October 2006 Archives

A second cup of coffee this morning, but the music's still ol' Blue Eyes:

A research organization dealing with customer issues recently interviewed First Coffee, and the questions they asked got me thinking about how we can learn about CRM from nearly any field of human endeavor, but we learn the most through the most exciting, spectacular, idiotic ideas crashing and burning, like socialism.

One question they asked me was "What are the most important obstacles and pitfalls to be aware of in trying to integrate customer data in large bureaucratic companies and organizations? Imagine a large, older incumbent organization with entrenched fiefdoms, or a traditional regulated monopoly, or a large company that has grown through numerous acquisitions."

Good question. Of course the main obstacle is that people regard data as power -- and frequently they're right. If they control the data they have their little fiefdoms and they're players. The pitfall companies usually fall into when integrating data is the one countries usually make when they try to adopt socialism -- they assume people see some abstract concept called "our common good" as in their own personal interest. 

Wrong. Unless people are incentivized to cooperate, either to produce or share data, there's no reason for them to do so. Right or wrong that's just human nature and there's no getting around it. Efforts to get around human nature will always, always, always fail. Look at Russia's economy and society today if you want a grisly example.

Because the fact is, unless it's more to an employee's advantage to share data than hang onto it he won't do it just because it makes life easier for somebody who's making more money. The reality is that, frequently, the guy hoarding data is correct when he surmises that if he loses his grip on it he loses standing and leverage within the organization, and the pitfall is that companies refuse to look at it from his point of view. 

If a company's data integration project requires some people to change the way they do things, the company has two choices: It can simply demand cooperation, which rarely gets even the sort of sullen, perfunctory "cooperation" such projects need, or it can look at the change from the point of view of the employee being asked to give up his data, see what it means to that guy and incentivize him to get with the program. 

For some reason First Coffee's never understood few companies do that, they oddly assume that because it's good for top management it's good for everyone down the line and that this notion is self-evident at all layers of the organization. Nothing could be further from the truth. Everybody in reality is a freelancer -- employees are working for their own good, not the company's. Realize this, make it in the employee's own good to contribute to the company's own good, and you'll get all the compliance you want.

Because management looks at "company" and defines it as "the people working for me who need to do what I tell them to," while employees hear "company" and define it as "the place where it's worth my time to work for the money they'll pay." Note the difference.

Deal with people as they really are, not as you'd like them to be, and you'll succeed. Ignore human reality and you'll end up frustrated, because human nature ain't gonna change to please you.

The research firm wanted to know what should be the elements of a successful data integration project for such situations?

Again, simply think "How can I incentivize people to do what I want?" If you're trying to pry information loose from someone who's dragging his feet on giving it up the only way to get it is to incentivize that guy. I can't think of any other method that really works. Oh it's possible to draw up flow diagrams and charts and all whatnot, but in reality if people in an organization don't want to share information they're either not going to or do so in a manner that rather defeats the purpose of the integration project. 

Everyone will look out for themselves first, as is natural, as the C-level people do and whoever's pushing the data integration project is doing, nobody's going to place themselves at a professional disadvantage just to help with a project that doesn't personally benefit them. Structure the project in such a way that it benefits those who are asked to change the way they do things.

"In this case," the researchers told me, "we are particularly interested in knowing how such projects can help senior management get access to useful information and insight for purposes of strategic management and decision-making (besides the conventional goal of improving customer relationships). What can you say about how customer-data projects should be structured with that management purpose in mind?"

Again, I hate to sound like Johnny One-Note, but I have learned that there are a few basic principles that are simply never abrogated in business, and one is that employee loyalty, crucial to customer loyalty, is tied almost 1 to 1 to employee self-interest -- the companies who have the greatest employee loyalty are those who treat their employees the best, period. Get a list of the Ten Best Places To Work and a list of the Ten Companies With The Most Loyal Employees and I bet you'll see overlap.

These are places that look at the company from the employees' point of view -- they start from "what profit would I need to give these people to work hard?" instead of "How can I use these people's hard work to profit?"

In such cases it's fairly clear to employees how what's good for the company is good for them. If the claimed benefits of data integration projects actually benefit the people who are being asked to give up some of their "proprietary" data they'll see that, and they'll agree wholeheartedly and give the kind of proactive cooperation such projects need to succeed. 

Look, you can stick a whole lot of farmers on a Soviet collective and tell 'em they'll all be shot and their families banished to Siberia if they don't produce 100 bushels of beets and you'll get 100 bushels of beets -- exactly, and the sorriest tubers that ever qualified as a "beet." As the history of the Soviet Union proved. 

Or you can show them how much money they'll make per bushel of beet, and that better quality beets will get better prices at market, and that they'll get to keep the rewards of their labor and sacrifice minus a reasonable tax and you'll get more beets than you know what to do with. As the history of capitalism proves every day.

Socialism failed because it failed to take this basic human nature into account, that working for the glory of Mother Russia wasn't enough of an incentive for people who weren't making any money to work harder, and data integration projects fail for the same reason -- people who aren't going to benefit from a project aren't going to work any more than the absolute keep-my-job minimum for it. 

If companies take a Soviet-style mentality to customer data integration projects -- do it for the glory of Acme Anvils, comrades -- they'll end up with Soviet-style efficiency results. If they do it with a capitalistic mentality, recognizing the reality that people do well what they're incentivized to do well, they'll have a successful program.

And when the researchers asked me "can you think of important resources or other experts we should consult for more insight on this topic," I said sure, Josef Stalin. Ask him why sovietized collective agriculture in a place with the most fertile land in the world was such a crashing failure.

It's no secret that most CRM projects, well-intentioned and with demonstrable ROI waiting in the wings, fail. Why? It's good for the company, so why don't workers all work together to make it work?

Because "good for the company" doesn't mean "good for me, Joe Employee." If it's good for the company to fire me I don't care about what's good for the company. If it's good for the company that I get transferred from the office ten minutes from my house in White Plains to lower Manhattan then I don’t care about what's good for the company. If it's good for the company to implement some CRM, data-sharing project that dents my standing and influence then I don't care about what's good for the company.

Make what's good for the company good for the employees of the company and your project will work. Otherwise say hi to Josef for me.

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 Frank Sinatra's A Swingin' Affair! album:

Hyperion, a vendor of Business Performance Management software, has announced new capabilities in Hyperion System 9 Release 9.3.

Company officials say with the release Hyperion is "augmenting its existing data management services with a new module for data integration" for integrating Hyperion applications with "ERP, CRM, and other transactional systems."

Hyperion System 9 Release 9.3 is planned for release in the next calendar quarter. "The timing of any product release, including any features or functionality, is subject to change at Hyperion's discretion," company officials are quick to add.

The product claims new functionality in financial management applications, data management services, and business intelligence modules, along with expanded options for integrating diverse enterprise systems.

Launched a year ago, Hyperion System 9 was designed to integrate financial management applications and a BI platform in a single system built on a common set of foundation services and accessed via the unified Business Performance Management Workspace. In May, Hyperion added a new Hyperion System 9 application enabling financial data quality management.

One new feature in 9.3 is "BPM Architect," described by Hyperion officials as a business process modeling environment that "helps enterprises align planning scenarios, financial and operational plans, and financial consolidation processes." Basically what it does is give an aerial view from which users can "design, deploy, manage, and synchronize financial management and planning processes."

There's also a new Hyperion System 9 Capital Expense Planning module, described as a tool "for planning the acquisition, lifecycle management, and retirement of capital assets." It allows financial and operational managers to integrate capital improvements into rolling forecasts and annual plans, run depreciation and amortization calculations, develop action plans for existing assets, plan for driver-based or user-defined asset-related expenses, and generate asset reports.

And with the flexible and open data integration architecture built into Hyperion System 9, customers have the option to either rely on the new module from Hyperion or use data integration tools from other vendors.

Because hey, "your reports are only as good as the data contained in them," as Henry van der Linden, support manager, Hyperion Competence Centre, De Lage Landen International B.V. correctly notes.

The new release also offers enhanced Microsoft Office integration for Office applications such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel. For instance, a user could create a spreadsheet in Excel and manage it as a Hyperion System 9 report, if the document is shared with another user via any Office application all updates to the data consequently update the original data set.

Release 9.3 also supports Google OneBox for Enterprise, a feature of the Google Search Appliance. Release 9.3 provides customers with access not only to BI-related dashboards, reports, and metrics, but also to information associated with planning and financial management processes.

SAP Netweaver customers who deploy Hyperion System 9 Release 9.3 have integration with the Netweaver portal environment. From the Netweaver portal interface, users can launch the Hyperion System 9 Business Performance Workspace and interact with Hyperion System 9 BI+ content.

MagSuite.com has announced support of AJAX technology in its on-demand application.

AJAX technology brings "desktop-like experience to web application," company officials say, which means, among other things, that pages are not refreshed when changes are requested by user. "For example, a page isn't refreshed when the Set Filter button is pressed in the Sales Invoices list after changing 'date from' and 'date to' filter dates."

Company officials say the improved product is being pitched to SMB users considering switching from legacy desktop applications to Web applications. They're offering a 15-day free no-obligation test drive at www.magsuite.com.

NCO Group, Inc., a vendor of business process outsourcing services, has reported Q3 2006 net income of $11.4 million, or $0.35 per diluted share; including special charges of $3.6 million, net of taxes, or $0.11 per diluted share. This compares to net income of $7.6 million, or $0.24 per diluted share, in the third quarter of 2005.

NCO is organized into four divisions that include Accounts Receivable Management North America, Customer Relationship Management, Portfolio Management and Accounts Receivable Management International.

Overall revenue in the third quarter of 2006 was $301.6 million, an increase of 21.0 percent, or $52.4 million, from revenue of $249.2 million in the third quarter of 2005.

For the third quarter of 2006, CRM's revenue was $62.8 million, as compared to $44.9 million in the third quarter of 2005. The increase was primarily attributable to "new clients ramping up business during the end of 2005 and during 2006," company officials say. Partially offsetting the revenue from new clients in the third quarter of 2006 was the reduction in revenue from a major client where NCO ceased providing certain services when the client exited the consumer long-distance business due to changes in telecommunications laws.

The company will not host an investor conference call following the earnings release. On July 21, 2006, the company entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity controlled by One Equity Partners and its affiliates.

And finally, for our British colleagues CMP Information, organizers of the Technology For Marketing, are announcing the launch of the Technology For Marketing Awards.

This event will "recognize the most innovative and groundbreaking implementation of marketing-related & CRM technology and interactive advertising solutions within the industry today," according to CMP officials. The black-tie affair will take place on the first night of TFM, Tuesday 6 February 2007, Grosvenor House Hotel, London.

