November 2006 Archives

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the North Mississippi All-Stars' Electric Blue Watermelon. Think the Allman Brothers with Peter Wolf on vocals playing a raucous college English Lit Department bachelor party:

Okay, it's not exactly breaking news, but there are 25.8 million small businesses in America, paying more than 40 percent of the total U.S. private payroll, and the majority are not using CRM. Yeah they're a self-interested business concern, but First Coffee likes how VendorGuru.com, makes it their business to at least get small businesses thinking about strategies and CRM products.

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, over 600,000 new small businesses sprouted in 2005, making a significant economic impact. Small companies can continue to influence the economy through growth and increased customer loyalty with Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

"Most small businesses want to grow and continue to win new customers. But the different technology needs of companies mean one CRM solution or strategy may not fit all," said Aris Pantazopoulos, managing director of Contact Solutions.

Small businesses are underestimating the importance of customer relationship management in business growth, according to Melinda Nykamp, Vice President of Customer Strategy Integration for Fair, Isaac and Company, Inc., who writes, "Indeed, your customer base has become your key to success in an increasingly competitive business climate. This is one of the primary reasons why customer relationships are making it closer to top of asset entries on corporate balance sheets."

In comments provided by VendorGuru.com, Nykamp says successful CRM initiatives must focus on the customer, include the business strategy, connect customer intelligence about customer needs into the daily operations of the organization, and measure the relationship.

Small businesses generated 60 percent to 80 percent of new jobs annually during the last decade, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. Small companies with fewer than 500 employees represent 99.9 percent of the 25.8 million of all U.S. businesses. Competition among so many small businesses can be tough, and CRM is a pretty good way to begin to stand out from the pack.

CRM at work in Egypt, and it's about time: Link Development, the development arm of LINKdotNET, has introduced what it calls "revolutionary Microsoft CRM" to the Egyptian government.

This new CRM module allows for the Ministry of State for Administrative Development Call Center to receive, track and, if so inclined, solve citizen's complaints, questions and suggestions regarding all types of services offered under the E-Government project.

Citizens now can call the number 19468 or access the bilingual website (www.egypt.gov.eg) in order to submit their request, and through the automated workflow provided by the CRM module, they are immediately assigned a case number to track their inquiries.

Citizens have access to that service at any time by giving in their case number to check on the status of their request. This CRM module will also cater to all services provided and offered by the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Social Solidarity and other ministries in the future.

"Egyptian companies have reached a very high technical level and are competing with Microsoft partners worldwide," commented Tamer Elhamy, Microsoft Business Solution manager, calling LINKdotNET "one of Microsoft's most prominent partners not only in the Egyptian market, but also in the Middle East."

Engineer Sameh Bedair, Policy Making and Programming Sector Manager in the Ministry of State for Administrative Development, claimed that the new engine reflects a actual, genuine interest in making citizens' lives easier, a novel -- and welcome -- concept in the Middle East, a region of the world, First Coffee can say from personal experience, where governments view "citizens" as little more than sheep to be shorn, herded and kicked around when they get in the way.

Think I’m kidding? Here's how citizen "service" operates here: In Istanbul in the 1990s, any package larger than a shoebox which was sent to someone living in Turkey from outside the country via post office had to be picked up at the airport, the government wouldn't trouble themselves to deliver it. Citizens here would no more think of demanding government efficiency and accountability than they would of flying off the top of Topkapi Palace -- there was actually a law forbidding any criticism of the post office here in the 1990s, I don’t know if it's still in force or not.

You got a slip in your mailbox saying you had a package, and you had to go out to the airport outside the city, where they gave you a sheet of paper with -- at that time -- 22 lines for signatures, each with a different functionary's title, "Assistant Associate Shipping Control Maintenance Clerk."

There were 22 of these make-work jobs for shiftless brothers-in-law of well-connected politicians who could get such deadwood on the public payroll simply by creating a Deputy Assistant Associate Shipping Control Maintenance Clerk (#23!) "job."

And then you had to go around the airport's administrative offices and get signatures of each of the guys on their correct line. In order. Sometimes -- you think I'm making this up or exaggerating, I know you do, but I swear on Dave Barry's head I'm not -- the same guy's name appeared twice, like lines #9 and #17. And you had to get them all signed in order, the guy wouldn't sign #17 until you got numbers 10 through 16 signed, you had to come back to his office again. God help you if anyone went on vacation.

If you started at nine you were usually done by about two in the afternoon. You'd make it to about #14 or #15 and then everybody'd go to lunch so you might as well too and start back in an hour, so all told you left your house around eight in the morning and got back at three-thirty or four. First Coffee doesn't complain about DMVs anymore and reserves great scorn for anyone who whines about long grocery store lines.

It was not only excruciatingly infuriating, but sad -- you'd go in a guy's office and it would be obviously a converted broom closet, with nothing but a government-issue desk and chair government-issue calendar. And I mean nothing, no pictures of the wife and kids or well-connected brother-in-law politician. Maybe an extra chair for someone to sit and keep the poor sap from talking to himself.

You'd almost feel sorry for the lazy useless slug -- he'd sit there in a suit and tie, talking on the phone or to the guy who signed the lines before or after him, drinking tea or just staring at the grimy cinderblock wall, waiting for someone to come along who needed a signature so he could make them wait a few minutes before signing.

After a while First Coffee politely requested friends and family not send him any packages. If you were with a business like Coca-Cola or 3M you could send an office flunky out to waste their day doing it, and there were kids hanging around the airport who specialized in getting all the signatures -- pay an 11-year old a few lira and he'd do the circuit for you while you sat in the airport bar. I always figured I'm here, I might as well get the exercise, it's not like you could run errands in town while the kid did his thing.

First Coffee knew a Fulbright Scholar who had learned Arabic in Syria, and who said there it was worse. I believe it -- Turkey is far more advanced socially than any other Middle Eastern country except Israel. Things have improved here somewhat since then, nowadays First Coffee's wife can go to a closer post office to pick it up and there are fewer signatures required, but the basic attitude of the government towards its citizens, best described as mild contempt, hasn't changed.

So any sort of citizen-focused initiative in the Middle East is to be applauded. "Several ministries are able to facilitate the process of troubleshooting citizens' problems and equally, their own work pressures. We are currently in the process to deploy this service nationwide to all ministries by virtue of which the concept of government services will be totally upgraded," said Engineer Sameh Bedair of the Policy Making and Programming Sector Manager in the Ministry of State for Administrative Development.

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 Steve Earle's 1990 album The Hard Way album. Visiting my folks in Richmond over Thanksgiving we went to the Ft. Lee thrift store where I found the CD for sale, and snapped it up for a buck or so. It's an album you rarely see in stores, it's the only album of his you can't find on iTunes, which puzzles me because I always found it his most interesting album. Yeah the first side of Copperhead Road is his best stretch -- by far -- but the second side's really, really weak.

There's a part of First Coffee that really enjoyed working with ad people back when I was doing that kind of thing, say what you want about advertising but you meet a lot of smart, creative people who don't take themselves too seriously. Others took themselves way too seriously, but you find that everywhere (see above). But one great thing about the ad business is you run across companies with names like Holy Cow. Here's betting they at least called Phil Rizzuto for the first-year anniversary party.

"Working with Holy Cow Branding will be a terrific endeavor to catapult Biz IT Pro to the next level," says Steve Noe, president of Biz IT Pro. "I've worked with Lorana Price [CEO of Holy Cow] over the years."

First Coffee loves this next line in the press release: "Biz IT Pro partners with businesses to solve problems using strategies, technology and common sense, which will reduce expenses and increase revenue for them."

Oh right, the PR firm's name: "After working with the firm, clients will be able to say, 'Holy Cow!' about the designs and services they have received," says Price.

Bond Art and Science, a digital consulting firm based in New York City, announced today that industry veteran Hyo Yeon has joined the firm as a Senior Partner. Ms. Yeon joins Bond Art and Science from FCBi, the digital, direct and CRM-focused business unit of Foote, Cone & Belding (now DraftFCB), where she was Executive Vice President, Managing Director of the New York office, and Chief Strategy Officer of FCBi WorldWide.

"We installed POSH back-end this year, which will drive the ATMs we've introduced to the Caribbean market," said Helen Llanos, assistant general manager of ISL.

Glenn Hofmann, a former executive at HSBC Finance Corp., has joined Integras, the advanced analytical services division of Claritas Inc., as Assistant Vice President of Location Research.

Most recently, Hofmann held the position of Director of Modeling at ID Analytics, Inc., a San Diego-based Identity Risk Management company, where he managed a group of scientists in the development of statistical models to both detect and prevent identity fraud.

 * Asia Pacific with a 54 percent share (44.4 points ahead of the closest competitor).

 * North America with a 41.1 percent share (28.1 points ahead of the closest competitor).

 * Latin America with a 32.8 percent share (10.1 points ahead of the closest competitor).

In related news Empirix Inc. has announced that its Hammer On Call automated testing service is compliant with contact center solutions from Avaya.

Empirix Hammer On-Call is part of a broader set of Hammer Performance Assurance services that enable automated testing of large Avaya contact centers with 100 or more agent seats.

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 we're back in action, jet-lagged as all get out from Richmond-Washington, Washington-Atlanta, Atlanta-Milan, Milan-Istanbul this weekend. So any mistakes are to be blamed on any one of the seven cups of coffee so far.

First Coffee did manage to pay a visit to TMC headquarters while back in America for Thanksgiving, and let me say in this e-mail world it's great to sit down over coffee and get to talk with the people you work with and for. So cheers to Patrick, Tracey, Greg, Michelle, Mae, Stefanie, and even Nadji made time to fill me in on the back story of the company, time much appreciated.

Plus you get to learn, um, colorful phrases in Hungarian and Russian from Tracey and Greg which are surprisingly appropriate for the drivers here in Istanbul. Time well spent, friends, time well spent.

