First Coffee for 8 June 2006: NetSuite's Canadian Products, eOn Reports Record Net Income, Pitney Bowes Uses Antenna In Europe, Vermin Control in Baghdad

David Sims : First Coffee
David Sims
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First Coffee for 8 June 2006: NetSuite's Canadian Products, eOn Reports Record Net Income, Pitney Bowes Uses Antenna In Europe, Vermin Control in Baghdad

By David Sims

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Stephen Stills’ Manassas:

NetSuite, Inc., a vendor of on-demand CRM and business software suites, has announced a set of new tax engine features and additions, pitched towards Canadian multi-province mid-market companies for more efficient tax management and faster tax filing.

The newly-released functionality adds enhancements to the existing tax engine already built in NetSuite for Canada, which has been on the market in Canada for more than five years. Additionally, NetSuite has also unveiled the option to select French as the base language in all product offerings for Canada, allowing Quebec-based companies and other French-speaking businesses to conduct business in both English and French.

Designed specifically for the accounting and tax environment in Canada, the NetSuite product offers Canadian businesses capabilities for tax management and filing. The new functionality announced today was designed in large part to give businesses capabilities in charging, tracking and reporting of the applicable Goods and Services Tax (GST), Harmonized Services Tax (HST) and Provincial Sales Tax (PST) for their activities.

Importantly, these new capabilities allow businesses operating in multiple provinces with tax liabilities in each to eliminate the guess work, and manual intervention required in other systems by automatically selecting the appropriate tax codes based on a customer’s shipping address.
 
In addition, NetSuite users in Quebec and French-speaking businesses can now choose French as their base language when first setting up their NetSuite account. Users can also choose their own user interface language as appropriate for them allowing businesses that operate in French-speaking and English-speaking provinces simultaneously to support the linguistic needs of their employees.

Moreover, businesses can also communicate with their customers in any language they choose using the multi-language capabilities of NetSuite and entering translated item names and descriptions for inclusion on printed documents, e-mail and faxes.
  
The new tax engine features announced today are included in NetSuite Version 11.0 which is in a phased roll-out throughout June.

Telecom vendor eOn Communications Corporation has reported record net income of $294,000 or $0.02 per common share for the third fiscal quarter ended April 30, 2006.

Net income for the quarter was $294,000, or $0.02 per common share, compared to a net loss of $696,000, or ($0.05) per common share in the quarter ended April 30, 2005.
 

Revenues from continuing operations were $3 million, an increase of 4% compared to $2,942,000 for the same period last year. Third quarter revenue increased 3% and income from continuing operations increased 49% compared to the second fiscal quarter of 2006.

Net income for the nine months was $1,406,000, or $0.11 per common share, compared to a net loss of $1,126,000, or ($0.09) per common share in the nine months ended April 30, 2005.
 

“Building on this momentum, we expect to produce the first profitable year in our company’s history,” stated David Lee, eOn’s chairman and chief executive officer.

During the quarter the company added new customers of its eQueue contact center product, including SerWizSol a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons, Ltd., and one the largest outsourced customer service BPO providers in India.

Antenna Software, a vendor of on-demand wireless CRM, has announced that Pitney Bowes Inc. has deployed Antenna’s A3 SmartClient mobile application to its field engineering team in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe.

Using Antenna A3 SmartClient, service calls logged in Pitney Bowes Siebel CRM system are automatically dispatched in real time, allowing the company’s field engineers to update the status of customer service calls and order parts directly from their Windows Pocket PC devices.

Pitney Bowes has standardized on Antenna A3 as its mobile field service product across Europe. To date, Antenna A3 SmartClient has been rolled out to field engineers in the United Kingdom and across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, using O2, T-Mobile and SwissCom.

Antenna A3 SmartClient is billed a providing real-time visibility of field operations to the business and reducing operational cost, delivering greater operational efficiency and improving customer experience.

There are also plans to deploy the product across the entire field service operation in France by October 2006.

“The beauty of the hosted Antenna A3 is its flexibility. It integrates very easily with multiple business systems, in our case Siebel and SAP, and supports multiple mobile devices and wireless networks,” reported Ray Lawes, VP service operations, Pitney Bowes UK.

Pitney Bowes officials said the company selected the Antenna A3 to “maximize its investment in Siebel CRM, improve the response time, customer satisfaction, and productivity of service engineers and support the drive for a 360-degree view of customers at all times.”

Since the rollout of Antenna A3 SmartClient in February 2006, Pitney Bowes has measured an increase in customer requests responded to within agreed SLAs and now see more than 90 percent of all service calls automatically directed to the correct engineer without any manual intervention or delay.

Want a good salary and benefits package and career advancement with those fries?

The Daily Telegraph is reporting that McDonald’s is launching a new phase in a campaign to improve its image and counter criticism about the quality of jobs it offers on the back of a study showing parents are happy to see their offspring join the ranks of the “McJob’’ brigade.

“The American burger group is aping the tactics of critics and embarking on what it openly admits is a campaign with disruptive elements. One theme is based on redefining McJob, the label that infuriates the company and annoys staff,” the Telegraph says:

“David Fairhurst, McDonald’s vice-president, people, is attempting to give McJob a positive spin with posters, new investment and research studies. One poster declares, ‘McProspects, over half of our executive team started in our restaurants. Not bad for a McJob’.”

Take that, Douglas Coupland.

Staff morale has played its part in McDonald’s counter attack, the paper says, reporting that “employees have made it clear they are fed up with the negative image of the business and are tired of enduring sniping from friends and families.”

McDonald’s employs 78,000 workers, many of them part-timers, and expects to be recruiting another 25,000 over the next year while continuing to reject three in four applicants.

No, First Coffee has never been accepted for a job at McDonald’s. I’d rather not talk about it.

Great, great news out of Baghdad this morning on the vermin control front, raise a glass, everyone.

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