The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is still Bob Dylan's new album Modern Times. The more I listen to it the more I like it, whereas the more I listened to his last two, Love and Theft and Time Out Of Mind, the less I liked them.

For sheer enjoyable listenability this might be his best since Oh Mercy or his underrated folk cover albums, World Gone Wrong or Good As I Been To You, or even Slow Train Coming. It's a stronger album than Under The Red Sky, Down In The Groove, Knocked Out Loaded, Empire Burlesque… admittedly not stiff competition, but we might have to stub our toes against Infidels to find one this top to bottom solid:

Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. has unveiled its "IP CONVERGENCE Server SS9100 Release 6" (SS9100 R6), the latest model in its IP telephony server lineup with enhanced IP Centrex functions.

The news as of the second cup of coffee (actually a Diet Coke) this morning, and the music is Dusty Springfield's Dusty In Memphis album. There's more good stuff here than "Son Of A Preacher Man," too, although that's like saying there's more good stuff in Tupelo, Mississippi than Elvis's birthplace:

Hummingbird Ltd., a vendor of enterprise content management and network connectivity products, has announced the general availability of Hummingbird Enterprise eDOCS for Microsoft SharePoint, which, according to company officials, "provides access to and interaction with content managed by Hummingbird Enterprise through Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003."

EDOCS for Microsoft SharePoint will also integrate with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 when it is launched.

The product lets organizations use their investment in Hummingbird Enterprise, by providing workers using SharePoint Technologies with access to Hummingbird's document management and records management capabilities in support of regulatory compliance.

EDOCS for Microsoft SharePoint is "a collection of customizable Web Parts," according to company officials, which "expose the functionality of Hummingbird Enterprise within Microsoft Office SharePoint environments, providing a central point of access to documents, folders, and workspaces and exposing" -- you'd think they were flashers, all this talk about exposing -- "Hummingbird's full text search capabilities through SharePoint products and technologies."

The product offers fully customizable document/folder views based on secure metadata and login access rights.

Founded in 1984, Hummingbird employs over 1,400 people and serves more than 33,000 customers, including 90% of Fortune 100 companies. Hummingbird products are sold directly from 40 offices worldwide and through an Alliance Network of partners and resellers.

A word to the wise from Larry Caretsky, President of New Jersey-based Commence, developers of a stand alone industrial CRM product: Caretsky says that most ERP companies offering CRM have shortfalls.

"Managing the sales cycle and sales representative performance, marketing campaign management and integration with customer support are not provided by ERP tools," he said.

The news as of the second coffee this morning, and the music is Eric Clapton's Timepieces collection:

Not a great morning to try to get work done, in addition to this being the height -- or depth -- of holiday season, as news is pretty thin on the ground, and it's also First Coffee's birthday and his Ever-Loving And Wonderful Wife™ bought him The Complete Cartoons Of The New Yorker, whose hundreds and hundreds of pages sit here oh so temptingly…

The title of the book is a bit of a misnomer: The book, great as it is, does not have the complete cartoons, but the two accompanying CDs do, all 68,647 of them. And most importantly, all 1,000 by Charles Addams, the best cartoonist that magazine's ever seen.

One of my favorite Addams cartoons is here, the one of Pugsley at a large pond in Central Park, where at one end is a group of kids with their graceful sailboats in the water, and Pugsley's putting a black submarine in the pond at his end, grinning maliciously at the sailboats.

Norwegian retail chain Coop Trondos has chosen Lawson Software's M3 software to provide a consistent product for its 30-plus chain of stores to help improve their processes throughout the value chain.

The contract was signed in Lawson's first quarter fiscal 2007. Trondos runs two Coop OBS Hypermarkets and more than 30 other retail stores in Norway and has a total annual revenue of $433 million.

With the new retail product from Lawson, Trondos officials say the company is "expanding its use of IT to include more efficient tools for planning functions in goods intake and stock control."

"With our choice of Lawson M3, we want to invest in an integrated retail product that covers processes running throughout the whole value chain.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Sonny Rollins's "Moritat," which you'd recognize as "Mack the Knife:"

Gulfshore Technologies, Inc. has announced that Facial Esthetique, a medical spa facility in Bonita Springs, Florida has selected their collaborative InternetOffice.Biz suite of products to manage their eCommerce website and their in-house Point of Sale, as well as to meet their Content, Contact, CRM Management and growing back office needs.

Didn't know some place named "Facial Esthetique" needed CRM, didja?

Facial Esthetique's medical program is run under a licensed healthcare professional, who determined that to run their medical and beauty office well they required an Office Suite that was capable of teaming their online products with their in-house services.