Oh, and the music: Past iPod song shuffle selections this morning include Ol' Blue Eyes' "Cheek To Cheek,"  "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" by Minnesota Mudthroat Zimmerman, and an Emerson, Lake and Palmer live version of the song built around the coolest eight-note bass riff ever played, "Peter Gunn." We're in an Aimee Mann mood, though, we'll get to her great Live At St. Ann's Warehouse album here soon.

Don't you love that title? Didn't know there was a patron saint of warehouses, did you?

Xactly Corporation, a vendor of automated on-demand sales compensation management, thinks that recent market research findings and growth projections support its focus and strategy to deliver on-demand sales compensation products.

Recent market analyst research suggests sales performance management is "a fast-developing category" which is "likely to be dominated by the leading sales incentive compensation management vendors," company officials say.

"There exists a tremendous green field opportunity for Xactly to capitalize on the intersection of sales performance management and Software-as-a Service," according to Christopher W. Cabrera, Xactly founder, president and CEO.

Cabrera said his company offers "a true multi-tenant on-demand sales compensation management application with data management and analytics capabilities,"  giving companies "access to a central repository for sales performance-related data from ERP/order management, HR, product, CRM and other front- and back-office applications."

The Xactly Incent on-demand sales compensation management tool is sold primarily to sales and finance executives, compensation analysts, sales operations and sales pros. Its rules-based, services-oriented architecture lets customers build different compensation plans and manage incentive compensation with what Xactly officials describe as "minimum initial investment and low cost of ownership."

A couple weeks ago oft-quoted tech research firm Gartner, released their "Predicts 2007: Diversity Persists in the CRM SFA Market," in which analyst Michael Dunne writes that a sales performance management market "will coalesce around best-of-breed vendors largely originating from the sales incentive compensation management market. This is the domain that has developed into a sustainable, discrete market."

Primarily, sales incentive compensation management software vendors "will take the forefront by augmenting core functionality for designing, deploying and managing compensation plans with capabilities for established targets and market coverage," Dunne thinks.

EFunds Corporation, a vendor of payment processing and information intelligence products, has announced the appointment of Nelson Eng as president, U.S. for eFunds Corporation.

Eng will oversee all aspects of eFunds U.S. operations as he succeeds Rahul Gupta who is leaving the company next month.

Eng joins eFunds Corporation with 23 years experience in the technology and software industry and more than 14 years in the financial services markets. Most recently, Eng was general manager and group vice president of the financial services sector for Oracle Corporation which achieved double-digit growth in sales for its CRM business during his tenure.

Prior to this role, Eng held various senior management positions at IBM, Vignette and Dell.

Art Technology Group, Inc., a vendor of eCommerce platform vendor, has announced that Woolworths, still one of the UK’s biggest retailers, is deploying additional ATG software to power its online storefront and call center operations.

Using ATG applications such as ATG Commerce Assist and ATG Outreach, Woolworths officials say they can now offer a "stronger" multi-channel experience to customers.

Woolworths already had a commerce platform from ATG, but with the added ATG Commerce Assist application, the company says it is "further unifying its Web and call center environments, enabling contact center agents to create and manage online orders for customers."

ATG Outreach, company officials say, will help Woolworths "gain a richer understanding of customers through their web interactions, preferences and behaviors" to create "e-mail and proactive customer service campaigns."

Andrew Harber, head of strategy and channel systems at Woolworths, said the venerable retailer wants to "drive even more revenue online." Following a "de-merger," company officials say, Woolworths has moved into an Enterprise-wide Licensing Agreement, adding ATG Outreach and Commerce Assist to the mix to "drive forward its multi-channel campaign."

Englewood, Colorado-based TeleTech Holdings, Inc., a business outsourcer, has announced the launch of a retail voice portal designed "to provide a centralized inbound product to geographically dispersed retailers," according to company officials.

The retail voice portal is the newest addition to the TeleTech OnDemand suite of products, allowing big box and "other Global 1000 retailers," according to company officials, to have local store calls routed to a central location using a nationwide voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) network and an automated interactive voice response (IVR) system.

The product is being pitched by TeleTech as one which "can result in significant financial benefits by generating thousands of dollars in additional revenue per day per store and providing greater in-store productivity for retailers."

Basically it allows local callers to tap into a centralized, consistent menu that provides local store information as well as a variety of other options. Callers are then routed to the most appropriate location. Local store staff handle in-store customers while prospective customers are shunted off onto contact center agents.

Word of warning as Christmas approaches: Due to verbal abuse by shoppers, 2006 has seen "a marked increase in critical incident stress debriefings for retail establishments and call centers," according to ComPsych, a vendor of GuidanceResources, selling employee assistance programs, behavioral health, work-life, wellness, crisis intervention services and outsourced HR.

The company says acute-stress counseling sessions related to customer abuse in general "has more than doubled since 2005." Around the holidays especially, "retail work environments can become hostile," said Dr. Richard A. Chaifetz, chairman and CEO of ComPsych.

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 Return To Forever's Romantic Warrior:

This will be my last First Coffee column until the 27th as we'll be in Richmond for Thanksgiving. My sister's family from Vermont's coming down, The Whole Fam Damily™ will be together for the first time in a hair past a coon's age, all 23 of us. Other than family my priorities are much time at Barnes & Noble and dinner at the Smoky Pig in Ashland, as good books, beer and barbecue are hard to find here in Istanbul.

Entellium, a vendor of on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, has announced the commercial availability of the Usability Release 2006, a series of upgrades and enhancements to its on-demand CRM product suite.

The announcement is timed to coincide with World Usability Day, described by company officials as "a series of events designed to promote leadership in usability and design-a key distinction of Usability Release 2006."

The enhanced versions of Entellium's flagship eSalesForce and eCustomerCenter products are based on feedback from hundreds of sales and customer service users. The products feature "a sleek new look, greater automation and a more intuitive approach to navigation," company officials say, so "sales and support teams will be able to manage their activities and tasks more efficiently."

"Today's CRM products don't do nearly enough to make the lives of sales, marketing and customer service employees easier," said Paul Johnston, Entellium President and CEO. "Most have been optimized to serve senior management and the IT department. As a result, these tools actually slow the user down, hindering their effectiveness on the job."

One thing I like to do is check out the colleges NFL players went to. I don't know why, perhaps it's just my natural bent towards general knowledge (what the vulgar call "trivia"), but it's a kick to pick up such tidbits as the one that quarterback Dave Krieg, who played well for years and years, went to now-defunct Milton College. As you can imagine I'm in high demand at parties.

The San Francisco 49ers have two graduates of Yale on their roster, running back Chris Hetherington and tight end Eric Johnson, and the St. Louis Rams have two Harvard grads, linebacker Isaiah Kacyvenski and quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick. There are also graduates of Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth, Columbia, Penn and Princeton in the NFL.

Scantron Service Group, a vendor of computer hardware maintenance and network design and support, has received second place in the BlackBerry 2006 Corporate Application Awards. Scantron Service Group was recognized for its Mobile Service Delivery package, which enables their 170 Field Service Technicians to "respond quickly to hardware service requests made by their customers," according to Scantron officials.

Scantron created an application on the BlackBerry platform that quickly gets tickets out to the Field Service Technicians, and then returns ticket processing information, allowing critical information to be exchanged in real time.

Integrating into their back-end AS400 and DB2/400 CRM data and application, the Mobile Service Delivery makes use of the push-based BlackBerry architecture and is optimized to be "light weight" over wireless networks.

Seattle Seahawks center Jean-Philippe Darche went to McGill University in Montreal, Indianapolis Colts tackle Daniel Federkeil went to the University of Calgary, Green Bay Packers punter Jon Ryan went to the University of Regina in Saskatchewan and Chicago Bears defensive end Israel Idonije went to the University of Manitoba.

Former CRM vendor Smart Online has reported results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2006. For the third quarter of 2006, Smart Online's revenue increased 117 percent with total revenue from continuing operations of $749,206 compared to approximately $344,692 for the same period last year.

An additional $462,468 of revenue was generated by Smart CRM which was reclassified as a discontinued operation. Total revenue, including revenue from continuing and discontinued operations, was $1.2 million.

Net income from continuing operations was $429,581 or $0.03 per share. Net loss attributable to common stockholders was (1,899,848) or (0.13) per share.

For the nine months ended September 30, 2006, revenue increased 194 percent with total revenue from continuing operations of approximately $2.9 million compared to approximately $1 million for the same period last year. Total revenue, including revenue from continuing and discontinued operations, was $4.4 million.

The company took a non-cash charge of approximately $2.8 million reflecting the goodwill impairment related to the discontinued operations of Smart CRM.

Neither New York Jets punter Ben Graham, New Orleans wide receiver Michael Lewis, Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Marvin Allen nor Philadelphia Eagles defensive end Christian Mohr went to college. In pro baseball and basketball that's common, in the NFL it's highly unusual for someone to not have at least three years somewhere.

4 Real Investment, Inc., a lead management software and services company, has teamed with Clickpoint Software to announce their first end-user mortgage Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application.

Lead-based CRM products have provided tools necessary to manage leads through an often complex and technical interface. In addition, existing systems usually require technical experience in order to import, export and manage third-party relationships.

Clickpoint officials say their product "provides an easy-to-use interface designed after programs you are already familiar with, and has automated most of the technical processes."

Lead-based companies normally rely on several programs or services to purchase leads, import leads into the CRM, integrate with a predictive dialer, determine lead performance and return bad leads. Clickpoint officials say their product has "integrated all of these services into one easy-to-use program," and that the company is "continually working to provide all of the tools necessary to manage a lead business and is partnering or integrating with the industries lead products providers."

4 Real Investment, Inc. currently sells online lead management software for mid-to-large lead providers, and Clickpoint Software is an online CRM product for anyone managing a lead-based business.

