May 2006 Archives

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Willie Nelson’s great gospel record, The Troublemaker:

CRM Help Wanted: Charnwood Borough Council is inviting expressions of interest from experienced integrators to provide a CRM product to support its front and back office staff in the provision of improved service to their customers.

The product must possess the following functionalities: (i) Multi-channel access including the ability to uphold the same high standards across multiple different channels; (ii) Back office integration with legacy and partnership systems; (iii) Provision of common customer database to enable the holistic view of the customer.

It is proposed that over time most of the Council’s front office activities will be supported by the selected product.

The time limit for receipt of requests for documents or for accessing documents is June 12^th, the time limit for receipt of tenders or requests to participate is June 19^th.

Contact the Eastern Shires Purchasing Organisation at www.espo.org if interested.

TeaLeaf, a vendor of “Customer Experience Management” products, has introduced TeaLeaf CX, a comprehensive data store providing what company officials claim is a “360-degree view of the online customer experience.”

TeaLeaf also introduced four new products that are powered by TeaLeaf CX, enabling a “clear and consistent view of the customer across the enterprise,” according to TeaLeaf officials.

David Stone, senior vice president, director of online customer experience and support, Wachovia, claims that “Wachovia is consistently rated amongst the leaders in online banking.” This rating must have been compiled without First Coffee being consulted, as customer service is why we switched from Wachovia to First Market for our primary online banking.

TeaLeaf CX provides the visibility – including new support for Web 2.0 applications such as those built in AJAX – “required to detect unknown obstacles blocking business processes,” according to company officials.

TeaLeaf CX also provides Business Impact Analysis reports to help “quantify the business impact of issues and identify commonalities to rapidly pinpoint application problems.”

Fujitsu Network Communications Inc., which does sell wireline/wireless networking and IT products, today announced the availability of its new Flashwave 6100 Gigabit Passive Optical Networking platform.

Fujitsu officials claim to have created a broadband access platform that provides density and channel capacity, inter-working with legacy networks and packet infrastructure, and “the ability to inexpensively respond to future bandwidth requirements.”

Group products include the Flashwave 6100 Optical Line Terminal and a series of Flashwave 6100 Optical Network Terminals.

The Flashwave 6100 GPON platform supports dual- and quad-port GPON cards within a 9U (15.75”) chassis to provide broadband services to up to 10,240 homes and businesses per standard rack. Current Broadband Passive Optical Networking systems typically support 75% fewer homes per rack, Fujitsu officials claim.

One of the goals for the Flashwave 6100 platform is to allow seamless integration with existing networks. In addition to the new GPON service units, the Flashwave 6100 platform supports all service interface cards from the Flashwave 4100 Multi-Service Provisioning Platform.

This capability gives service providers the option of deploying traditional MSPP, Ethernet, and GPON services from a single multi-service access node.

VoIPers Kayote Networks, Inc. have announced a partnership with TeleMessage. The partnership allows TeleMessage’s SMS and Text-to-Speech technology to help Kayote’s VoIP Traffic Manager notify users instantly of any event that causes a decrease in call traffic quality.

“Feedback has shown us that customers want to receive call traffic quality alerts as quickly as possible, so they can take immediate action or update other team members,” said Baruch Sterman, chief executive officer of Kayote Networks.

The TeleMessage system enables Kayote users to receive instant alerts through landline, mobile phone, fax, e mail, SMS, Instant Messenger or pager and respond to these alerts with voice or text commands that VTM acts upon immediately.

The new feature will also provide an additional channel for users to contact the Kayote 24/7 NOC (Network Operations Center) for support.

VTM is Kayote’s hosted VoIP softswitch that enables carriers of all sizes to outsource their entire VoIP back-end at reduced hardware investment. VTM monitors VoIP traffic, triggering alerts to users when predefined quality of service, volume, or billing thresholds are not met. The system automatically switches to failover routes predefined by each user in line with specific business needs.

If a first-response user does not take action within a specified amount of time, another message is sent to a second contact number, as well as to an additional user. VTM can now also send users file attachments to facilitate an educated analysis of a problem.

The good news this morning is that significant help has reached Indonesian earthquake survivors. And guess who got it there.

It wasn’t the Indonesian government. It wasn’t the incompetent U.N., which when needed in East Timor responded by evacuating as fast as it could, leaving it to Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia to restore order and the Red Cross to provide food and water.

No, as usual in these major disasters, Indonesians have the U.S. military to thank for actually providing the actual help. American military cargo planes landed a field hospital, a disaster assistance response team from the U.S. Agency for International Development is being readied and the amphibious assault ship USS Essex, which has extensive medical facilities, is speeding to the area. Plus America’s kicking in several million more dollars in aid, according to news sources.

All for the most populous Muslim nation on earth, all free of charge. As usual we’ll do far more than any other country to help, and we’ll be thanked with the usual brainless sniping from do-nothing world bureaucrats.

The U.N. will do what it does best: Loudly take credit for America’s work and loudly criticize America that we’re not doing more they can loudly take credit for.

In 2004, the last year for which complete figures are available, “40 percent of all emergency aid provided worldwide by governments to victims of natural disasters last year was provided by the United States,” according to Jack Kelly. First Coffee’s lowball estimate is that the U.N. claimed 97.2 percent of the credit for America’s work.

We gave well over a billion dollars to the Asian tsunami relief alone, yet Norway’s Jan Egelund, the U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, characterizes us as “stingy.” And how much did Norway, per capita one of the wealthiest countries on earth, contribute to Katrina relief? Can you spell S-T-I-N-G-Y?

Already the U.N.’s claiming credit for “organizing” a “multi-nation effort” in Indonesia, which will consist mainly of a few countries sending a few doctors and a few countries cutting a few modest checks. But of course the majority of any help that actually reaches people and saves lives with be courtesy of the U.S. military. As usual.

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

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Elemeno P’s 2003 album Love and Disrespect:

Israel-based ECI Telecom has announced that it has been awarded a five-year frame agreement with an estimated value of over $75 million by British Telecom for its broadband products.

ECI’s product enables BT to provide over 150,000 business customers with dedicated, high capacity Digital Private Circuits.

BT’s service programs, known as “Customer Wideband Serving Section,” include high performance voice and data communications services such as MegaStream and ISDN30.

“ECI has been a very good supplier to us for many years now,” said Bob Watson, Access Electronics Programme / Plant Manager, BT Wholesale.

ECI will be supplying its Exline 2 systems that transport 2Mbps links symmetrically over copper, offering enhanced capabilities and smooth integration within existing networks. It supports advanced class features such as caller ID, call waiting, and distinctive rings.

Al-Futtaim Technologies, the Al-Futtaim Group company that represents Alcatel Enterprise Solutions and Microsoft Business Solutions in the UAE, has announced the launch of integrated customer relationship management (CRM) and contact center product, based on the formal alliance between Microsoft Corp. and Alcatel, for the UAE market.

According to AME Info, a regional company news consolidator, the product is primarily for midsize companies with contact centers of 25 to 150 agent positions.

The joint offering uses Alcatel’s OmniTouch Contact Center Premium Edition developed on Microsoft Windows Server System, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0.

It integrates the Genesys Gplus Adapter for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0, which enables voice interaction management for both Internet protocol (IP) and traditional circuit switched telephony and multimedia – Web, e-mail, fax, what have you.

Under the new agreement between Microsoft Corp. and Alcatel, the two companies recently launched its go-to-market activities for the UAE through Al-Futtaim Technologies, the sole distributor for both of them in the UAE.

The product is being billed as offering “greater optimization” and simpler configuration and installation processes for fast implementation of plug-and-play, out-of-the-box business applications.

LogicaCMG has announced the successful and on-time live operation of the New Retail Platform to support Electrabel’s energy supply business.

As prime contractor, LogicaCMG has worked together with Electrabel to design, implement and bring to live a fully integrated SAP CRM, IS-U, and Business Warehouse product for the energy supply businesses.

NRP supports 2.5 million customers and can be expanded to cover the entire Electrabel customer base of 4 million. In terms of number of customers, this is the largest live integrated SAP product in the world.

Sophie Dutordoir, General Manager of Electrabel’s supply business, said they worked in partnership to create “an integrated product” which maintains responsiveness and customer service “as our market becomes more and more competitive.”

Webcom, Inc., a quote-to-order enablement vendor, has announced the availability of Version 5.1 of its WebSource Configuration, Pricing, Quotation & Proposal.

