June 2006 Archives

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Joe Jackson's Night and Day album:

First Coffee's 30 June piece on net neutrality generated a bit of reaction, we'll take the good, the bad and the ugly here. It really needs all the italics and bold text, so hit the link at the bottom if you're reading this off the First Coffee blog page.

I really enjoyed your TMCnet article on Net Neutrality. Two observations:

["Anyway, UPI quotes Cleland as saying that Net-neutrality legislation would hinder broadband access providers' ability to offer more than one service. "How does a new entrant succeed? You differentiate and you innovate," he said. "(Net neutrality) is saying you have to have the same price, and the same terms and conditions."

[I have no idea what the hell he's talking about, do you?"]

Unfortunately, the double talk you so rightly point out seems to be the norm rather than the exception these days. That is why I do not listen to or read mainstream news anymore.

Oh it's good to scan the MSM news media once in a while to see what the liberals are up to. And as Anne Coulter correctly points out, it makes a lot of people's jobs a lot easier, if you happen to be the al-Qaeda director of counterintelligence all you have to do is read The New York Times, and you're done by 10:00 a.m.

"If anybody should rightfully get to cash in off today's Internet it's the government, specifically the Department of Defense, not the Johnny- come- lately phone companies."

It is not the government who should cash-in, but the taxpayers who fund government activities through taxes. Instead of getting a return-on-investment, we are the ones that will pay more.

Keep up the insightful reporting.

Thanks Ron. Oh don't worry, not everyone was so nice, here's Mailbox 99 writing in:

David you are a caricature of America's fast-growing whiny entitlement culture.

That's a relief, I'm glad I'm not a representative example of it.

"I really like the internet and those guys make a lot of money so I should get whatever I want however I want it."

How about this David- THEY built the networks- THEY own them. I am sure if someone came to you decided they knew best how to manage a personal possession of yours you would throw a temper tantrum. But when it is to your supposed benefit you are all for it! If only we could all be so ignorant and hypocritical.

If I were renting out my "personal possession" to someone who was paying me money to use it, as the phone companies are doing, I guess I'd have to at least listen to their opinion on it, wouldn't I? And I'd certainly expect them to want some sort of "benefit" from it, whether it was in my power to grant it or not I wouldn't think it unreasonable for them to want some benefit from something they're paying to use, it'd be rather "ignorant" and" hypocritical" not to, wouldn't it?

Putting aside the fact they OWN the networks, how about this: The solution you support will put a bunch of half-wit government bureaucrats in charge.

Is that as opposed to the fully-witted ones or the quarter-wits? Or the half-wit government bureaucrats who enabled the birth of the Internet in the first place?

The internet can be run like your local DMV- wouldn't that be great!! Not to mention the enormous corruption that will certainly follow in its wake.

Leaving aside the fact that my DMV doesn't have two lines, a fast one for those who pay more and a slow one for those who pay less, how does "enormous corruption" follow from not allowing rich sites to bribe service providers to slow down their competitors? I guess I'm not following the logic on that one.

Lastly, once it is established that whiney, entitled US citizens such as yourself can, on a whim, take the property of others or at least make significant restrictions on how others may run their business, NO ONE will ever invest 10 cents in another project, let alone $10 BILLLION dollars. Why take the risk?

Why take the risk? Why not ask those who did -- the very service providers who are spending billions, they claim, to build bandwidth they demonstrably don't need; who are, in other words, doing exactly what you say they're not doing? Must be hard to defend an argument that's being disproved in reality even as it's being made, I'd have thought.

Try to look past your own selfish entitlements and put a little thought into this issue-- or maybe move to Russia, they ran their entire nation in a manner you propose and look how well-off they are.

Sorry, that was gratuitous, but sometimes simply quoting someone's own words is the best argument you can make against them. Just ask John Kerry.

I liked your article about net neutrality. But what can be done about it? I'm in a state with all democratic congressmen, and I think I read that every Democratic Congressman voted in favor of Net Neutrality. Is my only option to sit back and see what happens, or is there more I can do?

Good question. As far as what can be done about it, I honestly don't know. I guess if enough people felt as you did it could become a hot button issue, but I don't sense there's the groundswell out there right now.

The whole issue is confusing, at best, and dishonest at the worse. Reading the list of proponents of this bill is certainly enough, at least for me, to kill the whole idea of Net Neutrality: MoveOn.org. Daily Kos, People for the American Way, and on and on of nearly 100% Leftist/ Socialists.

How did the net get this far without a laundry list of laws and regulations coming out of Washington? You want a "level playing field", as the liberals constantly whine about, go to an ice rink!

That's the one thing that worries me about my supporting net neutrality -- if it puts me on the side of the Democrats in Congress and RINOs like Snowe, not to mention the truly brain-dead wingnuts like Daily Kos and MoveOn.org, I have this nagging feeling there's something grossly wrong about it I'm missing. All I can figure is that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and even a blind hog gets a few acorns.

Brady writes in response to Mailbox 99:

C'mon man, get a grip. The amount of bandwidth one gets one pays for today via ones service provider, yes? That is what the phone companies should charge you for, whatever link speed you wish to pay for. Period. Done. They are making money, plenty of it. But you want to give them control way beyond that... full control over the traffic on the net. That gives them the ability to throttle any competitive traffic... hey, Skype... no, they don't pay us so even though you have a 6 Meg DSL connection we'll throttle that Skype traffic to an unusable speed... and since it doesn't then work well at that speed we'll raise our regular phone rates because we know you have to use regular phone service again. Monopoly time.

That's well said. In other words, my service provider isn't being paid to decide which sites are more attractive to me and which aren't, it's being paid to bring me all the sites and let me choose for myself. I mean, that's how they did it in Russia, isn't it?

Please please read up on this my friend... David is pretty much right in that our politicians are bought and fairly useless and that this could destroy a great deal of innovation on the net. It would be no less than tragic.

That's what keeps nagging guiltily at me, libertarian that I am: I like the fact that I get to decide which sites I can hit, I don't want my service provider to make that choice for me.

Really sharp article, David.

I was reading about the 11/11 tie in committee, and it sounded surreal, with some 70 telecom reps in the room furiously passing talking points up to the speakers so that at times our congressional representatives were nothing more than readers for the lobbyists.

And Olympia Snowe, whom I find both admirable and frustrating in equal measure, does pin the issue down neatly. There's an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" angle to the argument, but you correctly raise the larger issue of this being a rider on an omnibus bill, of the sort that tend to get passed.

Good reporting on this – keep us informed.

Maybe it's my jaded past as an MSM reporter myself -- I'm not proud of it, I have repented -- but the tableau of the telecom reps pulling the strings of the congressmen strikes me as maybe a bit more gauche than normal, but accurate.

As a confirmed libertarian I'm opposed to government regulation and corporate monopoly in equal measure, so when they collide, as they do in net neutrality, it's kind of like a team from Texas playing a team from California, you wish there were a way they could both lose. But if I have to pick a "winner," I'll go for the one that doesn't screw up what's admittedly a good thing.

And finally Scott had a pretty good observation I hope turns out to be more accurate than my feeling about how things are going:

"Innovation is rarely the province of large corporations, it's almost always the little guys."

Which is why the whole "OMG! Google is going to load slower!" is a red herring. Network providers and operators aren't that stupid. They know they can't predict the next big site, so why risk losing subscribers by slowing down sites? 

I don't think the plan is to differentiate at that fine of a grain. I can see providers wishing to do it at the protocol level - VoIP gets a larger "chunk" of bandwidth than say web traffic. That can be made into a selling point, but saying some random website loads faster than with the other guy's network isn't. 

Here's hoping your scenario is the result if net neutrality fails, Scott, I'm happy to stand you a beer if it does -- living in Istanbul I can say things like that, of course -- especially the part about the granularity of control. That quote by Smith in my original article, however, gives me the willies.

Thanks for all comments, more are always welcome.

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 Creedence Clearwater Revival's Chronicle, probably the best greatest hits package ever assembled:

It's time to delve into net neutrality, see what yesterday's Senate committee vote meant, what portents of doom are portending and if Google of Yahoo! is going to win the bidding war for premium service the telecoms are slavering for.

The basics: Don't confuse the apples with the apple cart. Net neutrality is but one part of an omnibus legislation phone companies are keen to see get passed so they can start doing things like offering pay-television services in competition with cable companies, according to industry observer Amy Schatz:

"The Senate bill's main focus is creating a national video franchise system that would allow phone and cable companies to bypass the sometimes lengthy negotiations with local authorities over offering pay-television service," Schatz writes. "But the bill also contains a wide variety of other requirements, from antipiracy technologies for television broadcasts to changes in a federal fund that subsidizes phone services in rural areas."

In fact, in typical Congressional restraint, there are over 200 amendments. One vote yea or nay passes or kills the whole schmear, if you want to kill any one of the amendments you have to kill all of them, which means if you want net neutrality you have to do without competition for your pay-TV service and whatever the hell the other 199 amendments are -- marble and gold-plated bridges in Alaska that don't go anywhere, if Ted Stevens was in the room when it was being written.

If phone companies could wave a magic wand they'd have the whole kit 'n' caboodle passed, and get to open a bidding war between large Net users -- Amazon, Yahoo!, Google, all those XXX and online gambling services nobody ever actually hears about but which are by far and away the most profitable things on the Internet and which'd quietly get way, way more profitable for whoever owns the broadband.

The phone companies are grinning, cackling and drywashing their hands in anticipation. The Washington Post reported in December 2005 that William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp. told reporters and analysts that yeah, an Internet service provider such as his firm should, in fact, be able, for example, to charge Yahoo! Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc. A law allowing him to do so is a license to print money.

But they have to find some way to spin it like they give a crap about you the consumer, so in typical pretzel logic they're poormouthing about all the money they're having to invest -- billions! -- in upgrading everything to broadband, and who's gonna pay for all that? Of course you are. It's noteworthy that this argument is so threadbare that it only takes two logical jumps to get back to your wallet.

Craig Newmark, founder of Craig's List, recently held a Wall Street Journal Point-Counterpoint style debate with former Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry, where Newmark was pro-net neutrality and McCurry wanted to throw orphans out in the snow, evict grandmothers from their homes at midnight and outlaw ice cream.

Newmark pointed out that " I also work with some of their engineers, talking about the way big telecoms operate and issues like network capacity. It turns out that they have lots of unused capacity for bandwidth, but the big telecoms have been very remiss in implementing the newer Internet protocols (IPv6) required for growth, due to bureaucratic inertia."

In other words, running out of fiber anytime soon is not a problem. Newmark quotes an article Fiber Optic Association President Jim Hayes wrote on StreamingMedia.com in late 2004 saying "The backbone was terribly overbuilt… ninety-three percent of all the fiber that's been installed is still unused."

McCurry asked Newmark what the definition of "is" is.

That should settle the intellectual part of the debate, since "invest in broadband" is the only fig leaf the service providers can come up with to cover a naked money grab. What do they care what you think? You don't want to pay up? Fine, go read a book.

Ironically, it might be the phone companies' overarching greed that'll cost them with net neutrality. There are so many goodies stuffed in this Christmas stocking that the debate might break down over the sheer volume of it all, what with summer break coming up for Congress there simply might not be the time. Win the battle, lose the war.

It's rare First Coffee finds himself agreeing with RINOs like Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, but whoever writes her public statements uncorked a good one with "Net neutrality has been the founding principle of the Internet and has been the single greatest reason for its growth and its success." Ditto here.

After all, it's not like the phone companies invented the Internet, or even subsidized its early years, or have done anything but make money off it. They have tons of unused bandwidth lying around, do they expect us to believe their tatty excuses that they need more? No, I don't think they really do, they just need some mantra their bought and paid for legislators can repeat at press conferences. "Need to invest in more bandwidth" will do for the intellectually lazy, those who dig deeper, well, screw 'em. Who cares?

Uberdork Steve Forbes tut-tuts that net neutrality is a wolf in sheep's clothing, warning us that it will "stifle innovation." Which, of course, is the standard threadbare soundbite corporations always use when somebody might keep them from wringing every last dollar out of customers. Don't believe a word of it. Innovation is rarely the province of large corporations, it's almost always the little guys.

Honestly, the arguments the anti-fairness guys use are just plain stupid. Scott Cleland's the founder and president of Precursor LLC and chairman of NetCompetition.org. Incidentally, you can be almost 100% sure that anything which has to call itself "netcompetition" is pushing for anything but, that's why they have to try to snow you with the name. Remember the Democratic Republic of Germany, a.k.a. East Germany?

