outcome metrics.

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Breath of sanity: All this CRM stuff’s great, sure, but don’t forget that business is still about the relationship, not the management part.

Australian industry Steven Deare writes of the Australian National Bank, as CRMed-up as anyone with unified data warehousing and SMS assisted log-ins and what have you, but such technologies will only ever complement traditional services rather than replace them, according to Gerd Schenkel, general manager, customer strategy and cross marketing, NAB.

“We are a firm believer that banking is a face-to-face business and we use technology more and more to support our face-to-face sales people,” Deare reports Schenkel saying at a Teradata conference in Sydney this week, adding Schenkel’s comment that “ believe a big area of innovation will be in technologies that help our people deal with our customers face to face or on the phone.”

Amen. Now go grab a Guinness. What about your boss? Yeah, sure, get her one too.

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 something you’ve never heard, Gil Scott-Heron’s “Johannesburg:”

The privately-held business intelligence vendor from Cary, North Carolina, SAS has entered into an agreement to acquire Veridiem, a privately held software company based in Maynard, Massachusetts.

It’s the seventh acquisition by SAS since 2000. Veridiem’s flagship software, Veridiem 2, is designed to link sales results to the marketing investments that drove them to identify what’s working, what’s not, and what will work better.

The company’s products help clients analyze and optimize their return from marketing investments such as advertising, promotions, incentives, direct mail, events and the Web. Veridiem works in a field known as Marketing Resource Management.

SAS officials say the acquisition will bolster SAS’ Customer Intelligence product line, which includes marketing automation, event-based marketing, campaign optimization, Web analytics, e-marketing and customer analytics.

The acquisition also brings SAS’ Boston-area presence to about 160 employees, as Veridiem’s dozen employees join existing employees at SAS’ office in Middleton, Massachusetts.

In 2003, SAS acquired Marketmax, a vendor of retail planning and merchandise intelligence software.

Veridiem is privately held and backed by leading investors such as North Bridge Venture Partners, Venrock Associates, Infinity Capital and North Hill Ventures. The acquisition agreement is subject to certain conditions, including the approval of Veridiem’s stockholders. Financial details were not disclosed.

Using the Veridiem software, companies can simulate the expected outcome of various marketing strategies, measure the effectiveness of those already underway, and identify mid-course changes that can maximize results.

Veridiem’s software is also designed to promote accountability in marketing organizations, deliver continuous intelligence about the impact of marketing activities across various channels, and generate strong return on investment.

Gartner Research Vice President Kimberly Collins wrote last April that “marketing organizations are under increased pressure to become more accountable and to increase visibility of marketing programs and their impact.”

SAS President and CEO Jim Goodnight said the Veridiem purchase would improve SAS products’ marketing activities.

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Tokyo’s Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. has been busy with the product announcements here. Yesterday they announced distance broadcast testing, today it’s the launch of IP Convergence Server SS9100 Release 5, what company officials describe as “the latest model in its IP telephony server product lineup.”

The SS9100 R5 increases line capacity up to 20 thousand lines, and will be available to the Japanese market from March 20, 2006.

Oki launched its first SS9100, an IP telephony server that links IP-PBX functions and business applications on Microsoft.NET, in February 2004 and since then has been increasing the functions and expanding the peripherals and terminal lineups.

Oki says they were the first in Japan to launch distributed access points for Voice over Wireless LAN, the MWINS BR2100 Series, thus enabling low cost mobile Centrex systems, and “achieving easier and more comfortable conversations by connecting business applications to telecommunications through the high-function softphone, Com@WILL Softphone.”

The SS9100 R5 is a large-scale system based on several servers, which increases the line capacity for each system from 5,000 ports to 20,000 ports. The SS9100 R5 achieves a large-scale Centrex structure by mutually connecting servers that connect within each server. It can be centralized at a center or distributed to each location, establishing a risk dispersion structure.

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Kintera Inc., a vendor of CRM to nonprofit and government sectors, has announced financial results for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2005.

Total revenue for fiscal year 2005 increased 73 percent to $40.9 million, compared with $23.7 million in the year ended December 31, 2004. Total revenue for the fourth quarter 2005 was $9.1 million, an increase of 17 percent compared with the fourth quarter 2004.