Accordingly Internet Office allows Facial Esthetique to manage and track their product sales and services through their website and in the office at checkout. In addition, the Internet Office Suite of Products allows Facial Esthetique to manage and report on accounts receivable/payable; quickly and easily produce treatment plans upon checkout; schedule treatment rooms; organize their back office; share calendars; manage their online content and products; and collaborate with all aspects of the business with one easy to use, completely online software tool.

Best part of it all? "No need for servers, tech staff, networking and disparate systems to manage the business of beauty," according to company officials, "InternetOffice.biz does it all in a secure online environment with daily backups to co-locations."

...
PacificNet Inc., a vendor of Customer Relationship Management and telemarketing services, call center, e-commerce, and Value-Added Services in China, has been selected by The NASDAQ Stock Market to become a member of the newly established NASDAQ Global Market.

The news as of the first coffee this morning here at Radio KCRM 98.6, All Aimee Mann All The Time:

We're big fans of the detective fiction genre, would much rather read anything by Raymond Chandler than Moby Dick and eagerly await Robert Parker's next Spenser novel. So imagine our pleased surprise to see JX2 Technologies, a business software company owned by Macdonald and Spillane, two of the greatest names in American 20th century crime fiction.

John D. Macdonald created the towering Travis McGee character, endlessly imitated but never improved upon, and Mickey Spillane's creation, Mike Hammer, is one of the most well-known fictional crime-solvers not living on Baker Street. JX2 Co-Owners Jim Macdonald and Jim Spillane share McGee and Hammer's sense of justice, so we sent the Radio KCRM sound truck for an interview and to get the hubcaps stolen.

"For decades, wealthy companies with Information Technology departments were the only ones that could afford the huge cost of integrating and implementing software of this caliber," says Macdonald, drinking low-rent whiskey in a lower-rent office in the lowest-rent part of town where if you could just get the cockroaches to kick in their fair share of the rent you'd be able to upgrade to the office closer to the water fountain, or one where the radiator worked.

Feet up on the desk, battered fedora fending off the glare from the single light bulb lit as a sentry against a deep darkness which takes no prisoners, Macdonald says JX2 is hoping to change that by offering the same quality of software without the demanding price tag.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Loudon Wainwright III's great live album Career Moves:

Wow, it's, like, so unlike salesforce.com to announce good news, we're surprised here at First Coffee to see the normally media-shy, reticent founder, Marc Benioff, out in front blowing the company's horn announcing results for its fiscal second quarter ended July 31, 2006.

"As we soar past the half-million paying subscriber mark, we stand on the cusp of another remarkable achievement: a half-billion dollar annual run rate. These are historic milestones for salesforce.com and the industry that we are leading," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com in a rare public appearance. "Few software companies achieve this scale and momentum."

As the company heads towards one million subscribers and one billion dollars in revenue, Benioff, clearly uncomfortable in the spotlight, said he wants "to thank our 24,800 customers, partners, and our 1,625 employees for creating this amazing community of success on the Business Web."

Salesforce.com's announced results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2007include total revenue of $118 million, an increase of 64% on a year- over- year basis and an increase of 13% on a quarter-to-quarter basis. Subscription and support revenues were $106.7 million, an increase of 63% on a year-over-year basis and an increase of 13% on a quarter-to-quarter basis. 

Professional services and other revenues were doing well, $11.5 million, an increase of 82% on a year-over-year basis and an increase of 13% on a quarter-to-quarter basis.

The rub is in Earnings per Share: GAAP earnings per share were "approximately break- even," company officials said, noting that non-GAAP earnings per diluted share, excluding the effects of stock based compensation and amortization of purchased intangibles related to acquisitions, were $0.06. 

Net paying subscribers rose approximately 57,000 during Q2 to exit the quarter at approximately 501,000 total subscribers, an increase of 63% from Q2 of the prior year, and an increase of 13% from the prior quarter. 

Customers rose approximately 2,100 during the quarter and totaled approximately 24,800, an increase of 47% from Q2 of the prior year, and an increase of 9% from the prior quarter.

Based on information as of August 16, 2006, salesforce.com is initiating guidance for its third quarter fiscal 2007 ending October 31, 2006, and updating guidance for its full fiscal year 2007 ending January 31, 2007.

Q3 FY07: Revenue for the company's third fiscal quarter is projected to be in the range of approximately $126 million to approximately $128 million.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music, in honor of PR maven Ryan Zuk's getting a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young concert cancelled out from underneath him in Phoenix, is a Crosby, Stills and Nash threefer – Crosby, Stills and Nash, Déjà Vu and CSN – and Neil Young's Live Rust:

Kyliptix, which claims to be "the first company of its kind to adopt a utility-style, usage-based billing model that eliminates the upfront investment associated with software acquisition," although "of its kind" is left tantalizingly undefined, has announced the launch of Kips CRM.