"The TFM Awards have been created to recognize specifically the outstanding results and success achieved by many end-users in their application of marketing technology and CRM solutions within their marketing, customer service, sales and online advertising campaigns." explains Simon Mills, TFM Event Director. "TFM is the UK's premier event for marketing, customer service, sales, advertising and CRM technology."

The "glittering" awards ceremony will consist of 12 categories each focusing on the achievements of end-users from within all vertical sectors when using technology solutions for marketing and new media applications. The winning entrants will be those who demonstrate that "their campaigns are the very best in their respective fields reflecting the growing sophistication within the maturing marketing technology market."

These categories will cover best-practice ranging from CRM and data analytics to e-mails, mobile & Web marketing, and interactive advertising technology.

First Coffee notes disapprovingly that in the listing of about a dozen awards -- Best Use of a CRM Solution for SMEs, Best Use of a CRM Solution for Corporates, Best Use of Campaign Management Software, Best Use of Data in a B2B Marketing Campaign, Best Supporting Actress, etc. -- there is no award category for CRM commentary.

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 Louis Jordan's great Anthology:

Scribe Software Corporation, a vendor of data migration and integration software technology for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, has announced that the company has been acquired by The Mustang Group and key members of the Scribe management team.
Mark Prestipino, President and CEO of Scribe said the principals at The Mustang Group "have the deep background, expertise, and operating experience in the markets we serve."

Previous investment firms Edison Venture Fund and Borealis Ventures sold their interests in the company as part of this transaction. Existing senior management will remain in their current positions.

Bob Crowley, a Managing Partner at The Mustang Group said the group sees "great potential as Scribe fills the growing unmet need for affordable, easy to deploy, packaged integration tools for both the on-premise and the on-demand application spaces."

CRM vendor Sage Software has announced the establishment of its Saudi operation, based in Riyadh.

"We have been running our regional business out of the head office in Dubai, but business growth creates the demand for physical presence and greater commitment," said Marc Van der Ven, managing director, Sage Software Middle East.

"Sage has invested in setting up a local Saudi operation to be closer to our business partners and provide them with marketing and technical support and training to assist customers," said Van der Ven.

Saudi Arabia, which has not qualified for WTO compliance, could stand some greater efficiency in their business operations. Van der Ven said Saudi businesses are "realizing the need to invest in their infrastructure, whether it's to manage their accounts, their people or their sales and marketing processes."

The Islamic state, known for its fundamentalist, strict society, makes up 55 percent of the market in the region for most industries including the IT business. Businesses operating there need to have "greater control of their budgets, streamline their business processes, improve customer satisfaction and track their marketing spend to ensure their products and product messages are reaching the right audiences," according to Sage officials.

Sage has customized its flagship HRMS solution, Sage Abra HRMS, for the region. It has been Arabized, supports the Hijri calendar and local government regulations, which makes it user friendly for the local market.

Sage Software Middle East claims over 1,500 customers, 10,000 software users and 45 partners in the region.

Yankee Group is trying to push the idea of Business Control Layer as "a key new technology in driving Service Provider innovation."

The Business Control Layer concept, conceived by telecom billing and CRM company, FTS, is gaining traction as a variety of industry observers, including Yankee Group, agree to promote it. More grist for the mill.

According to the Yankee Group report with the North Korean Communist Party propaganda-esque title "Next Generation Business Control Can Drive Service Innovation Through Dynamic Usage Based Pricing And Greater Service Management," ("Forward Together, Fellow Comrades!") today's communications markets are "reaching a level of maturity which creates the need for more dynamic service offerings."

The report "takes a closer look at the move to a more innovative service delivery environment, potential business offerings created by flexible service delivery and the role that a dynamic Business Control Layer can play as part of the experience," according to Yankee officials.

"Service Providers are encouraged to take advantage of the axiom that 'not all customers are created equally' by delivering tiered services and bundles that best fit different customer types," noted the report's co-author Paul Hughes, Vice President of Communications Software Strategies, Yankee Group. "We also stress the importance of real-time interaction with the customer as a way to increase satisfaction while making the most of targeted cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, especially in cases where there is the opportunity to increase average revenue per customer."

Service Providers are advised to "re-evaluate the service management capabilities of their OSS/BSS infrastructure" and how it links to their existing Web self-service or CRM front end, with the idea being that a new dynamic Business Control Layer must be in place to "ensure that customers demanding greater service bandwidth, service extension, or real-time service updates can be managed effectively."

Autonomy Corporation plc, a vendor of CRM and other infrastructure software for the enterprise, has announced a multi-million pound (dollar) contract with the U.K. Government to deploy Autonomy IDOL Server software.

Autonomy has collaborated in the past with government, defense and intelligence agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, NASA, the U.S. Air Force, the U.K. Audit Commission and the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry.

Autonomy's agreement with the U.K. Government is based on software license, professional services and maintenance fees.

Autonomy's technology, in company-generated words this reporter admires for their sheer lyrical poetry, "forms a conceptual and contextual understanding of any piece of electronic data including unstructured information, be it text, e-mail, voice or video."

VendorGuru.com has announced a recently-launched B2B site which company officials call a "one-stop approach" for CRM software and Internet protocol (IP) telephony.

According to a recent Harris Interactive study commissioned by the American Business Media, immediacy and reliability are two highly-desired qualities for the B2B world, shockingly enough: "An overwhelming majority (of business executives) agree that B2B magazines and Web sites are more informative (87 percent) and reliable (83 percent) than general business sources," according to the study.

VendorGuru.com presents businesses with a number of companies offering CRM software and IP telephony as well as a research process.

"VendorGuru.com has performed comprehensive research to identify the most esteemed and innovative companies in CRM software and IP telephony," Managing Producer of VendorGuru.com Tara Moynihan said.

The company connects businesses with CRM software and IP telephony vendors such as Nortel, Packet8, Sage ACT!, Pivotal, Nuance and UCN.

Britain's Daily Record is reporting that "one in five bosses never take a coffee break," and as a result "staff… feel under pressure to also cut down on breaks." A separate study also found that offices are "happier places" with regular breaks:

"Researchers at Cambridge University found that socializing over a coffee with colleagues can lead to improved company culture as well as better performance in work-related tasks," the online journal reported

Dr. Brendan Burchell, who led the study, said "breaks at work are hugely important for employees' well-being."

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 Frank Sinatra's Come Dance With Me album:

More news from Oraclestock, which should be winding down here, I can hear ol' Max Yazgur getting the combine fired up…

Sun Microsystems Inc. has announced that Swiss telecommunications carrier Swisscom Mobile has selected Sun Fire T2000 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System and the Sun Java Identity Management Suite to enable its 1,145 retail stores to connect with the company's Siebel CRM system from Oracle and point-of-sale applications.

Swisscom officials say the move will let the stores provision services at the point of sale, making it easier for customers to take advantage of more and better services faster.

According to Christian Kattenbusch, project leader for CRM and identity management at Swisscom Mobile, its Siebel CRM project is "now one of the largest Siebel implementations in the world." Sun used to play a relatively minor role in all that, supplying large SMP servers to run the Siebel 7 deployment, but Kattenbusch says that recently "Sun's role has grown steadily," to the point where he now considers Sun "a key strategic ally."

The new Sun infrastructure components will further expand the capabilities of the Siebel CRM system, according to Kattenbusch: "For half the price of the old environment, we will get a substantial improvement in scalability and availability," he said, adding that Swisscom is "extremely impressed" with the performance of the T2000 server and wants to consolidate other machines to the new Sun systems.

The Sun Java Identity Management Suite is helping Swisscom Mobile simplify secure access to the corporate CRM system and POS applications, according to Kattenbusch, since the Sun Java Identity Management Suite's comprehensive user authentication and single sign-on capabilities allow the retail stores to immediately connect to the company's CRM and POS applications.

Swisscom officials say it's working: Since implementing the Sun Java Identity Management Suite, they say, "retail outlets have decreased the cost of a sale and reduced the training requirements of shop staff for each new service launch." Customer service levels have also increased and -- here's the kicker -- can be "easily measured," they say, with a satisfaction indicator within the Swisscom Mobile shop.

Integrated Software Development Ltd., a vendor of enterprise software aimed at small-and medium-sized enterprises, has announced that Trilogical, an Israel-based integrator of cellular and GPS-based management systems, has expanded the range of Benefit modules incorporated into the system it has developed for the Israel Defense Forces.

Trilogical is an IT vendor specializing in the development and integration of cellular and GPS-based IT systems that enhance functionality of client operations, including fleet management, field service management, monitoring and control systems, security and telemetry applications. It develops and incorporates products for specific IDF field maintenance and service units based on Benefit modules.

Trilogical's new products for the IDF will now include Benefit's web-based modules that allow operations at remote workstations with no need for application installation, automatic SMS service that notifies field personnel of new tasks and assignments, and automatic downloading capability of files from the central database to technicians' PDAs in the field.

CRM veteran Sandra Hoffman has been appointed Chair of the AeA's SE Council Board of Directors. AeA bills itself "the nation's largest trade association for the technology industry."

The AeA's SE Council serves the states of Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. 

Currently Hoffman is serving as "CIO-in-Residence" with the Advanced Technology Development Center. Headquartered at Georgia Tech. ATDC is a science and technology incubator that helps Georgia entrepreneurs launch and build successful companies.  She is also the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for Turknett Leadership Group. 

Hoffman has over 25 years of manufacturing experience focused ERP and CRM experience and has held senior management positions in software development, quality assurance, technical and professional services, client management and customer support operations.  In addition to 14 years with IBM, she has held executive positions at Simplex and MAPICS, where she held the dual role of CIO and Chief People Officer.

Submitted for your consideration: Callidus Software Inc., a vendor of Enterprise Incentive Management, has announced that Telus Communications obtained a 103 percent and 3,316 percent ROI by the end of the first and second year after deployment through TrueComp software.

First Coffee isn't saying these numbers have been verified independently, just that these are rather attention-grabbing numbers.

This ROI was achieved, Telus officials say, "through increased revenues and reduced incentive management administration costs." Company officials say they recouped their investment in TrueComp software in under six months.

In 2003 Telus was using multiple incentive management systems that did not offer the automation, real-time reporting and modeling they wanted. Company officials say they were "markedly inhibited" by the lack of a state-of-the-art enterprise incentive management system. That led to the purchase of Callidus TrueComp software in 2003.

Tanya Dorbyk, VP of Sales Performance at Telus Communications, said the thinking at the time was to establish "a critical corporate objective that our premier sales organization needed to have reliable, real-time information to drive performance and high productivity aligned to corporate targets."

So the eye-popping ROI was achieved thusly: Telus reduced incentive overpayments by 60 percent, saving the company $2.4 and $2.7 million in year 1 and year 2 after TrueComp Enterprise deployment. Specifically, using Callidus TrueComp enterprise software, Telus Communications was able to increase sales performance, achieving annual growth of 2.0 percent in 2004 and 4.25 percent in 2005 "due to TrueComp," company officials say.