With this latest version, enterprise customers get a web services API, document content management, currency and market pricing processing, workflow history and analysis, workflow processing, including file attachments, new order management functionality and CRM integration.

Aleks Ivanovic, CEO and founder of Webcom, Inc. said WebSource CPQ V5.1 is “the culmination of our client-driven approach.”

Some features of WebSource CPQ V5.1:

·    Unlimited nesting of documents, including management by exclusion, not just inclusion
·    Rules-based currency and market pricing management
·    Complete workflow history in support of regulatory requirements
·    E-mail notification at the action level, including dynamic quote and order content
·    Web services API covering areas such as status updates, shopping cart properties, product/service details, users and companies
·    Quote “status” control of field-level data revisions
·    Unlimited file attachments, such as drawings, specifications, RFP/RFQ, etc.
·    User-specific order approval rules, including parallel and serial approval request processing
·    Shipment tracking at the line item quantity level
·    Enhanced CRM integration addressing the needs of customers with multiple channels to market.

I don’t care what anyone says – Australia’s got the best tourism promo spot First Coffee’s seen.

CGI Group Inc. has announced the acquisition of Plaut Consulting SAS, a French management and technology consulting firm.

Founded in 1998, the company, which is headquartered in Paris, is privately owned and has annual revenues of approximately 14 million euros. The acquisition, expected to close on June 1st 2006, will allow CGI to increase its footprint in France.

Known primarily for implementing SAP products, Plaut Consulting SAS guides its worldwide clients through organizational and information systems transformation projects in the manufacturing, retail and distribution, financial services and telecommunications markets.

Didier Moscatelli, President of Plaut Consulting SAS said by coming together with CGI, “we will be well positioned to increase our service offering.”

In addition to specializing in SAP integration, Plaut Consulting SAS also handles business intelligence, CRM and integrated technologies.

“This acquisition is ideally aligned with our strategic plan to profitably triple our operations in Europe by 2010,” stated Jacques Leray, Vice-President, General Manager of CGI France.

According to Asia In Focus, the Chinese government “has passed a new regulation to ban the uploading and downloading of Internet material without the copyright holder’s permission. Under the regulation, effective from July 1, anyone uploading texts, and performance, sound and video recordings to the Internet for downloading, copying or other use, must acquire the permission of the copyright owners and pay the required fee.”

Yawn. China can pass all the fancy-looking laws and regulations they want, the fact is no country aspiring to or occupying first world status does a worse job protecting intellectual property than China, where piracy’s rampant. Instead of more window-dressing, what would be genuinely impressive would be more enforcement than the one-off showpiece trials for intellectual property theft they decide to stage now and then.

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

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Miles Davis’s The Birth Of The Cool:

Seagull Software, a vendor of software products for connecting legacy applications to Internet architectures, has announced that it expects to report revenue in the range of $27 to $28 million for the financial year ended 30 April 2006, an increase of approximately 19 percent as compared to $23.4 million for the previous financial year.

On a pro forma basis net income for the year is expected to be approximately $100,000, as compared with a loss of $908,000 for the previous year. First Coffee detects progress.

“Growth was our primary focus during FY 2006 so we are extremely pleased with the strong growth that the company achieved in FY 2006, and with our ability to generate pro forma profit for the year,” commented Don Addington, CEO and President of Seagull Software.

On an International Accounting Standards (IAS) basis, the company expects to report a net loss in the range of $900,000 to $1 million, including deferred stock compensation costs and amortization of intangible assets.

The company plans to publish final audited fourth quarter and annual results for the Financial Year ending 30 April 2006 on 22 June 2006.

Seagull Software specializes in technology that transforms “legacy” applications into SOA-compliant Web services. Their LegaSuite product lets users connect legacy applications on IBM mainframe, ICL mainframe, iSeries, UNIX/VT and Windows client/server platforms to the Web, to other middleware and to newer-generations of applications such as portals, CRM and SCM.

LegaSuite is based on open standards including Web services, XML, J2EE and .NET.

Last week Amcat, a vendor of customer care & interaction products, which likes the slogan “Every Company is a Contact Center,” announced that Michael J. Rohleder has been appointed as CEO and Mark Patterson as CFO for the Amcat Group, a family of companies that provide customer interaction and communication infrastructure products to customers globally.

Rohleder said Amcat will continue to be strong in the contact center technology brand, “especially in the outbound market.”  He said the company strategy is to position Amcat to be “the leading technology partner for any company who wants to improve customer interactions and efficiencies while reducing costs, whether in a formal contact center or as part of a total enterprise customer interaction plan.”

Rohleder has extensive experience in high tech companies achieve growth and potential. Most recently, he was Executive Vice President of Ultra-Scan Corporation, a biometric hardware and software company where he helped prepare the company for capital financing and long-term growth.

Prior to that, he was CEO of the VEBA Electronics Group North America, a $4 billion global semiconductor distributor. During his tenure at VEBA, Rohleder built the North and South America operations of the company from a $20 million regional distributor to a $2 billion division with over 2000 employees.

Rohleder also served as Senior Vice President of World Wide Sales and Marketing for ON Semiconductor, a $1 billion publicly traded semiconductor company, where he held full responsibility for strategic planning, operating and leadership responsibility for global sales, business development, customer service and the tactical marketing organization.

Mark Patterson comes to Amcat from CHR Products, a Dallas-based telecommunications company where he served as CFO since 1999. He began his career at Price Waterhouse and has served as CFO for several companies in the real estate and high tech industries over the past 22 years.

Patterson received his BA and MBA degrees from Texas Tech University and a MS- Accounting degree from the University of North Texas. He became a licensed CPA in 1984. He has authored several books and national trade articles and is a well recognized technical speaker and lecturer.

Mr. Patterson’s background is well suited to the needs of Amcat both now and in the future, as he brings experience in strategic planning, operational analysis, financial procedures, reporting and controls, corporate finance, debt/equity structuring, IT systems (ERP, MIS, Internet), acquisitions and mergers and IPOs.

The Palm OS platform is now being used by the MantraGroup for mobiVoip.

Calling Palm OS a “terrific” product for basic PIM and document use, MantraGroup says Palm, a separate, independent company that makes hardware, “has done a yeoman’s job of extending it to a new line of devices with more multimedia and storage capabilities.”

MobiVoIP is an effort to give the Palm OS VoIP functionality. “When Skype came to Pocket PC, allowing wifi-enabled PPCs to make phone calls for free over the internet, users across the globe were hoping for a PalmOS version,” MantraGroup officials say, in announcing the proprietary technology of MantraGroup’s mobiVoIP.

MantraGroup officials say Palm OS’s “greatest strength” is “running on economical devices (often with long battery life).”

MobiVoIP allows a Palm to connect to the Internet through Bluetooth,Wifi, or EVDO.

Some of the features of the first official version of the technology, mobiVoip 1.0, that company officials are most excited about include the ability to make PSTN calls over IP, caller-ID via SIP and a profiles settings dialog for configuring user Account, as well as:

Secure Account Authentication using SIP MD5 Authentication
Network Settings Dialog [for IP address related settings]
Automatic IP reproduct [via STUN servers]
Detecting Dynamic IP [when STUN is disabled]

Codecs supported: G.711 and GSM 6.10 FR, where you choose your codec based on your
connection speed: GSM 6.10 FR for low speed connections > 60kbps, G711 for
high speed connections > 160kbps.

Lots of other features available as well, of course. MobiVoIP is available in Australia, China, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, Taiwan, the UK and the USA.

Oki Electric Industry Co. Ltd and KDDI Corp. have announced an agreement to collaborate in providing mobile products for the enterprise market using E02SA, KDDI’s “au” mobile phone equipped with WLAN functionality.

Based on this agreement, according to the Electronic Engineering Times, Oki will provide mobile products for enterprises in Japan starting October 2006.

According to company officials, E02SA, planned for launch in July 2006, “enables enterprise users to build an efficient network with a single handset as it functions as a VoIP extension phone equipped with WLAN in the office, as well as an ‘au’ mobile phone outside the office.”

E02SA is also compliant with IEEE 802.1b WLAN standard, as well as with IEEE 802.11g and IEEE 802.11e for the quality of service control function in the wireless area.

Good news: Word has it that Paul Newman and Robert Redford are going to do another movie together.

Of course Newman’s 81 and Redford’s 69, so don’t expect an action picture. Maybe The Shuffleboard Sting, or Butch and Sundance’s Great Geritol Raid.

