The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Miles Davis and John Coltrane’s 1957 recording “Bye Bye Blackbird:”

Noting that “seventy percent of all customer interactions take place over the phone,” Peter Alexander, vice president for small and medium business marketing, Cisco Systemshas announced that Cisco Systems, Inc. has, with the support of Microsoft, the release of the Cisco Unified CRM Connector 3.0, a customer relationship management (CRM) application integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0.

The product is billed by Cisco officials as helping small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) gain access to customer information on inbound and outbound calls, “increasing operational efficiency and providing an improved customer experience.”

The Cisco Unified CRM Connector 3.0 helps to provide a complete view of the customer, including current and past purchases, sales information, order status, account relationships, and billing information, company officials say.

When a call is received by the Cisco Unified CallManager or Cisco Unified CallManager Express, the Cisco Unified CRM Connector 3.0 links to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM system and provides onscreen pop-up windows of the customer contact record and phone call activity so that the service agent can track the call. The same information and capabilities are also accessible remotely. New customer data or phone call information is uploaded back into the system, so the next interaction picks up where the last one left off.

Features in the Cisco Unified CRM Connector 3.0 include an Internet Protocol phone service that pushes complete customer information to Cisco Unified IP phones from inbound calls that match a customer record. The IP phone lookup service allows users to view customer contact information from any Cisco XML extensible markup language display-capable Unified IP phone.

Additional features include fast and easy click-to-dial functionality for accessing CRM contact records, call-duration tracking, and detailed call-information capture.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 1272 in E flat, performed by the Quartetto Italiano in 1968:

Interested in participating in the beta testing of a new CRM product? Oh come on, where’s your sense of adventure?

The Kyliptix Integrated Business Product CRM module is billed by company officials as delivering “integrated sales, marketing, customer service, and support in one complete offering.”

Designed to adapt to the customer acquisition, retention, and development processes within SMBs, this CRM application provides” low cost of ownership and seamlessly integrates with popular accounting software and other external applications used in today’s business environments,” officials say: “KiBS is here to help solve various problems that are traditionally associated with a utility-style billing model.”

Designed to simplify collaboration, interoperability, and integration, KiBS CRM “removes confining, costly aspects of traditional agreements with a utility-style billing model.”

Developed on the principle of software as a service or SaaS , KiBS CRM is designed to let companies eliminate licensing arrangements with recurring fees and software management requirements, free up server storage space and reduce IT costs associated with the deployment of products, the acquisition of hardware, software implementation, and on-going maintenance.

The product’s framework and delivery method lets employees in all areas of an organization work with existing data “rather than replicating or porting data to other locations,” company officials say, adding that the CRM application can be integrated
“with various external applications."

KiBS CRM is currently accepting applications from companies interested in participating in our Beta Program. For more information please email anthony@kyliptix.com.

…

Enterprise software vendor CDC Corporation, through its CDC Software subsidiary, which focuses on mobile applications and online games through its China.com Inc. (“China.com”) subsidiary, has announced “robust growth in China during the first quarter of 2006,” driven by 24 percent growth in revenue from CDC Software and an increase of 27 percent in online game users.

CDC sells the Pivotal brand of CRM, among other enterprise software products.

During the first quarter of 2006, 16 new customers licensed enterprise software applications from CDC Software in China, and total revenues for the region increased by 24 percent compared to the same period a year ago.

In addition, China.com’s portal business has demonstrated strong momentum over the past quarter, company officials say.

ThreeStone Group and CobbleSoft International have announced a long-term agreement for 3SG to provide on-demand executive sales business development and communications services, while CobbleSoft “continues their focus on rolling out some of the largest projects in the company’s history,” according to CobbleSoft officials.

“Clients are using our self service management methodology at the very heart of enterprise endeavors to incorporate the IT Infrastructure Library best practice standards, and promote helpdesk socialization,” said Richard Stevenson, CobbleSoft’s chief executive and resident coffee maven.

“Our relationship allows us to maintain this client focus while ThreeStone addresses the amazing market response our approach has generated in the Americas, Europe and Australia,” Stevenson explained.

CobbleSoft’s COIGN Enterprise, an on-demand service management and helpdesk product, is a web-based product to employ real time data warehousing with dynamic workflow and on-board analytics for service intelligence.

Using Oracle on demand technology, COIGN automatically and transparently scales to meet GRID, RAC and SOA deployment requirements where and when needed.

3SG will build, execute and scale an international sales business development and communication strategy “that will challenge traditional market players based on CobbleSoft’s main strengths,” 3SG’s founder Jim Turner said:

“CobbleSoft has the unique competitive advantage of enabling new technology with a warm personality,” according to Turner.

The Hanoi University of Technology and Cisco Systems have launched a Networking Research and Development Laboratory focusing on network security, a collaboration sponsored by the Cisco University Research Program.

