March 2007 Archives

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Greg Brown's "Mose Allison Played Here:"

Infor has announced that Turkcell, Turkey's largest mobile phone operator and Europe's second largest GSM operator, has won the Gartner CRM Excellence Award 2007 for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Turkcell was singled out for its successful deployment of Infor CRM Epiphany, which Turkcell officials say has "dramatically improved" interaction with Turkcell's 31.8 million customers.

Infor CRM Epiphany is a CRM product marketed for integrated marketing, sales, service and analytics.

Turkcell, the only company here in Turkey listed on the NYSE, manages more than 23 million customer interactions per month through 19 different communication channels. "We congratulate Turkcell on winning this award," said Gregg Monastiero, senior vice president of Infor's Strategic Solutions Group for CRM.

The award was presented following a review which involved Gartner analysts evaluating all entries based on proven excellence in their CRM initiatives. From this, Gartner selected three finalists. Attendees at the Gartner CRM Summit in London then evaluated each finalist's presentation against Gartner's eight building blocks for CRM and voted Turkcell the winner.

Attendees at the event, Turkcell officials say, chose Turkcell for its "vision and organized approach to challenges." And believe First Coffee, "organized approach to challenges" is not the usual M.O. here in Istanbul. If they gave out awards for "winging it and somehow holding it together" nobody would have a prayer against these people.

This is, of course, much of the charm and attraction of Istanbul in particular and Turks in general, it's great that things here are fairly relaxed and loose. Of course the guy who installed your plumbing was relaxed and loose as he was doing it, so there are drawbacks.

Gartner officials also cited Turkcell's customer-driven, multi-channel product development strategy designed to reward customer loyalty, another innovation in a culture where, as recently as 1997, the state telephone company actually charged users more per minute for the longer they stayed on a call.

Voters noted the importance of having board-level support for the initiative, and felt that it was clear that Turkcell had made good use of customer segmentation and customization -- beyond the usual Turkish segmentation of "people who buy things from me vs. people who could get hit by a bus for all I care."

Some attendees noted that Turkcell's approach thinks about the experience from an individual customer's view. That this is remarkable here is a good indication of why Turkcell is the only Turkish company ever to get traded on the Big Board.

"We are delighted to receive this prestigious award," said Meltem Sahin, Head of Marketing Insights and Reporting, Turkcell, a position which can't exist at more than a handful of Turkish firms.  Still, given that until the 1980s Turkey was a closed, Soviet-style command economy, the progress that has been made here, due to then-Prime Minister Turgut Ozal's throwing the country open to competition, is phenomenal.

"We believe this award highlights Turkcell's continued commitment to providing the highest levels of customer satisfaction possible. With the help of Infor CRM epiphany, we have decreased customer complaints by 30 percent and increased first time query resolution by 15 percent. In the last year alone we increased customer satisfaction in a market where our competitors are facing decreases," Sahin said.

Turkcell has 31.8 million post-paid and pre-paid customers as of December 31, 2006 operating in a three player market with a market share of approximately 60 percent as of December 31, 2006. In addition to wireless telephone services, Turkcell currently offers General Packet Radio Service countrywide and Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution in dense areas.

Turkcell provides roaming with 541 operators in 193 countries as of February 26. Turkcell reported $4.7 billion net revenues as of December 31, 2006 as per IFRS financial statements.

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Staying overseas, which means changing a lot of "s"es to "z"s in officials statements, since one thing Ye Olde England has been singularly successful in exporting worldwide is British English, we note that Luxoft, a large Russian provider of high-end IT outsourcing services, has announced that it is extending its co-operation with investment bank Deutsche Bank.

Luxoft President and CEO Dmitry Loschinin and Deutsche Bank's Daniel Marovitz, COO of Technology for Deutsche's Global Banking Division, finalized the agreement during CeBIT's German-Russian IT Summit, which promotes the cooperation between Germany and Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

Luxoft will provide development resources in Russia and the Ukraine to enhance Client First, a Client Relationship Management package. Moreover, based on Deutsche Bank's experience with Client First, the two companies believe that the product has wide potential in the business community and will therefore work together to market it to organizations worldwide.

Client First provides real-time management of each client relationship by aggregating and centralizing data from many internal and external sources. The system currently serves over 5,000 Deutsche Bank employees across Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.

Client First is used as a CRM platform in a number of different businesses across the bank.

Loschinin emphasized that working with Deutsche Bank has been a truly collaborative partnership, saying "we are taking an almost unprecedented step by working with Deutsche to sell a product that was specifically developed for just one client."

Luxoft was the first company in Europe to achieve Level 5 CMMI quality certification.