They increased their time devoted to sales, recovering 17,730 days of additional selling time the first and 52,500 days the second year and cut shadow accounting from 40 to 5 hours per salesperson per month while increasing cross-selling and up-selling and getting an additional 572 sales transactions annually by the second year.

Telus officials say the product also helped cut compensation management costs -- specifically to cut administration costs by $560,000 annually after two years' deployment.

It also helped reduce compensation error rate and improved dispute management "while payees grew from 300 to 1,000 over a two year period, compensation disputes decreased from 3,775 to 1,750" for  a 53.6 percent reduction, and the average time to resolve a dispute was cut by 500 percent, from 40 to 8 hours.

News flash from British Web analytics company ClickTracks: Online activity will increase soon due to something called Christmas.

"In some cases, the holiday season can represent as much as 50 percent of a retailer's annual sales," says Michael Stebbins, ClickTracks vice president of marketing. Therefore, ClickTracks is "discounting two of its flagship products" to give online retailers "extra selling power."
Retail industry analysts predict a 23 per cent increase in Q4 online sales, to $33 billion in the 2006 Christmas buying season in the US.

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 "Rock 'n' Roll Records (Ain't Selling This Year)" by The Supersuckers:

Remember Daylight Savings tomorrow, spring forwards fall back. Don't show up to church early, enjoy that extra hour of sleep.

OnSite has announced the release of its "POS for NetSuite" product along with its acceptance into NetSuite's SuiteFlex Developer Program.

OnSite has used NetSuite's SuiteFlex platform to extend and enhance NetSuite to meet the point-of-sale needs of retailers. NetSuite holds such company data as customer information, orders, invoices, website transactions, shipping records, time tracking, and payroll data -- applications that are built on it using SuiteFlex.

Retailers using POS for NetSuite achieve visibility on up-to-the-minute point-of-sale data and can also access this same information via the Internet. Additionally, NetSuite likes to bill itself as a full-fledged ERP + CRM suite, hence "all non POS business activities are managed through the single NetSuite Web-based application," OnSite officials say:

"With support of the latest USB POS peripherals from HandHeld Products, Star Micronics and APG, POS for NetSuite provides state-of-the-art customer interaction and transaction processing. Built from the ground-up as a pure 'for NetSuite' product, there is no product overlap or additional learning curve versus NetSuite."

POS for NetSuite is currently in select beta status and is planned for release next month. At this time, OnSite is providing demos for prospective NetSuite customers.

In other NetSuite news Marketworks, a multi-channel e-commerce vendor, has announced it has become a NetSuite Solution Provider. Marketworks will now offer NetSuite value added resellers and customers with multi-channel e-commerce solutions to drive new revenue opportunities through major online marketplaces, search engines, and shopping comparison sites.

Marketworks provides NetSuite VARs and customers with an on-demand multi-channel e-commerce product that is now integrated with the NetSuite platform. Its e-commerce engine is now combined with NetSuite's Web-based business application platform in a product being pitched to the middle market.

"NetSuite is considered the leading on-demand business software for managing accounting, ERP, CRM, and e-commerce functions," said Ken Powell, president and CEO, Marketworks. "The revenue growth potential for VARs and customers alike are attractive for all involved."

With online shopping "more fragmented than ever, businesses are searching for a comprehensive product that enables their products to be found by shoppers regardless of how they shop on the Internet," added Powell.

As I said when this World Series started that the Tigers would win in five I guess I'd better keep my day job and not get into betting mortgages in Vegas, but I'd like to remind any gloating Cardinal fans that in 1968 the Cardinals led the Tigers 3-1 and went on to lose the Series to Detroit, and in 1985 the Cardinals led the Royals 3-1 before losing. So go ahead and order the champagne, but you might not want to bother icing it down just yet.

Bluespring Software, a vendor of Business Process Management software, has announced that it's joining Microsoft, IBM & BEA as featured speakers at the Object Management Group Workshop titled "Building a Service Oriented Architecture with BPM and MDA."

Karl Treier, Chief Technology Officer of Bluespring, speaks on "the specific need for a segmented approach to standards better capable of addressing the differences between the 4 primary types of BPM technology," which he identifies as people-centric BPM software, document-centric BPM software, integration-centric BPM software and application-embedded BPM software.

"As standards continue to evolve, it is important that we recognize the fundamental differences in each of the four types of BPM software," said Treier. "While some overlap exists, they are not interchangeable technologies as some would have you believe. They solve very different business problems and require proper attention be paid to the distinctions."

CDC Corporation, vendor of enterprise software applications and online games and parent company for CRM vendor Pivotal, has announced that, based on preliminary financial data, the company expects total revenues for the third quarter ended September 30, 2006 to be in the range of $77.2 million to $78.0 million, an increase of approximately 25 percent over the same period a year ago.

CEO Peter Yip said the company is "reconfirming our full-year guidance for 2006."

The company's estimates for 2006, published on July 17, 2006, place total revenues in the range of $300 million to $305 million and adjusted net income in the range of $31.6 million to $32.8 million.

Harte-Hanks, Inc. has reported third quarter 2006 diluted earnings per share of $0.35 on revenues of $294.7 million. These results compare to diluted earnings per share of $0.34 on $281.7 million in revenue for the third quarter of 2005.

Third quarter 2006 results include stock-based compensation of $1.9 million (1.5 cents per share) as the result of the adoption by the company of SFAS No. 123R for periods beginning after 12/31/2005.

During the quarter Harte-Hanks Trillium Software announced the integration between its TS Quality data quality software and the latest version of mySAP Customer Relationship Management, (mySAP CRM) 2005.

The Trillium Software Data Quality Connector is designed to provide integration of data quality processes so that organizations using mySAP CRM can instantly check quality of their customer data and match customer records online, in real time.

The San Antonio-based firm also acquired AberdeenGroup, a Boston-based provider of technology market research. AberdeenGroup gathers market information and prepares reports based on research and benchmarking data on 17 different business areas, including retail and financial services, sales and marketing, human resources, service, and supply-chain management and procurement.

The purchase of AberdeenGroup will enable Harte-Hanks to "expand its demand generation offerings," according to Harte-Hanks officials.

Good word of advice to Aussie travel agents: TA Fastrack CEO Adrian Caruso says travel agents must constantly reinvent themselves in order to survive under this environment. Agents need to invest in customer relationship management (CRM) and customer loyalty programs "in order to keep their existing customers," he said.

Agents also need to consider re-investing in efficient technology, marketing and websites rather than retailing in expensive locations. Caruso noted that "most travel agents in the United States and Canada are located in relatively low-rent locations," where they rely on direct marketing and the Web to bring in new business.

He cited a recent study of Asian tourism operations showing that successful agents had made cross selling, up-selling and customer relationships a priority. To that end, agents need to focus on "fine-tuning customer relationship skills, their own sales skills and destination knowledge," he said.

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 Johnny Cash's At Folsom Prison. It's one of the rare times you hear a celebrity interacting with us commoners without being patronizing or condescending. Johnny could've been pulled from the audience as well as he understands and connects with the guys listening to him, it's a world away from plastic überfake Barbra Streisand haughtily lecturing her audiences:

Ross Systems, a vendor of enterprise software solutions and a division of CDC Software, a subsidiary of the Chinese-owned CDC Corporation, has announced that Guida's Milk and Ice Cream, a dairy based in New England, has installed Ross' supply chain management (SCM) product.

Guida's needed to improve its forecasting capabilities to meet one of its largest customer's scan-based trading mandate, improve operational efficiencies and drive cost savings and competitive advantage.

Guida's looked at Ross SCM as a way to address two critical business issues -- firstly the company needed a forecasting application that would handle all of the inherent variability in the business, capable of replenishing orders based on true demand versus previous order quantities. Without a more efficient method, Guida's would continue to face overstock issues, as well as frequent stockouts, resulting in costly special deliveries in order to keep customer commitments.

Secondly, Guida's needed a way to meet the SBT mandate set by one of its largest customers, a major grocery chain. SBT -- the process of using point-of-sale scan data to manage payment, promotion and replenishment of products -- was new to Guida's.

"Guida's' future with this very large customer hinged on the success of Ross SCM and our new SBT capabilities," said Joel Bartolome, IT manager for Guida's.

Guida's implemented Ross SCM within 45 days during its busiest season to meet the SBT mandate, while its competitor scrambled and failed to meet the deadline. In addition, with Ross SCM, shipped orders reflect true customer demand, saving Guida's more than $4,000 a month by eliminating the need for special deliveries based on inaccurate forecasting.

Interesting report from industry observer Renee Ferguson, attending Oraclestock '06: There was no meeting schedule handed out to press attending the event, because "there are no executive meetings scheduled for press members at OpenWorld 2006." As Ferguson rightly wonders, "What's Oracle got to hide?"

First Coffee has never attended an industry event like Oraclestock and not spoken with executives, and Ferguson hasn't either: "Huh? No executive meetings? Isn't this what these conferences are all about? Getting together, in person, with a company's executives to discuss the news of the day, product road maps, the company's vision for the future?"

Most of the time, as Ferguson says, "it's back-to-back meetings with executives -- and customers -- to the point of exhaustion." Evidently Oraclestock is offering only an executive Q&A, hardly sufficient to understand the executives' underlying thinking or ideas for the future. One PR flack told Ferguson it was because company execs were too busy seeing customers. One wonders why this is the only time of year they can do that, like why the weekend your mother-in-law comes to visit is the one weekend you really need to go help your friend repaint his ice fishing cabin.

Like any reporter Ferguson lets her imagination run rampant when denied the facts: "So that leaves me (happily, I might add) to suss out the news that isn't the news at this event. In other words, what's really going on that Oracle can't make a single executive available for an interview? Are there too many customer meetings packed into this five-day event to manage a few media questions? If so, what does that say about Oracle's commitment to the customer the rest of the year?"

Maybe, as she suggests darkly, "there were questions Oracle didn't want to answer, like what's the real end date for Applications Unlimited, when the payment for extended services outweighs the cost of upgrading to Fusion applications? Or what's going on with all those acquisitions outside PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel?" Maybe they don't want to sit on the hot seat and answer embarrassing questions about Fusion.

First Coffee doesn't know why Oracle execs have chosen to break with standard practice and not meet with journalists one-on-one at Oraclestock. Like Ferguson I can speculate, but like Ferguson, that's all I can do. And believe me, reporters can speculate -- in print -- much worse scenarios than are probably actually the case. This is how rumors start -- "I read on one Web site that Oracle is refusing to talk about Fusion…"

Plus reporters can be as petty and spiteful as anyone when not shown what they regard as the proper obeisance due someone of their exalted calling. I speak from experience here.

