By David Sims
David(at)firstcoffee.biz
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Tom Waits' Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards. Now that's my idea of Valentine's Day music:
Lumtron Technologies, a vendor of document management products, today announced the release of its AccuraScan module, a tool to efficiently scan, index, and file large numbers of paper documents with minimal user involvement, while at the same time linking those documents to corresponding client records within an organization's client management system.
Calling AccuraScan "the most advanced document capture functionality our users have ever seen," Dan DeSerto, President of Lumtron Technologies, said the company has "capitalized on the power of .NET technology."
Simultaneously supporting both early capture (front-end, or pre-process) and late capture (back-end, or post-process) centralized batch scanning, AccuraScan lets the user verify the accuracy of the document capture process by displaying thumbnails of the scanned pages, and distinguishes control sheets from actual documents.
Multiple scan setting presets and automatic image enhancement tools (auto-rotate, de-skew, de-speckle, etc.) help automate the document capture process. Committing the documents to the database, the product uses integration methodologies for the documents to be routed to the appropriate recipient's inbox (in an early capture environment), or to be automatically indexed, filed, and tied to the appropriate clients' records in the organization's business or CRM system (in a late capture environment).
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Happy Valentine's Day… Robert Louis Stevenson. One night in France, Stevenson passed by the window of a house, looked inside and "fell instantly in love with a woman he saw eating dinner with a group of her friends," according to Writer's Almanac. Stevenson "opened the window and leapt inside," bowed and introduced himself to the woman, an American named Fanny Osborne. They fell in love and got married.
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TRG, a vendor of global training products, has announced a partnership agreement with Xentor Products Ltd., a UK based sales force Performance Management software and consultancy provider.
TRG and Xentor are shooting for sales in the Performance Management field. Combining Xentor's software platform with the support of TRG's ROI analytics team and advisors "enables an organization to… enrich individual learning and development plans for sales professionals," believes Larry Laws, Xentor Chief Marketing Officer.
The partnership will extend TRG's European market as well as Xentor's Western hemisphere relations, and is expected to "allow us to create a global synergy that will ensure our clients can gain real competitive edge," according to Don Kyle, Director of Operations for Xentor.
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Happy Valentine's Day… William Butler Yeats. The great Irish poet spent his adult life hopelessly in love with Irish Nationalist Maud Gonne, who told Yeats that she couldn't marry him because she believed they had been brother and sister in a previous life.
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Netezza Corporation has announced that Telekom Slovenije, Slovenia's leading national and international telecommunications provider for fixed line, mobile and Internet services, has selected the Netezza Performance Server data warehouse appliance.
Telekom Slovenije began reviewing its data warehousing requirements in early 2006 after internal discussions showed the existing product wasn't able to scale effectively to deal with the increased levels of data processing.
Following a discussion with its retained reseller partner, crmT Slovenia, Telekom Slovenije chose Netezza's NPS system.
Jovo Suput, CIO at Telekom Slovenije explained that even "the most straightforward queries started to take longer to process," and found the price and scalability of the Netezza system "attractive."
Telekom Slovenije will use the Netezza system as a central data warehouse integrating data from billing, inventory, CRM, SAP and others systems to analyze all data across business-critical processes.
Telekom Slovenije officials say they hope the product will "help us reduce customer churn, potentially fraudulent activities and ensure accurate revenue assurance, improving sales and marketing, product offerings and development."
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Happy Valentine's Day… Sylvia Plath. In 1956, studying in Europe on a Fulbright Scholarship, she went to a publication party and met Ted Hughes, whose poetry she admired. "When he introduced himself, Plath quoted one of his poems to him, and he guided her to a side room of the bar," Writer's Almanac writes. As Plath later wrote in her journal, "He kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off ... and my favorite silver earrings ... I bit him long and hard on the cheek and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face." They married four months later.
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SAS officials credit "strong demand for industry-specific and packaged products" for the 30th straight year of revenue growth for the CRM analytics vendor.
Total revenue in 2006 was $1.9 billion, up 12 percent over $1.7 billion in 2005, SAS has announced. New software license revenue increased 20 percent, nearly twice the growth rate expected in the market this year.
The results "validate the new course we set for the company several years ago when we began investing heavily in business and industry-focused applications built on an enterprise intelligence platform," said SAS CEO Jim Goodnight.
Industry and packaged business products were up 49 percent over 2005, SAS officials said. Goodnight added that "one of our core strengths, powerful predictive analytics, continued to represent a significant stream of revenue at 19 percent growth."
Sales of business intelligence and data integration/warehousing were each up by nearly 50 percent.
Dan Vesset, Research Director, Business Analytics, IDC, said given SAS' latest financial performance announcement, "it is clear that the shift toward packaged analytic applications has benefited the company faster than we expected."
Over the recent years, SAS has transformed itself from a company known primarily for its advanced analytics tools to "a provider of a broad portfolio of packaged analytic applications," Vesset said, which "incorporate the company's analytics, query and reporting and data management expertise."
SAS officials say they saw strong increases in key vertical markets. The retail-based sector grew 18 percent, revenue from financial services jumped 17 percent and life sciences revenue grew 12 percent -- "a result," company officials say, "of organizations increasing investment in advanced analytics to improve business operations."
In the public sector, where fraud detection products drove increases, revenue rose 10 percent. Cross-industry business products saw total gains of 45 percent because of high demand for marketing automation, performance management, and risk and IT management software.
The Americas accounted for 45 percent of total revenue; Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) 45 percent; and Asia Pacific 10 percent.
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Happy Valentine's Day… E.B. White. Depressed over not writing a masterpiece he was thinking seriously of quitting his job at The New Yorker and running a summer camp. He wrote a letter to the fiction editor, Katherine Angell, who wrote back "for you to give up writing now would be like a violinist giving up music, the thing he most loved in the world, because he can't be [the best]." White returned to New York and married her.
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