By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is one of the greatest songs of the 1970s, "Miracles," by one of the '70s lamest bands, Jefferson Starship, not to be confused with their great '60s incarnation as Jefferson Airplane:

Salesforce.com has announced that Singapore Airlines has deployed Salesforce SFA and Salesforce Marketing to "foster collaboration and information sharing among its growing number of home office-based sales representatives," according to company officials.

The company used "fourteen applications from the AppExchange directory" to enhance its Salesforce product by automating manual tasks, increasing efficiency in campaign efforts and improving visibility into account status.

"We have a highly dispersed team of inside and outside sales representatives in North America, and it was often a challenge to collaborate as a team to meet our sales goals," said Michael Stellwag, manager of direct sales and marketing at Singapore Airlines.

While "many of their competitors are dismantling their sales teams," salesforce.com officials claim, Singapore Airlines is "committed to providing customers with a point of reference. However, in order to make this economically viable, Singapore Airlines has moved a majority of the sales team to a home office, and they needed an application to facilitate the collaboration between different sales people."

The Apex platform, formerly known as the AppExchange platform, is available as of this week. The next release of the Apex platform is currently scheduled to be available in conjunction with the release of Winter '07. The Apex programming language is currently scheduled to be available during the first half of 2007.
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Jacada Ltd., a vendor of desktop and process optimization products for customer service operations, has announced that two of Capita's regional business centers have selected Jacada WorkSpace, a unified customer service desktop, for customer service operations.

Capita, a British vendor of integrated professional support services, wanted to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of its contact center operations. Specifically, it wanted its customer service representatives (CSRs) to better serve customers, bridging together all desktop applications and tools they use for greater accessibility and simplified processes. Capita wanted Jacada WorkSpace to create a central interaction point for the CSR.

Mike Minahan, Customer Services Director for Capita, said they wanted the new technology to "provide our CSRs a central point of activity for more expedient call handling, and to streamline many of the complex processes that are presently performed in numerous disparate applications."
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And just because we enjoy practicing random acts of kindness here at First Coffee, we'll note that Knova Software, a vendor of Intelligent Customer Experience applications, has announced its inclusion on the Software 500, Software Magazine's list of the world's foremost software and services providers, published as an online catalog on www.Softwaremag.com.

Knova was ranked No. 304, with software revenue of $23.6 million. But hey, they're on.

Bruce Armstrong, president and CEO of Knova Software, said with the launch of Knova 7, the acquisition of Active Decisions and "high demand for our software and service, we expect to continue our strong performance in 2007 and beyond."

"The 2006 Software 500 results show that growth in the software and services industry was flat from 2004 to 2005, the ranking year. The industry continues to be dynamic with more than 90 new companies on the list this year," says John P. Desmond, editor of Software Magazine and Softwaremag.com.

The list is a revenue-based ranking of the world's largest software and services suppliers targeting medium to large enterprises, their IT professionals, software developers and business managers involved in software and services purchasing. It's based on total worldwide software and services revenue for 2005.

Rankings include revenues from software licenses, maintenance and support, training and software-related services and consulting. Suppliers are not ranked on their total corporate revenue, since many have other lines of business, such as hardware. The financial information was gathered by a survey prepared by King Content Co. and posted at www.Softwaremag.com, as well as from public documents.
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I Told You So™, Part 1: Incoming House Speaker, San Francisco Democrat Nancy Pelosi, demonstrated her party's new "tough and smart" approach to national security by wimpily caving in to intraparty racial preference politics to pick, as Chairman of the all-important House Intelligence Committee, the stupidest option possible: Texas Democrat Silvestre Reyes, a man who does not know the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and who thinks al-Qaeda and bin Laden are… flip a quarter… uh, Shiite? Wrong, Bozo. Thanks, Nancy.

Sleep safely in your beds, friends and fellow Americans, knowing this is the level of talent that you voted in to make the intelligence decisions to defend your country for the next two years. Yes, in fact it is your fault: See, in reality, as opposed to snappy political ads and MSM-spooned up sound bytes, elections have consequences. Real ones.

Here's a little tip for the 2008 elections: When America's enemies are pulling as hard as openly as they were for Democrats to win the 2006 elections, ask yourself why enemies sworn to destroy the United States have such a strong preference for one party over the other. Saves them the work, I guess.
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A good source of RFID trade news, RFID Update, has noted that United States government efforts to tighten security in the pharmaceutical supply chain "hit a roadblock last week when a federal court judge issued an injunction that lifts pedigree requirements for drug shipments."

RFID is an industry those of us in CRM should keep an eye on, dip a toe in the trade journals once in a while, there'll be an inevitable convergence between marketers frantic to know what customers want and don’t want and spy chips with the ability to track what customers buy and what they do with it.

"While RFID had not been a requirement for the pedigrees," RFID Update writes, "industry observers agreed that pedigree enforcement generally was a positive step toward the ultimate adoption of RFID-based e-pedigrees. Thus, with the FDA pedigree requirement now postponed, momentum behind RFID e-pedigree adoption may be slowed."

The requirement, as RFID Update notes, was established in 1987 "as part of the Prescription Drug Marketing Act (PDMA), but it was stayed repeatedly for years in hopes that practical technology solutions could be developed." None have. The FDA, drug manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, and "various industry associations" think RFID can meet the pedigree requirements, so the FDA removed its stay this summer and will require paper pedigrees effective January 1, 2007.

However, ten pharmaceutical wholesalers have filed suit against the FDA's Department of Health and Human Services in federal court to block the pedigree requirement, claiming it would cause them "irreparable harm." Judge Joanna Seybert of the Eastern District Court of New York agreed, and issued the injunction last Friday. This injunction is likely to stay in effect until the suit is ultimately resolved, RFID Update notes, "which could take years."

Still the RFID industry hopes to cash in on a government-mandated boom in demand: "Ultimately, the courts tend to favor the government in cases such as this that allege Equal Protection Clause and Due Process Clause violations when the rational basis test applies," according to a lawyer cited by RFID Update, who said it was "likely that the FDA pedigree requirements will eventually take effect."

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