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

The news as of the, oh, second or third coffee, and the music is The Rolling Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet:

Bridgeport, Connecticut: GoECart.com, a vendor of on-demand ecommerce products, has announced the release and general availability of GoECart 6.0, with integrated CRM tools.

This latest version of GoECart delivers web merchants “the total package for their ecommerce needs – a fully managed, flexible, and robust online store product that includes a slew of features and tier 1 on demand data center hosting,” according to company officials.

Manish Chowdhary, CEO of GoECart.com calls GoECart 6 “a more effective, complete, and hassle-free alternative for managing their ecommerce sites.”

GoECart 6 provides online store owners with technology and infrastructure needed to set up, manage and grow a web-based business. In addition to user-friendly ecommerce site administration tools, sales-friendly marketing and customer service tools, a search engine friendly software architecture and true tier-1 ecommerce hosting, GoECart also provides a complete online store website that is simple to customize – with absolutely no HTML or programming experience required.

The product is being released to what GoECart officials hope is a fertile market – according to market research firm Forrester, online retail sales will grow from $172 billion in 2005 to $329 billion in 2010, which is 14 percent compounded annual growth rate over the next five years.

GoECart 6.0 is billed as having “more than 200 features,” but the major ones are a fully managed shopping cart with tier 1 ecommerce hosting, easy-to-customize ecommerce storefront not requiring HTML knowledge, an Intuitive Administration Panel with customizable “My Favorites” navigation, a “search engine friendly architecture,” marketing and merchandising features include coupons and gift certificates, tell-a-friend functionality, and affiliate programs and integrated customer service and customer relationship management (CRM) tools.

Russia: Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation has announced that Russian Standard Bank, a retail lending private bank, is reporting significant and positive results after its first-phase implementation of Teradata Customer Relationship Management (CRM) product running on a Teradata Warehouse.

RSB holds one of the largest in-house consumer databases in Russia and is using the Teradata product to “better analyze, understand and serve its 14 million customers,” according to company officials.

“We selected and implemented Teradata based on the vendor’s expertise in data management, proven references, and products specific to retail banking and consumer finance,” said George Gorshkov, senior vice president and head of marketing for RSB, who added that the bank “expects to continue to improve our target marketing with reduced costs in customer acquisition, reduced customer attrition, and better customer value management.”

According to RSB, implementation of a clearly-focused business strategy, high-quality bank products and information technologies have enabled the bank to create a new consumer lending market in Russia. RSB competes in the nascent Russian consumer finance market.

According to a recent IDC study reported in CRM Today, March 26, 2006, spending on information technology is growing rapidly in Russia’s banking sector.

India: I2iTelesource and Comfone have announced they are partnering to provide GRX (GPRS Roaming Exchange) and MMS (Multimedia Message Service) HUB Services to Mobile operators in India.

i2iTelesource is India's largest distributed CRM services provider.

A GRX is a dedicated data network interconnecting GPRS mobile operators' networks. GRX services enable users to reach their GPRS services while abroad or beyond the reach of their home network.

With MMS Hub, operators can benefit from building up their MMS interconnections through a single physical connection and service contract, thus increasing efficiency and reducing costs. The interchange of MMS traffic between operators is enabled with IP access and routing using DNS with Mobile Number Portability Support.

Pick it: Aspire Technologies, a vendor of sales quoting software products for the global small and midmarkets, has announced what company officials are characterizing as “strong results” for its QuoteWerks software.

Demand for the quoting application, which integrates with most of the major CRM applications available, has remained “strong,” company officials say, since Aspire Technologies released Version 4 of the software in the third quarter of 2004.

Upon completion of an internal deployment audit, company officials report that sales of its QuoteWerks software package has surpassed 40,000 active users representing deployments in 75 countries worldwide.

“QuoteWerks is well-suited for most any company that engages in line item sales quoting through leveraging a service-oriented architecture that provides ease of use and flexibility to users,” claims John C. Lewe, IV, President of Aspire Technologies.

Vistula Communications Services, Inc., a vendor of Voice over Internet Protocol ("VoIP") services to telecommunications carriers and Internet Service Providers, has announced it has entered into definitive stock and warrant purchase agreements with a select group of accredited institutional investors intended to raise gross proceeds of $16.5 million in a private placement.

Under the terms of the financing, Vistula will sell an aggregate of 16.5 million shares of common stock at a price of $1.00 per share. The investors will also receive warrants to purchase an additional 13.2 million shares of common stock at an exercise price of $1.00 per share, which will expire in five years.

The shares and warrants will be issued in a private placement transaction under Regulation D of the Securities of Act of 1933. Vistula is required to file a registration statement covering the common stock purchased by the investors and the common stock underlying all warrants within 45 days of the closing.

This financing will provide the funds necessary for Vistula to complete its purchase of the intellectual property rights to the hosted V-Cube IP PBX product, which serves as Vistula's core Voice over IP technology offering. The V-Cube facilitates full contact communication services including Voice, Video, Conferencing, Call Contact Center and IVRS across enterprise IP networks and provides a centralized administration, provisioning and maintenance interface.

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

And welcome back my friends, both of you, to the show that ends, as well as the rest of the best here on 98.6 KCRM, the pride of beautiful crime-free South Central LA, where you get the news as of the first – but just the first – sixteen-ounce iced coffee this morning and if you want to play air guitar along with ol’ Primo Java here you just slip The Allman Brothers’ Hittin’ The Note, a much, much better album than anybody had a right to expect from this band in 2003 in the CD changer, might have to take out the Reba McEntire, Toby Keith, Dixie Chicks or The Mozart Effect CDs to do so, but remember: Those Learn Japanese While You Sleep! CDs don’t work, but if you ever bought X-Ray Spex as a kid you’ll probably fall for that too:

First up to bat today we have… Johnny Damon, and folks, wear those “Looks Like Jesus, Acts Like Judas, Throws Like Mary” t-shirts proudly except when passing Greg Galitzine’s door, then second we have the Agile Software Corporation, a vendor of product lifecycle management products, telling us that Acer, the folks who made that PC you’re using right now, has selected Agile PLM as its global PLM product standard.

A global IT firm, Acer will use Agile Product Collaboration and Agile Product Portfolio Management to “accelerate getting products to market, as well as to improve and streamline the visibility, management and collaboration of new and changing product record information across its worldwide operations and extended supply chain,” according to company officials.

After looking over the PLM market, Acer selected Agile, so it says on the cue cards, “because of its robust, industry best practice products, and its excellent reputation as the PLM market leader in the electronics and high tech industry.”

Richard Lai, Acer’s chief quality officer, quality and services business unit expressed ye fond hope that Agile would “help us streamline our outsourced manufacturing capabilities by providing visibility into our complex product portfolio across our global manufacturing and supply partners. This visibility will enable us to better collaborate with our partners and optimize our product development investments.”

Sounds like Mr. Lai could do with a change of windshield wipers or X-Ray Spex, but there you have it, campers, a basic tenet of CRM: It’s all about the visibility. Hey if you can’t see ‘em you prolly ain’t gettin’ your money’s worth out of ‘em, can I get an amen?

With headquarters in Taiwan Acer makes more than just PCs, oh my yes, there are servers and storage devices, LCD monitors and high-definition TVs, peripherals, and e-business products for business, government, education, and home users. In time-honored American tradition the company outsources the majority of its manufacturing responsibilities, evidently “Made In Taiwan” is now “Made In China.”

It’s coming up on the top of the hour here at KCRM, the pride of Pitcairn Island, and the question Silicon.com asks – sorry guys, no Pamela Anderson before’n’afters here, that’s a different silicon site and have your credit card handy – in a good piece by industry observer Ron Condon, is can CRM help you make money in the mid-market?

Moving right along, next up here on KCRM we have… okay okay, the blow-by-blow. Herr Condon recounts that two years ago, a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit of 370 businesses of all sizes revealed that only 15 per cent of them had derived any real value from their customer relationship management implementations.

Of course… your company wouldn’t be in that Pitiful Percentage, would it? You wouldn’t be listening to KCRM, the pride of Idaho’s potatos… potatoes… Martha, get Dan on line two, never can remember how to spell that – if it were, right?

The study, which Condon reminds us all was funded by IBM, concluded: “To the chagrin of many companies – from those with double-digit billion dollar annual revenues and up to $100 billion in assets, to small businesses with less than $50 million in annual revenue – CRM has yet to achieve the promised return on investment goals that made it so appealing in the first place. Furthermore, in many cases, customers have yet to notice a decisive difference.”