Anyway, UPI quotes Cleland as saying that Net-neutrality legislation would hinder broadband access providers' ability to offer more than one service. "How does a new entrant succeed? You differentiate and you innovate," he said. "(Net neutrality) is saying you have to have the same price, and the same terms and conditions."

I have no idea what the hell he's talking about, do you? That statement has absolutely no connection with any reality I'm aware of in the debate on whether megacorporations should be allowed to discriminate in supplying your Internet content based on who can stump up more cash. If Google outbids Yahoo!, well then Google loads faster and if you prefer using Yahoo!, go suck eggs, pal. Tough toenails.

What do differentiation and innovation have to do with that? Absolutely nothing, Cleland's just hoping you're too stupid to realize that.

Hal Singer, president of Criterion Economics, is someone else who thinks you have oatmeal for brains. First Coffee's almost always on the side of the free markets -- when it's a product or service that was developed via the free markets, which the Internet was not. The Internet was created and developed by the government and large research universities, about as far from the free market as you can get in America. The free market didn't develop it because it wasn't profitable to do so.

Now you can make a buck off the Internet, so the phone companies are blustering around like they took losses for years "innovating" and "differentiating" as they nursed the Internet along, and now they want to cash in on what's rightfully theirs.

Bushwa. If anybody should rightfully get to cash in off today's Internet it's the government, specifically the Department of Defense, not the Johnny- come- lately phone companies.

Anyway Singer claimed that a lot of the pro-Net neutrality talk is based on "misconceptions about what access providers want to do," according to UPI: "The debate suggests some anti-competitive motivation from access providers," he says.

Refer to the Smith quote above for why you can safely disregard anything else Singer, or anybody else who claims you can trust service providers, says.

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 Jim White's (The Mysterious Tale Of How I Shouted) Wrong-Eyed Jesus, First Coffee's favorite American album made since Tom Waits' Rain Dogs:

Is First Coffee shocked that Net neutrality failed in Congress? Not really. It's not the absolute stupidest thing Congress has ever done -- there's way too much competition for that title -- but since ensuring it would have required adherence to principles other than kowtowing to contributors it's not particularly surprising that it got toasted.

We'll look at it for a couple days and have more to say about it Saturday, once all the shakin' and hollerin's over.

Children International, an international nonprofit humanitarian organization which runs a sponsorship program uniting children and sponsors, has gone live with Aptify CRM on an enterprise-wide basis. Aptify, a vendor of customer and member relationship management, e-Business, education management and other applications, will enable CI to provide what CI officials hope will be "responsive and personalized service for its sponsors, donors, and field offices worldwide."

Established in 1936, Children International aids needy children in 11 countries including Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Mexico, the Philippines, the United States and Zambia. Sponsors' contributions help provide poverty-stricken children and families with necessities such as health and dental care, educational assistance, decent clothing and nutritional assistance.

Basically, the charity will use the technology to track marketing campaigns for sponsorships and donations, provide a robust reporting tool set and employ fundraising management to handle donations and in-kind gifts.

"Aptify's out-of-the-box standard processes supported 70 percent of our unique needs," says Barry Sanders, CI's IT director who seems to have found a rewarding career after football (rimshot). Additionally, CI has fulfilled the rest of their requirements by using Aptify's flexible configuration tools.

Future plans for Children International include incorporation of the Aptify e-Business suite into the children.org website to enhance its online capabilities for its current sponsors and contributors.

Aptify, headquartered in Washington, D.C. has been recognized twice by the Inc 500 as one of the fastest-growing privately held companies headquartered in the United States.

Stop the presses, CRM systems starting to deliver real benefits at last.

The proportion of companies who describe their CRM applications as "very successful" has more than doubled in the past 12 months, according to the latest survey from the British consultancy PMP Research. Their positive experiences are encouraging other organizations to review their implementations in the hopes of achieving additional benefits. The research has been commissioned by the Evaluation Centre.

"For the past two years, PMP's annual survey on CRM has found only a very small number of satisfied customers (4%)," PMP officials say. First Coffee presumes this means that only four percent of CRM customers were satisfied with their CRM systems, not with PMP's survey. Where have all the copy editors gone? Long time passing.

But this year, the proportion who state that their CRM applications have been "very successful" in delivering all the benefits anticipated has leapt up to 14%. Release the doves, Krug all around.

A further 39% label their CRM efforts as "successful" and say that the business has seen some, if not all, the benefits expected. "Put together," PMP officials point out, "this means that half of this year's sample (53%) reckons to be seeing real improvements as a result of implementing CRM applications."

It's a general rule of thumb that about half of CRM implementations fail. But companies are nothing if not dogged: Two-thirds (66%) told PMP that they are currently making changes and additions to their implementations in order to get more of the benefits they originally sought, or say they have plans to do so shortly. Just 11% have ruled out further improvements completely. Six have jumped off the window ledge and are unavailable for further comment.

Respondents were asked to rate their motivations for adopting CRM technology on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 for "very important" and 1 is for "couldn't care less." The aggregated results show that the two most common drivers for introducing CRM systems are "desire to improve customer satisfaction levels" at 3.96 and "requirement to improve customer lifetime value," 3.70.

Presumably "desire to get off this stupid committee and kick it over to IT" wasn't an option. But "attracting new customers" came in at the bottom of the list of desirable outcomes, 2.84. The East German judge gave it a 5.

The study also found that "the company website (91%), e-mail (87%) and web forms (64%) are all now common methods of online customer communication," according to PMP officials. Again, the wording leaves us to idly speculate what other forms of "online customer communication" are available, if one does not use the website, e-mail or web forms. The telephone was the unchallenged king of interaction at 96%, and fax came in at 85%.

Maybe expectations for CRM simply aren't all that high anymore. PMP found that the biggest proportion -- 47% -- of companies they surveyed estimate they have invested "less than £250,000" on CRM over the past three years.

Technalign, Inc. has announced they are partnering with InsynQ's Appgen Business Software group to provide Appgen's MyBooks Professional and Custom Suite accounting software products to partners and customers via the Technalign Partner/Distributor distribution network.

Technalign will deliver Appgen applications through their partner network, starting with a single user small business accounting application priced at only $59.00, and an Executive Dashboard reporting module for only $295.00.

The second phase of the partnership will involve interfacing MyBooks Professional with Technalign's HiAtlantis CRM, a product scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2007.

"MyBooks Professional and the other Appgen applications fill a large gap we've experienced with our customers and partners alike -- to get accounting software on the Linux Desktops and Servers," says Technalign CEO Dianne Ursini. "Many companies have been hesitant in the past to move from Windows to Linux in the SOHO and SMB markets, given the inability to run their accounting department software completely on Linux."

HiAtlantis currently "interfaces to accounting software using a spreadsheet file to import to legacy accounting applications," according to company officials.

The Appgen applications will be available with Technalign's Frontier, on the distribution CDs; version XI customers may download the TAFusion MEPIS package of MyBooks.

Hey Tim Henman, nobody expects you to be the next Brit to win Wimbledon any more, we're waiting for Andrew Murray, but certainly you could put up more of a fight than 6-4, 6-0, 6-2? Yeah okay, it's Roger Federer, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but even he doesn't routinely win 6-0 sets in majors. It's one thing to lose honorably to a demonstrably better opponent, it's another to roll over and stick your paws in the air in front of the home crowd.

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 Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen's "Truck Stop At The End Of The World:"

Way back in the late '90s -- 1990s -- when First Coffee started working in the CRM field (eye roll, "Here goes Gramps again, fetch his ear trumpet,") I worked with Bob Thompson of CRMGuru.com fame. At the time Bob was trying to get something called "Partner Relationship Management" off the ground, the idea of treating channel partners as customers. "He wants to own the buzzword," a mutual associate said to me at the time.

Not a bad ambition. I've seen worse. I've had worse. I've accomplished worse.

It didn't really catch fire then. In March 2005 I looked at PRM again for TMC, and found that it still hadn't. "For the majority of manufacturers, PRM rarely fulfilled its promise of being able to synchronize product introductions, train workers and foster teamwork among resellers," CRM Daily wrote at the time. Instead, the PRM platform became a foundation for managing, publishing and controlling pricing throughout channels.

At the time Siebel still had their PRM stuff for sale -- heck, at the time there still was a Siebel. Here's how it was described:

"Siebel Partner Relationship Management provides companies with an enterprise-wide platform for managing relationships with partners and resellers. Using Siebel PRM, companies can plan and execute collaborative sales, marketing, and service programs; enhance forecasting accuracy and pipeline visibility; reduce partner management costs; and improve their ability to orchestrate channel operations on a global basis. Moreover, Siebel PRM provides native support for industry-specific PRM best practices, leading to greater partner program effectiveness and increased end customer and partner satisfaction."

As I wrote at the time, reading that seemed as nostalgic as reading old plot lines from Happy Days. Basically PRM's a great idea, automating the most common tasks involving channel partners, manufacturers and distributors. It grew like San Francisco Giants sluggers on steroids during the dot-com bubble, and collapsed about as fast.

It didn't go into a coma because the idea was bad. Much of it simply wasn't worth the keep. One vice president of sales recalls his dilemma with PRM: "I could [either] use Fed Ex tubes and have an admin crank out labels, or implement an entirely new system just for that. Fed Ex won."

Last October Bob told me " I think PRM got lost in the downturn and never really came back. That said, channel-centric companies understand that while they have to 'manage' partner relationships a bit differently, the same principles apply. The main difference is that business partner's view of value is generally revenue or profit."

The problem, I noted back in March 2005, is that what PRM was supposed to do, companies can do using low-cost items like Microsoft SharePoint, low-cost portals, freeware for project collaboration, salesforce.com, Siebel-IBM OnDemand initiatives and other hosted alternatives. Plus it just kind of… smelled like something somebody was creating to get you to buy their stuff. Remember PartnerWave?

Then lo and behold, earlier this week salesforce.com announces Partnerforce, Salesforce Partner Edition, described by company officials as "a new on-demand offering from salesforce.com that connects enterprises, channels and partners through the power of the AppExchange and The Business Web."

Salesforce Partner Edition "now allows companies to deliver all the benefits of salesforce.com's industry leading Salesforce CRM and marketing services to any partner." PRM, by a bit of a back door, but still.

Salesforce Partner Edition is described as a tool that lets vendors "distribute sales and marketing information quickly and efficiently across a multi-tiered distribution channel through a customized, on-demand portal that is as easy-to-use as a website."

The idea, evidently, is that this helps ensure high partner adoption as it provides sales managers with an accurate, integrated view into their entire sales pipeline. Using the salesforce.com product, integrated dashboards can display forecasts and pipeline views across both the direct and indirect sales organizations, while an integrated lead management system proactively ensures that lead distribution is aligned across both internal sales as well as channel partners.

PRM's even getting some love from the analysts. "The ability for companies to be able to analyze their sales and marketing pipelines and programs across both direct and indirect channels is a critical component to any successful growth effort," said Tiffani Bova, research director at Gartner. "An integrated view delivers productivity and increased effectiveness to both sides of the sales model, ultimately driving revenue and profitability for both vendor and partner."

So is PRM the Next Big Thing (again)? That cliché of an overnight success after nine years of hard work? Bob can get out of that parvenu Burlingame and move his family onto the Big Island?

Not so fast, thinks industry observer David Bradshaw. "Yesterday, salesforce.com announced that it would be offering a partner relationship management (PRM) software extension to its CRM software-as-a-service," Bradshaw wrote recently. "The new product extends the functionality of salesforce.com to channel partners. The product enables product or service-producing companies (or 'brand owners') to let their partners deal with them using a dedicated version of salesforce.com."

As Bradshaw notes salesforce.com already has partners using it, including its currently largest customer Cisco, which is running a pilot program in EMEA.

And it's not PRM itself Bradshaw has a problem with, understand. He calls it a "very important area," noting the same dynamic Bob noticed years ago: Only around one-third of goods and services are sold directly, meaning that two-thirds of the market for CRM is up for grabs via PRM offerings.

Nevertheless Bradshaw sees "three key problems over the adoption of PRM systems."

One: Channel partners "often work with multiple 'brand owners', so see no reason for using one brand owner's system." Refer back to the FedEx observation earlier.