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OS2i, a vendor of offshore Recruitment Process Outsourcing services to the American and British recruitment industries, has announced its Reseller and Affiliate programs, designed to "enhance partners revenue streams and broadens their own current offerings by reselling or referring OS2i to their customers," company officials say.

Company officials stress that the partner program is particularly well-suited to US & UK individuals, organizations or associations serving Recruitment or the Human Resourcing industry.

Affiliate & Reseller Partners will be fully supported by a dedicated US or UK sales manager, a research team, marketing collateral, CRM access, web and e-mail leads and the commitment to make the partnership excel, OS2i officials promise.

The company was basically one of the first to run with the concept of offshore Recruitment Process Outsourcing, which after four years they've had some success with: the company is currently working with over 300 US & UK staffing companies and claims many of the top 100 within their client portfolio.

Operating a hybrid onshore-offshore business model, OS2i's offshore RRO facility is based in India -- surprise, surprise -- with onshore offices in both the UK and USA. This dual-shore model allows OS2i to deliver outsourced resourcing and recruitment administration services at offshore rates, with what company officials describe as "onshore quality and accountability."

What, you ask, are some typical outsourced oRPO services? Well, friend, we have candidate generation services such as job board resume database searching, advertising response, ATS searching, talent pool development, advanced online passive candidate identification, intelligent online advertising, candidate networking and referrals via e-mail & telephone. Not to mention candidate screening and recruitment administration.

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 The Pogues' rendition of Eric Bogle's "Waltzing Matilda," a fine song about the World War I campaign by the ANZACs at Gallipoli, not the unofficial Australian national anthem:

It's a favorite pastime for those of us in CRM to spend lots of time and effort defining what CRM is -- Paul Greenberg's done a heroic job -- but First Coffee would like to take a few moments here to define what CRM is not. Orthodox theologians would call this the apophatic approach -- defining by the negative.

For example, CRM is not the Wild Horse Coordinated Resource Management Project, scheduled to begin this year near Ellensburg, Idaho, according to local reporter Mike Johnston:

The Western Watersheds Project sent a letter to the state Department of Fish & Wildlife indicating it will challenge proposed cattle grazing in the state-owned Whisky Dick Wildlife Area 15-20 miles east of Ellensburg, the site of the Wild Horse CRM project.

NetSuite, Inc., a vendor of on-demand business management software for small- and mid-sized businesses, has announced that Linden Lab, creator of Second Life, a 3D virtual world, has selected NetSuite to help manage its rapid growth.

In January 2007 alone, Second Life Residents converted their Linden Dollars into approximately $5 million, company officials say. NetSuite "operates invisibly in the background to manage back-end operational processes," NetSuite officials say, adding that Linden Lab is "in the process of implementing NetSuite CRM functionality."

"Second Life has grown nearly seven-fold in the last twelve months," said John Zdanowski, Linden Lab's chief financial officer. "We needed a system that could support our growth." Company officials say they needed business software that could be installed quickly -- in about 60 days -- and just as swiftly scale with its rapid growth.

Linden Lab chose NetSuite in large part for its ability to replace separate ERP and CRM applications with a single, integrated business management application, and its track record in scaling with growing companies, Linden officials say.

Second Life is a 3D online world with a population from 100 countries around the globe, in which the residents themselves create and build the world which includes homes, vehicles, nightclubs, stores, landscapes, clothing, and games.

The Second Life Grid is a development platform created by Linden Lab, a company founded in 1999 by Philip Rosedale, the former CTO of RealNetworks, to create a shared 3D experience.

St. Jude Medical, Inc. recently announced it has completed the testing process established by the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise, an initiative promoting the adoption of standards that enable healthcare information to be shared across clinical settings. The testing took place during IHE's annual Connectathon in Chicago.

St. Jude Medical is the first manufacturer of cardiac rhythm management (CRM) devices to test a product for conformance with an IHE interconnectivity profile. Great company doing great work, but not what we do.

CRM vendor GoldMine gets a facelift: Dystrick design, Inc., a creative design and communications agency, has announced the launch of the new GoldMine Web site at www.goldmine.com. The new site was created for CRM vendor FrontRange Solutions.

Designed and implemented by dystrick, the site promotes the release of GoldMine Enterprise Edition. "Heightening the significance of the launch of the new site," GoldMine officials say, Microsoft has featured GoldMine Enterprise Edition as its mid-market Sales & Marketing product as part of the January 30, 2007, launch of Windows Vista.

Microsoft has linked its Windows Vista site to the new GoldMine site, driving visitors to the site to hear about GoldMine Enterprise with Vista. The new site also serves as an introduction for a new FrontRange marketing and branding campaign for GoldMine Enterprise Edition.