Integrated Software Development Ltd., a vendor of enterprise software aimed at small- and medium-sized enterprises, has announced that Tactivision, an Israeli communications company, has purchased the entire range of Benefit modules.

Tactivision is an Israeli IT company specializing in machine-to-man communications for the past decade. Company officials say they have purchased the entire range of Benefit modules and plans to operate the software as a comprehensive Customer Relations Management system.

Tactivision provides online support for computer networks and provides IT consulting services to its clients on a large range of IT issues including security, networks, software development, Web sites, hardware, smart telephony systems, and many other fields. ISD also signed a distribution agreement with Tactivision, that allows the company to distribute, provide training and customize Benefit modules for client to which Tactivision acts as a consultant or outsourced service provider.

"For the last ten years, Tactivision has maintained an impressive annual growth rate of 20 percent, not the least due to its very flexible CRM policy, and a system for customizing products to the specific needs of its clients, mainly professional service companies," notes Moti Maram, CEO of ISD. "Our distribution agreement with Tactivision is an excellent opportunity for ISD to capture the off-the-shelf CRM software solutions market in Israel and we expect the agreement to show excellent results within a short time."

Total CRM software revenue grew by 13.7 percent in 2005 to $5.7 billion, according to a recent industry report by Gartner Inc. As buyers recognize CRM as a key driver of customer acquisition and retention, continued market growth is expected with a compound annual growth rate of 11.2% until 2010, with North America as the leading source of small- to mid-sized business application software revenues.

Surado Solutions, another CRM vendor to SMBs, has announced the support of Computer Telephony Integration with ShoreTel IP PBX telephone systems.

Providing out of the box integration is critical for any business using CRM systems today, Surado officials think, so towards that end they company has increased its integration feature set with third party applications and systems. 

With CTI integration to ShoreTel telephone systems, when an incoming call is directed to an extension, Surado CRM CTI application residing on the computer is automatically alerted and pops up the Surado CRM Contact Screen for the person calling in. A variety of features are then available to the end user -- to continue working on the Surado CRM system, to put the contact on hold or to transfer to another extension.

Sundip R. Doshi, Surado CRM CEO said as more and more businesses move towards an IP based telephone system, "having tight integration between telephone systems and CRM applications is critical."

Surado plans to release seamless integration to other popular IP based telephone systems in the next year as demand for CRM and CTI continues to increase.

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 Ultimate Collection by The Supremes, the great '60s band -- more #1 hits than The Beatles or anyone in the '60s -- unfortunately hijacked into a vehicle for Diana Ross's ravenous ego:

The Chinese CRM vendor CDC Corporation has announced today that its portal business unit has launched Google's click-to-play video in the China market via the China.com's English Channel.

Google's click-to-play video ads were launched this July as a new way to help Google's advertisers reach their target customers. On the English Channel of China.com, Google's click-to-play video ads will be accessible to both large and small advertisers and will provide brand advertisers with a richer and more engaging format to communicate their messages.

"Google's click-to-play video ads are user-initiated, so that the quality of the user experience is preserved. As a result, advertisers get more engaged users and qualified leads," said Johnny Chou, President of Sales and Business Development, Greater China for Google.

Callidus Software Inc., a vendor which specializes in the CRM sub-field of Enterprise Incentive Management software, has announced financial results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2006.

Total third quarter revenues were $17.4 million, essentially flat compared to the third quarter 2005 and to the prior quarter. Third quarter license revenues were $5.8 million, equal to the third quarter 2005 and down slightly from the prior quarter. Third quarter maintenance and service revenues were $11.6 million, an increase of three percent compared to the third quarter 2005 and a slight decrease compared to the prior quarter.

On a year-to-date basis, total revenues are up 18 percent from $44.2 million to $52.0 million compared to 2005. Year-to-date license revenues are up 76 percent from $10.6 million to $18.7 million compared to 2005. Year-to-date hosted on-demand bookings were $6.1 million, compared to zero in 2005.

Year-to-date license revenues plus on-demand bookings totaled $24.8 million, an increase of 134 percent compared to the equivalent period in 2005.

Panviva, a vendor of performance support products, has announced the general availability release of SupportPoint in the US market.

SupportPoint is a specialized knowledge base product that provides fast, targeted access to structured documentation about complex systems, processes, and products to help employees execute tasks and processes correctly. The latest release of SupportPoint offers a new browser-based viewer to provide remote and off-site users with anytime, anywhere access to context-specific knowledge.

Effraim Herskovic, Vice President of Panviva, noted that training and retraining "can be a costly and time-consuming effort, as is help-desk and post-launch support for new applications. SupportPoint offers an alternative, building training into the job by delivering context-specific knowledge to users at the moment-of-need -- and providing on-going support in a knowledge base that's current."

The product is designed to document and deliver knowledge in a simplified, standardized way, and "accelerate user adoption and compliance for enterprise applications like ERP and CRM across an organization," according to company officials.

SupportPoint is also being used by contact centers around the world to reduce upfront customer service agent training, and put, as company officials describe it, "easy-to-use, self-service support at agents' fingertips."

Along with the addition of a browser-based viewer, SupportPoint's new features include built-in access to the SupportPoint Portal, an online library of tools for audit logging, license management, downloads, and more, as well as Active Directory support, for secure single sign-on and user authentication capabilities.

There's Oraclestock going on now, of course, but Epicor's also having a company picnic, called Epicor Perspectives 2006, and today the company's announced the introduction of Epicor Information Worker, a new desktop productivity product that delivers Epicor's enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications on the 2007 Microsoft Office system, providing information workers with improved access to business data.

Unveiled to more than 2,100 attendees at Epicor Perspectives 2006, the company's annual customer conference, Epicor IW  is built using service-oriented architecture principles with Microsoft .NET- based technologies, Epicor IW uses the Microsoft Office system to "enhance the user experience of an Epicor application with familiar desktop productivity tools," according to company officials.

Using Epicor IW, users are able to synchronize Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 contacts, appointments and tasks with an Epicor application along with other items such as customer information, sales history, inventory levels and production schedule for offline access. A simple matter of searching and dragging Epicor ERP information from the Epicor Task Pane to fields on a Microsoft Office Word 2007 document or Microsoft Office Excel 2007 spreadsheet is all that is needed, according to company officials.

Saving the document to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 then initiates a workflow process to create a transaction in Epicor along with the link to the document managed by Office SharePoint Server 2007.

"Epicor IW is an excellent example of the way in which the next generation of business applications will be delivered," thinks Sanjay Parthasarathy, corporate vice president of the Developer and Platform Evangelism Group at Microsoft.

Speaking of Oraclestock, Cognos has been busily issuing press releases from there, camped out in the mud with quick trips to the VW Microbus -- the one with the flowers and peace signs, yeah, that one -- for, ah, medications, as they wait for The Who's set. Here's another one:

Business intelligence vendor Cognos has announced that Steak n Shake, one of the largest and oldest restaurant chains in the U.S., has selected Cognos 8 Business Intelligence as its enterprise standard for performance reporting, scorecarding and dashboarding.

With more than 440 restaurants across the country, Steak n Shake needed "a centralized performance management platform that was robust enough to deliver a single version of the truth across the chain via a flexible set of standard and customized reporting capabilities," according to Cognos officials, and chose Cognos 8 BI.

The product offers such business intelligence functionality as including reporting, analysis, dashboarding and scorecarding through a single product, simplifying deployment and use. "Specifically," Steak n Shake officials say, "executives will capitalize on Cognos scorecards and dashboards to measure such key performance values as leadership, guest satisfaction and operational margins. A consolidated set of daily reports will also be circulated to help store managers gauge latest operational results and compare company-wide rankings."

Steve Pruden, senior project manager at Steak n Shake, said given the "critical nature" of supporting more than 440 restaurants, "we had to ensure that the system would deliver value to our store operators. With Cognos, managers can get in to the system fast, get the information they need, make the appropriate decisions with full confidence in the data, then get back to doing what they do best."

Who're these guys on stage now, The Keef Hartley Band? Never heard of them. Have we missed CCR? Man, if I hear any more of that Ravi Shankar sitar droney-drone I'll need to visit that dealer in the tent next door again.

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 "Functional" by Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane:

And a big happy birthday to Bob Kane, born in the Bronx in 1916, the man who created Batman as a way for his employer, DC Comics, to compete with Superman. First Coffee wasn't into comic books as a kid, no more so than any other relatively normal kid, but I always liked Batman, the cheesy TV show aside, because you could think about being Batman -- he didn't fly or really have any other special powers.

Pivotal Corporation, a vendor of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products and a division of CDC Software, a subsidiary of CDC Corporation, has announced that Boca Developers, one of South Florida's largest and most successful builders of luxury condominiums, has implemented Pivotal CRM from CDC Software.

By the way, if you want a great novel about South Florida real estate types and you've read all of Carl Hiaasen's books -- if you haven't read all Carl Hiaasen's novels that moves to the top of your To Do On The Train list, by the way -- get John D. MacDonald's Condominium.

Selling luxury, multi-family waterfront properties in South Florida, Boca Developers saw its annual sales jump from $400 million in 2004 to $600 million in 2005 and promptly realized hey, our methods of manually capturing and reporting critical sales data are inconsistent and inefficient and, like, so completely lame.

Like many builders, Boca Developers works with numerous sales offices, and of course everybody and their brother needs their own cotton-pickin' method of capturing and reporting data. The company also works with sales brokers, who aren't direct company employees and who lack incentive to follow a specific sales methodology or data collection scheme. Repeat after me, campers: "If there ain't no incentive…"

So Boca implemented Pivotal CRM to improve sales processes and create the marketing, sales and data infrastructure that would basically get everyone on the same page data-wise.

So with Pivotal CRM, all of Boca Developer's customer, prospect and lead information is in a single, centralized system so that a common, consistent and consolidated view of their data is accessible to a variety of different users. Heck, Vito and his cousin Guido, not unknown characters in South Florida construction projects, probably have their own CRM these days, too.

"Using Pivotal across the organization has not only saved time, it has also eliminated a lot of confusion and increased our confidence in terms of understanding our sales activity," said William Davis, systems delivery manager of Boca Developers.

Company officials say the CRM system has performed the way they hoped it would -- Boca Developers has been able to accelerate and simplify a variety of steps in the sales process just by having a clearer process and critical information more readily available.

"The ability to access all customer information and pinpoint their stage in the sales cycle – when you need another signature, another deposit, and so on – and being able to control it from a central location has become invaluable," said Davis.

Davis also cited the scalability and reliability of Pivotal CRM as major benefits. "We knew ahead of time that Pivotal would support our need for scale, and it has proven to be very stable and very thorough in its end-to-end processing," said Davis.

