CRM Vendor Scribe Purchased By Mustang, Sage, FTS and BCL, Autonomy, VendorGuru, Coffee Breaks

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CRM Vendor Scribe Purchased By Mustang, Sage, FTS and BCL, Autonomy, VendorGuru, Coffee Breaks

By David Sims

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."

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