Last month CRM Studios announced that it has executed a letter of intent to enter into a strategic agreement with Urban Television Network Corporation to re-launch the Urban Television Network. URBT will provide programming specifically targeting African-, Hispanic- and Asian-American audiences.

CRM Studios is an independent, top-tier film and video production company based in Fort Worth, no doubt they do a fine job, but they don't do our job.

SAP AG has announced that Executive Board member Shai Agassi has left the company "by mutual agreement," to "commit himself to his personal agenda of environmental policy and alternative energy sources and other issues."

Industry observers say Agassi was unhappy that he would have to wait longer to take over the company. Nancy Gohring has reported that "Agassi was scheduled to become co-CEO of SAP when Henning Kagermann leaves the job of CEO. However, SAP chairman and company founder Hasso Plattner asked Kagermann to retain his position until 2009," instead of leaving this year.

"Most likely, [Agassi] wasn't happy when I asked [Kagermann] to stay until 2009," SAP chairman Hasso Plattner said during a conference call to discuss the changes.

Some industry observers characterized the move as the new guard being pushed out by the old guard, as Agassi was widely seen as the driving force behind both NetWeaver and SAP's foray into on-demand which, as Denis Pombriant, managing principal at Beagle Research told Gohring, are "absolutely critical to SAP's success. If he's not there to push these initiatives, I wonder if there's anyone else who can."

In a prepared statement Plattner said he had "shared with Shai my plan that he should become successor to Henning Kagermann as a co-CEO for SAP. With the extension of Henning's contract to 2009, it became apparent that Shai was not comfortable committing to a 10- to 15-year period, which was not in keeping with his personal career timeline."

Given this, "I made the recommendation to the Supervisory Board that we change our plans and now adjust SAP's executive management team responsibilities," Plattner said.

"I look forward to new opportunities, and working on issues that are important to me, including alternative energy and environmental policy issues, as well as the future of Israel," Agassi said.

The SAP Supervisory Board has accepted Agassi's resignation effective April 1, 2007. Leo Apotheker, president of Customer Solutions & Operations, and member of the Executive Board, will assume the new role of Deputy CEO of SAP AG effective immediately.

Klaus Kreplin, Corporate Officer, will continue to lead SAP NetWeaver technology, Jim Hagemann Snabe, Corporate Officer, will lead development of the SAP Business Suite and industry solutions and Bob Stutz will continue to lead the CRM team. All will report to Kagermann.

Plattner said Agassi's departure is "not at all related" to the recent lawsuit Oracle has filed charging SAP with stealing corporate information.

And no, the Moroccan Red Crescent Organization (CRM), fine work that they do, do not do what we do. So there you are -- we're not the Wild Horse Coordinated Resource Management Project, cardiac rhythm management, a film and television studio or the Moroccan Red Crescent. Hope that's all cleared up now.

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

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is… well, we're back to our touchstone here, the album we have to listen to at least six times a year, the greatest rock album ever made or which will ever be made, the Rolling Stones's shambling kudzu sprawl of a masterpiece, Exile On Main Street, a runaway freight train joyriding between Chicago and New Orleans at night with Hank Williams, Keith Richards and Robert Johnson passing a whiskey bottle around the locomotive as the ghosts of Mississippi Delta blues guitarists and white Southern gospel shouters trade off at the throttle, a freeway crash of blues, country, gospel and rock with a tanker-truckload of the Rev. Billy Joe McAllister’s Kentucky Gospel Whiskey on your way to see what those Delta Sunday morning gospel musicians do in the juke joints on Saturday nights:

Research firm Forrester Research, which has to First Coffee's knowledge never been described as " a freeway crash of blues, country, gospel and rock," has recently named Oracle's Siebel CRM as having a strong current offering in their report "Forrester Wave Evaluation: Enterprise CRM Suites for Financial Services, Q1 March 2007." 

Forrester also names Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM and Siebel CRM On Demand as "strong performers" in this recent report.

To assess the state of the CRM market, Forrester analyzed strengths and weaknesses of various enterprise CRM suites vendors across 464 criteria in three areas of current offering, strategy and market presence.

According to the vendor summary cited in the report, "Through years of experience, the Siebel CRM product has developed in such a way that it routinely provides critical but undervalued functionality.  It is one of the few products in this evaluation to offer strong field campaign management to accommodate bank branches, insurance agent offices and investment broker offices."

Now that the subscription delivery model is getting more popular, Oracle's expanding its hosted CRM offerings. What with more than 12 new product releases in just over three years, Oracle's Siebel CRM On Demand delivers a well-thumbed hosted CRM product. 

Oracle's Siebel CRM On Demand provides such CRM capabilities as built-in analytics, a built in-virtual call center, and vertical editions featuring industry-specific out-of-the-box functionality.