Smart Online Inc., a vendor of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for the small business market, has announced the release of its enhanced Web-based Group Calendar software.

Sorry, First Coffee doesn't know of any novels written about the on-demand CRM group calendar software field. I don't know why there'd be such a gross oversight, it's not like the world of South Florida real estate, with its beautiful locations, shady characters, Mafiosos, beautiful women, eco-activists, guns, diamonds, Jewish retirees from New York and dashing lawyers filing and defending multimillion dollar lawsuits is any more exciting to the average reader than on-demand CRM group calendar software. I guess it's because in on-demand CRM group calendar software it's relatively rarer for pet poodles to get eaten by alligators in the back yard than it is in South Florida real estate.

Anyway, this less literarily-appealing application is included in Smart Online's monthly subscription for its entire suite of software and offers a real-time view of daily, weekly, or monthly events and activities.

"Small businesses are often challenged with managing their daily activities, as they cannot always afford to pay upfront for software and may lack the IT staff required to set up and maintain traditional calendar software," said Michael Nouri, president & CEO, Smart Online Inc., pointing out that while currently, no, the software does not offer a feature protecting poodles from getting eaten by alligators, if customers demanded such a feature Smart Online would do its durndest to satisfy that customer demand.

"Smart Online's upgraded Software-as-a-Service Group Calendar application enables our customers to share their calendar with others in their company, and access our entire suite of software with such applications as Salesforce Automation (SFA), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Contact Management, Accounting, and Human Resource Management. This allows a small business owner full visibility of their day-to-day activities and control of their business data," he said.

Smart Online's enhanced Calendar software allows users to compare their own calendar and the calendar of a colleague side-by-side, the Quick Add and Quick View features allow users to schedule appointments and view information without going to a different page. color coding events allows users to visually distinguish between types of events on their calendar, the Pending Invitation feature allows users to view their outstanding invitations (as well as the more mundane ones), Enhanced Day and Week views include more information on each event and the Electronic Reinforced Steel Fence feature is one tough nut for alligators to solve if they're hungry for a Fluffy dinner.

CRM vendor Epicor Software Corporation, which sells primarily to the midmarket and divisions of larger firms, has announced that based on preliminary financial data, the company expects total revenue for the third quarter ended September 30, 2006 to be between $95 million and $96 million, exceeding the company's earlier provided third quarter revenue guidance.

Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share for the third quarter is also expected to exceed the company's guidance.

On July 26 the company announced total revenues for the third quarter were expected to be approximately $93 million, with non-GAAP earnings of $0.17 per diluted share based on a weighted average share count of approximately 57 million shares.

George Klaus, chairman and CEO of Epicor, credited the  preliminary results' performance to "solid organic growth, complemented by the contribution from the CRS Retail Systems business, which we acquired in December 2005."

It's a bit early for this sort of announcement, but as Klaus said "With our annual customer conference -- Epicor Perspectives 2006 -- beginning this morning in Las Vegas, we felt it was important to provide, in advance, our preliminary revenue and earnings results."

The Company expects to report consolidated financial results for its third quarter after the close of market tomorrow. The company will host a conference call to discuss its financial results at 2:00 P.M. Pacific Time.

Epicor was named one of FORTUNE magazine's 100 Fastest-Growing Companies in 2006.

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 Talking Heads' "Life During Wartime," you know, "This ain't no party/ This ain't no disco:"

Happy Sugar Holiday from here in Istanbul, the three-day holiday ending Ramadan, where Muslims aren't allowed to eat, drink anything or smoke from sunup to sundown. Couldn't have come at a better time for the cab driver we had yesterday, I haven't seen a nicotine fit that bad in a long time.

Oh, and happy Labor Day weekend to all New Zealanders. Um, any holidays I've missed, please let me know and we'll get the problem corrected.

WhatCounts, Inc., a leader in comprehensive e-communication programs, today unveiled version 6.0 of its robust e-Communications Suite.

Company officials say enhancements have been made to the WhatCounts Conversion Tracker and the numerous application programming interfaces (APIs) for superior integration with CRM systems, marketing databases, and ecommerce systems.

The updated WhatCounts platform has an interface and flexible systems integration, as it's being sold primarily for targeted e-mail marketing, personalized content syndication via RSS, strategic coaching services, and interactive marketing using blogs, polls and surveys.

Content publishers, retailers and organizations use the WhatCounts e-Communications Suite "to improve brand loyalty and customer interaction," according to company officials. Its e-Communications Suite has been integrated with partner Pivotal Veracity's eDelivery Tracker for per-ISP inbox deliverability analytics.

Integration of Pivotal Veracity allows WhatCounts to offer what company officials describe as "a way to track whether messages are being delivered to the inbox, spam folder or deleted by recipient ISPs without their knowledge."

Integrated platforms are "the future of the online marketing industry," said Deirdre Baird, Chief Executive Officer of Pivotal Veracity. "Our integration with WhatCounts provides marketers with the advanced analytics required to truly optimize the delivery of e-communications campaigns and ensure messages are reaching inboxes across more than 300 domains in 68 countries."

David Geller, founder and Chief Executive Officer of WhatCounts, says he's "pleased with the maturity of our e-Communications Suite 6.0 release… permission-based communications continue to show a proven ROI for marketers who maintain highly-targeted conversations with their subscribers."

The e-Communications Suite 6.0 is available through the WhatCounts hosted Web-based application or via the proprietary Broadcaster pre-configured hardware appliance.

Business Objects, a vendor of business intelligence products, has announced the general availability of BusinessObjects Data Quality XI for Siebel Customer Relationship Management Applications.

The new product, powered by Business Objects Data Quality XI Release 2, provides a single integrated data quality platform that scales across operating and application environments. Now users of Oracle's Siebel CRM Applications can access data for their customer relationship management initiatives.

Data Quality XI for Siebel CRM Applications offers a centralized business rule repository that allows companies to create business rules and apply them enterprise-wide, since a service-oriented architecture allows multiple departments within an organization to access and share the business rule repository.

The product essentially consolidates data from disparate sources and using a consistent data quality process, giving real-time access to information.

Business Objects and Oracle have a long-standing partnership, and Business Objects is one of Oracle's top ten global ISVs. Business Objects products are embedded by Oracle across all current PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, and JD Edwards World applications, and resold by Oracle with PeopleSoft EPM. In addition, Business Objects supports all major components of Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Chicago-based Sonoma Partners, a vendor of IT services for mid-size and enterprise companies, has announced CRM Elements for Real Estate, a sales and customer relationship management tool for condominium developers, home-builders and real estate marketing companies.

The customizable software is designed to "help capture greater sales revenue, close deals more quickly, keep customer databases up to date and perform thorough analyses by providing real-time reporting," according to company officials.

According to Mike Snyder, principal of Sonoma Partners, the software probably offers the greatest benefits to developers and agents managing sales for multiple property sites with 50 or more units per property by offering what he calls "a more sophisticated means of capturing and updating large amounts of data."

The product "helps users manage pricing and inventory in real time with configurable sales alerts that notify you when unit sales cross predefined thresholds," explained Snyder.

"As a result, a user knows instantly when it's time to adjust prices, saving the builder from leaving money on the table," said Snyder.

In addition to real-time reporting, CRM Elements for Real Estate can be customized to send scheduled e-mail results of sales statistics on a weekly, daily or hourly basis to help users spot consumer trends.

"Nearly 90 percent of the prospective clients I speak with rely on either Excel or Outlook programs to keep track of sales leads and monitor the sales process," said Snyder. "These programs help organize data, but they don't necessarily help you analyze it. CRM Elements for Real Estate is designed to not only keep information organized, but also to help an executive analyze his or her marketing tactics."

The software is built on top of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform, accessible from Microsoft Outlook and the Internet. "Customers can get up and running quickly without a lot of end user training," said Snyder.

Sonoma Partners has customized its Microsoft CRM Elements for Real Estate software for a number of national real estate firms including Chicago-based Equity Residential, Dallas-based Fairfield Residential and New York-based Athena Group.

Also, Florida real estate firm EWM Realtors has selected SharperAgent to provide a marketing system. "We were in search of technology to make it easier for our sales associates to prospect, build value-added relationships, and grow customers for life," said EWM president, Ron Shuffield.

SharperAgent, a vendor of CRM and e-marketing suites for the real estate and mortgage industries, created Max's Marketing Magic specifically for EWM Realtors to build and retain client relationships.

Happy birthday Michael Crichton, who's written the definitive treatment of global warming in State of Fear. Great Crichton story from The Writer's Almanac: He wanted to study writing at Harvard, "but his writing style was continually criticized by his teachers and he earned a C average. He decided it was the school, not he, that was in error. So for the next assignment, he retyped an essay by George Orwell and submitted it as his own. The professor did not catch his plagiarism, and gave Crichton a B minus."

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 Frank Sinatra's Come Dance With Me album:

Great item from The Writer's Almanac this morning: "It was on this day in 1879 that the inventor Thomas Edison finally struck upon the key to inventing a workable electric light in his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. He started off using platinum wire, just as everyone had before him, but after more than a year of frustration, he decided to try carbonized cotton thread. At 1:30 in the morning on this day in 1879, he hooked a carbon filament up to an electric circuit and it glowed from 1:30 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. the following afternoon."

And just think: With no workable electric lights there wouldn't be any 24/7 outsourced call centers.

First Coffee says the Tigers in five. Cardinals'll steal a game in St. Louis.

The Reynolds and Reynolds Company and First Advantage CREDCO, a wholly owned subsidiary of First Advantage Corporation, have announced a partnership to deliver pre-qualified consumer prospect leads to automobile dealerships in the U.S. With the leads, dealerships can efficiently target in-market customers and sell more cars.

As part of the agreement Reynolds will provide a certified data interface that offers direct access between its flagship CRM product, Contact Management, and CREDCO's Lead Prospector Solutions, a suite of integrated consumer leads for automotive dealers.

Reynolds will also provide a certified data interface to those customer relationship management (CRM) providers in the Reynolds Certified Interface (RCI) program.

Dealers can have these leads delivered directly to their Reynolds' Contact Management application, from a participating CRM product in the RCI program, or request to have them sent in another manner to the dealership. This lets dealers focus on showing cars and closing deals, not generating prospect leads.

Which, let's face it, is dealers doing what they do best. Generating prospect leads isn't what car dealers are best at… sitting at a stoplight the dealer turns to the guy in the car next to him, "Hey chief, you ever think about getting rid of that pile and getting a real car…"

First Advantage CREDCO delivers what are called "Lead Prospector Targeted" leads, described by company officials as where the targeted lead generation product uses predictive and segmentation technology to deliver prospect leads that enable dealers to target the right customer with the right promotion at the right time.