Full year 2005 net loss was $41.9 million, or $1.36 per share, as compared with a net loss of $19.2 million, or $0.77 per share, in the year ended December 31, 2004. Kintera’s net loss for the fourth quarter 2005 was $11.8 million, or $0.37 per share, as compared to a net loss of $5.9 million, or $0.21 per share, in the fourth quarter 2004.

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Skura Corporation, a vendor of CRM services in the pharmaceutical industry, announced it has hired former Siebel senior executive, Jeff Wessinger, as President, Software Products, effective March 1, 2006.

Wessinger will take on the role as President of Skura Products, a division of Skura Corporation. His responsibilities include business development, product conceptualization and direction, and the implementation of alliances with leading companies worldwide.

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LignUp Corporation, a vendor of converged communications products, has announced the European launch of FastLign, an industry alliance founded to accelerate the adoption of IP telephony services.

Alliance partners provide a telephony services architecture, turnkey hosted applications and regional partners to operate and fully support FastLign managed services.

TeliaSonera International Carrier and the United Kingdom’s Streamdoor Limited will extend FastLign’s reach into Europe, enabling the market’s numerous emerging service providers to deliver hosted telephony services.

In the past, IP telephony services have been prohibitively time consuming and expensive to build, deploy and manage,” said Johan Andersson, VP and head of Marketing, Strategy and New Business at TeliaSonera International Carrier. “Service providers must build these services from the ground up, integrating a wide variety of technologies and services to provide a complete services product.”

FastLign provides service providers with a hosted telephony services model that removes system integration cycles, provides operations support and allows customers to address the needs of the marketplace. In their words.

Streamdoor, a provider of hosted on-demand contact center applications and VoIP communication services, will provide FastLign’s operational backbone and datacenter capacity.

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After 410 man hours spent tasting 157 coffees from the best roasters in the country (such a job), Food and Wine magazine chose the best of the best in their annual “Obsessive’s Guide to Coffee,” available in the March 2006 issue.

So if you live near Stumptown Coffee Roasters in Portland, Oregon, any coffee shop who uses Terroir Coffee Company’s beans, Counter Culture in Durham, North Carolina, Barefoot in Silicon Valley or Intelligentsia in Chicago or Ecco Caffè in Sonoma wine country, well, lucky you.

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 (iced) coffee this morning, and the music is Elvis’s “Kentucky Rain,” just everything a great song should be:

We’ll start off with one for the pocket protector set:

Japan’s Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. is announcing that it has succeeded in transmitting 160Gb/s data, which is equivalent to transmitting four movies of two hours each, in a single second over 396 miles.

This experiment was conducted as part of the “Research and Development on Ultrahigh-speed Backbone Photonic Network Technologies” project, consigned by National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. Oki used an optical testbed provided by Japan Gigabit Network II, and succeeded in transmitting world’s first 160Gb/s data, that included high-vision video.

The optical testbed offered by JGN II is an optical fiber, single mode optical fiber 63.5km x 10 fiber cables, installed between Open Laboratory in Kyoto and Dojima Relay Station in Osaka. At each connection point an optical amplifier similar to a relay station for commercial-use 10Gb/s data transmissions, and a dispersion compensation fiber were installed.

Oki’s saying this is the world’s first transmission of signal evaluation data simultaneous with high-vision video. Harushige Sugimoto, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Oki Electric, says the test proves that “it can be used for backbone lines such as the super high-speed optical communication between Tokyo and Osaka,” 312 miles apart, “which is 16 times higher in speed than the 10Gb/s systems that are commercialized.”

Sugimoto thinks that 160Gb/s optical transmission is “the next generation super high-speed optical transmission technology to be commercialized after 2010.”

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I get as many fraud e-mails and cheap Viagra ads as the next small business owner, but this one is One Of The Funniest Ones I’ve Gotten Recently:

I Am Prince Nana Opuku Asare Jr. I Am 37 Years And The Eldest Male Child Of Late, Chief Kwesi Opoku Asare the Late Traditional Ruler of the Central Region Ghana. Our Father Died On 16th June 2004 leaving the bereaved family with 102 Kilos of Au Gold Dust as legacy…