"Financial services customers are realizing tremendous benefit from pre-built, industry specific functionality such as account set up and field campaign management," said Oracle Vice President of CRM Strategy Mike Betzer.

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Flat Rock, Michigan-based -- and how many times do you start a news item with that lead-in? -- Kaleidico, an Internet technology company selling Web-based lead management tools to mortgage companies and other sales organizations, has announced the release of icoSales Enterprise Edition.

The product is a customizable lead acquisition, allocation and management application aligning "prospects with the sales person data shows is likely to understand their needs and finalize their transaction," according to company officials.

The product manages all leads regardless of type or source, incorporates data verification services, and synchronizes with online lead generation companies.

"We created icoSales EE for mortgage companies, banks, call centers and other large sales organizations looking for a lead management platform with CRM functionality," said Bill Rice, CEO of Kaleidico. "These organizations want to ensure that the leads they purchase are accurate, qualified and closable."

IcoSales EE is built specifically for organizations with more than 1,000 sales agents and multiple, affiliate offices. It allows for controlled branch autonomy so field offices can purchase and measure leads from different sources than the home office, better understand how their sales people are performing with specific leads and then make changes as appropriate.

For example, a mortgage company that has offices in Boston and Los Angeles can purchase and measure leads from one set of vendors for its Boston office and work with an entirely separate group of lead providers for its Los Angeles office.

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Star B2B, a business-to-business and consumer targeted marketing firm, has joined Star Marketing Group, a division of Omnicom Group, Inc. Star B2B joins Star Marketing's other units, which include Optima, Critical Mass, The Daggerwing Group, Innovyx, Javelin Direct, SigmaWorks Group, OMD Digital and OMD Direct.

Star B2B offers marketers a value proposition in the business-to-business and consumer sectors. Its demand generation response rates are implemented via multi-touch and multi-channel communications which are, company officials promise, "100 percent measurable."

Company officials also promise "upfront research and analysis" allowing Star B2B to "target fewer, yet more promising leads."

Star B2B is led by Dennis McGuire and Michael Carney. McGuire co-founded Saligent, a business-to-business lead generation agency. Carney is the former managing director of Rapp Collins Chicago. Star B2B is a joint venture between Omnicom's Star Marketing and MarketStar, a sales and marketing outsourcing company.

Star Marketing is comprised of Omnicom agencies mixing and matching from a variety of marketing disciplines, including CRM, interactive, direct marketing, digital and search media, analytics, ROI and marketing sciences, teleservices and e-mail.

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Infusion Software, a vendor of CRM and marketing automation software for small businesses, has announced the appointment of David Yohe as its Director of Marketing and Jeff Mask as Director of Business Development.

Yohe joins the company from global retail and manufacturing software producer JDA Software where he served as Director of Direct Marketing and Mask worked with Pfizer Pharmaceuticals as a Sales Representative in California.

Yohe is a graduate of the University of Arizona where he earned a BA in Radio/TV Media Arts focused on Marketing and Advertising. Mask holds a B.A. degree in Communications with an emphasis in Marketing and Advertising from Brigham Young University.

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Prestige International USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of Prestige International, Inc., has announced the expansion of service at its Los Angeles area facility to include support for luxury brand and concierge services.

As a global vendor of BPO and CRM outsourcing services, Prestige International extends this capability to its Los Angeles contact center where it currently supports several luxury/concierge clients. Over the past several months, product knowledge and best practices for the support of luxury brands and concierge service were transferred to the Los Angeles facility from other global locations, including San Francisco and London.

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Summit Realty Group, a commercial real estate firm serving greater Indianapolis and a member of the Cushman & Wakefield Alliance, and Ascendix Technologies, the publishers of Real Estate Advantage, have announced that Summit Realty Group has selected Real Estate Advantage as its new industry-tailored CRM platform and project management platform.

Summit officials say they wanted a centralized system to manage contacts, projects and property data as well as to improve access to that data. The firm also wanted a system that could be used while on the road or in the office.

The realty group's officials were "impressed with the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics CRM," they said, but wanted something that could "combine the Microsoft technology with applications tailored for the commercial real estate industry."

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

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Tom Waits' Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards:

Raymond James Financial, Inc., a U.S. financial services firm, has selected Microsoft Dynamics CRM as its software of choice for customer relationship management, which means that the St. Petersburg, Florida-based company "now recommends that its nationwide network of more than 4,600 financial advisors adopt Microsoft Dynamics CRM as its primary customer relationship management tool," according to company officials.

Raymond James will initially offer 3,000 Microsoft Dynamics CRM licenses, but expects to increase the number to more than 5,000 in response to demand over the next two or three years.