The guests of honor at the opening ceremony included His Excellency Professor, Doctor of Science Tran Van Nhung, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Training and Education; Professor Hoang Ba Chu, the university’s rector; and James Chia, general director of Cisco Systems Vietnam.

The Networking R&D Lab will be operated by Bach Khoa Networking Academy in HUT, the first regional-level Cisco Networking Academy program in Vietnam. The lab is also the first time that Cisco’s URP is sponsoring R&D in Vietnam.

Dedicated to the collaboration with researchers at universities and other research organizations around the globe, Cisco’s URP is supposed to help with the development of ideas and technologies and encourage innovation in networking.

The URP operates by soliciting research proposals, subjecting them to stringent peer review, before granting funds to support those deemed most worthy.

“The URP program will bring in an added dimension of international exposure for the researchers in HUT, helping to increase the quality of its research work. Cisco will in turn benefit as the work done in HUT may be used to enhance the features in Cisco’s products,” said Chia.

…

BNAmericas is reporting that US business intelligence provider Information Builders has developed a CRM product for Mexico’s largest bank, BBVA Bancomer.

The CRM project is based on IB’s Webfocus platform, a product that delivers enterprise business intelligence at the operational, tactical and executive level.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is John Coltrane’s Love Supreme:

The Zagada Institute has announced the publication of its Central America Call Center Report 2007: A Bilingual Niche.

The report is, according to company officials, “the first complete and independent call center study conducted on Central America,” and finds that the Central America Nearshore market’s growth in its current 21,012 agent population “will approach 40 percent annually over the next 24 months, resulting in close to 40,000 agents by the end of 2007.”

An estimated 95 percent of existing agents are bilingual and are “ideally position to continue serving the customer care needs of U.S. companies focused on the expanding Hispanic American market, now exceeding 43 million,” the report finds.

“In our comparative evaluation we find that despite the large sizes of Mexico and Argentina local agent population and the impressive agent growth in the Dominican Republic, the Central America Nearshore market as an aggregate has the highest number of dedicated bilingual agents serving U.S. firms,” said Philip Dickenson Peters, co-director of Zagada Institute and CEO of Zagada Markets.

Based on the levels of growth and service experience, the report categorizes the region into three growth niches: Maturing (Panama, Costa Rica), Contending (El Salvador, Guatemala) and Emerging (Nicaragua, Honduras).

According to company officials the “accelerated provisioning” of bilingual agents across all segments of the Central America Nearshore market is attracting a combination of both U.S. multinationals and outsourcing specialist companies to the region: “Firms report average savings of 35 percent from their regional operations as well on projects outsourced to Central American Third Party call center providers.”

Apart from the region’s expanding bilingual agent population, the report finds that other factors contributing to growth are stable parliamentary democracies, competitive telecommunication rates and coverage in key urban centers, extensive bilingual programs among the region’s 174 tertiary institutes and universities, low cost and adequate physical contact center office capacity in key markets and business friendly Economic Development Agencies.

By David Sims

david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Al Green’s version of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry:”

Document products companies Data Impact and Speedscan have announced that the two companies have merged, creating a company with worldwide reach in selling document management.

The closely held company will operate as Data Impact in the U.S. and Speedscan in the Asia Pacific region. The combined company has a worldwide workforce in excess of 150 people.

Data Impact CEO Bill Plant-Mason said it’s his belief that “customers prefer a single provider of outsourced business processes,” and that the newly-merged company “can now offer, on an international basis, a complete suite of document management services, including digitizing and indexing of high volumes of paper documents, conversion of microfilm and fiche to digital documents, integration and management of complex electronic print streams and a unique ‘click to pay’ electronic remittance system.”

The new company blends Data Impact’s print stream processing, document scanning and film conversion services with Speedscan’s document archival products.

The recent merger follows the acquisition by Data Impact last year of Florida-based Leahy Corporation, a regional film scanning specialist.

“Our strategy,” said Data Impact Chairman Charles Koehler, “is to keep adding geographically and product-wise to our comprehensive suite of services, providing the document imaging and management answers our clients want and need in order to stay ahead of their competitors.”

He characterized this merger with Speedscan as “a very important step” toward that goal.”

…

Readers might have noticed that First Coffee spends more time than average tracking developments in India. That’s not completely without design, it’s my belief that India, in 20 years’ time, will be a more dynamic, productive and important economy than China or the EU, unless one of two things happen: China frees up its political structure, or the EU finds a way to reverse its demographic decline.

david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Al Green’s unbelievably soulful Call Me album:

Lots happening on April 14ths past, during the column we’ll be searching for the best one.