There are players from Tusculum, Robert Morris, Itawamba Community College, John Carroll, Trinity (Texas), Lambuth, Saginaw Valley (three, by my count), Trinity (Illinois), Sonoma State, Mesa State, Northwood, Liberty, Stephen F. Austin, Carson-Newman and Walla Walla Community College in the NFL.

Information technology media company TechTarget has announced the addition of Hosted CRM and Healthcare categories to its 2020software.com Web site.

2020software.com is focused on providing small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) approaching a business software purchase decision with detailed feature comparison information and access to trial software through a "best of breed" or "short list" of the Top 7 vendors in the Enterprise Solutions, Manufacturing ERP Solutions, Mid-Market Accounting Software, HR Software, Business Analytics, RM Solutions, and now, Hosted CRM and Healthcare categories.

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's debut album, cleverly titled Jaco Pastorius. Guess whose picture is on the cover:

Folks, First Coffee's as much in love with technology and its advance as the next guy, but there are some technological innovations we don't need. "Destination elevators" are such an example. Battery "operated" hand razors are another.

You might have seen the news Stefanie Viscusi reported yesterday on SoundBite Communications Inc. and Mindshare Technologies, announcing a "partnership to develop and deliver on demand Customer Experience Management and Monitoring" products for enterprise organizations.

The partnership uses what SoundBite officials describe as the "virtually unlimited telephony capacity" of their hosted customer contact product with Mindshare's survey and real-time analytics expertise to "provide businesses with immediate customer experience feedback."

Chris Selland, Vice President of Business Development at SoundBite told First Coffee that "this partnership is important for a few reasons," first of all that "we've found that automated messaging generally performs muchbetter," with the emphasis on "much," than live operators "for companies who are seeking honest feedback from their customers."

Quite simply, Selland says, "people are much more willing to be more direct with a machine than they generally would be with a live agent." Stands to reason, especially if the agent is one of those "virtual reps."

Selland pointed out that "the feedback we get is near-immediate -- we can survey the consumer right after they've had the experience, when it's most fresh in their minds.  And, if there's a problem, we can resolve it -- right away."

Indeed, the example Selland uses is Asurion, a provider of specialty insurance, warranty and other marketing services to the wireless telecommunications industry, who's using the new SoundBite-Mindshare product to continuously survey and measure customer experience with its Roadside Assistance Service.

Asurion's services include towing, lockout assistance, tire changes and much more. Customers requesting roadside assistance are provided with an estimated time of arrival of the service provider. Ten minutes after the estimated arrival time, the customer receives an automated voice message asking him to confirm that help has arrived and invites him to participate in a brief survey about his experience with the service. If a customer indicates that help has not arrived, he's immediately connected to a live agent for assistance.

Donna Drehmann, Asurion's Director of Customer Satisfaction said they're using the Mindshare and SoundBite tool to "immediately survey our customers so we can ensure that they received the best service possible as well as learn ways in which we can further help them." The ability to continuously measure performance and respond to real time customer feedback "in an automated and cost-effective manner" is "invaluable" to their business, Drehmann said.

"Mindshare and SoundBite have highly-complementary capabilities," Selland explained. "Our ability to contact the customer and initiate the survey and their experience and capabilities in conducting and deeply analyzing the results are basically a perfect match. 

And, last but not least, this isn't just a hypothetical offering -- we're already out there delivering today."

Using automated voice messages in a hosted environment "allows businesses to reach customers faster without the need for live agents or on-premise hardware and software," partnership officials contend, calling it "a cost-effective survey that can be applied to virtually any type of customer service initiative that is supported by a call center."

"Customer experience continues to play an important role in brand preference and customer loyalty," Selland correctly points out, saying such information is "compelling" for businesses that "want to immediately understand how their customers perceive the service experience, and respond in real-time to enhance satisfaction and loyalty."

SugarCRM Inc. has announced its membership in the Interop Vendor Alliance with Microsoft. 

The Alliance was established to "connect people, data and diverse systems through better interoperability," according to SugarCRM officials. SugarCRM, a vendor of commercial open source products for both on-site and on-demand CRM, has joined with member companies to ensure interoperability for its customers.

In February of this year, SugarCRM and Microsoft announced a technical collaboration project when SugarCRM became the first commercial open source application vendor to adopt the Microsoft Community License and introduced a Windows-based distribution of SugarCRM. 

Today nearly 35 percent of SugarCRM's customer base runs on Microsoft Windows Server.

Today at Microsoft TechEd: IT Forum 2006 in Barcelona, the Little Ole Software Company From Redmond announced the formation of the Interop Vendor Alliance, which they describe as "a global, cross-industry group of software and hardware vendors that will work together to identify opportunities for enhancing interoperability with Microsoft systems on behalf of their customers."

Customers are telling Microsoft that interoperability is as important to them as security and reliability, company officials say, adding that "because of this, Microsoft is seeking to proactively work with partners and competitors alike to help reduce the cost and risk associated with integrating diverse systems."

Founding members of the alliance include Advanced Micro Devices Inc., BEA Systems Inc., Business Objects, CA, The Carbon Project, Centeris Corp., Citrix Systems Inc., GXS Inc., IP Commerce Inc., JNBridge LLC, Kernel Networks, Levi, Ray & Shoup Inc., Microsoft, NEC Corp. of America, Network Appliance Inc., Novell Inc., Q4bis, Quest Software Inc., Siemens Enterprise Communications, SOFTWARE AG, Sun Microsystems Inc., Symphony Services Corp., Xcalia, XenSource Inc. and the aforementioned SugarCRM.

Microsoft officials say the notoriously go-it-alone vendor "has increased its efforts to deliver interoperability by design," with commitments to open specifications that include Web services, open document formats, virtualization, anti-spam technologies and technical collaborations with open source providers such as Novell, Zend Technologies Ltd. and XenSource, as well as significant interoperability testing for applications and hardware for Windows Vista and 2007 Microsoft Office system releases.

SPSS Inc., a vendor of predictive analytics software, has announced that AIDA Cruises, which offers holiday cruises based in Germany, has purchased SPSS' predictive analytics applications to "optimize yield management of its ships and better serve its passengers."

AIDA, part of the American firm Carnival Corporation & plc., is currently operating four international cruise ships and will expand its fleet to seven ships in the coming years. As it will be more than doubling its cruising capacity, the company decided to implement SPSS' predictive analytics software to "enhance its marketing processes in support of this objective," company officials say.

SPSS' PredictiveMarketing software will allow AIDA to better target, plan, execute and report on its direct marketing campaigns.

Björn Conrad, Manager of CRM and Direct Marketing at AIDA Cruises, said with SPSS "we'll be able to do personalized offerings that are tailored to the preferences of our passengers."

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 one of the more underrated singer-songwriters from the 1960s, Donovan, remembered today chiefly for a couple "Colours," "Catch The Wind" and for being the unfortunate foil for Bob Dylan's tour of England in 1966. But people like Nick Drake, for example, owe a large musical debt to Donovan:

China.com, an Internet services provider in China and a Hong Kong listed subsidiary of CDC Corporation and parent corporation for CRM vendor Pivotal, has announced its Web 2.0 Developer Program, which includes $20 million allocated for investment in selected web development partners.

China.com will seek to "establish strategic relationships with leading local Web 2.0 companies to accelerate the development of innovative products and services targeted specifically for the China market," according to company officials.

The company wants to develop the next generation of products and services in online video, social networking, blogs, 3G and broadband content and mobile search. Through direct cash investments, equity investments, lines of credit or a combination of these, China.com will invest up to $20 million in selected Web 2.0 development partners.

Dr. Xiaowei Chen, Chief Financial Officer of China.com, said "we believe that with our strong financial resources, deep partnership with technology leaders like Google and Microsoft and broad understanding of Chinese Netizens, we are well placed to help our Web 2.0 development partners fully monetize their products and services."

CDC Software's product suite includes Pivotal CRM (customer relationship management), c360 CRM add-on products, industry solutions and development tools for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform, Ross ERP (enterprise resource planning) and SCM (supply chain management).

VendorGuru.com has provided the results of studies which show that between 36 and 14 percent of North American companies were using VoIP products and services in 2005, tying the results in to companies' adoption of CRM technology.

Using interviews with 240 companies, Infonetics studies estimate that 36 percent of large, 23 percent of medium, and 14 percent of small North American organizations interviewed were using VoIP products and services in 2005.

Infonetics forecasts "significant increases" in the use of VoIP phone systems across all segments with small business use expected to triple by 2010.

According to Tara Moynihan, managing producer of VendorGuru.com, "We have done exhaustive research on IP Telephony, as well as customer relationship management (CRM) and call center operations vendors."

The Infonetics surveys, conducted over the last three years, also found that in 2005, organizations spent an average of $47,667 on hosted VoIP; a figure that is expected to increase 34 percent to $63,799 by 2007. For managed customer premises equipment during the same period, expenditures are expected to increase more than 160 percent.

According to Matthias Machowinski, Directing Analyst at Infonetics Research, "When companies buy a new phone system, they generally invest in the latest technology, which happens to be VoIP-based now."

Machowinski adds, "Our forecasts show continued steady uptake of VoIP over the next few years, with adoption following a relative straight line, not the S-shaped curve typically seen in the adoption of emerging technologies."

First American MLS Solutions, a division of First American Residential Group and a member of The First American Corporation family of companies, has announced that six organizations have chosen First American's CRM-enabled MLXchange product as their new multiple listing service system.

Four of the six new accounts have also chosen to implement MLX Professional, First American's customer relationship management and Agent Web Site product. With these recent additions, more than half of MLXchange's 220,000 users now have access to the enhanced customer relationship management (CRM) tools that MLX Professional provides.

The new customers have a combined membership of more than 35,000 Realtors and include the Connecticut Multiple Listing Service Inc., the Sarasota Association of Realtors (Florida), the Metro Area Board of Realtors (Arkansas), the Rogers Board of Realtors (Arkansas), the Central Louisiana Board of Realtors and the Regional Multiple Listing Service Inc. (Florida).