Two: Many partners are "fiercely defensive about their ownership of the customer relationships and don't want to make it easier for the brand owners to usurp that ownership." Self-explanatory.

And third, "there are the usual issues over adoption of the system, which have increased because the end users are someone else's employees, not employees of the brand owner." In other words, unless it's Wal-Mart requiring you the supplier to use certain RFID products, which they can because they're Wal-Mart and you're… not, why should I install this stuff or use these hasselous processes just because it makes your life easier?

The advent of hosted software, not much of an industry presence back in the days when Bob 'n' Dave were tearing up the CRM world, ASP was as close as it got, goes a long way to addressing these three issues which didn't originate with Bradshaw nor suddenly become problems this year. They've been around for a while.

Salesforce.com's betting that its hosted model overcomes a lot of the resistance to PRM, mainly by not requiring costly installs, and that might have legs, but as Bradshaw notes, salesforce.com "will have a much tougher job with external users of PRM. What will really make a difference is if the brand owners offer sufficient incentive for their channel partners to adopt the PRM systems, and that is beyond salesforce.com's control."

Look, PRM's a good idea, but it's not an idea to build an industry around. "I don't know if specialized PRM vendors will be around much longer," Lawrence Lindsey, vice president of engineering for BPA software vendor Nsite told Marshall Lager last year. And Forrester analyst Liz Herbert told Lager "The most notable part of this trend is that it's largely the hosted-CRM vendors who are announcing partner and channel management additions."

So basically, if you can do PRM with CRM or e-commerce stuff, you should. No new billion-dollar buzzword, though. Don't we have enough of those already?

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 Elvis's "Kentucky Rain:"

That does it. First Coffee is officially Disgusted And Finished with taking World Cup soccer seriously. If I want pre-fixed matches I'll watch Italian league soccer.

Italy-Australia yesterday. Slow match, the ref wants to liven things up, thinks "Hey, I'd like to see Italy play a man down," throws a red card on an Italian player for an ordinary foul that might -- might -- have elicited a yellow card from a Premiership or Bundesliga referee. If the referee's wife had been beaten senseless by the player in the parking lot before the game. Might. If the ref really wanted to stretch it. S-t-r-e-t-c-h it.

Italy pulls back on defense, and since Australia's already playing without their star goal-scoring winger Harry Kewell it's a tough match -- Italy can't crack the Socceroos' gutsy defense, and Australia's strategy in the Azzurri box seems to be to let Italian defenders take the ball away and hope for an own goal or something, the only goal Italy's allowed all tournament. But Australia's looking good.

It's 0-0, then in stoppage time -- three minutes? Where the hell did three extra minutes come from? As the game wound down First Coffee told his wife "Looks like there won't be any stoppage time either" -- the ref looks at his watch, twelve seconds left, thinks "Holy cow, I've got a date with the hospitality hostess after this match, I can't let it go to extra time," calls a foul in the penalty box on an easily-avoided Australian player for lying on the ground when an Italian player decided to change direction and step on him.

The only people who thought it was actually a foul were the Italian player, his mother and the hospitality hostess. But no matter -- the ref had decided to award the game to Italy, either because he didn't want his evening attenuated or because he liked the snazzy Italian uniforms more than the Socceroos' admittedly unstylish green and yellow. One Italian player, Gennaro Gattuso, even said later "the referee made a mistake."

Right, tough beans mates, g'day, don't let the door hit your butt on the way out. No replay, no appeal, the preference of Italy over Australia of one Spaniard can't be challenged even when it's perfectly clear to 45,998 of the 46,000 human souls in the stadium and any honest soccer referee at any level that you don't give a game-winning penalty kick for such a picayune foul, if it was a foul at all, in the World Cup.

''They look after the big nations,'' Socceroo Scott Chipperfield observed correctly afterwards. ''They want the big nations through to the semis and finals. It's always the way.'' Indeed, the refs did everything but carry Brazil over Australia in group play, and no doubt the TV ratings will be better with Brazil and Italy advancing and FIFA will make more money. Funny how these… coincidences work out this way.

In the NBA the refereeing obviously favors the big stars and big-money teams, one reason First Coffee doesn't watch it. Sad to see World Cup's the same way.

CRM vendor Onyx Software Corporation's officials seem most anxious that everyone know what's going on with its impending buyout by M2M Holdings -- AND NOT CDC! -- as they're publishing the banns of marriage, reporting that the company has received notification from the Federal Trade Commission of early termination of the waiting period under the Hart Scott Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act ("Improving Antitrusts Since 1976"), as amended, "relating to the proposed acquisition of Onyx by M2M Holdings, Inc."

Completion of the HSR review satisfies a regulatory review condition to closing the transaction. The closing of the transaction remains subject to approval by holders of a majority of Onyx's outstanding common stock and other customary closing conditions, Onyx officials say. Onyx expects the transaction to close during the third quarter of 2006.

The deal echoes the takeover of MCI by Verizon. Qwest had actually offered what on paper seemed to be a better deal for MCI, but the long-distance carrier opted for the more stable situation with Verizon.

The story so far, if you're just tuning in: In January the Chinese company CDC Corporation announced its intention to purchase Onyx, and in March announced that CDC Software, a wholly owned subsidiary of CDC Corporation, had "presented a new proposal to the board of directors of Onyx Software for a strategic transaction that would combine Onyx Software with CDC Software."

Onyx's board of directors said it would review the proposal, and that was the end of CDC as far as Onyx was concerned, evidently. It was manifestly plain to all that Onyx did not want to be acquired by CDC, and just as plain that CDC wasn't giving up easily.

The full-court press started in March, when John Clough, chairman of the executive committee for CDC Corporation and vice chairman of the board for CDC Software, said CDC Software still really, really wanted to acquire Onyx, particularly for its Pivotal CRM division. CDC Software was disappointed with Onyx's response to CDC's original proposal in early January 2006, and professed in March to be "even more surprised by the lack of interest" it received from Onyx.

Hong Kong-based CDC had offered to combine all the assets of CDC Software with Onyx, and $50 million in cash, for a majority of Onyx's common stock, keeping Onyx a publicly-listed company. Onyx's management announced right around New Year's Day 2006 they were rejecting the deal and never publicly budged from that stance, giving as reasons that CDC Software assets are performing poorly, CDC lacks a sustained history of profitable operations and has a poor record of delivering shareholder value the like.

Then earlier in June Onyx announced that it signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by privately-held M2M Holdings Inc., the holding company that is jointly owned by Battery Ventures VI, L.P. and Thoma Cressey Equity Partners and whose primary asset is Made2Manage Systems Inc., an enterprise software and services company.

It's an all-cash transaction valued at $4.80 per share, or approximately $92 million. The parties anticipate closing the transaction in the third calendar quarter of 2006. "We believe that this transaction is the right decision for Onyx shareholders, customers, partners and employees," said Janice P. Anderson, chairman and chief executive office of Onyx.

Last week, Reuters reported, Onyx rejected a takeover bid by CDC, "saying an agreement to be acquired by privately held M2M Holdings Inc. offers shareholders better value."

And shortly thereafter Onyx officials issued a statement reaffirming their "support of the all cash transaction with M2M," unless "the Onyx board of directors reasonably determines in good faith, after consultation with its financial advisor and its outside counsel, that the CDC announcement constitutes or would reasonably be expected to lead to a transaction that is superior to the definitive agreement with M2M."

Onyx officials note that CDC's June 20, 2006 press release described an all cash $4.85 offer, "yet only two days later, CDC has abandoned its all cash offer and now purports to offer Onyx shareholders only a combination of cash and stock, demonstrating CDC's inconsistent statements and unpredictable behavior." They add that the stock could be trading as low as $4.50 by the time the deal went down, too.

...

Dutch journal ComputerPartner is reporting NetSuite Inc.'s plum deal with CompUSA Inc., to provide NetSuite's on-demand business software in all U.S. stores.

"The deal is the first of its kind where a U.S. mass-market retailer will resell on-demand software, according to Zach Nelson, chief executive officer of NetSuite," the journal says. "Software-as-a-service is going mainstream," it quotes Nelson saying.

"Of as Tuesday, 10 CompUSA stores in New York and Connecticut will offer NetSuite software. After a month, NetSuite and CompUSA will evaluate how the partnership has been working and then continue the gradual rollout of NetSuite until the hosted software is available in all CompUSA stores across the U.S., Nelson said," the article reports. "Customers will be able to purchase NetSuite software through CompUSA Business Services' 1,100-strong direct-to-business sales force."

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 Steve Martin's "King Tut:"

Gotta hand it to Portugal, winning -- surviving -- one of the absolute ugliest sports events First Coffee's ever seen. I've seen pro wrestling matches and Australian Rules Football (a.k.a. No Rules Football) games conducted with more class than last night's Netherlands-Portugal World Cup match. Sharks vs. Jets couldn't have come up with noticeably more violence, real or staged.

Ref Valentin Ivanov, who must've thought he was back to officiating those Chechens vs. Russians prison matches, threw a record-tying number of yellow cards for a World Cup match, 16 in all, and four red cards, two to each side, so by the final whistle the Netherlands and Portugal were playing 9 on 9. Had the Dutch equalized during the 90 minutes they'd have been down to two-on-two drills by the end of extra time.

Some of my best friends are Dutch, but the last two matches the Dutch team played are two of the reasons soccer won't catch on in the United States: It can be stupefying boring, and players whine incessantly like spoiled brats over faked-up "fouls."

Holland's final group match against Argentina was between two teams who'd already advanced, with the winner playing Portugal and the loser Mexico. Not exactly a life or death, winner plays Togo and loser gets fed to Brazil incentive. Neither team cared who won, and boy, was it ever obvious, a 0-0 yawner where four to five starters on both sides rested out for the whole game.

You do not have that in the NFL. Regular season games are meaningful since there are so few of them, and playoffs are the best players on the field, everyone giving a damn, at all times. Even in baseball, the American sport rivaling soccer in dullness, by the time you're in the playoffs there are no rest-the-starters, "doesn't matter if we win, lose or draw" games. Just ask the 2004 Yankees.

Then in the knockout round both Portugal and Holland put on a mucking and chopping Neanderthal affair with far more flops and fakes than actual painful encounters, despite all the cards and genuinely nasty fouls. Any American who tuned into that game to give soccer another chance, 50 million Brazilians can't be wrong and all that, would click off the set reassured in their preference for the clean, sedate National Hockey League.

See, a large part of soccer game strategy is for grown men to cry for as many fake fouls as possible. The endless fake-cry-argue-complaining players do turns Americans off, we feel like yelling "Just play the game, you bunch of whiny, lying little girls!" at the screen.

Last night at one point there was incidental contact with a player's jaw. He immediately dropped to the grass, clutching his eye -- right: his eye -- like he's been shot by a deer rifle, writhing in "pain" and screaming in hopes of getting a yellow card thrown. Americans don't respect junk like that, we don't want to watch grown crybabies endlessly lying, faking and pleading for special benefits they don't deserve, we subsidize that at the United Nations every day. We like our sports to be a break from childish irresponsibility, not more of the same.

Oracle has announced that their net income for the period ended May 31 was $1.3 billion, up 27% compared to the same period last year. Life's good in Redwood Shores. The strong fourth-quarter results boosted Oracle's performance for the full year, goosing net income for the year rose 17% over 2005 totals to $3.4 billion. Revenues were up 22% to $14.4 billion. No word on when Larry Ellison will retire from running Oracle to manage his philanthropic foundation full-time.

Oracle's applications business was their fastest-growing segment in the fiscal fourth quarter, what with new software license revenue from applications in the period reaching $640 million, up 83% from the quarter a year ago. Total applications software revenues for the period hit $1.3 billion, a 66% increase from the fiscal fourth quarter of 2005.

"We saw extraordinary growth in the quarter," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on a conference call with financial analysts. "We are growing the applications business faster than SAP."

Gotta get those anti-SAP digs in there if you're writing press releases for Oracle. Ellison's taken to pronouncing it "sap," as in the stuff you make maple syrup from, instead of the vendor's preferred "ess-ay-pee."

Much of the growth in Oracle's applications business has come through acquisition. Over the past 18 months, Oracle has acquired several enterprise application vendors, including PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel. Burp.

In the fourth quarter, Siebel especially delivered a significant boost to Oracle's revenues, with the sale of Siebel CRM software for the quarter kicking in $81 million to the kitty, nearly double what Oracle had expected, said co-President and CFO Safra Catz.