Tim Eitel, chief information officer of Raymond James, said Raymond James advisors who took part in head-to-head testing to determine the company's preferred CRM product consistently chose Microsoft Dynamics CRM, "including advisors who had already personally purchased other products."

Features which helped to sell the brokerage of Microsoft CRM, according to company officials, included "greater efficiency and tight integration." Most of Raymond James' corporate technology systems run on Microsoft software, Microsoft SQL Server and the Microsoft Office system. Financial advisors can input and access customer data directly through Microsoft Office Outlook, a program they already use throughout the day.

The integration among the Microsoft products eliminates the need to input customer information more than once, and advisors can also access meeting notes, sales reports, forecasts and other customer data via a single, customized onscreen dashboard. Because hey, even financial brokers like things nice 'n' easy.

Raymond James officials also cited Microsoft's "investment in this area of business software," to the point where company officials were convinced that Microsoft Dynamics CRM "would eventually become the de facto standard in business CRM."

Yes, Raymond James is the name of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' stadium, the one with the cannon that fires after a Buccaneers touchdown. Cannon was pretty quiet last season.

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Sophos, a vendor of IT security and control, has announced that CDC Software, a wholly owned subsidiary of CDC Corporation whose product suite includes the Pivotal CRM, c360 CRM add-on products and development tools for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform, has selected Sophos to "protect all tiers of its network against viruses, Trojans, worms, spyware, adware, potentially unwanted applications and hackers," according to Sophos company officials.

As CDC Software has numerous locations globally, the decision to consolidate at the endpoint with Sophos Anti-Virus was made partly in an effort to ensure that all worldwide locations receive the same level of protection.

For the next three years, up to 2,000 CDC Software employees will be protected against viruses, spyware, adware and potentially unwanted applications at the endpoint with Sophos Anti-Virus. Additionally, PureMessage will disinfect and/or quarantine viruses, spyware, Trojans and worms in both incoming and outgoing e-mail.

CDC products are used by more than 6,000 customers worldwide within the manufacturing, financial services, health care, home building, real estate, and wholesale and retail distribution industries. CDC Software is the enterprise software unit of China-based CDC Corporation.

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Captivate Network, which describes itself as a "digital at-work news and entertainment network," has announced Sheri Taylor Gilchrist as the vice president of Marketing and Programming. She will oversee the marketing, public relations and on-air programming for Captivate Network.

Prior to joining Captivate, Gilchrist worked at Harte-Hanks as senior vice president, CRM Strategy and Business Development. Her responsibilities included providing CRM strategy thought leadership for clients and prospects, as well as managing the growth and cultivation of new business pursuits with long selling cycles.

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Happy birthday, Quentin Tarantino. Note to self: Must see Reservoir Dogs some day.

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IBM and 3Com Corporation have announced what officials from both firms are calling "the industry's first product to integrate IP telephony with e-mail, messaging and core business process applications on a single, secure platform."

The System i Integrated Collaboration is described by IBM officials as featuring "unified communications capabilities to help customers increase productivity, lower costs and streamline operations." Because it runs on a single System i, IBM officials say, "it is easier and less expensive to manage than competitive Windows-based, multi-server offerings."

The Integrated Collaboration product builds on the System i IP Telephony product IBM and 3Com produced last November. It uses open standards such as Session Initiation Protocol to create a platform for innovation by enabling the 3Com VCX system to be "more easily integrated with collaboration and business applications running on the System I," IBM officials say.

IBM and 3Com officials say they have seen "substantial interest" from the community of System i product-providers and business partners.

IBM and 3Com expect to work with over 100 independent product vendors to integrate their applications with the new product. IBM officials give the example of iMessaging Systems, Inc., an ISV which provides a native System i IP telephony integration product by enabling its iNspire product with SIP. System i customers and ISVs use iNspire to integrate business applications and telephony even more easily to provide intelligent call routing, screen pops and interactive voice response.

CRM application provider Vacava used iMessaging's iNspire product to sell Vacava Customer Care -- a telephony and call center-enabled product requiring minimal effort to implement. Other ISVs planning to bring their application to the System i Integrated Collaboration product include Touchtone Corporation, RJS Software Systems, Inc. and KMR Systems.

Roland Corporation U.S., a manufacturer and distributor of electronic musical instruments, recently selected the System i Integrated Collaboration product to improve its customer service to the music stores and consumers it supports, integrating IP Telephony with Roland's ERP applications.

The System i IP Telephony Contact Center is being marketed to departments that receive high telephone call volumes, such as help desks, with built-in features using business logic to route calls to an appropriately-skilled agent and then provide screen pop" with application data such as previous contact or business history.