Serving more than 16,000 real estate professionals in the Palm Beach area, the Regional Multiple Listing Service (RMLS) used MLXchange alongside its previous MLS for more than a year before making MLXchange its primary system.

"By directly integrating prospecting and client communication tools with property information, MLX Professional eliminates a major source of redundant data entry, saving Realtors significant time and money," said Bryan Foreman, president of First American MLS Solutions.

MLXchange 3.0 is scheduled for release in early 2007 and will include dozens of new enhancements, including several premium features specifically for MLX Professional customers.

Sunrise, Florida-based Learn.com, a vendor of "workforce productivity" products, has announced that Upstream LLC, headquartered in Fargo, North Dakota, has selected the LearnCenter Workforce Productivity Suite to power its global training and communication initiatives.

Wonder whose location the North Dakota crew voted to use for training. "No, honestly, it's no problem for us to come down there, really…"

"Our challenge was to deliver a consistent curriculum to a large and geographically dispersed workforce based throughout three call centers in the U.S. and two centers overseas," said Peggy Ackerman, Director of Training and Quality at Upstream. "Before LearnCenter, we did not have an ability to deliver online training, build and maintain a best practices training portal, provide visible and self serve leadership development or convert legacy training materials such as manuals and PowerPoint presentations into online training."

Ackerman said Upstream's plans for Learn.com's product include using it as a vehicle to launch a new home-based call center solution "using technology to enable a workforce to train from home through online e-learning and assessments."

Calgary-based Guest-Tek Interactive Entertainment Ltd., a vendor of broadband technology to the global hospitality industry, has announced today it has completed an agreement to install its OneView Internet product at the Hilton Warsaw Hotel & Convention Center, Poland. This deployment increases Guest-Tek deployments in the EMEA region to 45 hotels and 8,647 rooms.

The international market represents what Guest-Tek officials consider "significant growth potential," with an estimated penetration for high-speed Internet accessing 2007 of only 9 percent, compared to 39 percent in North America, according to an In-Stat 2005 study.

Opening in early 2007, the new Hilton Warsaw Hotel & Convention Center will have 314 guest rooms and suites. Guest-Tek wired and wireless Internet products will be installed into each of the guest rooms and suites, plus all meeting, convention and public spaces.

Bert Fol, General Manager of the Hilton Warsaw Hotel and Convention Center, said the property's guests will be "looking for more than a hotspot."

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The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is just about the best music for doing this kind of work, those great albums from Frank Sinatra's Capitol years, currently A Swingin' Affair:

Got an interesting e-mail the other day from a gentleman named Siddhart Swaroop, correcting my Indian nomenclature in an article I wrote recently:

In the Tectura missive, New Delhi is called "Noida." Two different cities, though bordering each other.

Boy, go from not ever having heard of a particular company to seeing their name pop up all over the place, today we hear that ClickSoftware Technologies Ltd. and Syclo, a developer of mobile software products and a company unknown to First Coffee three days ago, have announced the deployment of their joint workforce management at a "major water district in the United States."

It's coyly unnamed, but what might qualify as a "major water district…" New Orleans? Lake Michigan? 

The ClickSoftware and Syclo joint product, marketed as Smart Schedule, clients can "optimize all types of field work, via a pre-integrated/pre-configured" product, according to Syclo officials.

Smart Schedule is a tool for scheduling and dispatching service or work orders and can be integrated into multiple enterprise applications, including CRM, asset management, billing and HR.

Smart Schedule is marketed as something to help eliminate reliance on paperwork, providing for what Syclo and ClickSoftware officials claim are "greater labor efficiencies by enabling the field force to complete more work on each shift."

The way it's supposed to work, evidently, is "the combination of products allows clients to work smarter with more data in the hands of workers at the point of performance: in effect, improving services by mobile workers being able to feed their CIS, asset management and financial applications with the data needed to better track, plan and schedule work."

First Coffee doesn't know about you, but whenever I hear "work smarter," I get this mental image of Dilbert's pointy-haired boss.

The large metro water district (Salt Lake City? The Okeefenokee Swamp? Venice?) was looking for "a proven product mix from established vendors that could be deployed with out-of-the box capability," both work management and schedule modules working together, that was "user friendly, and that could be upgraded (and future proofed) to take advantage of emerging technologies (such as RFID, GIS, GPS)."

Salesforce.com, a vendor of on-demand business services, has announced that its third quarter fiscal year 2007 results will be released on Wednesday, November 15, 2006, after the close of the market.

The company will host a conference call at 2:00 p.m. PST (5:00 p.m. EST) to discuss the financial results with the investment community. A live web broadcast of the event will be available on the salesforce.com Investor Relations website at http://www.salesforce.com/investor .

A live dial-in is available domestically at 866-901-SFDC or 866-901-7332 and internationally at 706-758-3772. A replay will be available at 800-642-1687 or 706-645-9291, passcode 1115764, until midnight (EST) December 1, 2006.

Salesforce.com will report GAAP earnings, which include recurring stock based compensation expense, and recurring amortization expense associated with the amortization of purchased intangibles. Guidance for third quarter fiscal year 2007 results, delivered on August 17, 2006, was given on both a GAAP and a non-GAAP basis, which excluded those items.

Current First Call consensus also excludes those items. Beginning with the third quarter fiscal year 2007, the company plans to report earnings and provide outlook on a GAAP basis only.

GroupSpark, a provider Private Label Exchange Hosting, has announced hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0, "completely Private Labeled."

Some features of the offering include an easy to use Web-based interface and full Outlook integration. The cost and complexity of building and maintaining a hosted Microsoft CRM product has prevented deployment by service providers across the world, GroupSpark officials say, and they're out to rectify that.

"As the first Private Label Hosted Microsoft CRM product in the marketplace, groupSpark lets partners to instantly add Hosted Microsoft CRM to their suite of services to increase revenue and decrease churn.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows companies to create a centralized repository of customer data that resides alongside Microsoft Office and Outlook -- the applications most employees use every day. From Outlook or a browser (guess which one, Firefox fans), employees can "access Microsoft CRM sales, marketing, and customer service modules to make sales decisions, market products, solve problems, and get strategic views of their business," groupSpark officials say.

TotalCare IT Solutions, the Research Triangle, North Carolina-based vendor of IT products to small and medium-sized businesses, has announced the addition of a customer relationship management platform to their existing service portfolio for small and medium sized businesses.

The CRM platform will be offered through a relationship with Morrisville-based Visitar.

TotalCare, a service division of Alphanumeric Systems, Inc., serves as an outsourced IT department for Triangle SMBs. “A modern theory in business is that technology has created a level playing field for organizations of all sizes. If SMBs are smart in how they use technology to their advantage, they can quickly become a threat to corporate power-houses,” says Tim Finnegan, Program Director.

“We believe that 360° Care via Visitar is one of those technologies that gives smaller businesses a significant competitive advantage," Finnegan said.

Intelliworks Inc., a vendor of CRM for higher education, has announced that the College of Business at Iowa State University has selected Intelliworks CRM software for their MBA program. The College of Business has a fall 2006 enrollment of 3,399 students.

In the first phase of the CRM implementation, ISU will roll out the iRM Essentials product to their MBA program. The core objective of implementing CRM for the MBA program is to provide prospective students with personalized and relevant communications.

Using the iRM Essentials system, recruiters and marketers at ISU will be able to segment and automate the dialogue with prospects while ensuring that every touch is treated in a 1-to-1 manner. It also has an advanced response measurement model.

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The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is arranging iTunes alphabetically, starting at the beginning and seeing how far we get… first two songs were "'Round Midnight" by John Coltrane and Miles Davis -- note the apostrophe before the capital "R" -- and "(Used To Be A) Cha-Cha" by Jaco Pastorius, currently we have "100 Years Ago" by the Rolling Stones, next one appears to be "25 Minutes To Go" by Johnny Cash:

I'll go back and check, but I believe at the beginning of the college football season First Coffee predicted that Rutgers would be undefeated and in the national title chase by this point.

Total net revenue for the third quarter 2006 was $11.7 million, compared to $12.1 million in the third quarter 2005. Net revenue for the third quarter 2006 was within the guidance range provided by Kintera management.

Kintera's net loss for the third quarter of 2006 was $6.9 million, or $0.19 per share, compared to a net loss of $8.3 million, or $0.27 per share, in the third quarter 2005. Net loss per share for the third quarter 2006 was also within the company's guidance range.

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization and stock-based compensation was a loss of $4.2 million, or $0.12 per share, in the third quarter of 2006, compared to a loss of $6.6 million, or $0.21 per share, in the third quarter of 2005. Adjusted EBITDA per share for the third quarter 2006 was within management's guidance range.

Cash provided by operating activities was $2.1 million in the third quarter 2006, improved from $7.5 million used in operating activities in the second quarter 2006. In addition, operating expenses for the third quarter 2006 totaled $15.7 million, compared to $17.7 million from the third quarter 2005.

The silver lining for Kintera officials is their rapid growth: The company was named the #1 fastest growing technology company by Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 Program for San Diego, and ranked #14 on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list, a ranking of the fastest growing companies in North America.

From the years 2001 to 2005, Kintera's revenue increased by 14,159 percent. The company credits its rapid revenue growth from 2001-2005 to the nonprofit industry's rapid adoption of Internet technology.

AOL and CRM vendor Autobytel Inc. have announced an agreement that will make the Autobytel network the exclusive fulfillment channel for AOL Auto searches.

As part of the agreement, Autobytel will integrate its proprietary lead distribution technology with AOL's automotive channel for the AOL-branded price quote process. Autobytel currently processes over a quarter of a million leads each month.

With this agreement, AOL Autos will use Autobytel's nationwide network of dealers to match AOL Autos customers with the local dealer of their choice.