The product's pitched at small businesses, and Kyliptix is marketing it as allowing SMB's to "gain a competitive advantage by employing the cost-effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality previously available only to larger organizations."

Fellow SMB workers, unite! Throw off the shackles of imperialist larger organization oppression!

KiBS CRM is a productivity tool that is described by company officials as delivering "a complete collection of customer facing processes, including Sales Force Automation, Marketing, Customer Service, and Support, to small businesses." Evidently it's designed to simplify processes for growing businesses, since as officials promise, "KiBS CRM can readily serve the needs of a few users, then scale to accommodate several hundred users at a time."

KiBS CRM works with the overall performance of a business concerned with the customer engagement processes -- and hey, who's not? -- including Web lead capture, Outlook integration, reporting, generation of quotes, sales orders, and invoices, sharing of accounts, contacts, leads and calendar events, and support of multiple languages.

Company officials say it's ideal for companies that have outgrown simple contact managers and need to improve their processes. The product has no upfront hardware or software purchase requirements.

William Gast, founder, president, and chief executive officer said the KiBS CRM is "the first in a full suite of offerings that we will be releasing in the coming months.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is one of my favorite recent musical discoveries -- Aimee Mann's Live At St. Ann's Warehouse. That voice, the female equivalent of Lou Reed; had Mann been on The Velvet Underground/Nico instead of Nico that album would have frozen water particles at fifty feet. It's a testament to Jim White's confidence that he let her sing backup on "Static On the Radio" and carjack the song at 65 miles an hour:

As part of the "Applications Unlimited" program, Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 9.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is… lessee, we don't have any music playing right now, let's fix that… turn on iTunes, go to Purchased, punch Shuffle, Play… the first song to come up is… "Can't You See" by The Marshall Tucker Band.

Microsoft has announced that Spy Optic Inc., a Carlsbad, California-based designer and manufacturer of eyewear and accessories, has selected Microsoft Dynamics GP for its new, overall enterprise resource planning and Microsoft Dynamics CRM to manage its customer and vendor relations.

The company, which has 125 employees, will use the technology to "streamline interactions with its European headquarters in Lombardo, Italy," according to Spy officials. Spy Optic distributes to more than 5,000 retail locations in the U.S., with plans to expand to markets in Australia and Europe.

The combination of a recent public offering and the welcoming of a new chief information officer evidently convinced Spy Optic that it was a good time to rejig their production, inventory, sales and customer data management, all of which were distributed throughout various nonintegrated IT systems.

"We expect the adoption… to be a day-and-night change for this company," said Erik Quade, CIO for Spy Optic. "Our goal is growth.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Kinks' Misfits:

EmailLabs, a vendor of e-mail marketing solutions and a subsidiary of J.L. Halsey Corporation, has introduced EmailLabs 4.8.

The new features help marketers "minimize undeliverable or improperly formatted e-mails, create more effective messages based on contextually relevant best practices, offer RSS delivery to their subscribers, and uncover statistically significant variations in campaign performance based on subscriber demographics and attributes," according to company officials.

Jim Herbold, general manager at EmailLabs said his company offers "best practices that… minimize the risk of having e-mail messages render poorly or get improperly filtered. We enable marketers to offer RSS to their most discerning subscribers, and we help demonstrate ROI to C-level executives by indicating how messages resonated with specific segments."

Officials say the product is provided as an ASP service, and is integrated with a company's Web site, sales force automation and CRM technologies through EmailLabs' application programming interface.

What company officials call "significant" features include EmailAdvisor, an e-mail auditing tool from sister company Lyris Technologies, whose five interrelated auditing components let marketers preview how messages will appear in the 35 most popular e-mail clients,

Betcha didn't know there were 35 e-mail clients, did you? "Lessee, Outlook, Eudora, MacMail… um…"

The product also checks messages against common spam filters and blacklists, determines the best time to send based on which ISP providers are experiencing delays, and get real-time, post-launch analysis of how 40 major ISPs are delivering, blocking or filtering messages.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Adam Carroll's album released a couple months ago, Lookin' Out The Screen Door:

Intelliworks, Inc., a vendor of CRM for higher education, has announced that Southern Methodist University, The Brookings Institution and University of Washington have all gone live on the Intelliworks CRM platform.

Frank R. Lloyd, Associate Dean, Executive Education SMU Cox School of Business, said they selected the system because "it was purpose-built for executive education programs, and it is being used by other top business school programs."