Let’s see, President Abraham Lincoln assassinated in Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. in 1865, coincidentally also Good Friday, given what lay ahead it was almost a God’s mercy to the poor man, the Civil War was over but his life wasn’t going to get any better during Reconstruction…

…

British software vendors Softalk are announcing the release of OfficeTalk 4.5, touted by company officials as a team working, collaboration and contact management product for small and medium size businesses, replete with “shared calendars, contacts, e-mail, tasks, planners and project management.”

“OfficeTalk 4.5 provides a powerful, low cost, easy to use alternative to Outlook, Act! and Goldmine,” contends Simon Bates, joint CEO of Softalk. “Everyone in the team can benefit, not just sales professionals.”

Company officials say OfficeTalk 4.5 was specifically developed as collaboration software “for organizations with five to 500 users who need to share business information and work more effectively as a team.”

OfficeTalk 4.5 starts at $625 for five users or $6,750 for a 50 user license.

Softalk officials say they designed OfficeTalk 4.5 “to improve productivity and simplify administration by providing one central place to organize business information such as contacts, appointments, telephone calls, e-mail, letters and other documents.”

The group mode and meeting mode lets users set up meetings and manage all shared resources such as meeting rooms, digital projectors and exhibition stands. The shared calendars allow users to view any other users’ diaries and task lists.

The contact management mode provides single company records with separate records for each contact linked to it.

She gets off the train at the top of Tunel in the middle of the pack. It’s about ten o’clock in the morning. She knows most illegal migrants move about in early morning or late at night, so she figures moving about at ten in the morning will fool them, make any cops think she’s legal.

She is not a smart girl. But she has thought of this. Truth to tell, she would be a good addition to a country willing to take her, as most of the migrants in holding patterns here in Istanbul are – they’re the ones who did something, who showed initiative and got out of whatever hellish situation they were in, they’re willing to suffer hardships and work hard to get to America, to Canada, to Europe. 

But of course no country would take a 19-year old Moroccan girl who’s now three months pregnant by the human smuggler who dropped her off with the others on the Turkish coast one night, telling them it was Italy and to go over the side. Especially since she has no passport, no papers, no skills and nothing except a burning desire to get to a better life. 

Coming out to the tram stop at the end of Istiklal Caddesi, the great pedestrian boulevard at the heart of Istanbul, she sees the police car parked in front of the Kaffee Haus, the place run by an Austrian couple who were nice to her the first time she was here. She had to leave soon after with a group making another run for the Greek border – although she’d hated to leave such a good job, they’d actually paid her – and hadn’t had time to thank them for the work and their kindness. She’s too embarrassed to go back now – and there’s the police car.

By David Sims

david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Best of Three Dog Night:

Peerflix, an online peer-to-peer service that allows members to legally trade DVDs online, today announced that Jim Ambras has joined the company as Vice President, Engineering.

Prior to Peerflix, Ambras was the Vice President of Products and Services at OnStation Corporation, a provider of CRM products to the automotive industry, where he was instrumental in turning the company around and launching many of its defining products.

…

Today’s a good day for those of us who appreciate contemporary popular fiction, as it’s Scott Turow and Tom Clancy’s birthday, as well as the birthday of one of the most influential yet underrated authors of the 20th Century, creator of the Ramona Quimby books, Beverly Cleary, who’s probably been read by more Americans than any other 20th Century author.

First Coffee has of course read all the Beverly Cleary books she’d written by 1973, all but one Scott Turow novel, but has been able to struggle through only one Tom Clancy novel, The Hunt For Red October, just to see what all the fuss was about, and that was quite enough, thank you.

Gratuitous anecdote: When First Coffee lived in Washington, D.C. in the late ‘80s he worked for a company escorting authors on book tours around D.C.

By David Sims

david@david-sims.com

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Swing Brother, Swing!

Global Crossing has announced it is broadening the scope and reach of its Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services for enterprise customers around the world by introducing Enterprise VoIP Outbound and VoIP Local Services to countries across Europe, complementing existing Enterprise VoIP service availability in North America.

Anthony Christie, chief marketing officer, Global Crossing said the company’s VoIP services are “now available across Europe as well as North America… for both managed and non-managed calling applications.”

A fully interoperable voice network enables an enterprise to maintain existing handsets and premises equipment and operate in a hybrid environment as they change over to an all IP voice product at their own pace, company officials explain.

Global Crossing’s private IP backbone ensures that VoIP packets receive the highest priority, which “translates into minimized latency, packet loss and jitter as well as call quality that is consistent and predictable qualities not possible with voice services based on public Internet transport.”

With Global Crossing’s VoIP Outbound Service, IP voice traffic will be transported across Global Crossing’s private VoIP platform for off net TDM completion via the local public switched telephone network. This service is now available for both national and international calling from France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, UK, and the USA, and for international calling from Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

National calling will be introduced to these countries in phases as part of the continuing VoIP development program.