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Tigerpaw Software, Inc., which sells CRM and professional service automation software, has expanded its Training and Education division and plans to open a new, larger training facility on April 16. Company officials say the facility, designed to accommodate live instruction and hands-on lab training for Tigerpaw CRM+, will expand class capacity by 50 percent and will be incorporate new staff and course offerings.

The facility will be located in a new building addition adjacent to the company's Bellevue, Nebraska headquarters. In addition to live training labs, Tigerpaw offers instructional videos and Webinars, delivered on demand via the Internet.

Tigerpaw Software develops CRM, service automation, and inventory control software, and claims "more than 10,000 users worldwide." Tigerpaw CRM+ is the recipient of the 2005 and 2006 Customer Interaction Solutions Product of the Year Award, the 2006 CRM Excellence Award.

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

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Frank Sinatra's A Swingin' Affair! album:

Access Business Technologies, has announced the launch of its PowerSite product, which provides mortgage Web sites for mortgage companies. Company officials say it includes borrower loan applications designed to "integrate directly with ABT-hosted LOS and CRM systems."

It's being marketed as having tools and content to "launch a Web presence" for mortgage companies, including mortgage calculators, customer advice and mortgage terminology glossaries.

"Adding, editing and changing content on PowerSite can be performed with no knowledge of HTML code," company officials promise. Still, "a complete training course for PowerSite is provided by ABT upon subscription."

There's also the Loan Officer Portal, which "provides access to the loan officer’s business tools directly from their site," company officials say.

Access Business Technologies sells managed hosting services, integration, reporting and professional services solutions for the mortgage industry.

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Chennai, India-based mobile-worx  has announced the release of ZestADZ, a comprehensive mobile advertising platform billed by company officials as combining "the best aspects of enterprise software, Web, CRM and mobile technology."

ZestADZ is designed to "complement conventional (print, TV, billboard, e-mail) media" for advertisers to "launch highly targeted keyword based marketing campaigns, that can deliver mobile advertisements across any mobile platform or network," company officials say.

The product enables mobile advertisements within WAP pages, mobile applications, mobile games, mobile content decks and SMS messages.

"We are keen to partner with them to deliver these products to carriers and publishers in the Asia Pac marketplace,” said Sanjoy Bose, CEO, Buzznet, a vendor based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

ZestADZ promises to follow the core principles of permission-based marketing, where advertising messages are sent only to subscribers who have opted to receive relevant and pertinent messages or content.

"Mobile marketing has tremendous potential. For a Direct Marketer it is indeed a dream come true and a great challenge. Till date the tools necessary for carriers, advertisers and publishers has not been not available, said R. Sridhar, described by ZestADZ officials as "a pioneer in Direct Marketing and Partner, IDEAS-RS."

ZestADZ it built on Open Source components is available on a fully hosted basis. Company officials say it will be available to early adopters on a limited distribution (Alpha Release) basis in May, with general availability in June.

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So, First Coffee thinks this Cricket World Series is pretty much Australia's to lose. Although it'd be nice to see New Zealand win this and the rugby World Cup in the same year, wouldn't it?

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Vendavo, a vendor of price management software, has announced the appointment of for Siebel executive Skip Bacon as senior vice president of Pricing Solutions.

Bacon will lead the company's global pricing science, business consulting and product management teams. He reports directly to Alan Crites, Vendavo's president and chief executive officer.

Prior to joining Vendavo, Bacon served as group vice president of Application Technology at Siebel Systems (now Oracle). In that role, he was responsible for Siebel's Enterprise CRM application platforms, which were deployed to more than 4,000 customers worldwide.

Bacon holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University.

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Applix, Inc. has announced a partnership with CRM vendor UFIDA, China's largest software company, to "enhance strategic business analytics functionality in UFIDA's U8 Management Solution," according to Applix officials.

They're serious about this: Applix has opened a new business office in Hong Kong.

Under the agreement, UFIDA will integrate the Applix business analysis and reporting application -- powered by the core TM1 analytics engine -- as the Business Performance Management engine of UFIDA ERP U8.

UFIDA ERP U8 is an ERP product for small and medium-sized enterprises. As part of the agreement they will incorporate new BPM features and functionality, including reporting and analytics. The combined product will be marketed as an "easy-to-use, fully-featured, highly scaleable BPM/ERP platform for synchronizing front and back office business management functions."

There is a growing market for fully integrated BI/BPM products in China and throughout Asia, said Michael Morrison, chief operating officer of Applix.

China's management market has exploded here in recent years. U.S. analyst firm IDC forecasts this growth to continue, with total sales in the country almost doubling within three years to nearly US $2 billion by 2009.

According to CCID, a Chinese IT market research and consulting company, UFIDA is the largest ERP vendor in China with 24.6 percent of market share.