"It works and everybody else is doin' it." First Coffee's heard better reasons for choosing a software system, but believe me, I've heard a lot worse too.

In a single system, "we can communicate with people as they progress from prospect to registrant to participant and past-participant," says Lloyd. And in this case, "past-participant" means "alumni who will be supplicated for donations for the rest of his natural life."

Using Intelliworks CRM, the SMU team hopes to be able to offer better integrated customer service, marketing, and sales, university officials say.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, the music is Cross Canadian Ragweed's version of "Whiskey River," and that Rob McGrath has exactly one week to get me my deposit in Tanner & Haley back or… or else:

Selectica, a vendor of configuration, sales execution and contract management applications, has announced the release of a study titled "Contract Management in the Mid-Market" by Aberdeen Group.

The report was developed, company officials say, to help mid-market companies (in their eyes, if you're doing between $50 million and $1 billion you're mid-market) gain insight into "effective and efficient contract management methodology for both the buy and sell-side agreements."

Selectica sells technology that automates business processes in the areas of sales execution and contract lifecycle management. Available on-demand or installed, the company's products link between CRM and ERP.

"Contract Management in the Mid-Market" is based on survey results of 140 respondents. Findings include the disturbing fact that more than 80 percent of companies on both the buy- and sell-side of contract management use entirely manual or only partially-automated processes and systems.

I didn't ponder the question too long
I was hungry and went out for a bite,
Ran into a chum with a bottle of rum
And we wound up drinkin' all night.

Time to rise and shine, friends, up and at 'em, sun never shines on a sleeping dog's butt, and worms taste good, lookit all those early birds suckin' 'em down out there eating your lunch, hey nobody ever delivers the early worm as takeaway, and here to help you get the lead out and switch on the ol' treadmill is Radio KCRM 98.6, All Jimmy Buffett All The Time…

… Bolder Minds Inc., a cutely-named Boulder, Colorado-based firm that provides business support products and services, has announced the signing of a technology reseller agreement with Toronto-based Book4Time Inc.

Book4Time sells web-based appointment scheduling and CRM tools for businesses that need to schedule client appointments -- gee, there's a niche market -- and manage internal resources used in delivering a service. Wow, like, hope those guys broaden out into services a broad strata of companies might actually need, they're really zeroing in on rather esoteric business processes there.

Unlike "traditional scheduling systems," Book4Time’s web-based portal supports alternative lifestyles and is accessible from anywhere, anytime without having to download and install software. In other words, "on-demand."

The product targets companies such as "spas, salons, or health service organizations that want to enhance their customer experience by making it easier to schedule appointments while increasing the productivity of their own employees," according to company officials, evidently anxious to differentiate their marketing focus from those spas, salons, or health service organizations which don’t want to enhance their customer experience, enjoy making it more difficult to schedule appointments and don't care about the productivity of their own employees (as opposed to someone else's employees?)

The agreement allows Bolder Minds to market and sell the Book4Time product in the United States. Bolder Minds will act as a sales agent for Book4Time and provide on-going account management services for the client base in the United States.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Kinks' blazing hot One For The Road live set:

And of course the top news story this morning is that a Doberman Pinscher named Barney, working as a guard dog at the creepily-named "Wookey Hole Caves" children's museum with security guard Greg West, destroyed a $75,000 teddy bear formerly owned by Elvis Presley. I’m ROTFLMAO, you?

"The rare Steiff bear, named Mabel, was due to form the centerpiece of an exhibition at Wookey Hole Caves near Wells, England," reads the Associated Press account. "The bear was bought at auction in Memphis, Tennessee, by Somerset aristocrat Sir Benjamin Slade and had been loaned to the collection."

Other news reports say the dog ripped apart "hundreds of bears," severely damaging the $900,000 exhibit. West claims he spent "several minutes" chasing the dog, trying to stop him.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is "Six Months In A Leaky Boat" by Split Enz:

Visitar, which likes to call itself "the first company to offer hosted communications enabled customer relationship management (CRM) products exclusively for the true small and mid-sized business," has announced two executive appointments, poaching some Avaya talent.

Stephanie Anderson has been named vice president of channel and alliance marketing; and Tommy Nijem joins as Visitar's chief architect and vice president of engineering.

As Visitar's VP of channel and alliance marketing, Stephanie Anderson will lead the company's efforts to deliver the channel program. Her responsibilities will include architecting the strategy and design of the channel and alliance programs, channel governance, sales enablement and marketing programs.

Prior to joining Visitar, Anderson served as VP of services solutions sales for Avaya Inc., where she was responsible for over $1 billion in revenues.