We’ll take dissenting calls right after this short commercial break – Come on businesses, know how to save! Cut your costs with… Burma Shave! – but methinks FC remembers hearing something about the whole point of CRM being to, well, make money. Whassup?

Rod Street, partner with IBM Consulting Services, tells Condon that in many cases – present company excepted, no doubt – “people were not clear about what they were trying to achieve. They didn’t identify the levers of business they wanted to improve and focus on them… the most successful ones were those who managed their budget and tracked the benefits against business goals.”

Here’s the kind of business success story First Coffee likes: Condon points to Heineken as an example of CRM success, where the company MADE A BETTER BEER set out with a specific set of goals – to MAKE BETTER BEER THAN MILLER OR BUDWEISER, WHICH REALLY WASN’T SO DAMN HARD NOW, WAS IT? prioritize more important customers, achieve better penetration for the Heineken brand and BLIND SIDE-BY-SIDE TASTE TESTS SHOW THAT BLINDFOLDED PEOPLE SPILL A LOT OF BEER, BUT THAT ONCE YOU HAND THEM THE GLASS THEY LIKE HEINEKEN BETTER! improve service standards.

And friends, Romans, brewers, make a better product. That goes a long, long way too, y’know. We’re not saying it has to be Sam Adams or Urquell Pilsner, but at least increase the quality lipstick on the pig, y’know, Maybelline or something like that.

Street told Condon, who told Cindy, who told Ethel, who told Mrs. Huntsicker who swears she heard from Elaine at the hair salon that “they used Siebel but they would always describe it as ‘improving service’ or ‘altering the way we handle different customer groups.’ The better focus yielded a 14 per cent growth in market share.”

Because here’s the clincher: “The aim of any CRM project should be to cut the cost of handling customers, while delivering better service. CRM should allow you to identify your most profitable customers, and should streamline business processes to deliver them a smoother and more efficient service. In short, it should increase profits.”

What, no world peace, free lunch and good five-cent cigar in there? Want fries with that too? Hey what’s this old cup here… “Passover Seder, Jerusalem, Upper Room, 32 A.D., This Cup Is Presented In Recognition Of Three Years Outstanding Small-Team Leadership By John, Peter, Bartholomew…”

Lots of examples in the Condon piece, itself worth a read. Basically he says sure, SMBs can get value from CRM. He quotes Jason Nash, CRM manager for noted SMB outfit Microsoft UK, saying “for some people,” and presumably he’s not addressing his friends back in Redmond here, “my advice is to think small. Think about having a clean database with all your contacts in there, and the ability to track meetings and e-mails against them. For a first phase, that might give them huge benefits from where they are today.”

Basically, Condon says, anybody can remember what their customers buy and suggest similar products for purchase. Anybody can upsell, anybody can cross-sell, anything you can do, I can do better.

That about wraps up the show in Saran Wrap for fresher podcasting here at KCRM, the pride of the Greater East Slingshot, Vermont Metro Area, but first, pace Dave Barry, First Coffee swears he’s not making this up, but National Review has printed a list of the Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs. The top ten:

4. “Sweet Home Alabama,” by Lynyrd Skynyrd (wussy SpellCheck...)

3. “Sympathy For The Devil,” by the Rolling Stones

Huh? Where’s Bob Dylan’s “Union Sundown?” And no “Louie Louie?” Come on, guys.

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

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is JibJab’s “This Land” parody from the last presidential election:

Bellevue, Washington-based Avidian Technologies has announced that it now provides support for Terminal Server and more advanced User Permissions in Prophet 3.0, its Outlook-based sales software.

Both features are available to existing customers as an update and will ship with all subsequent Prophet purchases.

These added features are designed to give companies using Prophet “greater control over their sales data and easier access for all users,” according to James Wong, CEO and co-founder of Avidian Technologies.

“This update to Prophet answers the call from our customers for an easy way to maintain better control and security over their sales data,” said Wong. “With support for Terminal Server we’ve broadened the options for accessing sales information.”

According to company officials, support for Terminal Server allows users access to their Prophet data through a Terminal Server session, providing ease of access and mobility, as users can access their Prophet data from any computer with the Terminal Server interface.

Terminal Server also permits installation from the central server, eliminating the need for IT to touch each computer.

User Permissions give companies the ability to create a hierarchy within Prophet so they can divide their customer information into teams, regions, territories, or any groupings they wish to create. Users see only the information they need to see and are able to share information with the right people.

Management can create sales reports for any group within the hierarchy such as a specific sales representative, team, region, or the company as a whole, providing a global view or a detailed look at performance and results.

Unlike traditional CRM or sales management software, company officials explain, Prophet is built into Outlook, “thereby eliminating the need to manage multiple contact databases or toggle between separate applications.”

Built on the .NET platform, Prophet works entirely inside Outlook and integrates with other critical business capabilities. This allows what company officials characterize as “management of contacts, companies, sales opportunities and all related communication and history inside the familiar Outlook interface.”

The Prophet Professional Server Edition and Prophet Enterprise Server Edition are available for sales teams of 5 or more, with prices starting at $299.95 per user for the Prophet Professional Server Edition.

AppExchange gets a few more: Centive, a vendor of on-demand sales compensation management has announced the availability of Centive Compel for salesforce.com's AppExchange.

Salesforce.com customers can now deploy Compel within their Salesforce implementation to provide an at-a-glance look at interactive dashboards that display a quick summary of key sales performance indicators with a single-click, drill-down capability.

Centive Compel is a fully-automated sales compensation management system delivered through an affordable, subscription-based service. Centive officials say it’s “easy to deploy, learn and use,” as “there is no software to purchase or install.”

Compel calculates accurate commissions and bonuses, provides sales representatives and managers with real-time visibility into attainment and performance data and offers finance executives a flexible system for modeling various compensation scenarios, and provides a complete audit trail of all changes made to plans and data as well as the security and process controls needed to support Sarbanes-Oxley compliance initiatives.

Scribe Software, a vendor of data migration and integration software technology for CRM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, has announced the availability of Scribe's Integration product for Salesforce and Great Plains for salesforce.com's AppExchange.

Scribe's AppExchange Mobile-ready product for Salesforce and Great Plains will be part of a live keynote demonstration of new AppExchange partner applications hosted by Tony Perkins, founder and editor of Always On.

This real-time integration product provides integration between Salesforce and Great Plains. The product synchronizes customer, address, and product catalog records and enables users to convert opportunities to orders in Salesforce. Those orders are then immediately and automatically processed in Great Plains.

Once the order is placed, the product ensures complete customer visibility in Salesforce by providing real time updates of orders and invoices from Great Plains. Because the product is built on the Scribe Insight platform, customers can quickly tailor the product to their specific business requirements via the configuration workbench, all without writing a single line of code.

And Rally Software Development has announced that Rally is “one of the first AppExchange OEM Edition partners.”

AppExchange OEM Edition allows Rally to develop, market, and sell their Application Lifecycle Management products running on the AppExchange on-demand platform, direct to customers, without requiring end-users to subscribe to the Salesforce CRM application.

The announcement was made today at Appforce, salesforce.com's first annual AppExchange partner, user and developer conference.

Built on the AppExchange OEM Edition, Rally Agile Product Manager enables product managers and IT business analysts to plan and release a “continuous flow of software products and services based on customer feedback taken directly from salesforce.com and other customer relationship management (CRM) systems.”

Parature, vendor of on demand customer support software, has announced that the company is offering current Talisma customers free data migration and professional services set-up when switching to Parature’s customer support product.

The offer is targeted mainly at organizations seeking support software that can be customized to their specific needs, such as reporting, Parature officials say.

Parature officials say Talisma customers “would benefit from Parature’s highly customizable and easy-to-use customer service software that enables companies to configure the product to their specific business processes and workflows.” They claim “no technical skills are required for customization, so support administrators can adjust the software themselves instead of relying on their IT departments or a professional services team.”

Parature officials consider their reporting capabilities “a key differentiator for Parature,” as they say it “reaches across the entire product platform, enabling support personnel to create custom reports analyzing any information in the system using the simple drag-and-drop technology to choose parameters. Reports can be in raw data formats or in 15 different graphical formats, as well as exported with the click of a button to Microsoft Excel.”

