CDC and Google, Callidus Q3 Results, Panviva, Epicor, Cognos

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David Sims
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CDC and Google, Callidus Q3 Results, Panviva, Epicor, Cognos

By David Sims

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.

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