Rudi Thun, Director of the Autos Channel for AOL, said the "combination of AOL's consumer experiences and audience with Autobytel's comprehensive nationwide dealer network" and lead distribution system was the goal of the deal.

AOL Autos lets users research the make, model and trim options on new vehicles, read reviews written by auto industry critics, compare options from one model to another, read about new dealership incentives, and then submit a price quote request to the local dealer of their choice.

Autobytel Inc. sells marketing, advertising, data and CRM products, including its Web Control customer management system, Retention Performance Marketing service reminder program, Special Finance Leads and AIC data center.

And the battle of automotive CRM heats up, with Indianapolis-based (points there!) Autobase, Inc., a provider of marketing and sales products for auto dealers, announcing its ranking on the Inc. 500 as one of the fastest growing private companies in the country.

Appearing on the list for the second year in a row at number 493 -- but hey, they're on it -- Autobase officials report a three-year growth of 307 percent. Autobase is also proud to announce its ranking of Number 363 on Deloitte’s 2006 Technology Fast 500, with five-year percentage growth of 348 percent.

Founded in 1988, Autobase has sold PC-based customer relationship management (CRM) to auto dealers for almost 20 years. Nowadays they provide a host of marketing and sales products to auto retail clients. This current offering includes products for business development centers, Internet lead management and digital marketing.

Syclo, a vendor of mobile computing products, has announced the release of Smart Schedule version 3.0 for its dispatch and scheduling product that works with enterprise asset management systems.

The Smart Schedule product from Syclo is built in conjunction with Clicksoftware, a vendor of automating scheduling products.

Smart Schedule "assists organizations who service and maintain physical assets," company officials say, such as equipment, plant floor, facilities and fleets, to "schedule the best person to perform the most critical work on time."

As opposed to those other products that schedule some fair-to-middlin' person to perform kinda sorta important tasks within a reasonable window of time, y'know.

"Solving this resource management issue enables significant improvements in worker productivity, customer satisfaction and asset reliability," Syclo officials contend, explaining that "through pre-configured scheduling rules and business objectives, Smart Schedule provides planners and schedulers with a tool for planning work and dispatching assignments."

The latest version delivers faster update times with quicker data-exchange processing and enhanced "retry" capabilities that improve fault tolerance for system downtime. This version also includes an advanced editor for on-site and configurations for special needs.

Syclo's Smart Suite includes pre-packaged and pre-integrated applications that mobilize CRM, ERP and EAM systems, among others.

Tribridge, Inc., a Microsoft consulting firm with offices across the southern U.S., has announced the expansion of its services in the Georgia and Carolinas markets. This expansion will help Tribridge's position as a provider of Microsoft business applications in the South.

"Tribridge has been doing business in Atlanta successfully for several years," said Tribridge CEO Tony DiBenedetto.

The area office is in Alpharetta and is headed up by Anthony Walsh, a technology veteran who has spent his entire career in Atlanta.

Company officials say Tribridge will continue its focus on the delivery of Microsoft Dynamics ERP and CRM products, custom software including Microsoft SharePoint, and IT security services.

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The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Charlie Parker: The Gold Collection:

Kintera Inc., a CRM vendor specializing in selling products to nonprofit organizations, has announced that La Leche League International has selected Kintera's social constituent relationship management (yet another variation on the CRM theme) system for its core member and donor management needs.

La Leche League International is a multinational organization that helps mothers worldwide breastfeed through mother-to-mother support, encouragement, information and education.

First Coffee thinks this is just amazing -- something ignorant peasant women have known how to do instinctually for thousands of years, modern, educated women need to form organizations and produce literature to know how to do. Reminds me of Bill Cosby's joke about parents going to birth classes, how the class was all these intellectuals going to learn to do something people have always known how to do for millennia.

Anyway, Kintera and ooTao Inc., a vendor of identity and data interoperability infrastructure development products, have signed an agreement to jointly integrate La Leche League International's open source authentication and data sharing standards with Kintera's social CRM platform, Kintera Sphere, enabling data to be shared between Kintera Sphere and other systems used by La Leche League International.

"The Kintera Sphere social CRM system provides our organization with a single, interactive system to manage relationships with both donors and members," said Barbara Emanuel, Interim Executive Director for La Leche League International, saying the system "provides a total view of a constituent's relationship with La Leche League International."

"Many areas of customer service and CRM technology are beginning to mature, but only a select number of vendors continue to deliver pure innovative products and services," said John Ragsdale, Vice President of Research, SSPA. 

The learning algorithm is designed to adjust context vectors so that words used in a similar context will have vectors that point in similar directions.  Talisma Answer learns the meaning of content based on contextual usage and then organizes the content for immediate processing and retrieval.

"Gone are the days when customers are willing to wait more than 24 hours to get a response to an e-mail inquiry," said Dan Vetras, President & CEO, Talisma.

Tectura, a vendor of Microsoft business products to mid-market companies and larger enterprises, has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Euroinfo Systems, an Indian Microsoft Dynamics partner and international IT services provider.

Oh great, it looks like we have another Indian PC Name Alert™ on the horizon. Calcutta and Bombay are now "Kolkota" and "Mumbai," Madras is "Chennai" and now it looks like "New Delhi" has been redubbed "Noida," an unusually ugly mud stick of a name for a city:

"With a Development Center of Excellence in New Delhi (Noida), India, EIS provides enterprise IT solutions and services in support of offshore and onsite development," the company says. Why don't we just change the name "India" to whatever it was too, before the Indus river was so named. Or better yet, why doesn't everyone adopt the Finnish practice of having two names for everything, one the locals use -- "Suomi," e.g. -- and one for foreigners -- "Finland."

EIS was attractive to Tectura because of its large team of Microsoft Dynamics professionals specializing in Microsoft Dynamics AX and Microsoft Dynamics NAV implementation services for the Indian market as well as for global offshoring. EIS also offers Microsoft Dynamics CRM expertise as well as integration services with Microsoft SQL Reporting Services, Analytics, SharePoint, and .NET.

The acquisition will give EIS a combined team of 200-plus members focused on Microsoft Dynamics and offshore development services out of three centers in Noida, Bangalore, and Mumbai.

I'd asked Greg Gianforte, CEO of RightNow Technologies, what he thought of Microsoft's latest CRM efforts, here's what he said:

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Billie Holiday's Lady In Autumn: The Best Of The Verve Years:

Scanning the election results from yesterday, First Coffee sees that MSM-backed Nancy Pelosi and Hugo Chavez-backed Daniel Ortega both won. I can hear the champagne glasses clinking from San Francisco to Caracas.

Respond, a UK vendor of complaints and feedback software (some things are better automated, listening to ratchet-jaw complaints has to be one of them), has announced the latest version of its complaints and feedback management application, Respond CenterPoint 3.66.

Respond CenterPoint is a software system that has been "incrementally improved" to allow dedicated complaint and feedback handlers "within a customer service or feedback management department to automate the entire process from capture through resolution to reporting," according to Respond officials.

For version 3.66 company officials said they put the focus on providing deeper functionality and "expanding the application's capabilities for logging, tracking, managing and reporting on all forms of feedback data, including complaints, complex queries, enquires, issues, comments and compliments."

Respond's Head of Product Management, Ian Mapp, said all of the new features in Respond CenterPoint 3.66 "have been developed based on feedback from our customers."

Features include a new Outlook link that lets users register e-mails with existing complaint cases, open complaints or create a new complaint from an e-mail within Microsoft Outlook. This increases automation, reduces manual effort and errors, and integrates with familiar desktop applications.

A plug-in manager for enhanced system maintenance and a configurable repeat contact search facility have also been added along with what company officials say are "improved security options." This includes a powerful new feature to selectively manage confidentiality of individual data elements within a feedback or complaint case.

Respond CenterPoint 3.66 is part of the Respond 3 XA suite of enterprise applications

The company claims "significant market share" in both the high-profile financial services sector and the highly regulated public sector.

Vtiger, a vendor of enterprise-ready open source CRM, has announced the release of vtiger CRM 5.0. The vtiger business model is designed for small and medium businesses looking for an alternate to more expensive CRM products.

Company officials claim vtiger has been downloaded "close to 500,000 times already," and say it "ranks among top 5 most downloaded financial apps in sourceforge.net."

Vtiger CRM is built over LAMP/WAMP stack and other third-party open source packages. The software can be installed in Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 and different types of Unix/Linux-based distributions, such as RedHat 7.2/8.0/9.0, Debian 3.0, SuSe 9.0, Fedora Core 3.0, Mandrake 10.0, and FreeBSD.

Features of vtiger CRM include an Ajax-based user interface redesigned by implementing the best breed of Web 2.0 technologies, such as AJAX, Tag clouds, and mashups with other Web services

"Vtiger CRM has passed through more than 10 development cycles to ensure that the product is enterprise-ready and usable," said Shankar R.N.S, Product Manager at vtiger.

Pitney Bowes Group 1 Software has introduced its Customer Data Quality Platform, which is billed as letting businesses and government agencies "better manage their customer data by matching and consolidating information from across the enterprise into a single, comprehensive system of record."

Built on a robust service-oriented architecture framework, Group 1 Software's CDQ Platform has "built-in understanding to resolve both syntactic and semantic ambiguities and inconsistencies with global name recognition and advanced entity resolution," coupled with global address data quality and geocoding components.

The CDQ Platform uses a knowledgebase and allows analysts to create custom business rules as new composite services which can be published and extended to the enterprise. This can help a company unify customer account data, eliminate redundancies, link members of the same household, and generally expand customer knowledge.

Chris Baker, president of Pitney Bowes Group 1 Software, said by extending the functionality of customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and customer data integration (CDI) applications and initiatives, Group 1 Software "enables its customers to establish the foundation for important business decisions and protect their investments in existing customer information management systems."

