CRM BI For CBN, Salesforce.com Winter '07, SEC's EDGAR Searchable Online, War "Crimes" Then And Now

David Sims : First Coffee
David Sims
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CRM BI For CBN, Salesforce.com Winter '07, SEC's EDGAR Searchable Online, War "Crimes" Then And Now

By David Sims

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Jimmy Cliff's 20th Century Masters compilation:

So who is this Mikhail Youzhny? He dissected sixth-seed Tommy Robredo -- admittedly overranked, but still -- in the U.S. Open in straight sets, and last night beat second seed Rafael Nadal in four to make the quarterfinals.

If I were Andy Roddick I wouldn't be so happy that Youzhny cleared Nadal out of my half of the draw, I'd be concerned about becoming the next scalp on the guy's belt.

By the way, whatever happened to Lleyton Hewitt, who was swept out in straight sets by Roddick yesterday? For that matter, what the heck's happened to Australian tennis? The nation that's had so many great players, including the incomparable Rod Laver, has only one player in the Top 100 men's singles players today -- Hewitt, at #18.

Time to build more public courts down there, guys.

Salesforce.com, a vendor of on-demand business services, has previewed Salesforce Winter '07, what it calls "the 21st generation of its family of on-demand business applications."

Salesforce Winter '07 is scheduled for availability in the fourth quarter. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications "should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available," company officials advise.

Using Salesforce's multi-tenant architecture, Winter '07 will deliver customization across every level of the service from the user interface to the AppExchange development platform.

"Winter '07 will build on our innovation of multi-tenancy to now offer unlimited customization through the AppExchange platform," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "This is a game-changing release that that delivers unlimited freedom to create custom user interfaces, innovative mashups and more powerful multi-tenant applications."

Today salesforce.com hosts over 50 million transactions in a single day and hosted 3.1 billion total transactions in Q2, according to company officials.

Winter '07 will "deliver the next generation desktop for The Business Web, enabling customers to tailor their user interface, personal workflows, activities, and tasks in one place," officials say. It will be based on AJAX for usability and interactivity.

Other features include computer-telephony integration with Cisco and "Salesforce Anywhere" with new Lotus Notes Edition.

DG's Computerworld has announced that The Christian Broadcasting Network, Inc. -- a client of Compass Technology -- is a finalist for its Business Intelligence Perspectives' "Best Practices in Business Intelligence" Awards Program in the category of "Use of Competency Centers to Champion BI Technologies to Enterprise-Wide ROI."

The outcome of CBN's BI initiative is that the Chesapeake, Virginia-based broadcaster now has a holy -- holistic, sorry -- view of the enterprise with consistent analysis and reporting capabilities enabling better management decisions and more effective constituent relationship management (CRM), company officials say.

IBM Corporation, Accenture, Intermountain Healthcare, and Valero Energy Corporation are also named as finalists for the award. The winner of the category will be honored on September 27, 2006 at the Green Valley Ranch Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada. First Coffee hopes CBN wins, as it'd be the only fun the CBN guys will have in Vegas.

CBN, as its first step toward an enterprise business intelligence product, selected Compass Analytics for Fundraisers, a product suite consisting of a data warehouse with subject-specific data marts, analytical services, scorecards, dashboards, and reporting services developed for nonprofit fundraisers and built on the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 platform.

A cross-functional Competency Center was formed within CBN, officials say, where members "use Compass Analytics for Fundraisers and create BI standards, promote BI innovations, and approve BI methods" as they work toward complete adoption of BI best practices by the entire enterprise.

The goal, CBN officials say, was to develop "a community of practice where information and analysis are the same across the enterprise instead of data silos produced within departments."

Oh hey, if you're interested, Autonomy Corporation plc has announced that the United States Securities and Exchange Commission's information about companies and mutual funds is now fully searchable online, powered by Autonomy.

Investors and analysts and pretty much any Joe Bloggs on the street, your idiot brother-in-law, can now search the full text of the SEC's EDGAR (Electronic Document, Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval) database of company filings for the last two years.

The SEC is widely acknowledged as the world's premier securities regulator. To help support investor education, the SEC offers the public a wealth of educational information on its Internet website, which includes the EDGAR database of disclosure documents that public companies are required to file.

SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, using terminology with questionable historical parallels, commented in June 2006 that the launch of EDGAR Full Text Search "is a giant leap for America's 90 million investors toward tapping the full potential of the Internet to provide customized financial information. This new full-text search capability will give investors and analysts instant access to the specific information they want."

Dutch CRM vendor Exact Software has announced that the company's Exact JobBOSS division has partnered with Okuma for production data delivery.

Okuma sells computer numeric controls (CNC) and machining technology, including vertical and horizontal machining centers, lathes, double column machining centers, grinders, and wheel machines.

Okuma THINC, a standard, off-the-shelf PC platform, is designed to enable access to almost any application and peripheral including shop management systems, and interfaces with bar coders, feeders, robots, probes and tool setters to help streamline production. Through THINC, communication with established business and production systems is immediately available.

The Okuma-Exact partnership is supposed to provide production data such as job starts, machine hours and part counts coming directly off the machine into Exact JobBOSS, with a level of accuracy unattainable through traditional data entry methods.

Steve Massey, general manager for Exact JobBOSS said this will be done by "pulling production data directly into JobBOSS," giving customers "the most up to date production information in real-time."

Established in 1984, Exact Software is headquartered in Delft, the Netherlands and has offices in Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, Asia, Australia and Africa. Exact Software North America is a division of Exact Holding N.V. and has its headquarters in Andover, Massachusetts.

The next time you hear some Euroweenie twit criticizing Israel's restrained, defensive campaign in southern Lebanon to root out the Hezbollah terrorists killing Israeli civilians in rocket attacks, remind him of the long, proud European tradition of mass slaughter of helpless civilians: Today in 1940 Germany started bombing civilian targets in London. Nothing of military value whatsoever, but cathedrals, homes, shops. They killed 30,000 people and destroyed 100,000 houses, all just for the hell of it.

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