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

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is today’s birthday boy, Bob Dylan, nee Robert Zimmerman, born May 24, 1941 in Minnesota. That’s right, Bob Dylan’s 65 today, so we’ve combed through our extensive Dylan catalogue here at First Coffee headquarters, and have come up with what we consider the greatest achievement of Zimmy’s 40+-year career, the five-song run on 1966’s Blonde On Blonde starting with “Visions of Johanna” on Side One and ending with “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat” on Side Two.

Kids, go ask your parents what “Side One” and “Side Two” mean.

Hard to imagine, I know, but Blonde On Blonde would be an even better album if “She’s Your Lover Now,” recorded during these Nashville sessions, the truncated version of which appears on the Bootleg Series, had worked as a take. That’s Dylan for you, though, his studio sweepings would be most any other singer-songwriter’s career highlights:

On-demand CRM vendor NetSuite, Inc. has announced what company officials are characterizing as “new advancements that bring mid-sized companies the benefits of a single business management suite without the cost, complexity, and rigidity of traditional software applications like SAP.”

Important to get that dig at SAP in there, evidently. The NetSuite promo is actually named “SAP For The Rest Of Us.”

NetSuite Version 11.0, a new release currently being rolled out, adds what NetSuite considers three “key features” that “now make back-office applications as easy to use as front-office applications.”

First is the new ERP functionality including Landed Cost, Project Accounting, Milestone Billing, Expense Amortization, Bin Management, Demand-based Inventory Replenishment, and CRM functionality such as activity management, integrated e-mail messaging, and task tracking. 

Second is the NetSuite Customer Dashboard, “an industry first,” company officials claim, which provides a single graphical view of each individual customer including purchase history, collections status, yearly pipeline, and custom metrics

Third is the NetSuite KPI Scorecards, which are billed as bringing “corporate performance management to the mid-market” by allowing a company to measure its performance against customized key goals and time periods.

KPI Scorecards can also be used to measure individual performance within the organization based on the employee’s role. 

Of course NetSuite can’t help pointing out that “contrary to its previous stance,” on April 20, 2006, SAP acknowledged that an on-demand approach is an important way to bring the power of a single suite to the mid-market and that on-demand software can be applicable beyond CRM in the lower mid-market. 

However, SAP’s proposed product, SAP All-in-One, is in NetSuite’s estimation “far from the answer to this need.  All-in-One, a derivative product from SAP’s incredibly complex and expensive enterprise R/3 product, was never designed to be delivered over the Internet.”

All the problems of the traditional R/3 code base – difficulty in upgrading to new versions, etc. – will, as NetSuite contends, be magnified to customers attempting to use it over the Internet, so why they want to tag their product as “SAP For The Rest Of Us” is beyond First Coffee.

There is no extra charge to existing customers for the core features of KPI Scorecards, Customer Dashboard and ERP usability enhancements. The new ERP features will be included with specific modules and vertical editions of NetSuite. NetSuite Version 11.0 is being delivered to customers using NetSuite's patent-pending "phased release" process, starting in April 2006 and continuing through June 2006.

Free CRM, a free, multi-user CRM software provider has announced Google Gmail support now directly integrated in the Free CRM product.

Google Gmail users can now send out mass e-mail campaigns, newsletters and template e-mail merges directly in the Free CRM system. Mail items in a Gmail account can now be copied to the user’s contacts in the CRM.

Businesses can now sign up for a free Gmail account at Google (http://www.Gmail.com) and a free CRM account at http://www.FreeCRM.com.

Google Gmail users can view their POP mail boxes using SSL encrypted security and also send out e-mails using secure TLS SMTP with FreeCRM.com. The combination of FreeCRM.com business services with Google's Gmail is being marketed as an “inexpensive vehicle for powering small businesses.”

Eric Stone, CEO of CRM ASP, Inc. says integrating Google Gmail with Free CRM product provides “integrated business services with a standard Gmail account and also provides FreeCRM.com users a… way to integrate e-mail with the CRM system."

FreeCRM.com positions itself as an “alternative to SalesForce.com and other CRM products with web based products or on-premises licensing options,” offering “an easy migration path from GoldMine, Act, SalesForce, Siebel On-Demand, and SugarCRM.”

Would-be Russian WiMax czars GlobeTel officials are steamed about a piece in the New York Post by financial writer Chris Byron calling on theAmerican Stock Exchange to “halt trading in the shares of GlobeTel Communications Corp.”

Byron says GlobeTel officials have “pirouetted from one see-through ploy to the next to create the illusion of value in a worthless penny stock.” He recounts in convincing fashion what he characterizes as “two complete pump-and-dump cycles that have sent an astounding 1.1 billion shares of its stock churning through the market,” resulting in “bogus $350 million market value for the company, two-thirds of which has now evaporated, with $74 million of it detouring into the outstretched hands of the company's insiders.”

The two “ploys,” of course, were the blimps-over-Colombia for cell phone transmission and the $600 million WiMax in Russia schemes, neither of which resulted in anything but a lot of nice-sounding press releases and a slew of class action suits filed against the company on behalf of investors.

Byron says GlobeTel’s new “fan dance” consists of “plans to sell prepaid phone and debit cards to Brazilians looking for ways to move cash in and out of the U.S. unobtrusively.”

According to Byron, law enforcement might be finally taking an interest in GlobeTel’s machinations: “Much of the fishiest selling in GlobeTel stock seems to have originated from the Boca Raton office of the brokerage Raymond James, where several of the company's top insiders maintained accounts.

“In March, the broker handling those accounts was abruptly dismissed, after which the firm's compliance officials began ordering his clients to withdraw their money, close down their accounts and take their business elsewhere,” Byron writes.

GlobeTel CEO Tim Huff’s response to Byron is to quibble over Byron’s definition of a “blimp” and the hypothetical structure of Russian WiMax project GlobeTel never delivered. The company’s stock, trading just north of $5 last May, is as of the market’s opening today worth a buck and a quarter.

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

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Loudon Wainwright III’s “Dead Skunk:”

On-demand customer relationship management (CRM) vendor RightNow Technologies, Inc. has announced the acquisition of Salesnet, Inc., an on-demand software firm focused on sales workflow automation. 

Initial integrations between the Salesnet application and RightNow applications will be completed this summer with all major features expected to be included by summer of 2007.

Under the terms of the acquisition, RightNow has acquired Salesnet through an all-cash merger. RightNow expects the transaction to be neutral to cash flow from operations and dilutive to GAAP EPS in 2006.  

Salesnet’s corporate office in Boston will become RightNow’s Boston office and will continue to include development, sales, marketing and support functions.

Salesnet was acquired to “accelerate RightNow’s customer experience management development efforts by combining RightNow’s knowledge foundation with Salesnet’s workflow engine,” according to company officials.

With the acquisition, RightNow adds 26 employees and a dozen off-shore development contractors with experience in sales automation products to mid-market and enterprise customers.

“Our acquisition of Salesnet brings substantial sales workflow domain expertise to our business, accelerates our roadmap by more than a year and adds hundreds of customers to our client base,” Greg Gianforte, founder and chief executive officer at RightNow, said. 

Jonathan Tang, president and co-founder of Salesnet, will become vice president of sales products at RightNow.

Salesnet sold on-demand sales force automation, focusing on sales methodologies. The acquisition brings RightNow added expertise in customer-facing sales functions, as well as vertical expertise in financial services and business-to-business.

Salesnet provides tools needed to handle “more complex selling environments,” according to Denis Pombriant, managing principal at Beagle Research Group.

RightNow will support Salesnet’s existing customers and provide an upgrade path to other customer experience management products. Rich Perkett, chief technology officer and co-founder of Salesnet, will join RightNow as a director of product development, responsible for the integration and expansion of Salesnet’s technology into RightNow’s product.

Salt Lake City-based Corda Technologies, Inc., which sells dashboard and visualization products for business intelligence, has announced the expansion of its sales and technical support team with the addition of three new sales offices in New York, Washington, D.C. and Dallas.

The new branch locations will have a two-fold purpose, Corda officials say, to “provide high-touch reach to customers” and “receive immediate feedback that will help shape the next level of products for customers’ needs.”

Each office will have a business development manager as well as IT/sales support staff to support the company’s efforts to try to boost their flagship product, CenterView, to the enterprise level.

“We are investing resources in these areas to be more in touch with our customers and their needs,” said Tom O’Dea, chief revenue officer for Corda. “Our offices will have experienced sales and business intelligence individuals who can provide quality service to our customers.”

This expansion will act as “a precursor to future growth” for Corda Technologies, O’Dea thinks.