No word yet on which multibillionaire will bankroll Larry Ellison's philanthropic foundation dedicated to reducing the violence in World Cup soccer.

Oracle's applications business, however, also saw significant organic growth during the quarter. Excluding revenues from Siebel and Oracle's Retek acquisition, Catz said, license revenue from the company's applications business grew 56%.

Oracle officials, however, stopped short of declaring the growth of its applications business an indication that businesses generally are opening up IT spending. "We can't tell at this point if it's an IT spending indication or a direct response to the state of the economy or people getting more comfortable with Oracle and buying more products," Catz cautioned. "But it does seem more Oracle-specific."

No word yet on whether Larry Ellison, uh, has a philanthropic foundation.

Oracle's cost of providing services, however, also grew by 24% during the quarter. Catz attributed part of that increase to the cost of maintaining the on-demand CRM service which Oracle acquired along with Siebel. Catz said the contractor providing Siebel's on-demand infrastructure had not reduced costs commensurate with the increasing scale of that business. Oracle plans to move the CRM on-demand infrastructure, Catz said. Siebel had previously identified IBM as the provider of its CRM on-demand infrastructure.

No word yet on whether or not Larry Ellison throws quarters to street beggars, or asks for change when he does so, or establishes that the beggar has not received any compensation from SAP before doing so.

DiamondCluster International, which earns its keep as a management consulting firm, has recently conducted a profitability analysis of one key marketing channel deployed by a major consumer services company, finding that… 86 percent of the $30 million being invested annually in that company's channel partner program was poorly spent because proper measurement was missing from the equation.

No word yet on whether Larry Ellison's philanthropic foundation, currently working to serve the needs of under-30 Stanford-educated beauty queens, is responsible.

The firm's newest white paper, "Profitable Channels: The Right Metrics Make All the Difference," reveals how to conduct an effective marketing channel check-up and capture millions of dollars in direct and indirect opportunity. To request a copy of the white paper, send an e-mail to profitablechannels@diamondcluster.com.

"Often times the data executives need to evaluate marketing channels and negotiate deals is easier to get than they think," claims Bill Abbott, a partner in Diamond's telecom practice who spearheaded the analysis. And rooting out those truffles "doesn't necessarily require a multi-million dollar CRM system or even IT department involvement."

No word yet on whether Larry Ellison can spell "philanthropy" without breaking into uncontrolled giggles. "Philanthropy? Yeah, give Tom Siebel half-price off the lunch buffet in the company cafeteria, there's your philanthropy."

You'll have to get the whole report for all the goodies, but suffice it to say that dropping unprofitable partners can, just as you suspected, immediately generate millions of dollars in cost savings: Diamond found that only 10 of the 74 partnerships were contributing value to the firm, an insight that quickly led to an increase in net channel value of $6 million per year.

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

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is "One Bud Wiser" by John Rich:

It's Saturday, but that doesn't mean there's nothing happening, or that there's nothing you might have missed, CRM-wise, this past week, but it does mean you might get the news confused with those game shows on TV:

Talisma Corporation, which styles itself a vendor in the "enterprise Customer Interaction Management" space, has announced a joint partnership with Japanese reseller Vital to sell Talisma's newly released Japanese products, Talisma CIM 7.0j, and CRM 7.0j.

In addition to releasing the new products, Talisma is also announcing the launch of the company's first Web site localized in Japanese. The announcement was made during a press conference with Vital at IBM Japan affiliate, LBS. Now let's take a commercial break and come back and visit with our contestants.

The partnership allows Vital to sell Talisma's products in Japan to companies such as Canon, Toyota, Epson, Sony, and Sharp, who are already using Talisma's products in other markets. One of Japan's most prestigious universities, Keio University, recently deployed Talisma's CRM product to enhance fundraising initiatives in association with its sesquicentennial (150^th, but you knew that) anniversary celebration in 2008.

Jocelyn Young, Research Director of Datamonitor has said recently that as organizations in Japan seek to acquire and expand their customer relationships, "the market for Internet-based customer interactions will increase." Just how much, of course, is the $64,000 Question.

Talisma CRM 7.0j is built primarily for the higher education market, as the product is billed as providing "increased functionality that yields significant enhancements across all areas of the institution and the student/constituent lifecycle."

Jim O'Farrell, VP of Corporate and Channel Marketing at Talisma Corporation promised that the announcement is "the first of many to come regarding internationally localized Talisma products offerings and Web sites. The growing market in Japan is at a point where customers are demanding that the existing model for customer service be replaced," and all this can be yours if the… price… is… right!

X10DATA Corporation, developer of the x10DATA Mobile Platform, has announced that it has mobilized Microsoft's Dynamics ERP and CRM applications on Palm's Treo 700w smartphone.

Why is this newsworthy? Because when powered by the x10DATA Smart Client, Treo users can navigate financial, sales, service, and project management applications real-time over Verizon's EvDO broadband network using 10 intuitive, single-handed commands and a year's supply of Turtle Wax.

Nobody questions anymore the benefits of mobile workers holding the ability to track and update critical business information while in the field, since those who do are here in our studio audience today. The power of field mobility is now available to small and midsized companies that use Microsoft Dynamics ERP and CRM applications, thanks to the technological advancements of x10DATA, Palm and Verizon Wireless.

"The Palm Treo powered by x10DATA enables sales managers, service reps and CEOs to do what they do best -- from servicing customers and taking orders to managing projects and cash flow," says Doug Migliori, President of x10DATA Corporation. "It means being 100% effective, 100% of the time, wherever you are."

That's great. Jay Stewart, tell us about it: After Palm introduced the Treo smartphone, it quickly became one of the most popular devices on the market, integrating a mobile phone with e-mail, organizer, web access, camera, and more. And now, the Palm Treo 700w combines the functionality and ease of use Treo smartphones are known for with the power of Windows Mobile.

(Pause for Carol Merrill to run fingers lovingly along the product).

And with the x10DATA Smart Client installed, it's the perfect balance of ease and power, delivering everything needed to be fully productive while away from the office, with one-handed operation. You can have the x10DATA or what's behind door number two!

"Whatever you can do from your PC, you can do from the palm of your hand with 10-command navigation and your thumb," states Mr. Migliori.

x10DATA Corporation is a recent spin-off from ADC Technologies Group, Inc. The company is a Microsoft Gold Certified ISV Partner and software developer of the x10DATA Application Platform and the EasyTrac Supply Chain Execution Systems powered by x10DATA.

Also this past week Oracle announced from Geneva revenues of $4.7 billion in US GAAP basis for the fiscal year 2006, ended 31 May 2006, for the Europe, Middle East & Africa region, a 10% growth compared to fiscal year 2005.

Operations in the region accounted for 33% of worldwide FY06 revenues, and new license revenues grew 10% compared with the previous year.

For the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2006, new license revenues were also up… the survey says… 20% on the fourth quarter 2005, as the region saw increased demand from a broad span of industry sectors, in particular public services, financial services, retail and telecommunications, as well as the small, medium enterprise market.

Many world-class commercial enterprises such as Thomas Cook AG, Telecom Italia, Virgin Atlantic and Société Générale and Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco Treat, have selected Oracle products in database, middleware, business intelligence, business applications, and collaboration to improve their business processes, and to help them gain better information, high availability and performance, and to deliver superior customer service.

Sergio Giacoletto, Executive Vice President, Oracle Europe, Middle East and Africa commented, "This has been a good year for the region, with growth across all lines of business. We have increased our revenues; consolidated our leadership in our bedrock markets of public services, financial services and telecommunications; and extended our presence substantially in the healthcare, retail and transport and logistics industries."

Overall it's a good area to be in now, especially if you want to buy a vowel. According to the latest Gartner report "Market Share: Database Systems Software Market, EMEA, 2005," dated 20th June, 2006 Oracle is the number one supplier in the EMEA region in the relational database segment with 48.3% market share.

According to Paul Lynde to block, the RDBMS segment continues to be the engine for growth, at 6.7%, accounting for 84% of the total database management systems. Overall, the DMBS market 5.8% in EMEA, totaling 4.7 billion euros.

Fairfax, Virginia-based Fairfax County Federal Credit Union has chosen for its credit union enterprise software The Complete Credit Union Solution, to handle its data processing needs. The software is made by Open Solutions Inc.

The credit union has also selected several of Open Solutions' complementary applications including cView, the company's CRM tool; the collection module and financial accounting products including general ledger and ProfitVision for profitability.

Fairfax County Federal Credit Union, with more than 18,000 members and $210 million in assets, recently expanded its charter to serve the entire county. As a result, the credit union sought a new core processing system, as its 27-year legacy system could not accommodate its growing needs, placing it in… Jeopardy!

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content. This has been a Mark Goodson-Bill Todman production, from Merv Griffin Enterprises.

The news as of the first of many coffees and Diet Cokes and first French toast -- Freedom Toast, excuse me -- this morning, and of course the theme song of Radio KCRM 98.6 is Adam Carroll's "Ol' Milwaukee's Best:"

So there I am with my invitation to the T-Mobile Sidekick Party in L.A., adjusting my cummerbund and wondering if I can swing up to Carmel to drop in on James Ellroy after Ellay (some excuse about a gardener last time I was out there, fine, keep the Coronas on ice, I'll take a rain check even though it never rains in LoCal SoCal) when I get a call from someone named Brittany Brower wondering if she can jump a ride to the airport in my stretch.

Sure sure, I say, distracted, wondering if Koz is firm on that $23 mil for the Nantucket place or if I can knock him down to $22.5 and a file in a cake, what with the Turkish lira tanking ahead of the regularly-scheduled army coup we're struggling for liquidity in the face of irrational exuberance here at… Radio KCRM 98.6, "All Louis Jordan, All The Time," your one-stop shop for disjointed stream-of-semi-consciousnesses having sometimes a tangential yet meaningful and caring relationship with Customer Relationship Management.

Note to self: Check with friends at Swift to see how The Kozman's picture looks today, $21 might not be out of the ballpark like a Barry Bonds juiceball if pitched correctly.

Okay, this Sidekick 3, the Ed McMahon of tech toys, let's see, reax from propellerheads in the audience… that's right, it's Radio KCRM Open Mike Night, and instead of Jeff from Tarzana we have bboyredcel from WENG, Engadget, fun-lovin' bunch over there, okay Mr. No Girly T-White Cells what's your studied take on this piece of technology… you say you've clicked on Brittany's link above and you'd like to discuss the merits of Sidekick 3 a bit further with her? I tell you she's got great etchings too, my man, now strap on the drool cup and tell the folks who've invited you into their living rooms tonight whatcha think of the tech toy du jour…

…" is this thing on, testing one, two, three, okay, what a waste of time and money… paralyzed epileptic monkeys on who had one too many acid-laced bananas. They do nothing, and restrict the user to over-priced ringtones, over-priced games, lack of open development for software, and a complete lack of synchronization capabilities, BT networking, hi-speed internet, a capable web browser (w3c compliant) and a slew of other things now standard in similar devices that cost less money (if not a few well spent $ more)... what a complete disgrace."

Hoookay, so you probably shouldn't hold the line open for T-Mobile's invite to the panel discussion and Meet Brittany Brower Reception afterwards, not to worry, Radio KCRM'll whisper in her ear why you couldn't make it as you'll be figuring out exactly what a paralyzed epileptic monkey dropping tab actually does with a cell phone…

… We've been asked by the Radio KCRM 98.6 head office in Milwaukee to take a more positive spin on things, what with all the bad news in the world it's good to be a force for positive good! So the boys over in rewrite tell us that the good news is from our friends over at Gartner pointing out that 30 percent of IT projects succeed, or actually meet expectations! Organizations who are spending billions of dollars each year aren't completely wasting all of it because sometimes they select the right hardware, middleware, and software, as a result of adequate vendor information and evaluation processes! Such successes can be found within price-sensitive small and medium enterprises, which require accurate IT information to be collected quickly and cost-effectively during software evaluation processes! And friends, sometimes it happens!