There's also Lead Prospector Bankruptcy, a delightful little predatory lead collection system where the CREDCO system can access Chapter 7 bankruptcy information in a dealer's market, up to 10 days earlier than any other source. Dealers get the advantage of early notification.

CRM providers in the Reynolds Certified Interface program will be able to request the standard interface to CREDCO's Lead Prospector Solutions.

Hi David--

I wanted to make you aware of Avectra -- an MMS (membership management software) provider based in the D.C. area. Avectra provides CRM for member-based groups -- associations, alumni groups, etc. (9 out of 10 adults belong to some kind of member-based group).

The need for a strong CRM component is clear for these groups, but like a lot of small businesses, budgets and resources are tight. Most of these groups are in it for the noble cause -- from the American Academy of Family Physicians dedicated to training doctors to the Atlanta Ski Club managing local skiers.

Avectra has its flagship product, netFORUM and an OnDemand version.

Is that true? Nine out of ten American adults belong to "some kind of member-based group?" Wow. I guess if First Coffee's college is still sending him letters hitting him up for donations he's on their list and is probably counted as a "member," although he doesn't consider himself as having joined anything but the "got the degree which I worked and paid through the nose for the first time around" club.

It seems to be the day for automotive CRM, as VinStickers, LLC has announced it has formed an alliance with AES Consulting, Inc. This alliance enables AES Consulting to offer the VinStickers line of MotoSnap ILM and CRM products to their Automotive Dealerships Clients.

Dealers will now be able to use the VinStickers Suite of Inventory Management and Marketing tools designed around the Training and Consulting Solutions that AES provides. AES will offer these under the MotoSnap brand so dealers may quickly identify and use these proprietary software and services.

(Ever notice that you almost never see "utilize," "leverage," "solution" or other such useless wordoids on First Coffee, words that mean absolutely nothing "use" and "product" don't mean? You're welcome.)

VinStickers provides software and services for automotive retail dealerships throughout the US. Their Internet marketing modules allow dealerships simple deployment and management of content-driven initiatives, company officials says, "providing an ability to publish their inventory directly to portals, Web sites, intranets, extranets, and other MotoSnap and VinManager applications."

These give dealerships with tools to communicate with prospects, manage daily activities and, hey, if it all works, sell more vehicles. What makes MotoSnap unique is the integration between dealer inventory and lead response management, company officials maintain, claiming this is "a feature not found in competitive ILM and CRM products."

AES plans to deliver these products to their existing and future dealership clients to round out their proprietary consulting services.

Transcend Communications, Inc. announced that it has signed an agreement with Scherer Brothers Lumber Company, Maple Grove, Minnesota, to provide an IP Telephony product enterprise-wide.

"This convergence project will allow us to improve customer satisfaction by providing an excellent telephone experience, realize workgroup productivity increases and provide meaningful reporting that helps us manage our communication KPI's," said Marjorie Arnold, I/T Director for Scherer Brothers Lumber Company.

"You see," Arnold added, "I'm not replacing a half dozen different phone systems, I'm putting in an application that will provide a competitive advantage to us. Customers call us constantly and we need to break down the communication barriers between our customers and employees. ShoreTel's product enables us to do this."

Arnold says the company is going to "dislodge our people from their desks" and use ShoreTel's virtual architecture, presence management and Office Anywhere to "improve customer response while increasing our mobility."

The transaction began with a pilot site of 20 users in Hopkins and now includes replacing all PBXs by the end of the year, providing one virtual phone and contact center system for all 550 employees and 11 sites.

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 Jimmy Cliff's The Harder They Come movie soundtrack, which somebody remarked is really the only essential movie soundtrack out there:

Hi David- I see you’re the CRM guy over at TMCNet and thought you might be interested in some news from one of my clients…

eGain, the Silicon Valley based pioneer of online customer support software (www.egain.com), is announcing its newest product suite on October 30^th.

As you know, the mindset of today’s consumers is changing – they are embracing the speed and collaboration elements of the Web 2.0 world and demanding much more from their interactions with their favorite brands. eGain, the Silicon Valley based pioneer of online customer support software (www.egain.com) has developed a new software suite directly aimed at helping companies successfully service their evolving customer, which will be announced on October 30^th.

The reality is that brand loyalty is shaped more by superior customer service than by product differentiation or price. The sheer number of potential “service” touch points companies now have with their customers – all the traditional methods plus SMS, co-browse, chat, etc -- and the rise of outsourcing, have added even greater complexity to the customer-vendor interaction.

I read your news story on Validar Corporation and their interactive marketing campaign and event measurement software.  I wanted to let you know that The Global Executive Companies has been doing this for years!  We have our own proprietary technologies specifically geared to the events business, which our clients rave about.

Please take a moment and visit 2 of our websites:  www.globalexec.com which describes our company, www.etouches.com which describes our technologies.  I will caution, however, that both sites are currently undergoing a rebranding and not all the flash/demo/descriptive information is up on site. 

Seeing that Fridays are always slow for news content, perhaps you can use the attached research report to give us an advancer on next week’s Oracle OpenWorld conference. 

Oracle will host its OpenWorld conference and first analyst day since January 2005 in two weeks. They anticipate "several partnership announcements" alongside ongoing messaging of its infrastructure products interoperability, possibly including announced Level 1 and Level 2 support of Linux, a good Deutsche Bank analyst's report says: "We expect the day to serve as a positive stock catalyst."

DB expects questions to focus on applications and growth: "We believe Applications Unlimited has compelled many customers to reinvest in the acquired legacy applications (via users, extensions, site rollouts, etc.)," although as the analysis point out, "organic license growth is likely around 10 percent," as opposed to the 47 percent reported in 1Q.

What the Bank's analysts really expect to see Oracle focus on is interoperability for its infrastructure products "as the company attempts to gain data center share within customers." Specifically, the analysts say, "our checks suggest that the company will announce Level 1 and Level 2 support of Linux. We note that the interoperability messaging, via open standards and less proprietary architectures, will likely remain a centerpiece of database, middleware, and BI messaging in an attempt to ease customer concerns of vendor lock-in while competing with best-of-breed vendors such as BEA Systems and Cognos."

Of course the recent IBM partnership will be a big topic at OpenWorld. If you missed it, IBM, Oracle and i-flex announced last week that the companies will collaborate to provide joint banking customers with infrastructure, services, and support for enterprise applications, core banking, and risk management.

The banking collaboration will combine the business and IT architectural leadership of IBM in banks, banking-specific application solutions from Oracle, and core banking and risk solutions from i-flex, officials from all three companies say. This combination is expected to help banks already using CRM, Core Transaction Processing, Risk, Analytics and Corporate Operations products.
Under the companies' banking alliance, IBM plans to expand its services with Oracle and i-flex to help ensure integration and support for IBM platforms.

"With our expanded set of applications for the banking enterprise, Oracle is teaming with IBM to deliver what customers want most -- integrated solutions to their business problems," said David Sardilli, Senior Vice President, Global Financial Services Business Unit at Oracle. "Our currently available applications and our joint support for standards and Services Oriented Architecture provide a broad portfolio for large banks which need scale, integration, and long-term support."

There's also today's announcement of the general availability of Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise On Demand and Oracle On Demand for Siebel CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

Billed as giving customers "choice and flexibility," the new services are said by Oracle officials to " expand the Oracle On Demand portfolio of Software as a Service and Managed Applications offerings." Oracle claims to be the "only software company to offer a complete range of On Demand services across its software products; including subscription-based solutions, managed applications, hosting, and software management services."

"These new offerings help assure Siebel and PeopleSoft users that Oracle will continue to support their investments," said Sheryl Kingstone, director, Enterprise Applications and Mobility Strategies, Yankee Group.

QuestionPro, a vendor of online survey services, is now available as a certified application on salesforce.com's AppExchange. It's used to measure the satisfaction of existing customers, test the reception of products and services on prospects, or conduct general market research to quantify the strengths and weaknesses of their brand and that of their competitors.

QuestionPro for AppExchange "brings together two important systems for managing customer data -- CRM and surveying," according to company officials. It allows complete survey customization, where survey data collected via QuestionPro can be integrated into Salesforce dashboard reports, such as customer satisfaction sorted by region or satisfaction sorted by support representative.

"Online survey services are among the top business application requests from our customer base," said Matt Holleran, vice president, AppExchange partners, salesforce.com.

The product is designed as a way to integrate customer surveys with salesforce.com's suite of on-demand CRM applications. Responses collected via QuestionPro.com surveys are automatically posted to a custom Survey object in Salesforce.

After developing the survey using QuestionPro's web-based wizard interface, a link is provided with custom variables for email campaigns within Salesforce. The link contains an ID for the survey hosted at QuestionPro as well as an ID for the Salesforce object that a customer would like to integrate. Using this link, they can send invitations to contacts in Salesforce to take a survey.

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 Steve Miller Band's Brave New World:

German CRM software vendor SAP AG has announced its preliminary financial results for the third quarter and nine months ended September 30, 2006, reporting that software revenues for the third quarter of 2006 were euro 691 million, up from 2005's euro 590 million, representing an increase of 17 percent -- 20 percent at constant currencies compared to the third quarter of 2005.

Product revenues for the 2006 third quarter were euro 1.6 billion, compared to 2005's euro 1.4 billion, which is an increase of 13, compared to the same period in 2005. Total revenues were euro 2.2 billion for the third quarter of 2006.

According to company officials, based on software revenues on a rolling four quarter basis, SAP's worldwide share of Core Enterprise Applications vendors, which account for approximately $16.4 billion in software revenues as defined by the company based on industry analyst research, continued to grow by 0.9 percentage points to 22.6% at the end of the third quarter of 2006. This, SAP officials say, represents "more than twice the share of the next largest vendor."

The company reported double digit growth rates in software revenues in each of its three regions for the third quarter of 2006. Software revenues in the Americas region grew 19 percent to euro 292 million for the third quarter of 2006 with the U.S. reporting an increase of 15 percent to euro 228 million. In the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region, software revenues increased 14 percent to euro 301 million with Germany reporting a three percent increase to euro 117 million for the third quarter of 2006.

Software revenues in the Asia-Pacific region for the third quarter of 2006 increased 22 percent to euro 98 million, with Japan reporting a 51 percent increase to euro 39 million.

Microsoft CRM integrator Neudesic has announced its expansion to the East Coast, initiating operations in Malvern, Pennsylvania, just 25 miles west of Philadelphia with offices in New York and Washington D.C. to open in the near future.

This expansion corresponds with the appointment of Tom Dodds as Vice President of Eastern Region Services. Dodds joins Neudesic after 14 years at Microsoft where he served in a variety of jobs. As an Architectural and Managing Consultant, he played a role in many of Microsoft Consulting Services' engagements, including shipping the Microsoft Systems Architecture and building the Southern California Security Team.

