CRM Vendor c360 On Track, iNetOffice's CRM Mashup, VeriFone in Israel, CRM BI Market Hits $1.14 Billion

David Sims : First Coffee
David Sims
| CRM, ERP, Contact Center, Turkish Coffee and Astroichthiology:

CRM Vendor c360 On Track, iNetOffice's CRM Mashup, VeriFone in Israel, CRM BI Market Hits $1.14 Billion

By David Sims

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 CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.



Featured Events