In addition to providing an integrated framework for both batch and transactional CDQ, and rich support for integration with C, C++, VB.COM, C#/.NET, Java, Web services, and XML, the CDQ platform also supports Internet- based software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery mode, and certified application connectors for SAP, Siebel and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Princeton Softech, an enterprise data management vendor, has announced that Deutsche Bank has selected Princeton Softech Optim.

Optim is marketed as enabling organizations like Deutsche Bank "apply a consistent enterprise data management strategy across applications, platforms and databases," letting organizations "align application data management with business objectives to optimize performance, control cost and reduce risks."

The idea Princeton Softech's pushing is that while organic business growth can inflate any application database with a wealth of information, application upgrades, while enhancing application functionality, can also add to database growth. Ultimately, their marketing pitch goes, application databases that drive business initiatives can become overloaded and performance slows.

In response, the company's saying Optim has "proven archiving capabilities" which allow organizations to "meet application performance targets, which in turn drives revenue growth. Information is readily available, allowing a quick response to client inquiries and legal requests. And Optim protects the privacy and integrity of enterprise data, helping to support compliance initiatives."

Deutsche Bank uses a Credit Risk Management application that runs on Oracle 9i and uses a Solaris database server. Over 2,000 businesses use the Credit Risk Management application.

Princeton Softech enterprise data management products are available for Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Siebel Applications and Amdocs CRM, as well as all custom applications.

And First Coffee doesn't want to tell anybody how to vote, but when the likes of Jihad Jaara, a senior member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group and the infamous leader of the 2002 siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, as well as Muhammad Saadi, a senior leader of Islamic Jihad and Abu Abdullah, a leader of Hamas' military wing in the Gaza Strip are all encouraging Americans to vote for Democrats, I'd at least have thought twice before voting for them, otherwise it's kind of like Michigan agreeing to hire the guy Ohio State would like to see them hire to be their football coach.

The New York Times didn't report Jaara's endorsement? Oh. Hm. Strange, but no doubt it's for your own good. Don't want you to get all confused or anything.

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The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music, since we seem to be on a Stones kick here, is Sticky Fingers, which some consider their best. First Coffee's willing to grant it could be as high as their second best, but no higher:

Today in Munich, at Convergence 2006 EMEA, Microsoft announced it will release a new version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM for the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Windows Vista.

Microsoft has also announced that, in addition to being offered through Microsoft's standard Volume Licensing program, Microsoft Dynamics CRM will be offered through the licensing model that is used with Microsoft Dynamics enterprise resource planning products. Company officials say this is to make it "simpler and more convenient" for customers and partners to buy and deploy Microsoft Dynamics for customer relationship management (CRM), financial management and supply chain management.

The new version, compatible with the 2007 Office release and Windows Vista, will be released at the same time as the 2007 Office release and will ultimately be available in 18 languages.

Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, said customers and partners could deploy it "as on-premise software or an on-demand service." Microsoft officials outlined the new features as follows:

An "enriched user experience" based on the 2007 Microsoft Office system. The new release of Microsoft CRM picks up on the new Ribbon user experience of the 2007 Office release, and lets users access roles-based CRM capabilities through Microsoft Office Outlook, Microsoft Internet Explorer and other mobile devices.

"Richer data visualization" with Microsoft Office Excel 2007. Rich data visualization and business intelligence enhancements to Microsoft Office Excel 2007 for "better analysis and decision-making for CRM managers and users."

Desktop action and insight using Windows Vista gadgets. New Windows Vista gadgets allow Microsoft Dynamics CRM activities, analytics and alerts to be placed directly onto the desktop or home page.

Unified communications with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. The new release of Microsoft CRM enables users to store voice-mail messages in Outlook and track them automatically in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

And a feature which should be popular with Starbucks corporate customers, enhanced security with BitLocker Drive Encryption in Windows Vista. The new BitLocker capability in Windows Vista helps protect confidential CRM data on laptops from being accessed by unauthorized individuals.

Microsoft also announced today that licensing options for Microsoft Dynamics CRM will be increased, by adding it to the licensing model that is offered with Microsoft Dynamics ERP products.

This includes both Business Ready Licensing and Modular Based Licensing.

By adding pricing information for Microsoft Dynamics CRM to the price lists for each of Microsoft's financial and business management products -- Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Microsoft Dynamics SL, customers will "find it even more simple and convenient to buy and deploy full-suite Microsoft Dynamics solutions for their businesses," company officials hope.

In keeping with Microsoft's usual practice of hitting user testimonials hard in announcing new releases, the Redmond Giants have announced that the National Football League's Indianapolis Colts and the South African financial group Sasfin Bank Ltd. are happily on board with the new stuff -- in the Colts' case, even switching over from salesforce.com.

About this pricing deal, First Coffee remembers back in July Microsoft announced the Business Ready Licensing model and the Business Ready Enhancement Plan for Microsoft Dynamics as "simplifications and improvements in value to the licensing and maintenance programs" for its Microsoft Dynamics business management products.

They said Microsoft Dynamics CRM functionality would be included on the Microsoft Business Solutions price lists over the next 12 months, starting with Microsoft Dynamics GP. Glad to see they're on schedule with something to do with CRM up there in Redmond.

Business Ready Licensing was described by Microsoft in July as an attempt to streamline pricing for Microsoft Dynamics products -- Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Microsoft Dynamics SL -- by "moving from a pricing model based on hundreds of modules and granules to a new model based primarily on the number of concurrent users who actually use the software."

This new model has three offerings: Microsoft Dynamics Business Essentials, Microsoft Dynamics Advanced Management and Microsoft Dynamics Advanced Management Enterprise. The models are based primarily on common functionality and, Microsoft officials claim, represent "a price reduction for a typical entry-level configuration, eliminating much of the complexity of licensing enterprise resource planning software."

It's not quite as high-profile as Microsoft, but Creative Manager Inc., vendor of Creative Manager Pro software, has released version 8.37 of its flagship product, Creative Manager Pro with what company officials characterize as "full-featured CRM capability."

Saying the new release 8.37 includes "specific enhancements that our large agency clients asked for," Ron Ause, Creative Manager's director of marketing said the product now has "more powerful features."

Among the variety of enhancements now available to all Creative Manager Pro users is the ability to automatically mass e-mail AR invoices to customers with an option for the client to pay via credit card directly from the invoice.

Media enhancements were included in the previous version 8.35, and improvements to the Transaction Preference function here give users the option to sync vendor invoices from Strata and SmartPlus as "approved" or "not approved."

Additionally, new upgrades in the product company officials claim is "the only Ad Agency software and Project Management Software for the Creative Design industry," offer logic to determine the outstanding open amount on a vendor invoice being applied to pre-billed orders when importing form Strata or SmartPlus.

The updated product has also added new features that work with Apple's latest Tiger Mac OS X and future Leopard Unix-based Operating System and Microsoft Windows. Company officials describe Creative Manager Pro as going "beyond costing to offer full Project Management, CRM, Digital Asset Management, billing and accounting, and Extranet capabilities."

Creative Manager Pro is created exclusively for design firms, ad agencies, in-house creative/MarCom departments, and creative service firms. It's a web-based integrated project management software and job tracking tool supporting Customer Relationship Management, Document Management, Shared Calendaring, Accounting and other functions.

Satuit Technologies, Inc., has announced that Harris Investment Management, Inc. has selected Satuit as its customer relationship management (CRM) provider.

HIM offers a range of investment management products and services. To support its business model, HIM wanted CRM built for the asset management industry rather than a general-purpose package. While there were a few generic CRM solutions available that were enhanced to better serve the asset management industry, even these were not built from the ground up to serve the investment professional, HIM officials say.

SatuitCRM is available on-demand, another factor in HIM's choice.

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The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the south end of First Coffee's collection. Only the truly finicky among us have an absolute order system for arranging CDs on the shelf -- alphabetically by artist, then chronologically within artist, and yes we do look up release dates we don't know -- so starting from the other end, we've selected Warren Zevon's Excitable Boy, Neil Young's Live Rust and Dwight Yoakam's Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc. for our listening pleasure:

Princeton Softech, a vendor of enterprise data management, has announced that Thiess, an Australian engineering and construction companies, has selected Princeton Softech Optim JD Edwards EnterpriseOne to improve the management of enterprise application data.

Controlling ongoing General Ledger data growth in its JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Financial Management applications is a "top priority," according to Thiess officials.

Organizations invest thousands of dollars and staff hours into ERP applications and rely on them to collect information that drives business initiatives and sustains success. However, it's generally accepted that unmanaged data growth can lead to decreased application performance, increased risk and revenue loss. Products like, well, Princeton Softech Optim JD Edwards EnterpriseOne manage enterprise data throughout its lifecycle, helping companies improve performance, mitigate risk and control cost.

Optim captures and archives complete business objects, such as ledgers, and offers application-independent access to standalone archives, so companies can respond quickly and accurately to audit and discovery requests.

Paul Winn, chairman, CEO and president of Princeton Softech, said Optim is for companies who want a consistent, long-term approach to enterprise data management.

While retaining historical data is necessary for compliance, retaining large volumes of data for extended periods of time can strain IT resources. Optim is designed to help companies segregate current from historical data and store the historical data in a secure archive.

Established in 1933, Thiess is one of Australia and Asia's largest construction, mining and services companies. It's currently working on projects throughout Australia, the near Pacific and South East Asia.

Princeton Softech enterprise data management products are available for Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Siebel Applications and Amdocs CRM, as well as all custom applications.

Today's Holiday: Recreation Day, in Northern Tasmania. We're not sure what this holiday entails (translation: Five minutes of lazy Googling didn't turn up anything) but we sure like the name.

Recommind, an enterprise search and categorization vendor, has announced MindServer Expertise, an application for its MindServer 4.2 enterprise information access platform.

MindServer Expertise is described by company officials as "a comprehensive directory search tool" combining standard directory content with individual work product, providing "real-time access to the tacit knowledge of an organization."

MindServer is designed to transform high volumes of discrete files, documents, and messages contained in enterprise management systems, HR, time and billing systems, CRM and contact management systems into manageable information relevant to a user's specific purpose.