As part of the move David Armstrong joins Neudesic as its Eastern Region Technology Officer. Prior to joining Neudesic, Armstrong was Principal Consultant with Microsoft Consulting Services. For over 8 years,

The close proximity to New York and Washington D.C. will allow the Philadelphia headquarters to be used as a launching pad to service all three geographies, company officials say, focusing on both commercial and public sector clients.

Neudesic is a Microsoft Gold Certified and Managed Partner working with .Net Custom Application Development, Enterprise Application Integration, CRM/ERP, Portals and Collaboration, and SQL/Business Intelligence.

You don't need to be a huge multinational hotel chain to offer good loyalty point CRM programs: Great Hotels Organization has announced plans to launch a rewards scheme aimed at the independent hospitality industry.

The model for the points program is the airline alliances' One World and Star Alliance. It was confirmed that GHO "Great Hotels Rewards" program will form part of the new "Voila Hotel Rewards" scheme, currently in development with American firm, Hospitality Marketing Concepts.

Participants say the program will place GHO on the same playing field with brands such as Hilton, InterContinental and Marriott. They hope it will offer value, recognition and rewards across GHO’s two flagship brands; Great Hotels of the World and Special Hotels of the World.

CEO Great Hotels Organization Peter Gould noted that hotels who operate loyalty and frequency programs "create value, recognition and rewards for consumers," and get not only a rise in their repeat business but also an increase in their revenue per available guest. "Our research indicates that guests who participate in frequency programs tend not to be as price sensitive because of the value and recognition they receive," Gould said.

The first phase of the program aims to involve 1,000 hotels and 5.5 million members, based in over 60 countries. The objective is to generate six million paid room nights per year. Hotels will be able to manage the rewards program online using CRM technology.

The frequent guest program was designed to secure and increase business from existing customers, as well as increase new business from members in other regions within the global network. Participating hotels can lower their cost of sales and realize net revenue gains over and above the cost of the rewards program, while lessening their dependence on third party bookings and advertising.

St. Louis-based Savvis, Inc., a vendor of IT infrastructure services for business applications, has announced that it has teamed up with Entellium to run that company’s suite of hosted customer relationship management (CRM) products.

Under the agreement, Savvis will provide a fully managed hosted computing infrastructure that underpins the delivery of Entellium’s CRM products, featuring service level agreements. Entellium data will be protected by Savvis’ managed security services and audited and tested by Savvis’ Professional Services.

Entellium, which pitches its products mainly to SMBs, claims a comprehensive service level agreement with all customers, including a money-back system availability guarantee. "Unlike many CRM providers that primarily target large enterprises," Entellium officials say, the company "has tailored its offering to meet the sales force and customer management needs of the vast mid-market."

Based on 50,000 hours of usability research, Entellium’s eSalesForce and eCustomerCenter help users to manage sales opportunities and customer service incidents. Entellium CRM products also allow businesses to automate many routine tasks such as filling out forms, tracking results and creating reports.

Paul Johnston, Entellium's CEO, said Savvis's partnership allows Entellium to focus on developing CRM products "while they manage the critical elements of our IT infrastructure."

SPL WorldGroup has introduced a mobile resource scheduling and optimization application, the SPL Enterprise RealTime Scheduling as a CRM add-on.

The enterprise scheduling application, designed for companies with large field-service workforces and specialized logistical requirements, was previously marketed in the UK under the name Sidewinder.  It is part of the commercial UK and Australian operations that SPL acquired in May of this year from Sidewinder Holdings Ltd.

SPL ERTS, an intelligent platform which a company can integrate with its core business processes, uses the latest "on the ground" information to automatically re-schedule and re-route field resources as circumstances change, all in real-time. 

Scott Miller, SPL’s Executive Vice President & General Manager for EMEA, said that while many companies have invested "significantly" in the front-end processing operations for customer service requests, namely their call centers, they should now focus on enhancing the efficiency of their field-based resources.

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 Faces' "Silicone Grown." Say what you will about the joke Rod Stewart's become, his disco, his atrocious pop fluff, his poor man's Frank Sinatra albums of standards, but every dog has his day and between 1969 and 1974 absolutely nobody did bluesy, boozy barroom rock'n'roll or heartfelt ballads guys aren't embarrassed to sing along with any better than Rod and his merry men in and out of the Faces -- Martin Quittenton, Ronnie Wood, Mickey Waller, Pete Sears, Ronnie Lane, Ian McLagan, et al. The loose, inspired, ragged glory of Every Picture Tells A Story, A Nod Is As Good As A Wink To A Blind Horse, Gasoline Alley, Never A Dull Moment, even Smiler had its indispensable moments... those shambolic concerts where you got either twice or half your money's worth...

Come to think of it, nobody's done it as well since then either. Just get Stewart's complete Mercury recordings and you're set for your all your beery, good-time rock'n'roll needs:

VoiceObjects, a phone application server vendor, has announced that it has made the application programming interface (API) for VoiceObjects Server available to the public. Company officials say this will enable third-party companies to create IDEs and other tools for use with VoiceObjects Server.

The company has also announced the immediate availability of VoiceObjects XDK, an XML development kit that helps tools vendors to create VoiceObjects-ready tools. SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer, will support VoiceObjects Server via the newly available interface.

The new SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer, you'll remember, supports mySAP Customer Relationship Management, mySAP ERP Human Capital Management and mySAP ERP environments. Other IDEs to support VoiceObjects Server are Angel.com's Site Builder, OpenMethods' openVXML Studio, and SpeechVillage's SpeechDraw.

The VoiceObjects XDK is included at no additional charge with VoiceObjects Server. Pricing for VoiceObjects Server begins at $500 per port.

VoiceObjects has also announced that Vox Tiger, a vendor of online phone application development services, has announced the launch of an on-demand phone application development environment, which allows developers to create phone applications that run on VoiceObjects Server.

Vox Tiger's on-demand provisioning frees developers from the cost and other burdens of purchasing, configuring and administering their own phone application servers and other technologies, company officials claim, allowing them to focus on phone application development.

Vox Tiger subscriptions begin at $65 per month. The service provides each subscriber with what company officials describe as "a complete development environment," including a choice of IDEs, including the web-based VoiceObjects Desktop, the Eclipse-based VoiceObjects Studio, and the SpeechDraw Vox Tiger Edition Windows application.

First Coffee's quite a fan of CRM for the automotive industry, so it's good to hear news like that today from Dealer.com, a Burlington, Vermont-based vendor of eMarketing products in the automotive industry. The vendor has announced its success in launching the revitalized CheckeredFlag.com -- in less than three weeks.

Using its SmartSite technology, Dealer.com built Checkered Flag's most complex site to date, with products for Checkered Flag's need for superior inventory management and tools with which to provide customer service.

Checkered Flag Motor Car Corporation, a family owned and operated dealership group serving Hampton Roads, Virginia, sells a lot of foreign cars down there -- over 1,000 cars per month at its five dealerships. Checkered Flag approached Dealer.com after internal surveys showed that more than 80 percent of its customers use the Internet as a search tool prior to purchasing a vehicle.

Which to First Coffee would be a red flag -- sorry, guys -- for lots of other car dealerships to get serious about CRM, but mysteriously, it seems most don't want to bother. Anyway, Checkered Flag saw the need to update its existing website -- a system that had become increasingly difficult to manage, particularly in capturing current inventory and overcoming design and functionality limitations imposed by rigid website templates.

Checkered Flag's Dealer.com-built website came online mid-September with the functionality Checkered Flag was seeking, and the speed and success of the design and build process.

"Our goal was to build a best-of-breed product that incorporates all the features customers need -- accurate and current inventory, accurate prices, research tools, financial calculators, quick response mechanisms to inquiries and more," said Alex Snyder, Checkered Flag's director of e-Commerce. "We were immediately convinced that Dealer.com would meet our needs."

The most critical aspect of the new site is inventory management. Dealer.com used its proprietary CarFinder technology to enable customers to custom "build" or enter specifications for new or used vehicles. Customers can enter any number of specifications -- brand, price, features, best warranties, monthly payments, and more. The system then scans current inventory across Checkered Flag's dealerships and displays every vehicle in inventory that matches the search or may suit the customer's needs.

As vehicles are added to inventory, CarFinder automatically sends e-mail to the customer with information and photos about any new matches.

With Dealer.com's support, Checkered Flag plans to integrate the body shop, service and parts, finance and outside vendors into CheckeredFlag.com. Future integration with the dealership's CRM and sales force management systems will further enhance sales and customer retention efforts.

As would happen with most any car dealership of any size, were they to get serious about CRM. Ah, the mysteries of the universe.

Etalk Corporation, a division of Autonomy Corporation plc and vendor of contact center recording and analytics products, has announced that they have received "the highest overall customer satisfaction rating" in a recent independent customer satisfaction survey of eight vendors in the call recording market.

The survey, conducted by DMG Consulting LLC and published in the recently released 2006 - 2007 Quality Management/Liability Recording Product and Market Report, consisted of both written and telephone interviews of vendor customers to rank their satisfaction level in categories that consisted of Product, Implementation, Service/Maintenance, Training, and Professional Services.

Besides receiving the top ranking in the overall category, etalk achieved high ratings among all the other categories.

"Etalk received the highest score for overall vendor satisfaction," said Donna Fluss, principal analyst at DMG Consulting LLC. "Customer satisfaction is an important indicator of a company's ability to deliver high-value products and services that meet their clients' needs."

The British vendor's contact center products provide voice-enabled real-time agent assistance and customer trend analysis based upon recorded calls. The Qfiniti Enterprise suite offers speech analytics technology that allows companies to automatically organize, categorize, and access their customer conversations, delivering relevant and accessible customer intelligence.

Their products include advanced speech analytics, compliance and quality monitoring recording, agent training and service assistance, customer satisfaction surveys, and performance management, all delivered in a single interface.

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 Tommy James and the Shondells' "Crimson and Clover:"

CRM vendor Soffront Software Inc. has announced that Operon Biotechnologies, Inc., has selected Soffront CRM for their customer service, marketing, sales, and IT support desk.

Operon Biotechnologies is a global leader in custom oligo nucleic acid synthesis (manufactured using DNA and RNA building blocks.) Their products are used by researchers in the Life Sciences industries.

Soffront CRM will provide Operon with a complete CRM and order processing solution. Operon's marketing, sales, and customer service departments will use the software for numerous global activities such as accessing comprehensive customer history records, integrating reports, exploring data mining possibilities, and implementing sales and marketing campaigns.

This spring Soffront, a vendor specializing in the mid-market CRM field, announced that Worldlink Integration Group, Inc. picked on-demand Soffront CRM to "improve productivity and data integration," according to Soffront officials.