In related news, Global Crossing has entered into a channel partner agreement with Britannic Technologies to provide them with enterprise VoIP and IP VPN services in Europe.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

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

So what’s the deal with salesforce.com?

They issue a press release this past week touting their near-perfect availability after high-profile crashes in December and January, knocking out service to customers. The ancient Greeks had a name for this: hubris. Whenever it made its appearance in a drama you’d know what was coming in the next act: the Tragic Fall. Which followed from the Tragic Flaw.

See? All that money for those freshman lit classes wasn’t totally wasted.

Industry observer and fellow blogger Paul Roberts has a good take on the on-demand CRM software vendor and “Wall Street darling� salesforce.com, whose stock took a hit Friday “just one day after the company acknowledged yet another service interruption which affected customers in North America.�

The company’s stock was down almost five percent in midday trading, Roberts says, “with news of the service outage a likely source.

By David Sims

david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a great discovery I made noodling around iTunes last night, Peter Wolf’s Sleepless album. This guy’s post-J. Geils Band career is surprisingly good, miles better than post-Wolf Geils, which admittedly isn’t saying much, but for some twisted reason this guy gets about as much press as good news from Iraq. Friends, it doesn’t get a whole lot better than “A Lot Of Good Ones Gone,” or the Jagger duet “Nothing But the Wheel,” this is one of the best rock, R&B, bluesy albums I’ve heard released in the 2000s:

Sage Accpac has announced the immediate availability of the latest version of its customer relationship management (CRM) product, Sage Accpac CRM version 5.8.

Offering “feature-rich sales, marketing and customer support automation for small and mid-sized businesses,” according to Sage Accpac officials, version 5.8 enhancements “expand on the Sage Accpac CRM traditions of fast deployment, easy feature configuration and flexible data integration with the introduction of new end-user dashboard options, improved data management capabilities and extended system administration features.

Sage Accpac officials claim their CRM product is “the only mid-market CRM product available today that allows organizations to choose either an on-demand or on-premises deployment and provides the ability to migrate between them in order to accommodate an organization’s changing business needs and IT resource constraints.”

“Our customers can choose the Sage Accpac CRM Product that is right for their growth model, workflow and budget,” explained Mike Lorge, general manager (Pacific), Sage Accpac.

By David Sims

David@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is X’s More Fun In The New World, the last great album by the last American band that mattered:

As the first step in what company officials are calling a “major European CRM initiative,” Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, has announced that it will deploy Siperian Hub XT in an effort to create a Consolidated Customer Master as “one true source” of customer data across all of its European and Canadian markets.

Pfizer’s CCM will serve as “a significant part of the data foundation for upcoming CRM initiatives,” officials explain.

Pfizer intends to use Siperian Hub XT to unify customer information from multiple systems and functional areas across 22 markets. In taking this step, Pfizer claims it will become “the first international customer to take advantage of the recently announced Siperian Hub XT and its international capabilities.”

In an effort to maximize and integrate their corporate data assets including customer (i.e. prescribers, pharmacists, governmental entities, organizations, and patients), locations and products, Pfizer’s CCM will unify customer information from multiple sources and systems, create and maintain what officials hope is “a unique, complete and accurate customer profile,” making that profile information available to all operational applications in real-time.

Justin Sowers, Director of Global Business Technology for Pfizer, said “ultimately, the CCM will enable the business to perform sophisticated analytics to derive actionable customer insights. A well-designed data model and web services layer will facilitate integration with other enterprise systems and scaling to all EuCan markets, from a technology perspective.”

Evidently creating a unique and scalable master data hub is tougher than normal for pharmaceutical companies, given their varying data sets and hierarchies.

By David Sims

david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is “Road Ode,” by Loudon Wainwright III:

Great news:

At the Stockholm Concert Hall yesterday, TMC President Richard Tehrani was awarded the inaugural Nobel Prize in Telecommunications for his contributions to Voice-over Internet Protocol telephony.

Presented by His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, the 2006 telecom prize was created in an effort to “make the Nobel more relevant to the breathtaking technological advancements which contribute so much to world prosperity,” according to the King’s presentation remarks.

“Rarely do we see an idea, an invention, a technology so completely change the face of the modern world -- for the better,” King Gustaf said to the glittering assemblage of past winners, international jet-setters and dignitaries. “And of course it’s primarily thanks to the individual we’re honoring here today.”

Information technology has become one of the world’s most dynamic fields, and Tehrani is responsible for the founding of the Technology Marketing Corporation, or TMC, which has been at the forefront of cutting-edge trends within the industry. “This is the future, plain and simple,” Tehrani, resplendent in a salmon-pink tuxedo with ruffled shirt, told the audience during his acceptance speech. “I’m overwhelmed and honored by this award.”

Laureates welcomed Tehrani into their company.