"Through our partnership with Applix, we're making significant improvements by adding world class reporting and analytics to our U8 management platform," said Wu Qiang, vice president of UFIDA.

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RainMaker, which sells management software for law firms, has developed a library of Web Parts to provide end-user access to information residing in its core enterprise system.

RainMaker's initial SharePoint content includes financial data from its financial management suite, with Web Parts such as financial and business intelligence reports. Firm management and other authorized users can use a new Message Center on the SharePoint portal to access financial reports from RainMaker, including standard (e.g. Realization), scheduled and bursted reports based on individual preference.

Further, specific Business Intelligence reports, with associated drill-down and charting capabilities, can be easily developed and distributed on-the-fly.

The product also features digital scorecards, which provide e-views of different dimensions of the law firm's business with user selection criteria, drill-down and trend graphs that satiate some of the more commonly asked performance requests within a firm, such as top 'X' rankings in your firm, daily or weekly cash reports, billing and collection statistics, and working attorney analysis and performance information.

RainMaker is currently developing Practice Management, Business Intelligence and some futuristic Financial Management-related Web Parts that will include CRM and calendaring components.

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Word of advice: Never hire an overseas tutor without meeting aforesaid tutor personally first. Take it from me.  Unless you enjoy playing darts in the dark.

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

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is It's A Beautiful Day's hot live album, Creed Of Love, which makes you believe that, yes, a violin can be a rock'n'roll instrument:

CDC Software, the wholly owned subsidiary of China-based CDC Corporation, has announced that RS Components Hong Kong, part of Electrocomponents PLC, has selected the Pivotal suite of CRM applications for its 14 offices throughout the Asia Pacific area, including its seven offices in China.

RS officials say they will be using Pivotal CRM to manage and track customer services including contact and activity management, telesales and sales account planning, account territory alignments and scorecard tracking as well as tracking visits to customers and prospects.

The company will also be marketing and distributing its trade catalogues and comparing customers and prospects data to their customer marketing management lifecycle data using the Pivotal application since the product allows for bi-directional integration of contacts between Pivotal and the legacy ERP system used by RS Components.

Established in 1937, RS sells "a part for every job, from research and development through pre-production to maintenance and repair," according to company officials, and has been operating in China since 1999, selling parts from electronic components, electrical, mechanical, tools and consumer products.

"The RS business model is extremely customer-centric," noted Richard Huxley, Asia Pacific Regional Manager, RS Components, adding that the company offers "a strong local sales and marketing force of more than 250 people, and two state-of-the art call centers with technical support."

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UDS Group, Inc., a Boca Raton, Florida-based vendor of CRM and other delivery management products, has announced the formation of a new partnership with DevStudios International, Inc.

DevStudios is a tech firm operating in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. This new partnership, according to DevStudios officials, allows UDS "unlimited rollout capabilities and eliminates costly onsite equipment installations."

DevStudios has finished development on a Remote Print Agent dispatch module for use with the UDS call center product, a module which "allows for any remote store location in our delivery program to make a connection to the UDS Delivery Processing Center without requiring any additional hardware," according to one UDS official.

Ryan Coblin, CEO of Universal Delivery Group, Inc., said his company will "immediately realize a cost reduction for every location served… and it will allow us to rapidly scale our capacity in order to meet demand."

Bob Vergidis, President and Chief Executive Officer of DevStudios, described the Remote Printing Agent software as saying "any computer, anywhere on the Internet can become an order receiving station for call center orders… without time consuming or costly requirements."

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Infor has announced a new Mobile Order Management -- touching acronym there -- product which lets field sales personnel in the distribution industry process orders remotely using a PDA, laptop or any other mobile device.

MOM is billed by company officials as letting sales personnel "spend less time on manual order processing and more time meeting customer need."

"Infor recognizes that in today's competitive landscape, distributors face growing pressure from customers and suppliers to find enterprising ways of saving time and resources," said Thad Zylka, Infor vice president of Distribution.

MOM is designed to integrate with any ERP system, regardless of vendor. Its intuitive, Web-based interface allows the user to access stored inventory data and submit order information via wireless access. When connected to the Internet or local network, the user has access to current inventory availability and customer-specific pricing.

"Ours is a service-driven business and our employees need quick access to inventory and order information to meet customer demands," said Bruce Streiff, Crest Industries CFO, explaining why they wanted to work with MOM.

Using MOM, field reps can remotely inquire about the status of an order; add, change or remove charges, line items and order line level comments; and search for customers and ship-to addresses.

MOM's other features include the ability to perform manual price overrides, and apply a discount or mark-up percent. Additional modules complaining that you don't call her often enough, telling you how to raise your kids, witching about your husband or wife, asking why don't you move closer and reminding you that "you used to do that when you were that age" optional.

