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.
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