The Radicati Group, Inc.’s latest study, “Microsoft Exchange and Outlook Analysis, 2006-2010,” looks at the current and forecasted MS Exchange installed base, with extensive breakouts by version, business size and region.

According to the report, Microsoft Exchange currently commands a 31% installed base market share and a 52% revenue market share of the corporate insourced messaging software market. The next version of Exchange, called Exchange 2007, is expected to be released in early 2007.

Microsoft is also currently beta testing a hosted e-mail service called Office Live.

The good folk from Redmond have aggressively expanded their reach into the hosted e-mail market since 2003, and Radicati expect that Microsoft’s revenue in this market will grow at an average annual rate of 25% over the next four years.

Microsoft clearly leads the e-mail client market with Outlook, Outlook Express and Outlook Web Access, and the study finds that uptake for Outlook Mobile, the company’s e-mail client for mobile devices has also been strong, due to increased demand for smartphones.

Happy birthday to Swedish writer Par Lagerkvist. What? Never heard of him? No wonder, he’s a Nobel Prize laureate for literature, a group only slightly less anonymous than North Dakota governors.

Actually he’s the perfect Nobel Literature winner. Here’s his career, according to the Writer’s Almanac: “He began writing for socialist journals and was considered one of the most promising socialist writers of his day. Between 1915 and 1945, he published more than twenty-five plays and novels, none of them very successful. He wrote about the anguish and the meaninglessness of the universe, and many of his characters were disabled, deformed, or dead. His short-story collection The Eternal Smile (1934) is about a group of spirits passing the time in eternity by telling stories about their former lives.”

He’s got the whole Nobel checklist: He was a depressing socialist who wrote about repulsive people hopelessly mired in despair in works nobody read. Keeping this guy out of the Nobel pantheon is like keeping The Beatles out of the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame.

He did achieve some popular recognition with his novel Barabbas in 1950, but because the rest of his career was so Nobel-worthy they overlooked that one lapse of writing something people other than the Nobel nominating committee liked, and gave him the 1951 Nobel Prize for Literature. Heck, they should’ve put his picture on the medal.

It’s also the birthday of Margaret Wise Brown, who contributed more value to world literature than 98% of the combined output of Nobel Lit laureates by writing Goodnight Moon in 1947.

3Sixty Systems, a CRM and software development company, has partnered with managed services provider InTechnology to offer 3SLive customers access to InTechnologys IP Voice Connect hosted IP telephony service.

The partnership has announced its first customer, law firm Robin Simon LLP, which has registered over 100 users in 4 UK locations to the service.

3Sixty has itself been a user of InTechnology’s managed network services for a number of years and, company officials say, was “keen to integrate its web-based 3SLive product with an IP telephony product specifically targeted at small to medium-sized businesses.”

InTechnology currently hosts the 3SLive platform in its data centers. The service is charged on a per user, per month basis offering minimal start-up costs for prospective customers of all sizes.

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

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Kinks’ “Bernadette:”

Let’s see what’s going on at SAPFest ‘06 in Orlando, or SAPPHIRE, as it’s probably more properly known.

In front of 15,000 customers and partners at the combined conferences for SAP customers and the Americas’ SAP Users’ Group, SAP execs described how the company will “transform the business landscape during the next decade,” according to company officials, by “addressing the growing data and information needs of both knowledge and information workers.”

In his speech, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann focused on the new role of IT in supporting growth, a departure from the formerly prevalent view of IT as a driver of cost efficiency. Kagermann characterized IT as an “enabler of accelerated business innovation and operational excellence.”

He said enterprise software must address three key business requirements: the need to automate processes for speed and flexibility; the need to enable collaboration by integrating automated processes beyond the firewall with those of customers, partners and suppliers; and the need to harness and “amplify” the value of the knowledge worker.

Executive Board Member Leo Apotheker, president, Customer Products and Operations, used his keynote to explain why companies need to embrace enterprise service-oriented architecture. The “globalization of markets, the consolidation and specialization of companies within and across industries and the rise of business model innovation” are forcing companies to “adapt their business models in a fast and flexible fashion,” he said.

Key Apotheker Quote: “Enterprise SOA is a reality and companies can no longer afford to wait on the sidelines… this is a matter of being a best-run business versus an ‘also-ran’ business.’”

Executive Board Member Shai Agassi, president of the Product and Technology Group touched on a number of topics in his keynote, specifically highlighting the move toward IT being embedded in business today.

In order for businesses to differentiate themselves from their competitors, Agassi thinks, they need to “harness IT as the ultimate competitive weapon.” In his talk Agassi explained how SAP is delivering simplified business processes and demonstrated on stage a new alternative graphic user interface for SAP software that will “extend core business functionality to an even broader range of end users.”

Agassi said SAP is reducing complexity by facilitating the integration of hundreds of enterprise services, which he described as the building blocks that will make up the foundation of customers’ application landscapes moving forward. Agassi also explained that one of the critical tasks that customers need to address is around assuring business compliance.

KnowTia Corporation has announced that the Oasis CRM product line will now be enhanced with an all new Version 2.0.

New features include integrated Ajax dashboards, blanket order management as well as an overall enhancing of the previous user-friendly interface. These features are coupled with their already existent real-time integration with both BusinessVision 32 and QuickBooks Pro.

KnowTia Corporation began working on the integration of Ajax into aspects of the main Oasis CRM interface for this past year, as they view this as the future of CRM platforms. Ajax lets users of the Oasis CRM system pull data into the interface without the need for web page refreshing.

Ajax also allows for data to be silently pulled from the server without any disruption to the user. The ability to have instantaneous search populations and refreshing dashboard graphs in a web environment is something else KnowTia hopes is a selling point of its CRM product.

Another feature of Oasis CRM is its integration with both QuickBooks & BusinessVision accounting packages. This lets business owners have their employees pull financial information about their client base without sacrificing their company’s financials. This in turn, Oasis officials say, “allows for a constant loop of client data which is consistently flowing throughout Oasis CRM and their accounting system.”

Other features highlighted by company officials include contact based, not account-based CRM, complete order management including fulfillment, easy to use and customizable web-based interface, comprehensive contract and complete inventory management.

Lingo, the U.S. Internet phone service provider, is claiming to be “the first VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) provider to offer unlimited phone calling to Mexico.”

The new Lingo “Unlimited Mexico” VoIP plan provides customers with the opportunity to use their broadband Internet connections and phones to call family and business associates in Mexico as often as they like, for $29.95 per month.

Like other Lingo VoIP offerings, the plan also includes unlimited phone calls in the U.S. and to Canada.

With the addition of this VoIP calling plan, along with recently introduced “local” phone numbers in top Mexican markets, Lingo claims to offer “more options for calling to and from Mexico than any major broadband Internet phone service available today.”

Subscription to Lingo’s Unlimited Mexico plan is free for the first month, and $29.95 per month thereafter. The plan includes unlimited calls to Mexico (landline), unlimited local and long distance calls in the U.S. and to Canada (including Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands), competitive rates to 200+ other international locations, unlimited calls between Lingo customers and other points.

This Mexican plan is one of the unlimited Lingo VoIP calling plans designed for residential and small/home-based businesses, starting at $7.95 and available free for the first month.

Next time you’re in England you might want to try what’s being called the best coffee shop in London, Flat White in Soho, run by New Zealander Joska Easterbrook. First Coffee hasn’t been there, but if it’s anything like the coffee shops in Aotearoa itself it’s worth the visit.

Strangely enough, Flat White doesn’t serve any flat whites, a great espresso-based coffee drink originating in New Zealand.

David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Public Image Ltd.’s “Rise:”

Mr. Cakebread, a man who has never heard a single funny Marie Antoinette joke and whose record is safe from First Coffee, will speak at approximately 9:40 a.m. in the land of the Yankees and at 6:40 a.m. in the home of the Dodgers, but hey for all those of you who keep banker’s hours an audio webcast will be available on salesforce.com’s Investor Relations website at http://www.salesforce.com/investor.

And if you’re a lucky holder of a Willie Wonka Gold Foil invitation you’re lunching on Marc Benioff’s ample tab at the rubber chicken lunch today where Salesforce.com executives will be presenting to investors in New York at noon, listen to the lip-smackin’ and gum-flappin’ on the Left Coast at nine in the morning to go with your soy latte and granola. You lucky lunchers be sure to tip the guy in the Hawaiian shirt standing by the door and toss a nickel in Tom Siebel’s tin cup on the sidewalk.