Whew, as we scrub off the clown greasepaint and try to work our mouth out of that rictus smile let's listen to Jimmy Buffett… the soft tropical breezes and soothing calypso music, much better… margaritas, changes in latitudes, sunsets over Miami… buy at two and three-eighths and sell at five -- oh sorry, wrong Buffett… stumbling around on a beach with a bottle of rum in one hand and Brittany Brower in the other, ah, that's better, except for that ringtone… it's Brittany's Sidekick 3, can't see where she pulls it out of, can't see where she's wearing enough fabric to hide anything that big… it's bboyredcel saying "and it doesn't even make toast, how lame, what an utter insult to anybody with an I.Q. over their shoe size, who'd buy this thing anyway? Is Brittany there? Know how to work the camera feature? Okay, can you ask her to stand next to -- "

Moving right along on Radio KCRM, 98.6 on your dial, in your heart and hopefully other significant bodily organs as well, here's a Goldie Oldie Retriever, our good friends in North Carolina, SAS, who'd like to remind listeners that Sun Hung Kai Financial, one of the largest and longest established Hong Kong financial services groups, has selected SAS Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to "improve its return on investment and increase both its profitability and market share," according to company officials.

I know, that's the sort of out-of-the-box thinking that gets you one of the largest and longest established Hong Kong financial services group, that and the right kind of friends in Beijing. The Group is aiming to extend its wallet share and generate more revenue by -- get this bleeding-edge strategy, revealed publicly here on Radio KCRM for the first time anywhere -- "matching its financial products to individuals' needs."

Hey who needs books studying the business acumen of Ernest Shackleford, Coach K or SpongeBob Squarepants when you have that kind of gray matter sitting around your conference table? Radio KCRM, "All John Cage, All The Time" salutes those folks.

Rebecca Neufeld, Head of Strategy and Corporate Marketing of Sun Hung Kai Financial noted that SAS has a "proven track record of success in the financial services industry in Hong Kong and Greater China," which didn't hurt them in the selection process either.

For their part, SAS has developed a complete roadmap for Sun Hung Kai's CRM strategy, with Denny's and Holiday Inns conveniently marked along the way, from customer profiling to predicting customer behavior and implementing marketing campaigns.

The first stage will start with establishing customer centric profiles, allowing Sun Hung Kai to identify the most profitable customers -- a vital step in populating the official Christmas card mailing list, sure, but also for drawing up tactics for boosting the effectiveness of database marketing. The initial process will take about three months.

Edvan Chan, General Manager, SAS Hong Kong and South China noted that by using cleaned customer data and advanced analytic technology, "predictive marketing such as cross-selling and up-selling can be executed."

SAS's CRM product is built upon the open-standards-based SAS 9 platform, and can be readily integrated with an organization's current infrastructure.

Switching to the community service announcements now, critic Ted Fry notes that while the new Adam Sandler movie Click predictably sucks, "all it really cares about is the carefully composed tableau of Adam Sandler farting with his butt poised inches from David Hasselhoff's face." In other words, funnier and more intelligent than a Stephen Colbert routine.

And time for the Radio KCRM 98.6 Trivia Challenge, first prize tickets for two to see any good movie, which country has the lowest rate of broadband penetration, Estonia, Ireland, Slovenia, Greenland or Lithuania? Well, okay, Greenland, but who's second-worst? That's right, Ireland.

The Irish Times reports that latest figures from the Commission for Communications Regulation show that "by the end of March, there were 270,000 broadband subscribers -- around 120,000 more than there were a year earlier. But ComReg's last quarterly report also showed that broadband penetration here remains the lowest among EU countries, at 5.34 per cent."

Why? Oh, maybe the fact that while broadband products that cost 20 a month, Irish Times says, "the true cost of securing broadband from most of these providers is actually 19.99/20 plus the 24.18 a month they pay to their landline operator -- usually Eircom -- for line rental. Landline rental is higher in the Republic than in any other EU country."

Friends, earning nickels here keeps you from pulling in dollars there. Think that maybe making broadband a lot more accessible by lowering the stinkin' fees will repay itself in increased government revenue from taxes paid by successful businesses and businessmen? Let's try it and see, shall we?

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 most casual, breezy, fun album Frank Sinatra recorded, Come Fly With Me:

A recent survey by Reader’s Digest finds New York to be “the world’s most polite major city,” beating out large cities in 35 countries. “Coming in a close second was Zurich at 77 percent, Toronto at 70 percent, and Berlin, Sao Paulo and Zagreb, Croatia, all with 68 percent,” according to a Reuters report on the findings.

Rounding out the top ten were Auckland, Warsaw and Mexico City. Politeness was measured with door-opening tests, “dropped- document” tests and seeing if service personnel would say “thank you” for a purchase.

“The more than 2,000 tests of behavior showed that people under 40 were more courteous than those over 40, men were more polite to other men and women were more polite to other women,” Reuters said, adding that “People around the world tended to offer the same explanation for their polite behavior – they were polite because they had been brought up to be that way.”

Got that? New Yorkers are the most polite big city people in the world, and under-40 New Yorkers are more polite than the over-40 crowd because they were raised right.

Now somebody named Sharon Jayson at USA Today, vendor of bite-size News McNuggets, comes along with a much more thinly-researched article, cherry picking quotes, sources and experts in an effort to try to convince you the reader that those durn kids today are just in their own world and don’t respect anyone, which besides being the most boringly oft-repeated claim every generation has ever made about the generation immediately following it, would seem to be blown out of the water by the more real-world Reader’s Digest findings.

Jayson’s bogeyman? Three guesses and the first two don’t count. That’s right, newfangled personal technology!

Evidently what’s responsible for kids today not giving a tinker’s damn about anything or anyone but themselves and their friends are IM, iPods, cell phones, Xboxes, a laundry list as boringly predictable as was my parents’ generation blaming television and stereos for the precipitous decline in Western civilization rampant in my generation.

Yawn. First Coffee cannot think of any personal technology, from the sticks and berry dyes used in the Lascaux cave paintings to smoke signals to zoetropes to moving pictures to vacuum-tube floor radios to television to record players to transistor radios (which of course led to listening to the Cubs on WGN when you shoulda been haying in the barn, kid, who’s gonna want to hire someone who listens to the radio instead of working? You better start showing some respect around here…) to Apples (“Chuck just spends all night up there programming that silly computer…”) to Pong to personal computers to Ataris to Walkmans to video games to the Internet to VCRs to Game Boys to portable CD players to cell phones to IM to TiVo to PlayStations to iPods on, which has not been blamed for a “breakdown in the social fabric,” “heightened rudeness,” “buncha damn kids not respectin’ their elders,” “increased drug use,” “not learning how to value money,” fill in the blank with whatever names, dates or countries you wish.

It’s a little-known historical fact that after filling the backlogged orders for Bibles, Johannes Gutenberg’s second job with his newfangled printing press was to run off a broadside for a sociologist at the University of Mainz complaining that the youth of the 15^th Century Rhine Valley were not respecting their elders’ social conventions and norms, and spending way too much time with such cutting-edge personal technology as sharpened sticks and charcoal, and their preoccupation with their peer group was keeping them from appropriate interests in pigslopping and buying indulgences from itinerant pardoners.

Recently historians have discovered that Alexander Graham Bell’s second utterance over his newly-invented telephone, after “Come here Watson, I want you” was “Sure hope my daughter doesn’t get a hold of this, we’ll never get her off. Kid’s in her own world – I ever tell you about that time last week, Watson, when we asked her to fill the coal scuttle, and she was too busy talking to Mabel to listen? I tell you, that kid’s in her own little bubble, doesn’t listen to her mother and wears only six layers of petticoats like some Italian immigrant hussy, you’re lucky that you don’t have kids today, Watson, I tell ya, when her generation start running things I just don’t… Watson? Watson? Hello? Operator, someone must have disconnected this call…”

Jayson’s article colors in the same numbers: Kids today, sheesh, whaddya gonna do, they seem to be in their own world alla time, don’t pay attention to nothin’ we tell ‘em, and you should see their clothes! Heavens to Betsy, my momma’d have done whupped me. Once they grow up and start runnin’ the country I don’t know what’ll happen, it’s like they don’t even care what our expectations are, they don’t even listen to me nag them about it, all they care about are their friends and toys, and their clothes, good gracious!

“They’re tuned out in some ways to the social graces around them and the people in their lives, in their physical realm, and tuned in to the people they’re with virtually,” sociologist Sherry Turkle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tells Jayson, oblivious to the fact that if she dropped her documents detailing this truth on the streets her best bet for someone helping pick them up would be an American under 40.

(The sociologist at M.I.T., isn’t that like the sportswriter for The Wall Street Journal?)

In one way the older generation is learning from the generation they love to criticize so much: Moving with cyberspeed, the anti-MySpace backlash has kicked into gear faster than any backlash against any teen-friendly technology yet.

Some teacher in Cupertino, California (hi Steve) tells Jayson “I don’t think we’re requiring civic responsibility anymore – the social graces, ceremony and ritual, dress codes, social mores and manners… My students seem to be saying, ‘I can separate myself from whatever experience I’m in and create my own bubble.’”

Sure, right up until you need help, then you’d better hope there’s a teen in his own bubble, talking on his cell phone, listening to his iPod floating past instead of a 48-year old who’s never IMed once in her life and needs her 11-year old to program the VCR so she can watch that hunky Kiefer Sutherland on 24 Hours when she gets home.

It’s amazing that young people, demonstrably more courteous to strangers than their parents who are too busy harping on how rude kids are to notice that their kids have stopped to open a door for someone the parent walked right past, could say they were “brought up” to be polite. Evidently learning by negative example takes.

Online commentator Dick Meyer gets it. “This impulse that new is worse, when combined with the eternal tut-tutting about ‘kids today,’ goes far in explaining why grown-ups worry so much about the weird things kids today do with gadgets and gizmos. I’m sure the guy who invented the smoke signal was brutally besmirched by his father, who thought the owl call was perfectly adequate,” he writes.

Despite working for CBS News Meyer’s capable of honest reportage, as he notes he personally doesn’t approve of all the techno-fixation among “kids today,” so as a news editor he “helped send a small squadron of bright reporters (who all use IM with gusto) out into the cyber world to find some bad news about teens and technology. They found almost none.”

Leaving aside the nonchalantly accepted practice of sending news reporters out to find a certain conclusion, instead of asking them to investigate an issue and report on what conclusion they actually do find, a practice First Coffee remembers from his shameful past as an MSM journalist himself, Meyer’s stand-up enough to admit that “As a parent of a teen and an almost-teen, I see tons of kids who on the whole do have the traits I think must be atrophying because of lives lived too much online, on cells and on call; they’re social, polite, imaginative, articulate, learned, and athletic. I don’t know many cyber slugs.”

And it’s not like technology is destroying reading, a criticism repeated ad nauseum ever since the first television broadcast: A recent Yankelovich/Scholastic study found that “contrary to popular belief, kids who use technology platforms to read or listen to books, are more inclined to be high frequency readers (34%), than those that do not (25%).”

So lay off kids enjoying iPods and cell phones and IM. Odds are they’re just trying to get away from your witching at them the way you used to turn the volume up on your stereo when your parents came in to nag you. And they’re turning out to be more polite than you are, so don’t mess with a good thing you can later take credit for.

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 Dizzy Gillespie’s “Ow:”

No, say it ain’t so! We CRM guys love Southwest Airlines. Love, love, love ‘em. Herb Kelleher, the airline’s late, much-lamented CEO is our Farrah Fawcett-style poster boy for How A CEO Should Be: Hard-nosed yet fair and honest on the business side, your favorite uncle when dealing with customers. When companies came sniffing around Company Days for secrets of success Herb used to make them do the Macarena.

We love the plastic, reusable boarding passes. We love stewardesses hiding in the overhead luggage bins. When First Coffee flew Southwest back in college, before I knew it was an Anointed CRM Icon, I loved the wine coolers before takeoff and the stewardess uniforms of hot-pants shorts and t-shirts.

We love them because they’re so common-sense even those of us who don’t have MBAs can understand what they’re doing. Southwest President Colleen Barrett told this reporter a few years ago “Other airlines can’t do what we do, because what we do is too simple.”

But mainly Southwest is revered by us in the CRM commentariat for their historically stratospheric – by airlines’ standards – customer satisfaction ratings. People will fly Southwest if they have any choice at all, because they simply like the way they’re treated, they like the way things are done to focus on the customer, and they like the fact that it’s different. Which is the entire theory of CRM: Treating your customers the way they want to be treated will bring them back for more. Company culture par excellance.