The application helps consulting and professional services organizations identify individuals within the firm who have unique expertise or specialized knowledge, so that they can find and collaborate with those individuals on project work, present the full value of the firm's knowledge in new business pitches, and match the best resources to client engagements.

"The competitive advantage of a large professional services organization lies in its deep bench and extensive intellectual assets, but as those resources operate around the world and across many different disciplines, it can be difficult to identify exactly who knows what," noted Bob Tennant, CEO of Recommind and a man who sounds like he speaks from personal experience.

The way MindServer Expertise is supposed to work is to collect information and identify expert individuals with "no additional work on the part of the organization's employees," Tennant says.

Expertise is determined by the work that has been produced, instead of static manual profiles which are rarely updated and quickly out of date. Using a centralized search application, the consultant or project manager can view profiles of people relevant to their search terms, as well as links to documents and projects related to that person and the search concept. Searches can be refined through smart filtering fields, such as client, industry, or office, and firms can quickly cross-reference relevant documents, projects, and experts related to a similar topic.

"Expertise location, weaving together diverse content applications to allow knowledge workers to share and receive expertise they need -- has great promise in sectors like law, enterprise software, professional services, securities research, and healthcare," said Forrester Research analyst Matt Brown in a 2006 report titled "Expertise Location: Your Next Frontier."

Smart companies, Brown said, realize expertise location is "not about a single software product. It starts with identifying critical knowledge gathering patterns -- and mapping a fabric of solutions directly to those business needs."

FTS, an Israeli company trying to own the "Business Control Layer" buzzword, in partnership with Cisco Systems and analysts Yankee Group will demonstrate "how service providers can improve revenues and increase customer satisfaction using the Business Control Layer" in Hamburg and London next week.

The free road show is open to all Service Providers at the Kaffeeborse in Hamburg on 15th November and the Institute of Directors in Pall Mall, London on 16th November.

During the seminar, Service Providers can learn how Telenet used FTS's Leap Business Control Engine and Cisco's SCE to achieve what company officials characterize as "higher revenues, a 40 percent reduction in customer service calls, reduction in churn and an increase in overall customer satisfaction. Attendees can also learn how they can create IMS-like capabilities using their current network infrastructure.

This is supposed to work by capturing events in real-time and responding in real time based on a preconfigured set of business policies or actions, such as sending the subscriber a message, changing service QoS, provisioning, balance management or rating to name a few.

The seminar will feature presentations in both London and Hamburg, between 8.30 a.m. and 12.45 p.m. including a complementary lunch. Contact Hamburg_event@fts-soft.com for the Hamburg event or London_event@fts-soft.com for the London event, no later than November 13th.

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 lazy afternoon coffee here, and the music is lazy afternoon music, the Stones' "Waiting On A Friend." Love that Sonny Rollins sax, really makes the track:

Zeus Technology, a vendor of application traffic management software, has announced its partnership with Danish network, security and consultancy services company Netic A/S.

The partnership will enable Netic to deliver Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager to its customer base, establishing availability of the advanced Application Delivery Controller in Denmark. A leading Danish mobile network operator has already selected ZXTM to power its billing, CRM and self-service platforms.

ZXTM is a traffic management product available as both an appliance and as a software platform to run on existing data center servers and blades and in virtualized environments, "providing customers with the ultimate flexibility in choosing a product that suits their technology and business needs," according to Zeus officials.

"Partnering with Zeus allows us to address the increasing demand in the Danish application acceleration market," said Karsten Thygesen, Technical Director, Netic A/S. "Organizations in Denmark are increasingly recognizing the need to bring more business operations online to improve customer service and ZXTM delivers the high levels of performance required to manage, secure and optimize application traffic."

ZXTM's capabilities provide organizations with centralized control and resilience for applications, for interaction between web-enabled applications and evolving XML-based Web Services. Claiming it's "more adaptable and easier to use than anything currently available on the market," Zeus officials say ZXTM enables both the network and applications to become more fluent and closely integrated.

It being a Sunday, we'll note that CRM vendor Technalign, based in Delta, Colorado has announced that they have officially partnered with Business Computers, Inc. in Texas to provide a Christian Desktop based on the Christian Edition of the OEM.

That's right, the Christian Edition includes preinstalled applications such as The King James Bible, Scofield reference notes, Strong's Greek and Hebrew Bible Dictionary for SWORD, and Dan's Guardian for content filtering.

The base system is an AMD Sempron 2800 with 256 megs of memory, an 80 gigabyte hard drive, a CD r-w, 3.5 inch floppy, mouse, keyboard and of course the TaFusion OEM Christian version installed.

Business Computers, Inc. laptops and desktops will be preconfigured running the latest TaFusion Frontier Christian Edition OEM, powered by MEPIS. The system will also include OpenOffice.org ( a full office suite compatible with Microsoft Office files ), Internet browsers, Thunderbird mail client, and CD/DVD burning software, to name a few. They will also sell systems with the regular Frontier products including those preconfigured with CrossOver Office and the PRO DVD versions.

Dianne Ursini, CEO of Technalign, Inc., said the new offering (get it? Offering?) "will allow companies and individuals to select a Christian version of TaFusion Frontier preconfigured. The demand has shown that there is a need for such an offering."

Of course there are Christians who would say such "choices" were already preordained. Kind of like, you know, preinstalled software from the foundation of the universe.

Business Computers, Inc. systems are manufactured and shipped directly by Business Computers, based in Texas. All systems are fully certified by Technalign for Frontier and are compliant with industry standards. The desktops come with a factory warranty and with either a one- to three-year component manufacturer warranty. Praying that it works always helps too, of course.

Stephen Bugge of Business Computers, Inc. and a man who has never once heard a joke about his last name in connection with computer operating systems, says consumers, as well as businesses, "are demanding Christian products as well as reasonably priced ones. Our systems provide companies with additional options at the lower ends, while we can also meet the demand at the high-end."

Business Computers provides services to business and consumers nationwide with full consulting services.

Five percent of profits from Christian OEM systems are donated to International Christian Missionaries. First Coffee can think of a lot worse things to do with that money, too.

Marketing Solutions Inc., a vendor of Web-enabled Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software systems, has announced a new CRM product Nexus.

Nexus "will provide businesses in any industry an opportunity to build, retain, and attract customers," company officials say, but it's designed for small to mid-sized businesses as an affordable CRM product.

Nexus officials differentiate it from other Web-based CRM systems by saying it's "the only system that captures real-time orders, customer history, customer and prospect information, sales commission, sales forecasting and one-to-one marketing functionality," and offers up-sell and cross-sell capabilities framed in a full 360-degree view of customer data as well. That's what they say.

Every function and process of Nexus includes marketing, sales, customer service, fulfillment, order management, and finance, and company officials are pitching the product as giving users the ability to rank open quotes, sales orders, and/or open invoices:

"An adjustable chart reflecting various stages within the sales cycle is displayed on a sales pipeline report to help ensure opportunities are being maximized," they say.

Northampton Borough Council, the largest district council in England, has opened a new Customer Contact Center in order to -- hey, this is council officials' own words here -- "improve telephone customer service performance."

The Center is tasked with ensuring citizens get connected with Customer Service Advisors as rapidly as possible, resolving more queries within a single call and improving the overall "customer experience."

And when government agencies start considering citizens as "customers" that's a step in the right direction.

Call handling technology from Macfarlane Telesystems is at the heart of Northampton's new operation. Macfarlane CallPlus technology intelligently routes all incoming calls to appropriate advisors, records calls, and provides both automated call handling (IVR) and detailed management reporting facilities.

Planned developments include the implementation of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software from Lagan.

The Customer Contact Center opened in June 2006. Council services provided through the Center include Housing Repairs, Housing Customer Services, Cleansing (waste, graffiti etc.), Complaints, "Councillor Contact Center" and switchboard answering.

In Development Phase 2, due to be completed December 2006, Building Control Planning, Environmental Health, Call Care (24 hour Call Out service to Sheltered Housing residents) services will be added.

In Phase 3, planned for completion March 2007, services will be extended even further and are likely to include: Sheltered Housing, Housing and Money Advice, Homelessness and Housing Needs, Tenancy Support, and Rental Income. The Center currently employs 26 personnel, a number which is expected to rise to 40 when Phase 2 is completed -- and grow further in Phase 3.

Northampton Borough Council's Contact Center currently handles up to 5500 customer calls per week.

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 Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys' From One Good American To Another album. Kinky for Texas governor; look what that job's a stepping stone to:

Let's see what the top news today is, and you know, First Coffee isn't one of these depressing, "if it bleeds it leads" MSM journalists, intent on reporting only the bad news, here at First Coffee we believe there's a lot of positive news out there, starting with the fact that the Democratic Party seems to have finally realized what most of America had known for years, that John Kerry, known to Republicans as "the gift that keeps on giving," is somebody you don't want on your side in anything, be it fighting in Vietnam or running a campaign:

To kick off, Reuters is reporting that "Hot pants and miniskirts will soon be legal in South Korea:"

The country is in the final stages of revising an indecency law that prohibits people from wearing revealing outfits and was once enforced by ruler-wielding police during authoritarian governments in the 1970s, officials said.

"The law for excessive exposure does not match our current society," said Kim Jae-kwang, an official with the Korea Legislation Research Institute.

Under authoritarian rule, police could arrest or fine women for their fashion choices. They also took scissors to men whose hair they felt was too long and tossed people in jail for unauthorized dancing.

SAS, a vendor of business intelligence, has announced new releases of Customer Intelligence offerings, specifically SAS Marketing Automation and SAS Marketing Optimization products.

SAS officials say enhancements to SAS Marketing Automation "provide a number of performance improvements for high volume marketers, and a series of new features to continue to make sophisticated marketing simple, effective, and profitable."