"We wanted to improve productivity in all aspects of our business and integrate all customer, prospect, and project data into one system," said David R. Clarke, president and CFO of Worldlink Integration Group. "We also wanted to increase our customer's ability to securely communicate with us and access collateral material through the web."

And in March Soffront announced Soffront Unlimited, an offering that packages all of Soffront's modules into a single product. Soffront Unlimited provides enterprise users with Soffront CRM for one low monthly cost, $95 per user in a hosted, ASP environment.

The Unlimited product includes sales force automation, marketing automation, campaign management, sales order processing, customer support, helpdesk, asset management, defect tracking, project and release management, knowledge management, customer, partner, and employee portals.

Beat Stemmler, Manager IT CRM/ERP at Operon who wins First Coffee's Name Of The Week Award, said that after screening approximately ten CRM packages and "implementing a detailed evaluation on our top five choices, we selected Soffront," because the product "fulfilled all of our requirements better than any other."

Operon purchased numerous modules of the Soffront CRM product suite, including customer service, customer portal, marketing automation, direct mail campaign, sales force automation, employee help desk, and defect tracking.

The reason being… "We expect a positive impact on our churn rate, new customer growth rate, and total customer satisfaction. In addition the management and top management will get a tremendously improved system for analysis and decision making," Stemmler said.

Operon Biotechnologies, Inc. is a global supplier of custom nucleic acids for academic research, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical development. Through their production facilities in the US, Germany, and Japan as well as distributors worldwide, Operon provides scientists with standard or highly modified DNA and RNA molecules in both small and large scale amounts to satisfy their oligo requirements.

So if you need your oligo satisfied you know where to go now, don'tcha?

Autobytel Inc., an automotive CRM vendor, has been named to Deloitte and Touche's Technology Fast 50 Program for Orange County, a ranking of technology, media, telecommunications and life sciences companies in the area by Deloitte & Touche USA LLP.

"This marks the eighth consecutive year that Autobytel has been named to the Technology Fast 50, which is a great honor," said Autobytel Inc. President and CEO Jim Riesenbach.

To qualify for the Technology Fast 50, companies must have had operating revenues of at least $50,000 in 2001 and $5 million in 2005, be headquartered in North America, and be a company that owns proprietary technology or proprietary intellectual property that contributes to a significant portion of the company's operating revenues; or devotes a significant proportion of revenues to the research and development of technology.

Rankings are based on the percentage revenue growth over five years from 2001–2005.

In 1995 Autobytel was one of the first companies to sell CRM to auto dealers, which is still kind of an ugly stepchild in CRM, it's not an area that's been looked at by established vendors yet. Autobytel sells its Web Control customer management system, Retention Performance Marketing service reminder program, Special Finance Leads, and AIC data center to auto dealers. Ugly red checked sports jacket optional.

Connextions, Inc. has announced that New Mountain Partners II, L.P., a private equity fund sponsored and managed by New Mountain Capital, LLC, has made a significant equity investment in the company.

Connextions sells business technology for such companies as Federal Express, Mercedes-Benz and UnitedHealth Group. Through its Connextions Health operations, the company sells Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products targeting the Consumer Driven Healthcare movement in the United States.

Announcing the investment, New Mountain's Founder & CEO Steven Klinsky said, "In addition to its scalable business solutions and strong position within the healthcare industry, we are impressed with the excellent and longstanding client relationships Connextions has established."

Klinsky noted that there are no plans to change Connextions' market strategy, operations, or staffing levels as a result of New Mountain's investment. Connextions' Founder, Chairman & CEO Jack LeFort will remain in his current capacity, and he will be joined on the board of directors by Steven Klinsky, Michael Ajouz and Doug Londal, all members of New Mountain.

Next month AppGate Network Security, a vendor of network security products, will make available for commercial use a product to "make it possible to integrate all types of access: mobile, PC, PDA," in one single product, "without having to accept reduced security or functionality," according to company officials.

The user will get exactly the access they need when they need it -- "no more and no less," as company officials say. This means one user, running the required AV software on their mobile device, can access SAP and their CRM system while someone else might be restricted to downloading e-mail and synchronizing their calendar to their mobile phone.

To that end AppGate has announced Mobile VPN support for Nokia Series 60 3rd edition mobile phones including the E61 and E70.

The global "smartphone" market is experiencing rapid growth and users increasingly want to move beyond the limitations of only having access to push e-mails on their mobile phones, company officials think: "Access to Intranet and other applications such as SAP and other reporting tools are becoming more and more important."

The AppGate product lets users of mobile devices such as mobile phones access all resources inside an enterprise's internal network, not only e-mail. It supports authentication from suppliers such as RSA, Cryptocard, NordicEdge, Mideye as well as other Radius and/or LDAP/AD based systems.

According to AppGate's CEO Göran Marby, "With this new development for the Series 60 platform, users of a wide range of S60-based devices, including phones from Nokia, Panasonic, Samsung and Siemens, can now benefit from AppGate's functionality."

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 jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius' 1976 debut album, cleverly named Jaco Pastorius:

Checking in with Companies Recently Taken Over this morning, we find c360 Solutions, a Microsoft Dynamics Customer Relationship Management Independent Software Vendor and a division of Chinese-owned CDC Software, has announced that it has exceeded key business objectives during the five months since it was acquired by CDC Software.

Since the completion of the acquisition of c360 by CDC Software in April 2006, c360 has added 95 new channel partners, bringing the total to over 600 worldwide; reached total cumulative c360 licenses of over 190,000, achieved maintenance renewal rates above 90 percent (one wonders what the target objective here was), and added five new products through licensing and acquisition (again, the targeted objective number isn't given here).

Estimated revenues for third quarter ended September 30, 2006 at 30 percent above budgeted revenues

The company was "consistently reporting growth in many key business metrics when they joined us in April," said Eric Musser, president of CDC Software, who said "we're taking c360 into new markets."

Musser credited the release of Microsoft's Dynamics CRM 3.0 last December with "a noticeable uptake in the CRM industry in general, and in the c360 applications in particular," and uptake Musser sees continuing.

Maybe you saw this last week, First Coffee doesn't remember seeing it: An IDC report titled "Worldwide CRM Analytic Applications 2005 Vendor Shares: Consolidation Continues in an Expanding Market" found that customer relationship management (CRM) analytic applications revenue grew 11.3 percent in 2005, reaching $1.14 billion.

The report found that SAS was the largest predictive analytics vendor in the worldwide market for CRM analytic applications, while another IDC report named SAS the biggest CRM analytic applications vendor in Western Europe. The company's revenue grew by 22.0 percent in 2005.

According to the IDC report "Western European CRM Analytic Applications, 2005 Vendor Shares," SAS revenues reached €59.5 million ($74.4 million), representing a market share of 21.4 percent. The report shows SAS as the leading vendor in the Benelux region, France, Germany, Italy, and reaching the highest market share -- 40.3 percent -- in the Nordic region.

"Growth will continue in the CRM analytics market because enterprises need to continually analyze their operations in order to increase efficiency and effectiveness. Being able to understand and predict customer behavior and anticipate the needs of the customer with products and services is essential to moving to the next level of CRM," said Mary Wardley, VP, CRM Applications, IDC.

Phil Winters, VP of Customer Intelligence, SAS EMEA said in his opinion, the IDC report's figures "reflect what SAS has observed as a growing trend in customer intelligence for some time now, a significant shift away from operational CRM systems to a more strategic analytical approach."

Winters said a driver for customer intelligence over the next 12 months will be "the changing role of chief marketing officers within the organization as they become more accountable to the CEO, and are required to demonstrate alignment of day-to-day marketing operations with long term strategic goals."

INetOffice, a vendor of browser-based office applications, and ShareMethods, provider of on-demand sales and marketing document management, have announced a partnership to "bring online office applications to market and to develop Ajax mashup recommendations," according to iNetOffice officials.

The goal of the joint work is to provide "the next wave of software services to improve efficiency and flexibility working with documents online using multiple on-demand applications," including CRM.

Some people -- i.e. vendors -- think the ability to create online office mashups enables organizations to improve productivity, better serve customers and users, and solve business problems more rapidly. The goal is integration of best-of-breed online office applications presented to users in a single interface, available any time and from anywhere on the Web.

Shall we quote the Bard here: 'Tis a consummation devoutly to wished, indeed.

The proposed approach from this new partnership enables the Internet as a platform for "plug and play" office productivity suites, tailored or modified for specific business needs. No online office application should be an island unto itself -- my we're poetic this morning, hello Mr. Donne -- the online office can go beyond a traditional office suite into an online office ecosystem where users can combine their choice of online document, spreadsheet, and presentation services on demand with an ability to share content across these services and to collaborate on a global basis.

There once was a man from Nantucket who had an ecosystem of an online office mashup which combined iNetOffice, ShareMethods, Salesforce.com, and Thumbstacks. This mashup enabled automatic creation and management of sales documents such as proposals, reports and presentations which could be shared internally or with sales prospects.

Generally speaking, newsletters and press releases can also be created and shared easily by marketing teams -- a sales user can build a dynamically-generated sales proposal using customer data from an on-demand CRM database. See a mashup of web-based CRM, enterprise content management (ECM), online word processing, and online presentation at http://www.inetword.com/mashup/index.html.

"This multi-way mashup is an excellent example of how quickly Web 2.0 applications can come together because of interoperability, standards, and user experience," said David Coleman, managing director of research and consulting firm Collaborative Strategies. "End users benefit from reduced time to create these applications and from the additional functionality that can be added through each of the components in the mashup. Quick, easy and intuitive are all attributes of Web 2.0 applications and this mashup shows how a virtual on-line office can be put together in a very short time."

iNetOffice and ShareMethods plan to make a sales and marketing productivity mashup broadly available. The two companies are also inviting other software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies to join their online office mashup and to participate in technical recommendations based on open standards such as WebDAV (Web Document Authoring and Versioning), SSO (Single Sign-On), and ALE (Ajax Linking and Embedding).

VeriFone Holdings, Inc. and Lipman Electronic Engineering Ltd. have announced that VeriFone Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Douglas G. Bergeron, will visit Israel from today through Wednesday, ahead of the planned November 1 closing of VeriFone's acquisition of Lipman.

During his visit, Bergeron will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to formally introduce VeriFone and to discuss the acquisition and VeriFone's plans for its operations in Israel after the closing of the transaction. Additionally, Bergeron and other members of the VeriFone management team will meet with various Israel-based shareholders to provide details on their plan for the post- acquisition VeriFone.

"I am delighted to return to Israel prior to Lipman becoming a part of the VeriFone family," said Bergeron. "The combined company will benefit greatly from Lipman's world class manufacturing and R&D capabilities in Israel, and we plan to invest in this segment of our business to ensure its continued success going forward."

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