A hallmark of that culture might get toasted as Southwest is proposing experimenting with (sigh) assigned seating. You know, like your third-grade teacher, who wanted you all to sit in the same seats, she claimed it was so she could “learn your names” easier, which of course wasn’t true since she never called on you she always called on that teacher’s pet Sally B. Joyner, who should’ve had a little brass toad on her desk.

You’d think a business as successful as Southwest – 31 consecutive years of profit, market value greater than all other major airlines combined, which sure is due partly to common sense-radical ideas such as standardized aircraft, and keeping good employees happy to cut down on turnover – wouldn’t kill the golden goose. And maybe they’re not, maybe people really like assigned seating. I don’t, but then again I don’t like American Idol or moussaka either, but I do notice that “first-come first-served” means people tend to show up on time a lot more often than when they have an assigned seat.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting this morning that Southwest “will try out several different boarding methods using assigned seating on about 200 flights departing from San Diego International Airport beginning July 10.”

That’s it? Come on, lighten up Dave, it’s not like they’re suddenly going to turn into customer service troglodytes like Northwest or Delta overnight, are they?

Well, no, and it’s not like they’re the only ones using what the vulgar refer to as “cattle car” seating, as if you don’t feel distinctly bovine from the minute you walk into any airport for any plane anywhere. On other planes you simply get an assigned stall number.

But open seating might be a thing of the past. Jane Gardner writes that low-cost Australian airline Jetstar will discontinue unassigned seating. See, when rock concert promoters use unassigned seating it’s called “festival seating,” although granted, festival seating got a bad name after that Who concert in Cincinnati, so why is it “cattle call” on airlines? Inquiring minds want to know, just as they’d like the euphemistic simp who decided to soften terrorists into “insurgents” and “militants” to please get back to reality.

Since Jetstar began flying over the Great Southland a couple years ago it’s used open seating, but Gardner reports “Jetstar chief executive Alan Joyce said automatic seat allocations will begin on all domestic services on or after October 29.”

And why, pray tell, screw with a good thing beloved by families with young kids, for whom flying’s such a chore that anything to ease the ordeal is as welcome as sunglasses on the Sahara? Let’s see what Joyce told the Australian Tourism Exchange: “Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah manage the costs blah blah blah blah blah blah blah those costs can be managed.”

Yeah, journalists get like a dog in a Far Side cartoon if they stay in this business long enough. “Mr. County Supervisor, is it true that you knew the state would build the mental hospital on that plot of scrubland out past the old MacPherson place on Route 29 when you bought it for 29 cents an acre on the advice of your pal Weenie Hoskins, chair of the State Land Appropriations Committee, which is now buying it for $5,000 an acre?”

“Son, ah dunno what yer insinuatin’…” Right. Where’s that whiskey bottle…

So the idea is that assigning seating saves money. How? There’s a science of boarding planes, according to a good sketch in Aircraft Maintenance Technology.

We’re all familiar with what’s called, in complicated industry jargon, the “back-to-front” method of boarding a plane. You know the drill: “Those sitting in rows 28 through 48…” You’d think that’d be the common-sense way. But it’s actually “probably the slowest way we could possibly do it,” according to Mark Ahasic, director of operational planning for JetBlue.

Evidently there are myriad options: “America West uses the ‘reverse pyramid’ method; Delta the ‘rotating zone;’ and United the ‘window-middle-aisle’ method,” AMT says, in pursuit of saving a minute or two of sitting at the gate.

Jet Blue conducted trials on more than 100 actual flights, as well as on a computer, recalcitrant barnyard animals and Abu Ghraib inmates and found the best way to board is known, in specific technical terminology, as “every man for himself:” On a 156-seat plane, AMT says, “passengers boarding all at once, after the elderly and those needing special assistance, took 17 minutes to settle into their assigned seats, about a minute faster than any other method Jet Blue tried.”

Such random seating is “less labor intensive,” Dean Breest, a spokesman for Northwest told AMT, and certainly the last thing First Coffee wants gate attendants doing is any extra work by having to pay attention to passengers as they chat with friends about how bravely the pilot for the flight you’re boarding is currently upholding the airline’s honor in the bar by taking on the entire Australian national rugby team in vodka Jell-O shots.

But really, AMT admits, the dirty fact is that “there’s no consensus among the airlines on the best way to avoid bottlenecks among child-toting, luggage-lugging, aisle-blocking passengers.” Which of course you, I and every yip-yappy dog in a carrier knows.

America West tried something called the “reverse pyramid” which “cut its average boarding time by two minutes and experienced a 21 percent decrease in flight delays,” and United thinks boarding according to “window-middle-aisle” will save four to five minutes per flight and $1 million a year.

Hey, airlines, how stupid do you think we are? You really expect us to believe that saving a minute or two boarding will help you do a better job of taking off and landing on time when after boarding EVERYONE HAS TO SIT ON THE PLANE FOR FORTY-FIVE MINUTES BEFORE TAKE-OFF?

Southwest even has the fastest boarding method, AMT admits, of dividing passengers into groups according to arrival time and letting them pick their own seats. Alas, it also “reportedly is the airline’s chief source of customer complaints.”

So even the best-run companies do get some customer complaints, and even in Eden Eve bites the apple. Southwest, after all, does have a business to run, and if assigned seating is really such a huge money-saver, well, that’s how it has to be, I guess. Entropy.

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 Randy Crawford’s great cover of “Rainy Night In Georgia:”

You know, folks, not every idea is a good one, and not every product dreamed up in big-money conference rooms and backed by smart Silicon Valley venture capital is going to be wildly snapped up by millions. Gruesome horror stories abound, but First Coffee is thinking specifically of TV and other “premium” services on cell phones.

It’s one of those “why not?” ideas, instead of a “here’s how” idea, a shaky foundation right there.

“Why not?” ideas are New Coke, putting books on CD-ROM, France or letting Magic Johnson host a TV talk show. They don’t fill any need, nobody was standing in line for them, there aren’t any problems they solve, “why not?” ideas hope demand spontaneously generates around the product. It might work, never know until you try, cf. Pet Rocks and Democratic presidential nominees. No telling what someone might buy.

“Here’s how” ideas are ones that fill an actual need – cell phones themselves, call waiting or satellite dishes. Paperback books, Jolt Cola and giving Jay Leno the Tonight Show. 500-pound bombs on “safe houses” in Iraq. Genuine problem-solvers.

VoIP was a “here’s how” idea. It’s a cute combination of gee-whiz, because-we-can technology and a genuine need – cheaper phone calls. There’s always a need for cheaper phone calls.

Video phones were a “why not?” bust, bit the dust, done and rusted and good riddance to ‘em. Sure they were technologically possible, but not something human beings needed or would pay for. Caller ID, on the other hand, was a smashing success because it solved the “here’s how” problem of “How do I tell if it’s a telemarketer or that guy who got my phone number from Marcia?” before picking up the phone.

CRM was a “here’s how” idea, which is why it succeeded. Customers really wanted companies to do a better job serving them, they were willing to patronize companies who offered better customer service, so companies figured out ways to do that – hook up all customer contact points within an organization so if Joe Friendly called in one time and sent an e-mail a week later, the next time he called the customer service rep would have a record of that e-mail, what was said and what action was taken.

Blogging is a “here’s how” idea. Thousands of people want a way to chime in, spout off and otherwise join the national cacophony. There needed to be a way to let them do this, so presto! Web logs were pressed into service and have morphed far beyond their original raison d’etre, just like the Internet itself.

Podcasting is a “why not?” idea. We can do it, so why not do it? Few podcasts are seen by anyone outside of immediate family and friends, there’s no real need it fills the way YouTube.com does.

Selling TV and music over cell phones is a “why not?” idea. Tell me, where is a person forced to rely on a cell phone to fill an urgent need to watch TV? Anyone addicted to The Sopranos or As The World Turns has already arranged his or her life to be around a TV at that time, what else? Airports? You can’t get away from TVs in airports. You have a TV at home, in the break room at work, at any friend’s house, in your neighborhood bar. In cars? Besides the fact that they now have TVs in cars for people who can’t afford Ritalin, are you ever really in a car so long that you have to watch TV? Rarely. Certainly not long enough to justify a $40-a month plan to watch midgets impersonating TV characters.

Just like the “fully-wired house,” or whatever they’re calling that techie geek hell where your computer controls all your household appliances, it’s something that sure, it’s possible, but no genuine human being really wants to live that way, nobody except the clinically dead think it’s a good idea to spend half a day figuring out how to program a computer to make toast.

Microcash, that idea where people can pay 25 cents here and 50 cents there online; virtual sales reps where a computer-animated face spewed the canned prompts (“Hi, I’m Vicky, like my 38 D bustline?”), buying pets or groceries online, all examples of “why not?” technology and products that filled no real need, met no real demand and all flatlined, some thrashed around in more protracted, grisly, agonizing deaths than others.

“While the number of U.S. cell phone users has doubled over the past six years to 215 million, only around 1% of them regularly use cell phones to watch videos, for example. Cell phones also are facing competition from iPods, Blackberries and other multimedia devices,” The Wall Street Journal reports this morning.

There you go. Blackberries are a “here’s how” product: How do I check my e-mail when I’m away from the office and not around one of those airport computers which isn’t being monopolized by a 13-year old kid on his second hour of playing Doom? You can argue that people went overboard with Blackberries, but like all good inventions – talk radio, bourbon – it’s liable to overuse.

IPods, classic “here’s how” products – how do I listen to my downloaded music when I’m away from the computer? IPods that play video, the jury’s out. Portable music makes sense because you can do so many other things while it’s on, portable video doesn’t because that’s all you can do.

But First Coffee has never been around someone getting the shakes saying “Damn, I wish I could watch American Chopper, but I’m not around a TV, I don’t know where I can get to one and if I don’t see what bike Paulie’s building I won’t be responsible for my actions… hey lemme see your cell phone, does it get TV?” Such instances are rare, folks, certainly not frequent enough to support a billion-dollar industry.

And why do you need a cell phone to play music? There’s no way it can do it as well as an iPod, it just makes the phone more expensive and it’s one more thing to go wrong. What, you can’t afford an iPod? Get a job.

Read those stats from the WSJ again – 215 million people all across this great U.S. of A. of ours yakking away on cell phones day, night and behind you in a movie, and roughly the population of New Mexico uses them to watch videos. That’s not an investment opportunity, friends, that’s a curiosity. Percentagewise more people use screwdrivers to open beer cans when the pop top snaps off, do we see Craftsman putting can openers in the handles of screwdrivers and charging more for them?

Cell phones are wonderful, although as someone said recently, 90% of all cell phone conversations are totally useless – I forget the source so forgive me, write in if you know and I’m happy to attribute, it might’ve been a comedian on TV but the line was something like the only really necessary cell phone conversations are to the auto club when you run out of gas on the Cross Bronx Expressway, or to say you’ll be late because you’re behind some clown who ran out of gas on the Cross Bronx. Cramming more “features” on a cell phone than that gets into “Do I really want to pay for this?” territory.

Some hopeful vendors are trying to come up with “compelling programming” to get people to pay for cell phone TV. Friends, anyone capable of creating programming compelling enough to get people to pay for cell phone TV is going to find himself working for more prestigious, high-paying outfits really soon.

One cell phone TV company is hiring Howard Stern’s former producer to create content. Right. Howard Stern’s producer’s contribution to what everybody liked about Howard Stern’s show was to turn on Howard’s mike, and then go sit in the booth, do crossword puzzles and wrestle any FCC censors to the floor. Any bar bouncer who knew a six-letter word for Japanese tea could do it.

(Note to Rich Tehrani: Let’s have Dave Barry’s former editor at the Miami Herald edit First Coffee, it’ll be as funny and widely-syndicated as Dave’s column and we’ll get our own spin-off TV show! Got the number for the Herald around here somewhere…)

See, Dave Barry’s column was a “here’s how” product: People wanted something funny, smart and consistently good to read in their newspapers, so Dave always had work. First Coffee is a… uh, okay, let’s not mix our metaphors here, we’re drifting.

The point is that anybody who wants TV, or music, already has equivalent options to cell phones, in most cases much better ones. So just because we can put TV and music on cell phones doesn’t mean we need to, or that anybody will pay if we do so.