The comin’ atcha the next day, Wednesday, May 24^th, will be the Bob Dylan Welcome To Social Security 65^th Birthday Bash, as Zimmy celebrates Geezerdom by trying to remember just where the hell he is and if the line about the ragged clown behind comes before or after the line about disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind.

Second billing on KCRM, the pride of Southeastern West Virginia, is RightNow Technologies, hailing up from where hail means you’ve got a few extra golf balls to use during the winter where the wind comes sweepin’ across the plains, presenting at the Pacific Crest On Demand Conference in Shakeytown at 10:00 a.m. local earthquake time, which means you East Coasters have to finish that third martini by two in the afternoon.

And again, for those of you who just can’t make it a Webcast of the presentation will be available on the company’s investor relations website at http://www.shareholder.com/rnow/medialist.cfm. You’ll need a note from your mother or a doctor explaining why you couldn’t be at the Webcast.

Right, now back to spinnin’ the plastic fantastic and looky who’s under the needle, campers, Toots Thielemans’ “One More For the Road” goin’ out as a special dedication from the D.C. traffic police to Patrick Kennedy and his Amazin’ 151-Proof Ethanol-Powered Car… hey folks, at least he didn’t hit the water in Kennedy family style. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming here on KCRM, the pride of West Slingshot, Nebraska:

In what company officials describe as “an effort to increase the speed and accuracy of their quoting system,” ABC Companies, which sells and leases new and used highway coaches in the U.S., has implemented SmartCatalog by Endeavor Commerce.

ABC Companies has finally ended the suspense and chosen the Sales Configuration Edition of SmartCatalog to be integrated with their current Sage CRM SalesLogix system. With the addition of SmartCatalog to Sage CRM SalesLogix, ABC’s account executives will have the ability to “create accurate quotes and proposals with just a few clicks of the mouse,” since according to SmartCatalog officials, “SmartCatalog is a rule-based configurator that will ensure the quote-to-order entry process is flawless.”

Flawless, sports fans, as flawless as Tinker to Evers to Chance, the Great White Shark Choke or Nadia Comaneci.

“ABC Companies has always focused on ways to increase the speed of our quoting process without compromising our quoting accuracy,” said Jim Morrison, VP of Sales and a guy who has never, ever had anybody hum “Riders On The Storm” in an elevator after being introduced to him.

“Not only will SmartCatalog allow us to produce fast and easy quotes, they will also be extremely accurate,” he says, since “the ability to generate quotes offsite is also a major benefit, considering a majority of our account executives are often traveling.”

And considering the style in which account executives usually travel saving a few shekels here and there’s not a bad idea either.

SmartCatalog also generates update opportunities within Sage CRM SalesLogix. This simply allows the account executives to generate fast, accurate forecasts that will prove to be very important when traveling down the chain of command, where hey, the faster and easier the better.

… and thank you London Bach Choir for helping the Lads From Dartford out in the studio there, can’t quite understand why Mick failed the audition. Switching gears let’s have The Jim Carroll Band’s “People Who Died” next here on KCRM, the pride of Oliver North’s Southern Comfort, remember to patronize our sponsors, folks, generally by speaking slowly and explaining all the polysyllabic words…

I-many, Inc., a vendor of advanced Enterprise Contract Management (ECM) products for managing corporate commitments, today announced David Blumberg has joined I-many as Executive Vice President of Fulfillment Services.

In this new position, Blumberg will be responsible for all professional services, as well as customer support and sustaining engineering functions. He will also be responsible for formulating and directing I-many’s marketing strategies in its Life Sciences and Healthcare business line.

Blumberg comes to I-many from Accenture, the recently rechristened $16 billion global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company which has absolutely nothing to do with those clowns currently sweating out a jury of their peers in Houston – where he was a managing partner.

During his 15 years at Accenture, Blumberg rose from consultant to a number of senior management positions, where he served as the lead partner for the pharmaceutical and medical products practice, global account manager for one of Accenture’s “Diamond” pharmaceutical accounts, and oversaw Accenture’s global pharmaceutical and medical products CRM business.

He was previously with IBM and General Electric, and earned his MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Net neutrality’s the big issue on Capitol Hill, and hey, can we all just get along? Then we can be spared the spectacle of techno musician Moby putting in an appearance pleading for something that should be such a no-brainer it’s no wonder Congress is about to screw it up, a free Internet.

It’s rare First Coffee finds himself on the side of California Senator Barbara “If I Get Any More To The Loony Left I’ll Be In The Pacific Ocean” Boxer on any issue, rarer still to find himself on the side of the Dixie “If We Get Any More To The Loony Left We’ll Be In Arizona” Chicks, but he a) understands their antipathy to Arizona, and b) applauds their efforts to defeat legislation threatening to let broadband providers charge content providers based on bandwidth consumption, with which, as industry observer Roy Mark records proponents correctly saying, “the Internet will be dominated by a handful of powerful telephone and cable company gatekeepers who will have the ability to decide which sites work best based on who pays the most.”

… and wrapping up the broadcast here on KCRM, the pride of the Upper East Side, let’s have those One-Hit Wonders From The Land Down Under But Above New Zealand, The Church, telling us what it’s like “Under The Milky Way,” and remember, folks, if at first you don’t succeed, look in the trash for the instructions.

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

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Tony Bennett’s “Mood Indigo:”

European marketers do use business intelligence in hopes of better performance and return on investment from their strategies, according to a survey of executives at 350 companies in seven countries and across four industries.

The top benefit, according to the survey’s findings, is “being able to optimize customer communications,” followed by “generating action-ready insight based on customer value metrics.”

“Marketing leaders use BI… across the EMEA region, and across the industries examined, BI helps marketing divisions align themselves with business strategy,” said Phil Winters, Vice President of Customer Intelligence at SAS, who sponsored the study.

The study was carried out by IDC’s CMO Advisory Research area, examined marketing’s use of BI tools for improving planning and execution and how BI can lead to better organizational performance.

Two trends were identified in this process: the proliferation of more niche segments, and the fragmentation of media and content – and thus the channels – to reach the intended audiences.

“What we find remarkable is that marketing organizations that use BI tools show a 16 percent higher ability to provide insight into customer needs and are more effective in predicting customer behavior by 24 percent than those who don’t,” said Winters.

“A marketing organization’s effectiveness is directly impacted by its ability to use customer/market insight through the usage and benefits of BI applications,” said Rich Vancil, Vice President of CMO Advisory Research, IDC. He noted that one-third of the study's participants use customer and market insight, including “prediction of customer behavior,” to achieve greater effectiveness in customer retention, acquisition of new customers, revenue growth and market share expansion.

SAS commissioned IDC Research to conduct the research in Germany, Italy, France, The Netherlands, Poland, UK and Denmark across the retail, telecommunications, manufacturing, and financial services industries. A white paper sponsored by SAS was written by IDC summarizing the results of the survey. The white paper is available as a free download at www.sas.com. 

There’s more news at the SAS Forum International in Geneva, which wraps up today. One the folks at SAS are particularly fond of is the study showing that organizations that deploy complete business intelligence platforms “show lower total cost of ownership” than those that use products from multiple vendors.

At least that’s the conclusion put forth in a study conducted by the HEC School of Management in Paris, researching costs of implementing a BI product.  

The TCO concept involves costs related to the acquisition of a BI product, but also its deployment and the ongoing use. Responses come from executives at 109 companies who deployed at least one BI product from Business Objects, Cognos, SAP or SAS. 

“When evaluating vendor offerings, it is important that organizations take initial software costs into consideration, but also the costs for maintaining and operating a product, such as incremental consulting charges, the functionalities of each vendor’s platform and their ability to scale,” explained Professor Jean Loup Ardoin, who provided academic guidance to the MBA students who conducted the survey.

This study also validates earlier research conducted by a team of students enrolled in the MBA program of Said Business School, University of Oxford. The results of this study were announced at the beginning of the year. 

“The study endorses our strategy of offering an end-to-end and fully integrated BI platform to lower total cost of ownership,” said Tonny Dierckx, Practice Head of Manufacturing at SAS International. “The average enterprise probably has 12 or more different business intelligence tools deployed to address specific requirements of various departments. This leads to duplication of spending and support.”

Finally, SAS and Sun Microsystems, Inc. have announced what officials from both companies claim is a new world-record benchmark for the extraction, transformation and loading of massive volumes of data into a data warehouse with the recently released SAS Enterprise Data Integration Server.

