Second Cup Of Coffee: Altico and Baptist Hospital, VoiceNation, CRM In '07, Autonomy

David Sims : First Coffee
David Sims
| CRM, ERP, Contact Center, Turkish Coffee and Astroichthiology:

Second Cup Of Coffee: Altico and Baptist Hospital, VoiceNation, CRM In '07, Autonomy

By David Sims
[email protected]

Here's a second cup of coffee, there appears to be a lot in the pot this morning so drink up, campers. Music's Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited:

Altico Advisors, a Microsoft Certified Partner headquartered in Massachusetts, has announced that all proceeds from the Year End Class conducted every December for Altico's Microsoft Dynamics GP clients have been donated this year to the New England Baptist Hospital.

"There are a lot of incredibly worthy causes that we could support, so choosing just one is always a difficult task. This year we chose an organization that was close to our heart and had personal meaning for us," says Rich Maloney, who is Altico Advisors' CEO, Chairman of the NEBH Finance Committee and Vice Chairman of their Board of Trustees. "This act of annual giving is another way of supporting the communities we serve."

Yeah, First Coffee lets them talk that way here when they're doing something good like this.

Established in 1893, New England Baptist Hospital is a nonprofit, adult medical/surgical hospital, known nationwide for its pioneering excellence in orthopedic surgery. NEBH performs more complex orthopedic procedures than any other hospital in Massachusetts.

"Our goal is to provide legendary service to our patients and to exceed their expectations every day," explains Debra Coleman, Vice President for Development and Chief Development Officer at NEBH. "We can quantify our success in a number of ways. For example, we were recently listed as a one of the top orthopedic hospitals in the country by US News & World Report for the 4th year in a row. And we consistently rank in the top 1 percent for patient satisfaction both in the greater Boston area and nationally."

Nice of her to say "patient" instead of "customer."

Normally, Coleman says, "donations come in as a result of our fund raising efforts. We were enormously pleased by Altico Advisors' unsolicited contribution and show of support. This is a great start to the new year."

Altico Advisors implements and supports business, financial, and customer management software solutions for mid-market companies throughout New England. Altico is a Microsoft Certified Partner specializing in Microsoft Dynamics GP (Great Plains) and CRM systems for manufacturing, distribution, software development and service companies.

New England Baptist Hospital is a premier Orthopedic Center of Excellence, providing the highest quality medical and surgical care and performing more complex orthopedic procedures than any other hospital in Massachusetts.

Well done, Altico, a tip o' the pot to yer.

VoiceNation, which sells outsourced voice telephony and disaster recovery products, announced today the "Next" Initiative, a program to enable companies to "maximize the benefit they receive from voice communications by understanding the technology, options, and services available to them."

Resellers who sell VoiceNation's technology will also get a "completely new CRM application integrated with account provisioning, real time reports, and commission tracking," according to VoiceNation officials.
Focusing on fast-track technologies that will be hitting the marketplace over the next 180 days -- did you know about that? I sure didn't -- the Next Initiative is how VoiceNation will work with their client base to "ensure they are using the latest capabilities to build revenue for their business," is how VoiceNation officials put it.
Jay Reeder, President of VoiceNation, said the company is "rolling out several major breakthroughs in the next six months, and we wanted to have a plan in place to make sure our customers are able to keep pace."

The new voice communications technologies that VoiceNation plans to unveil include new voice platform with "toll-free mega-pop" that can handle 500-1000 simultaneous inbound calls, as well as personal communication assistant technologies with "presence management" capabilities. This enables one person to instantly know the status of another -- "at work," "in a meeting," "on cell," etc.

There's also Instant Messaging integrated with presence management to allow IM-based message status notification and incoming call announcements, a new Web-based user interface to control personal calling and status options as well as the new CRM application mentioned earlier.
        
"The Next Initiative is our way of protecting the integrity of our own research and development, so that it is never about what is flashy and trendy," Reeder said.

CRM vendor Autonomy Corporation plc has announced that it has been chosen to power the Swedish Armed Forces' new high-level technical architecture for its Command and Control System. The project is overseen by a joint venture company which includes Saab, Ericsson, IBM and Boeing.

What, not Volvo?

Autonomy was chosen, its officials say, for the technology's ability to "form a conceptual and contextual understanding of the meaning of a document and use this to perform advanced operations, such as automatic profiling, alerting, agents, query guidance, clustering and summarization."

The company's meal ticket has been its enterprise search capabilities, and in this case its dynamic hyperlinking and automatic, personalized channel generation were also particularly significant factors in the decision, if Autonomy's official statements are anything to go by, as the software will be used to capture and deliver findings from various research programs around the world.

Swedish military. First Coffee always thought Sweden was rather like a polar bears or wolverine, an entity with no natural predators in that if Russia or Germany really wanted it they'd have it by now. In such countries the "military" is usually one big off-book social welfare program, far more concerned with paying salaries, providing job training and keeping the official unemployment figures down than actually fighting anyone.

Autonomy's fully scalable and language-independent software will be used across vast repositories of documents in both Swedish and English. Employees will be able to track every document in the system, check for duplicate information and discover any shortfalls and missing information.

Gotta love Aussies. Here's a headline from Australian industry observer Brendon Chase: "Technology That Will Still Suck In '07."

Does your little CRM antennae go up? First Coffee's sure does. Let's see what Chase thinks… "Mobile phone coverage -- What? I can’t hear you. Hello? Okay I can hear you now. No, not now...How about I just call you later on a landline."

Yep, we'd agree with that one, here's another: "I can’t decide whether it’s the Linux desktop that will still suck in 07 or the end users who will fork out for Microsoft and Apple this year. I guess it’s a little from column a and a little from column b."

Hm, here's another one -- "Home networking for non-geeks – Over the Christmas period I was asked to help set up some friend’s and family’s network. Connecting two computers together, connecting to a wireless router, and setting up a secure home network on Windows is too difficult for the average punter."

Oh, and here we are: "CRM integration projects. As a programmer you’ll still be fixing these projects in 07 and reprogramming them in 08 to align business with IT.'"

Yeouch.

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



Featured Events