SAS Marketing Optimization is designed to let marketers "mathematically optimize" outbound customer communications while balancing the organization's capacity to deliver. The latest version of SAS Marketing Optimization has what company officials call "improved usability" for business users. This release also provides improved reporting, analysis and collaboration. 

SAS Digital Marketing, available next month, delivers e-mail and text messaging capabilities. 

SAS Customer Intelligence includes Marketing Automation, Marketing Optimization, Interaction Management, Web Analytics, Digital Marketing, Veridiem Marketing Resource Management and Marketing Performance Management components. It's built using the open-standards-based SAS9 platform, combining best-in-class technology with industry and domain expertise.

Company officials say the product can be integrated readily with an organization's current infrastructure. 

More good news from Reuters: Starbucks Corp. said Friday it had lost track of four laptop computers, two of which had private information on about 60,000 current and former U.S. employees and fewer than 80 Canadian workers and contractors.

The data, which includes names, addresses and Social Security numbers, is about three years old, dating prior to December 2003. The company has not received any reports that anyone's personal information has been compromised.

Asked if there were any secret recipes on the missing computers, O'Neil chuckled and said, "I don't know of any."

And an interesting case study from Richard Stevenson at CRM add-on vendor CobbleSoft International, a transplanted Brit in upstate New York who just had an article, “Service Intelligence: Value-Added Compliance," published this week, October 31^st, in the British Computer Society’s journal, 50^th anniversary edition"

Good evening old chap, Richard writes, how’s life out in Istanbul? Sitting here as New York starts to get chilly makes me wonder why I don’t live in Europe somewhere nice! We had our first snow flurry yesterday…  it disappeared quickly, BUT… a sign of things to come. I love the snow, but hate the extended cold.

I promised you recently that I would forward a new case study on to you as soon as we had it ready. Well, please find attached. Our client recently spent several months and stressful times with auditors, and completed the SAS 70 Type II audit. This was primarily because the majority of their customers are public companies, needing to provide assurances for compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) etc. 

According to their auditors, this was the first time that they have not had to write up the technology in place -- ever. Naturally, we were ecstatic that COIGN Enterprise enabled them to sail through.

Stevenson notes "a new industry phrase/ buzzwords, also coigned (pun intended) by CobbleSoft: 'Service Intelligence (SI).' We’re advocating the use of SI for customer support and service, as opposed to BI which tends to refer more to the health of a company and financials. SI in COIGN Enterprise is partially provided through our concepts of Active Data Warehousing, basically real-time data warehousing."

The case study itself tells of CyberShift, a provider of workforce and expense management software and services, who "established a corporate-wide initiative to consolidate its client support, incident management, and data center service desk systems to support its Total Client Service Quality program."

CyberShift chose CobbleSoft, a vendor of specialized service desk, service management and database products, to provide the Web-based application framework to meet its objectives. In addition to "ensuring compliance with regulations and control requirements, such as Statement on Auditing Standards (SAS) No. 70," according to CyberShift officials, the product has "streamlined the end-to-end support process within

CyberShift by improving operational efficiencies as well as reducing internal management costs."

Visitar has announced what company officials are calling "key enhancements to its 360° Care viaVisitar" product. The enhancements include both planned upgrades and response to customer feedback, more core functionality and support options for the product's targeted small and mid-sized business market. 

The company sells hosted products to the SMB market, so pricing for the product remains only $55 per-seat, per month. It will be available for customer access in mid-November.

Visitar's first interaction product, 360 Care viaVisitar, provides customer relationship management (CRM) and sales force automation (SFA) that link rich telephony capabilities with business applications designed to "improve efficiency and enhance customer and employee interactions," company officials say. 

The new version includes enhancements in CRM and customer interaction functionality, the user-driven configuration model, and the technology platform. 

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 a 1970s Rolling Stones mix. It's sturdy if not great music, but I appreciate it: After their 1968-1972 skein of the best four-album run in rock history there was going to be some letdown, but even through all the marking-time records they’ve made in the past 34 years, there hasn't been any outright rubbish. Bob Dylan's thrown some absolute garbage out there, The Kinks, The Beach Boys, Eric Clapton, Steve Miller, Tom Waits, Paul McCartney, The Who, John Mellencamp, Lou Reed, R.E.M., David Bowie, U2, Joni Mitchell, anybody who's been around twenty years or more has at least one avert-your-eyes bad album, Neil Young's got a whole shelf of crap, but almost uniquely not the Stones, they've always adhered to a high standard of professionalism in what they do that's frankly admirable. It’s not all timeless music, there's forgettable product like Emotional Rescue and Undercover, but none of their records sound like they just didn't care about the quality, it all sounds like they were at least taking their job seriously and there's something to be said for that, other bands could do with a work ethic and taking pride in a job well done like that:

In the third quarter 2006 quarterly revenue increased to $377.5 million, up 60 percent from the year-ago quarter. Quarterly diluted EPS on a GAAP basis was $0.40, compared to $0.28 in the year-ago quarter and quarterly diluted EPS on a non-GAAP basis was $0.45, excluding stock-based compensation expense of $0.05.

Revenue for the third quarter of 2006 increased to $377.5 million, up 12 percent sequentially from $336.8 million in the second quarter of 2006, and up 60 percent from $235.5 million in the third quarter of 2005. GAAP net income was $61.0 million, or $0.40 per diluted share, compared to $40.6 million, or $0.28 per diluted share, in the third quarter of 2005.

For the nine months ended September 30, 2006 revenue increased to $999.8 million, up 59 percent from the year-ago period and diluted EPS on a GAAP basis was $1.09, compared to $0.74 in the year-ago period. Diluted EPS on a non-GAAP basis was $1.22, excluding stock-based compensation expense of $0.13.

Revenue for the nine months ended September 30, 2006 increased to $999.8 million, up 59 percent from $628.9 million in the same period of 2005.

Lakshmi Narayanan, President and CEO of Cognizant said during the quarter, the company "experienced strong growth across our industry segments, including… healthcare, life sciences and financial services. Demand for our broad range of solutions was particularly evident in testing, ERP/CRM, complex systems development, high-end vertical BPO and IT infrastructure management."

Hagerman & Company officials have announced that the company is one of the first Autodesk resellers in America to be authorized to sell and deliver Autodesk Subscription Gold Support, a service that provides access to support from technical experts with experience in the industries the company serves.

"Available only to Autodesk subscription customers," Hagerman officials say, the Autodesk Subscription Gold Support program offers customers toll free telephone support Monday-Friday during normal business hours (8 a.m. to 5 p.m. in all U.S. time zones), direct access to qualified technicians with target three-minute maximum hold time, target two-hour maximum response times, up to four named callers and local language support.

As part of this new authorization, Hagerman & Company was required by Autodesk to meet personnel, facility, performance and infrastructure criteria consistent with industry best practices in technical support. "A thorough review of Hagerman's capabilities and customer surveys revealed the company already exceeded all required performance metrics," the company's officials said.

"Hagerman & Company has been authorized to do this only after agreeing to meet defined Autodesk criteria," said Taylor Pohlman, Vice President of Worldwide Product Support at Autodesk.

AdventNet Inc., the parent company of CRM vendor Zoho.com, and a vendor of enterprise IT management and IT security software, has announced the support for Managed Security Service Providers with the release of version 4.0 of ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer.

ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer is an enterprise-class, vendor-neutral software for firewall log analysis. It's billed as enhancing the availability and security of a network by continuously collecting, analyzing, and reporting on the firewall traffic logs.

Firewall Analyzer supports almost all major firewalls including Cisco Pix, CheckPoint, NetScreen, WatchGuard, SonicWall and FortiGate.

"We have been receiving a lot of requests from MSSP's and NOC Administrators asking for user specific device view, anomaly detection filters, and administration report support in Firewall Analyzer to cater to their disparate clients," said Saravana Kumar, Firewall Analyzer's Lead Architect.

ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer is available for download for both Windows and Linux installations. A 30 days, unlimited, professional edition is available for evaluation.

In addition to Zoho.com's CRM, AdventNet offers including network & systems management (ManageEngine.com), security (SecureCentral.com), collaboration and office productivity applications (Zoho.com), database search and migration (SQLOne.com), and test automation tools (QEngine.com).

Contact center vendor Amcat has been chosen by Birmingham-based Countrywide Skips to provide their customer contact management system. The new system will enable the company to manage inbound advertising response from consumers looking to hire a skip anywhere in the country, and will automate its business-to-business telemarketing campaigns, according to company officials.

(Question to British readers: What the hey's a "skip?")

David Austin, Managing Director at Countrywide Skips, said they started the brokerage operation in May with an on-line advertising campaign, and inclusion in other media such as Yellow Pages. Whatever skips are they're popular items: "The number of telephone enquiries this generated was phenomenal, and within a short period of time we were handling over a 1,000 calls per month," Austin says.

It was obvious to skip officials that they needed to automate the whole telephony process. Well duh, if you're into skips in a big way these days yeah, I mean, like totally. "We needed to implement a complete unified customer contact product with comprehensive statistics and reporting, that would ensure that we could handle all the new enquiries correctly, while getting the best deal for our clients from the 400 preferred suppliers that we work with across the UK."

Austin said he was introduced to Amcat as a result of a recommendation from a business colleague who had used their Contact Center Suite for a mobile phone business. "Based on this referral," he said, "we decided to invite the company to provide a demonstration and the results were impressive. It had everything we needed including inbound and outbound customer contact, real-time statistics and IVR (interactive voice response) and multi-media such as e-mail."

Placing the sort of faith one would expect from skips, Austin said he expects "the new system to manage over 5,000 calls per month within the next few months and our inbound calls to increase to around 16,000 within 12 months."

The beauty of the Amcat product, he noted, is that it is good for growing companies, since "we can add new capacity as we expand and implement new features when we need them. We also have the capability to integrate it with our other business systems such as Sage in the future." Now that First Coffee knows they have such a robust contact center I might just contact them and ask just what a "skip" is.

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