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 Allman Brothers’ Hittin’ the Note:

Nokia Corp. and Siemens AG have “agreed to combine their telephone equipment units in a deal valued at roughly $31.6 billion,” according to somebody at the Associated Press retyping a The Wall Street Journal article…

Well, heck, First Coffee subscribes to The Wall Street Journal, we can sit and read the article together here over our morning espresso as well as any AP reporter:

Nokia Corp. and Siemens AG, accelerating consolidation in the telecom industry, agreed last night to combine their phone-equipment units into a joint venture with assets valued at about €25 billion – or more than $30 billion – people familiar with the matter said.

The two European technology giants are expected to announce the deal today, these people said. If completed, the transaction would create one of the global industry’s biggest players.

As currently planned, both companies would contribute their network-equipment operations to the new venture, in which each would get a 50% stake. The venture would be based in Nokia’s homeland of Finland, and Nokia would receive a majority of the venture’s board seats, people close to the talks said.

Nokia executive Simon Beresford-Wylie would serve as chief executive of the venture, these people said. Siemens, which is based in Germany, is expected to play a smaller role in management of the new company.

Nokia couldn’t be reached for comment. Siemens declined to comment..

… A combination of the two companies’ telecom-equipment units would be roughly equal in size to European competitor Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson of Sweden and the combined Lucent-Alcatel.

Thanks to the WSJ for that exclusive, First Coffee hereby awards you another hazelnut latte, guys, job well done. That’s why we pay $99 a year for your schizophrenic amalgam of left-wing news and sensible, level-headed commentary.

The article goes on to say that “Nokia and Siemens have come under pressure from lower-cost Asian rivals as well as from consolidation among their main customers – the phone companies that operate the world’s communications networks. By cutting duplicated research and development costs and other expenses, the combination could save the two companies a total of as much as €1.25 billion annually, according to people familiar with the matter.”

Sure helps to have People Close To The Talks or People Familiar With The Matter if you want to work for The Wall Street Journal, doesn’t it? First Coffee has some P.F.W.T.M., but they’re usually more familiar with what Mummy’s making for dinner tonight or why the suspiciously wet cat was doing all that screeching in the bathroom just a little while ago.

As the WSJ’s P.F.W.T.M. say, Nokia-Siemens would be a bit more exotic than your average, everyday, humdrum multibillion-dollar merger, since Nokia, the world’s dominant maker of cellphone hand-sets, “has shied away from big mergers. For Siemens, it would be a similarly aggressive step: The company, a stalwart of German industry, hasn’t participated in the global merger game in a major way so far.”

The Journal’s – we anointed Industry Insiders can call it “the Journal,” sometimes without even capitalizing “The,” but non-qualified civilians shouldn’t presume such jocular usage without express written permission – P.F.W.T.M. finger Chinese providers as the driving force behind the merger: “The sale of global cellular operator Millicom International Cellular SA of Luxembourg to China Mobile Ltd. of Beijing for more than $5 billion, which is expected to be announced soon, illustrates the ambition of the new Asian players.”

In other words, Chinese competition is expected to be as cheap and stiff as a secondhand polyester suit, so merge or die: “By combining their equipment businesses, Siemens and Nokia hope to mount a more robust defense against the threat to their global market share posed by their new Asian rivals.”

P.F.W.T.M. also privately whisper that, well, Nokia’s been missing a few steps here recently, feels Motorola breathing down its neck, and once that biological clock starts ticking you know what happens, guys you wouldn’t let buy you a Mai Tai a few years ago get a bit longer, more appreciative glances and maybe a quick glance at your etchings.

Not that the guy’s exactly Brad Ridgerock fresh from the cover of People magazine himself, as the Journal points out, Siemens’ CEO Klaus Kleinfeld “sold the telecommunications unit’s mobile hand-set business to Taiwan’s BenQ Corp., actually paying BenQ to take the money-losing division off his hands.”

Siemens’s telecommunications unit “has struggled in recent years, and has been rumored to be on the block for months. Mr. Kleinfeld referred to it last year as one of the company’s ‘problem children.’”

Basically, things are getting leaner and more shipshape around Siemens, and problem children need to shape up or ship out – “last year the telecommunications unit posted a profit margin of 3.5%, far below the 8% to 11% margin that management has been targeting,” the Journal said. “Mr. Kleinfeld has said that each of Siemens’s 12 units – which span such areas as power generation, transportation and medical equipment – must reach their margin targets by the spring of 2007.”

Sounds good, but “the telecommunications unit has continued to struggle, despite management shake-ups and smaller restructuring steps. In April, Mr. Kleinfeld signaled there would more job cuts at the unit and acknowledged that it still faced “huge challenges.” The merger with Nokia suggests that Mr. Kleinfeld – supported by the company’s powerful supervisory board – finally concluded that it couldn’t turn the business around on its own anytime soon.”

The Chinese company specifically mentioned by the Journal as attacking the European markets is telecommunications-equipment maker Huawei Technologies Co., which earlier this month “reached a preliminary deal to buy most of the assets of smaller rival Harbour Networks Holdings Ltd., according to executives at the two Chinese companies,” according to the Journal’s Jason Dean, a deal which, “if finalized… would expand fast-growing Huawei’s presence in the market for data-network gear.”

Huawei, unlisted “but based in the southern city of Shenzhen, is one of China’s biggest telecom-equipment makers as it reported sales of $5.68 billion last year. It sells data-networking gear, in part through a joint venture with 3Com Corp., in addition to cellular phone network equipment and other products,” Dean reports.

Another Chinese manufacturer to watch is ZTE, but don’t look for immediate world domination any time soon: the company “reported lackluster growth in sales and profit for 2005 as its product mix shifted,” the Journal reported a couple months ago.

“The push to boost exports at ZTE and Huawei Technologies Co., China’s other sizable telecom-equipment maker, is putting pressure on more-established, larger manufacturers based in North America and Europe,” the Journal observes, while noticing that “the competition is chiefly in developing markets, particularly in Asia and Africa. Less than 2% of ZTE’s revenue came from North America and Europe. Exports accounted for 36% of revenue last year, up from 21% in 2004.”

So not exactly a Yellow Peril swooping down on through a defenseless Europe, but enough of a threat to make Europe sit up and take notice. First Coffee thinks of the American car industry, may it rest in peace, which was forced to either adapt or die to the Asian efficiency challenge of the 1980s, and shortly thereafter was found by the side of the road with all four paws sticking up in the air and Toyota tire tracks across its butt.

First Coffee also wonders about the strategy of consolidating into Biggerness at a time when aggressive innovation and risk-taking seem to be called for. Running back to hold the fort is pretty much an admission that you’re not going to advance anytime soon, that you’re ceding the battlefield to an enemy who’s outfoxed or outfought you, and you’re just holding on until the end comes. Armies hunkered down in the fort aren’t known for creative, winning innovation, it’s the guys under fire in the field who generally do that.

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 Rolling Stones’ Get Yer Ya-Yas Out, a recording from a concert in Madison Square Garden on a night when, as one critic wrote, they just might have been The Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the world:

CRM: It’s not just for business anymore.

Scott Miyake Geron, MSW, Ph.D., the director of the Institute for Geriatric Social Work, recognized a need for work-based training products that meet a wide variety of demands in the field of aging and social work, so he turned to CRM vendor Agileview for help.

IGSW has created an innovative series of online training courses that offer social workers and other social service professional’s vital training in aging and also provide Continuing Education Credits (CEUs) and an optional Certificate in Aging from Boston University.

Individuals or agencies may buy licenses to IGSW’s packages with either a credit card or Purchase Order. The SmartView Learning Management System automates the delivery and tracking of all content and training.

“Agileview, and the people managing SmartView, in particular, have given us an outstanding partnership that allows us to deliver a user-friendly experience to all of our clients,” says Geron. “As we become increasingly experienced with user preferences, and technology; SmartView has provided us with a cost effective, flexible product to change with the times.”

This year IGSW hopes to serve social workers nationally with high quality, cost-effective continuing education products. Though demand is expected to increase exponentially in the coming years as the Baby Boomers finally shuffle off this mortal coil, the current staff expects to keep pace thanks to their planning, and use of tools such as SmartView LMS.

SmartView’s low-cost, all-inclusive system enables agencies to build their own training content, deliver 24x7 classes to targeted audiences, track individual progress, and automate certification tasks. The SmartView team includes one-on-one assistance, especially for those agencies who may be implementing online tools for the very first time.

Witness Systems, fearless vendor of workforce optimization software and services, has announced that Impact 360, its comprehensive workforce optimization product, is compliant with key IP telephony and contact center products from Avaya, a firm which certainly needs no introduction here.

The packaged Impact 360 Workforce Optimization product powered by Avaya, which includes quality monitoring/full-time recording, workforce management, performance management and e-learning capabilities, has been successfully compliance-tested by Avaya for compatibility with Avaya Communication Manager 3.1, the company's IP telephony software.

With Impact 360, according to company officials, organizations can capture, analyze and act on cross-functional information that impacts the performance of their contact center workforce, customer interactions and customer service processes.

"Being rated Avaya compliant signifies another milestone for our Impact 360 Workforce Optimization product, which is sold by Avaya and its Business Partners," said John Bourne, senior vice president of global product management, Witness Systems. "Building on the scalability of the Avaya Communication Manager 3.1 platform, the Impact 360 Workforce Optimization Packages – powered by Avaya – scale to approximately 800 users on a single server.”

This, according to Bourne, reduces the total cost of ownership of the software-based Impact 360 products.

Witness Systems is a Premier member of the Avaya DeveloperConnection Program, an initiative to develop, market and sell third-party products that interoperate with Avaya technology. As a member of the program, Witness Systems is eligible to submit its products for compatibility testing by the Avaya Solution Interoperability and Test Lab in Lincroft, N.J. where Avaya engineers test plan for each application to verify whether it is Avaya compliant.

The DeveloperConnection program lets Avaya provide products and capabilities to member companies. One example is Application Enablement Services, a set of application programming interfaces, protocols and Web services that makes it easier for developers to create Avaya-compatible networks, devices and applications.

Witness Systems used AES to build Avaya interoperability into its Impact 360 software.

Wicom Communication, a European provider of IP based Contact Center products and VoIP telephony software for fixed and wireless network environments, is announcing its support for the Competence Call Center Group in its international expansion.

The Call Center service provider brings together its German, Austrian and Swiss operations into one virtual call center with the help of Wicom’s Communication Server Suite.

The Competence Call Center’s 250 employees in the German capital and 50 agents in Zurich are already using the Wicom product, and now also the company’s operations in Linz, Austria will run on Wicom CSS. The Wicom CSS is an open standards-based all-IP telephony software suite, allowing a single, integrated system to be used for multi-channel customer service, telesales, enterprise telephony and mobility

“The virtualization of our Call Center opened up new opportunities for us to deploy our resources at an optimum level. We are now able to offer a better customer service at competitive costs to our clients,” claims Christian Legat, Managing Director of CCC in Berlin.

A customer calling into the call center, whose details are already captured on the database, is put through to an agent who instantly receives all relevant information about the caller. Incoming queries via e-mail are also handled in this way.

The system decides which agent is most suitable on the basis of key words included in the incoming query. This type of intelligent routing means incoming calls are put straight through to the right agent, cutting down waiting times and minimizing the amount of call transfers.

“If for example there is an influx of calls coming into the Linz center, colleagues in Berlin or Zurich can be brought in to share the load at the click of a mouse button and within seconds agent numbers handling inquiries increase significantly,” explains Stephan Bahr, Regional Sales manager for Wicom in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. “Agents don’t need to be physically present for this. The Communications Server Suite integrates not only home office workers but also agents available on mobile phones.”

In addition to callers and call center agents, the management team at CCC also benefits from Wicom’s VoIP product. Real-time monitoring is now possible across multiple local offices as the system records and provides information on all communication events coming in and out of the call center.

Today’s Igor Stravinsky’s birthday, born in Oranienbaum, a suburb of St. Petersburg, Russia in 1882. The Writer’s Almanac has a great account of  the opening performance of his composition “The Rite of Spring” in Paris in 1913:

The audience sat quietly through the first several minutes of the piece, but when the music suddenly turned harsh and dissonant, people in the audience began to shout at the stage. Fights broke out between the audience members. People who were enjoying the music attacked those who were booing. People spat in each other's faces. Men exchanged cards in order to fight duels the next day. The police were called. Stravinsky was so upset by the response that he left his seat in disgust. But the performance kept on, despite the disturbance. The composition lasted only thirty-three minutes, but it made Stravinsky was one of the most famous composers in the world.