The results show that the SAS engine on Sun SPARC processor-based servers can, company officials claim, “outperform any other vendor’s tools by more than 250 percent in throughput testing,” based on published results. 

Using a Sun Microsystems Sun Fire E25K domainable server running UltraSPARC IV+ processors (dual-core CPU), the Solaris 10 operating system and Sun StorEdge SAM-FS/QFS shared file system, SAS demonstrated the performance of SAS Enterprise Data Integration Server when used for ETL through the completion of a test involving the throughput of 3.9 terabyte (trillion bytes) in one hour, representing 81.2 GB/Hour/CPU – a world record based on published benchmarks. 

Are good times ready to roll again? More CEOs are planning to hire Bay Area workers than anytime since the dot-com bust in 2001, according to the quarterly Bay Area Business Confidence Survey conducted by the Bay Area Council.

Of the 512 CEOs and top executives surveyed between April 13-26, 2006, 43 percent plan to increase their Bay Area workforce in the next six months, only eight percent plan reductions, and 48 percent will maintain current levels.

Bay Area Starbucks might be looking to hire more baristas soon, in other words.

As a matter of fact, the problem CEOs and other execs in the survey are having is finding new employees in the nine-counties, and an even harder time attracting them from outside the region due to the cost of housing. Only 18 percent of respondents say it is easy to find qualified candidates for jobs at their company in the Bay Area, versus 53 percent who say it is difficult.

In a sign that competition for employees is increasing, 42 percent of CEOs and top executives report it is more challenging now to find qualified candidates than 12 months ago. Just five percent say it is easier. In terms of attracting workers from outside the region, the cost of housing in the Bay Area has made it "very difficult" according to 62 percent of respondents.

"It's clearly a bull market for job seekers in the Bay Area," said Jim Wunderman, President and CEO of the Bay Area Council. "It's about time. Four-and-a-half years since the national recession officially ended, the Bay Area is still about 335,000 jobs short of where it was when the recession began."

Citizen relationship management vendor Lagan, who sells 3-1-1 products for public sector organizations, has announced it will provide its Frontlink product to the City of Hartford, Connecticut.

Hartford will be the fourth city in the U.S. to implement Lagan's citizen relationship management software platform to maximize city services, following Hampton, Va., Minneapolis, Minn. and Yonkers, N.Y.

Lagan's CRM product supports a city's existing call center by offering support in the form of a database. When a citizen calls with a complaint, their concern is logged into the system, much like a business CRM, it is tracked and the citizen is subsequently contacted when the issue has been resolved.

Cities around the country are setting up 3-1-1 call centers to provide their citizens with assistance to non-emergency issues, keeping the city's emergency 9-1-1 line open for critical matters. In addition to the Lagan clients mentioned above, Chicago, Dallas and Albuquerque, among others, have debuted 3-1-1 systems to generally successful receptions.

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

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Handel’s Water Music:

RWD Technologies, Inc., a vendor of learning and performance products and services, has released RWD uPerform, what company officials describe as “a comprehensive performance support tool for businesses seeking to improve application functionality and return on investment for their enterprise products.”

In the enterprise resource planning (ERP) sector alone, companies will invest upwards of $39 billion per year by 2009, according to the IDC study "Worldwide ERP Applications 2005-2009 Forecast and 2004 Vendor Shares," released last August. Yet despite such massive investments, many organizations are ill equipped to train their employees on – or retain employee insight into how they use – these products.

RWD uPerform is being marketed to this target demographic, as it’s advertised as allowing the user to “create, organize, distribute, access, and maintain application simulations and procedural documentation.”

Additionally, through its collaboration features, central authoring capabilities and scalable architecture, RWD uPerform can help employees “share the knowledge and information [for] the proper usage of enterprise applications.”

RWD uPerform integrates with most all enterprise applications to provide end users with contextual learning materials on demand.

Select key features of RWD uPerform highlighted by company officials include capture fields, buttons, and screens into both procedural documents and interactive simulations in a single recording session, as well as access online context-sensitive help and batch publish documents and simulations in a variety of formats.

It’s also billed as providing scalability to support projects with hundreds or thousands of documents, creating custom templates to enhance the look and feel of documents and simulations and the ability to check in new content for storage, workflow and versioning.

The products lets users collaborate by participating in author-to-author, author-to-reviewer, author-to-end user, and end user-to-end user discussions in user interface and customizable boilerplate text available in 15 languages.

RWD uPerform works with standard enterprise applications and Microsoft Windows web-based applications.

"We know more than 80 percent of work-related learning is learned on the job," said Mike Bray, president of RWD's Enterprise Learning Products group. "We address this by helping companies build communities of practice among employees with similar job roles and responsibilities. When these communities are connected with collaboration tools they can have significant impact on business results and employee productivity and retention."

CRM vendor SAP AG has announced the formation of four new "industry value networks" (IVNs) serving the consumer products, retail and technology industries and the public sector.

The networks are designed to “bring together customers, partners and SAP to co-innovate and quickly develop products to solve industry-specific customer challenges,” according to SAP officials. The products developed through these IVNs will use the SAP NetWeaver platform to create business products.

The end result will help customers “extend and enrich their investments in SAP products,” is the hope expressed by SAP officials at the SAPPHIRE international customer conference currently taking place in Orlando.

For partners, SAP officials say, IVNs represent an opportunity for independent software vendors and system integrators, who have built products that are certified as "Powered by SAP NetWeaver" and “have a strong need to create a vertical focus in their business.”

Customer and partner IVN members may also participate in SAP's newly launched Enterprise Services Community,

Stephen Graham, group vice president, Global Software Business Strategies at IDC has said that well-structured partner networks “can provide vendors with significant benefits over traditional relationship models.”

Currently, SAP has value networks covering six industries, including banking and, most recently, chemicals. SAP plans to expand this initiative to additional industries throughout the year.

In the IVN for consumer products, members can collaborate to deliver products and integration scenarios to address key industry issues, including compliance, food safety, meat tracking, and wine and spirits management.

Food safety is actually a fairly important regulatory compliance topic in the consumer products industry. Due in part to a lack of supply chain visibility at certain points in the harvesting process, a significant percentage of fresh crops often deteriorates after harvest, leading to billions of dollars in annual losses.

SAP officials claim that “losses due to counterfeited food products are rising to upwards of tens of billions dollars each year.” There you go – another entire field of crime First Coffee didn’t know existed, never mind on such a massive scale. How, he wonders, (or more to the point, why) does a criminal counterfeit an apple?

In the IVN for high tech, members collaborate to develop products around manufacturing execution, product compliance, price management and service parts management.

Manufacturing execution, for example, is a business issue for high-tech companies given the level of outsourcing and offshoring of supply chain operations. High-tech manufacturers often lack the capability to sense and respond to changes on the manufacturing floor.

For the IVN for public sector, members will focus on developing products to help governments and public agencies and organizations transform tax and revenue management processes by addressing key pain points such as outdated legacy systems, lack of current tax products being integrated with other systems, and growing demand from citizens for high-performance services.

And in IVN for retail, members can work together to develop products to address industry issues around store and multi-channel management. Specific focus areas include integration with point-of-sale products; connectivity for mobile devices such as handhelds and kiosks; customer loyalty programs; and customer analytics.

"Accurate information is critical to retailers as they address the problems of customer intimacy, satisfaction and convenience," said Gayle Papadopoulos, vice president and general manager, worldwide retail products, HP.

AppExchange picks up another one: Integration Technologies, Inc. and on-demand CRM vendor salesforce.com have announced the availability of the InterWeave Integration Platform for salesforce.com's AppExchange.

Salesforce.com customers can now access and deploy InterWeave products with their Salesforce implementations to, in the words of InterWeave officials, “create a bi-directional, real-time bridge between their data in Salesforce and their in-house systems.”

The InterWeave Integration Platform for Salesforce is on the AppExchange and is immediately available at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange.

Happy birthday to novelist Dorothy Richardson, born in Abingdon, Berkshire, England in 1873 who wrote the first stream-of-consciousness work in English, a thirteen-volume autobiographical novel Pilgrimage, published in 1938. Thirteen volumes of narration filtered through the mind of her persona, Miriam Henderson, with no narrator to make sense of her thoughts. Thirteen volumes of defiantly unreadable, aggressively solipsistic, turgid sludge anointed one of the great works of 20^th century literature, one good reason why First Coffee got out of the academic world fast.

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