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 dawning of the Infomayshun Age here at Radio KCRM 98.6 on your dial and in your heart. Coffee’s the usual iced caffeine IV drip, and the theme song is Adam Carroll’s “Ol’ Milwaukee’s Best:”

If you have embarrassing snapshots of your days in the vanguard of the Age of Aquarius you can safely and quietly donate them to the Smithsonian as we are smack squarely in the Age of Infomayshun campers, which leads to all sorts of wonderful things like BlackBerries, CRM, wireless connections in the men’s room and that little treasure trove of Infomayshun we got after exterminating the rats in the Zarkman’s not-so-safe house last week, Infomayshun which has led to the wiping out of 104 more terrorist rats in 452 raids nationwide, capturing at least 28 large arms caches and over 750 prisoners.

If you blinked you missed that news, they tried to rush it past the blizzard of headlines about how Zarqawi’s death doesn’t change anything, same ol’ bleak outlook, nothing to see here folks, unwinnable quagmire, move along, please.

So while Zark’s off with his 72 past Second Runner-Ups of the Miss Virginia pageant we’re using the captured Infomayshun to roll up some more rats. Radio KCRM looks forward to the Infomayshun from Iraq being a bit duller in the upcoming days and all bad news being even more hysterically hyped.

Of course not everybody appreciates the Age of Infomayshun. The very same MSM which Scotch-taped obviously clumsily faked Texas Air National Guard memos to your TV screen before the ink was dry is being oh so carefully diligent to let you, Infomayshun Consumer, know that these wonderful documents showing how dispirited, desperate, pinched and otherwise losing al-Qaeda is in Iraq MIGHT NOT BE 100% GENUINE! WE MUST WITHHOLD JUDGMENT UNTIL SUCH TIME AS INFOMAYSHUN CAN BE AUTHENTICATED! THEY SHOW A WEAKENING INSURGENCY, NEWS WHICH WILL UNDO ALL THE UNWINNABLE QUAGMIRE PROPAGANDA WE’VE BEEN SHOVELING DOWN YOUR THROATS FOR THE PAST SEVERAL MONTHS, DO NOT BELIEVE, DO NOT BELIEVE, DANGER, WILL ROBINSON, DANGER! LISTEN TO DAN RATHER INSTEAD oh damn.

Oh, and in related news, Radio KCRM is announcing that he’s giving up day-to-day control of his far-flung media empire to concentrate on running his charitable foundation. Donations to start one are greatly appreciated and will not all be spent on beer.

Open Solutions Inc., which makes its bread selling integrated enabling technologies for financial service providers across the United States and Canada, has announced that Indianapolis-based First Internet Bank has selected The Complete Banking Solution to address its enterprise-wide data processing needs.

Radio KCRM wonders if it could also address the First Internet Bank’s acronym, gotta bet a better one out there somewhere. Hey, and Wachovia needs to change their pronunciation from “walk ovah yah” to “watch ovah yah.” One sounds like Vinnie and Guido threatening you in a back alley (anybody ever been in a front alley?), the other sounds like guys you’d almost believe were “legitimate Italian businessmen.”

The $430 million Internet-based bank has approximately 40,000 accounts and serves customers throughout the U.S.

"We wanted to create a bank based solely on the Internet – one without branches that could fully serve customers' needs nationwide almost entirely online," said Nicole Lorch, vice president of Marketing and Technology at F.I.B. Lorch noted an Internet-only bank has lower overhead. Indeed. It also has far more limited customer service options, and Americans generally like seeing faces when they bank, as F.I.B.’s learning.

Nevertheless, F.I.B. chose to migrate from their existing RDS system, which Open Solutions had acquired in 2004, to Open Solutions' relational core data processing platform, since “choosing Open Solutions' relational platform will enable us to offer a variety of competitive products and services to our customers,” Lorch said.

The Complete Banking Solution has Internet banking, business intelligence, financial accounting applications, electronic imaging, payment and interactive voice response products. In addition to the CBS, F.I.B. will implement “numerous complementary products from Open Solutions,” Lorch said.

With $430 million in assets, First Internet Bank of Indiana is the first state-chartered, FDIC-insured institution to operate solely via the Internet and has customers in all 50 states. Services include interest-bearing checking accounts, regular and money market savings accounts with industry-leading interest rates, CDs, IRAs, credit cards, and check cards that can be used instead of cash or checks.

F.I.B. is a wholly owned subsidiary of First Internet Bancorp, a single-bank holding company, privately capitalized with over 300 private and corporate investors. The Bancorp became effective March 21, 2006.

On hidden camera, in a nationwide taste test four out of five doctors and 73% of senior executives say that better collaboration with customers, suppliers, and partners is the most important business benefit to be gained from network convergence, according to a global survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit for AT&T.

The survey of 236 senior executives worldwide found that companies are pinning high hopes on investments in converged IP networks to help them improve customer service and the quality of their customer relationships.

According to the respondents, companies are planning to bring customer service into an IP environment. Currently, just 8 percent of companies run their contact centers on an IP network, but this figure is expected to leap to 39 percent within the next two years.

The trend among firms to adopt a multichannel approach to customer service will also gain substantial momentum over the next two years, if Madame Sosostris’s crystal ball has anything to say about it, with nearly half of the companies surveyed planning to communicate with customers via video link, compared with just 9 percent today.

In addition, 42 percent of all executives said that their firms will use Web chat or messaging, and 39 percent will use mobile text, versus today's 16 percent and 21 percent, respectively.

The research also reveals that customer service technologies will be important in helping firms improve innovation and product/service quality. For example, information obtained from customers through contact centers and other communications channels will soon be processed by new analytics tools providing agents with higher-quality knowledge and feedback that will help improve the entire customer service experience.

Bill Archer, president of AT&T's operations for Europe, the Middle East and Africa says this survey shows that “while IP creates a scalable, robust, and global platform for integrated CRM technologies, a firm's customer service will still only be as good as the humans delivering it."

Archer said that while the demand for technical aptitude will increase, “strong interpersonal skills will remain important as ever, for three-quarters or more of firms in the survey, voice and face-to-face communication will remain major channels of customer communication.”

Free copies of the EIU research white paper "Customer Service in an IP World" can be downloaded from the AT&T Web site at:

As part of the research for the paper, the Economist Intelligence Unit conducted an online worldwide survey of 236 executives. The majority of respondents came from Asia Pacific (39%), North America (30%) and Europe (25%). Other respondents came from Latin America the Middle East and Africa.

Ever wonder why you don’t see any Latin America-Middle East-Oceania directorships? “Hi, Bert Walters, I’m the LAME-O director for Acme Anvils and – oh, sorry about that cough there…”

The other 27 percent of senior executives were split evenly between “tastes great” and “less filling.”

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The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the musical theme for today is Good Stuff I Don’t Listen To Nearly As Much As I Should, so we have Donovan’s Troubadour, kicking off with “London Town:”

SSA Global, a vendor of enterprise business software and services, has announced the general availability of SSA Sales 7.0 and SSA Service 7.0, what company officials call “a major enhancement to the company’s suite of customer relationship management products, SSA CRM, powered by E.piphany.”

The enhanced product provides companies with a tactical and strategic solution to improve current and future sales, service and marketing technology deployments, according to company officials, providing “a comprehensive 360 degree view of each customer by providing a shared customer and product list that streamlines the sales quotation, order creation and service processes.”

“SSA Sales 7.0 and SSA Service 7.0 were developed in direct response to our customers’ demands for enhanced technology that helps improve their ability to measure, predict and increase sales and service performance,” according to Cory A. Eaves, chief technology officer, SSA Global. “SSA Sales 7.0 and SSA Service 7.0 leverage SSA Open Architecture, the SSA Global services-oriented architecture to enable integration with existing and future systems.”

Chicago-based CRM consultants West Monroe Partners, a full-service business and technology consultancy, has been named one of Chicago’s 101 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For by the National Association of Business Resources. The award was presented June 9th at the NABR’s symposium and awards luncheon at the Chicago Marriott Oak Brook, an event to which, inexplicably, First Coffee was not invited, despite having gone to college near Chicago and spent a great amount of time in Chicago blues clubs, as well as having eaten at both Gino’s and Giordano’s. One would think that sort of dedication would be appropriately rewarded.

The award is presented to Chicago-area companies that “demonstrate excellence in human resources practices within a variety of categories,” according to the official citation. Maybe they could’ve had a few guys from accounting departments in on the process, as only 60 companies were selected this year.

Criteria included commitment to diversity and multiculturalism, work-life balance, communication, compensation and benefits, employee education and development, recruitment and selection, recognition and retention, employee engagement, and community initiatives.

According to Carolina Newswire, Think Mortgage has hired Customer Connect Associates to implement a Customer Relationship Management technology for them, namely salesforce.com:

“Customer Connect will assist them to develop and automate their business processes for delivering wholesale lending services to brokers across the country. Think Mortgage is a wholesale mortgage lender based in southern California.”

“Our unique understanding of Salesforce.com software will help Think Mortgage to implement faster processes and highly competitive products to significantly improve the experience of retail loan brokers,” Geoff Ables, president of Customer Connect, tells Carolina Newswire.

Jagged Peak officials say the firm will employ its flagship software application platform EDGE (Enterprise Dynamic Global Engine) to deploy www.77.tv.

More than simply a website, according to company officials, the programming featured on ReacTV delivers “reactive prize-driven content” and “patented ads” to consumers over the Internet and on cable television, reaching over 50 million consumers, starting August 1, 2006.

Paul Demirdjian, Jagged Peak’s Chief Executive Officer and not one given to understatement, said his company’s engagement with ReacTV is “to provide the technology framework and overall business services. Together we will integrate a platform that will change the way marketers and consumers view advertising consumption. We look forward to assisting them in their business plan, which will build not only a new company, but a new industry.”

ReacTV fuses advertising with active, interacting consumers, who compete from their homes for millions of dollars in prizes while sophisticated data collection techniques assure advertisers exact viewing numbers. In other words, no Seinfeld reruns.

PacificNet Inc., a vendor of CRM and telemarketing services, call center, ecommerce and Value-Added Services in China, has announced that its PacificNet Epro subsidiary has been selected by China Telecom’s Hunan Branch to provide CRM consulting and call center training .

Under the project service agreement, PacificNet Epro is engaged to enhance the CRM service level and telemarketing management capability of Hunan Telecom’s customer service center called the “10000 Information Hotline.”

This consulting project consists of the following deliverables: Development of Outsourcing Telemarketing Program, Call Center Workflow Design, Business Management, Project Return On Investment, Critical Success Factors on Customer Affinity, Five Steps of Customer Service and Telemarketing, How to Design Effective Telemarketing Script, and Customer Service Agent Role Playing Sessions.

Hitachi Consulting, the business and IT consulting company of Hitachi, Ltd., has announced its support for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0.

Earlier this year, Microsoft awarded Hitachi Consulting Gold Certified status in the Microsoft Partner Program by demonstrating competencies in Advanced Infrastructure, Business Intelligence, Business Process and Integration, Custom Development and Information Worker Solutions.

“We view Microsoft as a strategic partner in the marketplace and are pleased to announce our support and services for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 product,” said Brian Biglin, Microsoft alliance director for Hitachi Consulting.

Hitachi Consulting has more than 100 trained Microsoft professionals and is certified in eight offices nationally – Dallas, Houston, Denver, Chicago, Seattle, Orange, Boston and Atlanta.

“Orange?”
…

RightNow Technologies has hired former Oracle and Siebel executive Scott Creighton as vice president of business development. Creighton will lead the growth and management of RightNow’s global alliances and partnerships.

Prior to joining RightNow, Creighton was Oracle’s vice president of global CRM marketing, where he was responsible for overall CRM go-to-market strategy, business development and global marketing. He has also held several senior positions at Siebel.

I’ve been listening to Donovan for the past couple hours, this Troubadour collection, double CD, about forty songs, hits pretty much all the high points from 1964 to 1976, and I’m feeling so… mellow. Life is so beautiful, colors are brighter, I’m catching the wind with the universal soldier here, we’re exploring Atlantis with Barabajagal amidst wafting patchouli and the season of the witch, listening to the flowers in the garden as Riki-tiki-tavi kills all our snakes for us and flowers give presents to gardens as Sunshine Superman smokes electrical banana and I… I feel… like… like I need to get Let It Bleed on – fast.

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