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Satmetrix, which sells on-demand software applications and consulting services to measurably improve customer loyalty, has announced the company's founder Andre Schwager will deliver a Webinar based on research presented in a February 2007 article in Harvard Business Review titled "Understanding Customer Experience."

In this article, Schwager and co-author Christopher Meyer assert companies can systematically monitor customer experience in order to take steps to improve both it and their bottom line.

The article defines various aspects of "customer experience," including how customer experience management compares to customer relationship management (CRM), how to rally an entire organization around creating better customer experiences, how to obtain the right information from customers, and the importance of acting on customer experience information.

Building on this article, Schwager will deliver a Webinar titled "Bringing Your Client Promise to Life through the Customer Experience" on Thursday, March 29th at 8:30 am PDT.

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DataFlux, which sells data quality and data integration products, has announced that DSM Nutritional Products has implemented DataFlux technology to "classify its internationally coded spend and materials data."

The DataFlux technology is being used to implement a "ecl@ss" classification validation, which will help with corporate purchasing and DSM Nutritional Products' existing SAP R/3 systems, DSM officials say.

The DataFlux Data Quality Integration Platform (acronym QuIP?) is used within DSM Nutritional Products to validate code and standardize spend and materials descriptions, by allowing business users to set coding rules using an intuitive client interface.

The DataFlux technology is used to maintain one consistent and reliable data source of master data within a reference database. Using the product, "we have experienced a remarkable improvement in the accuracy on spend classification" said David Barron, Master Data Manager, DSM Nutritional Products.

Barron explained that the investment is "aimed at supporting our global initiative to reduce purchasing costs by ensuring the quality of spend classifications at an operational level by profiling, verifying, customizing and monitoring our data on an ongoing basis."

When it comes to data quality, many organizations focus on their CRM data. However, DataFlux officials contend, "more companies like DSM" are getting operational efficiency by implementing a data quality product for other areas like manufacturing and purchasing."

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

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Arlo Guthrie's Amigo album. You've all heard of Alice's Restaurant, but musically this is his best.  Get this one, add in "Comin' Into Los Angeles" and "City of New Orleans," okay, "Alice's Restaurant," a handful of others and there's your essential Arlo right there:

Medford, Oregon-based Harry & David Operations Corp., a premium gourmet food retailer known especially for , has selected SAP for Retail solutions to develop a scalable, integrated IT platform.

"It's a real peach of a program," a Harry & David officials should have said, but alas, didn't.

Harry & David officials said they selected SAP over Oracle, as it looks to "gain greater long-term efficiencies and visibility into its retail and wholesale businesses."

The company is one of the nation's oldest catalog mail-order companies and currently operates stores in 34 states. The company's signature fruits, baked goods and confections and hallmark gift box towers have been a staple of gift giving for more than 70 years.

Believing the company is "poised for tremendous growth, both as a direct retailer and as a wholesaler to numerous retail outlets," Joe Foley, CIO, Harry & David Holdings, Inc. said the seasonality of their business demands "a platform that can rapidly scale."

Harry & David will begin using the product with food and beverage capabilities, followed by SAP ERP Financials.

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Convergys Corporation has announced a "direct response contract" with Rosetta Stone, the publisher of Rosetta Stone language-learning software.

Rosetta Stone wants Convergys to handle high volume calls with agents and a routing platform that directs calls based on the unique campaign profile. Convergys began providing inbound customer care and sales support for Rosetta Stone in December 2006.

Basically it's a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) services deal for the Cincinnati-headquartered outsourced services provider.

Rosetta Stone is a popular language-learning software in the world, used by millions of people in 150 countries. The company issues products in 30 languages. Inc. Magazine has named Rosetta Stone Inc. one of the 500 fastest-growing companies in the United States, and for the third year Deloitte and Touche has named it one of the fasted-growing technology companies in Virginia.

...

Access Commerce, a vendor of e-commerce and CRM software, has announced Cameleon EasyQuote for salesforce.com's AppExchange.

Cameleon EasyQuote for Salesforce is an on-demand quotation system to help sales teams with the opportunity-to-order process, providing quotes and orders, shorter quotation cycle times and improved win rates.

Incorporating Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX, Cameleon EasyQuote provides an advanced quotation spreadsheet, catalog search, product and service configuration, pricing and promotion application and proposal generation.

Cameleon EasyQuote can be customized without programming. This allows the user interface, business processes and proposal documents to be tailored to meet various customer requirements.

...

Wayne, Pennsylvania-based Deacom, Inc. has announced that SEM Products, Inc., located in Charlotte, NC, is implementing the Deacom Integrated Accounting and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Software System to manage all facets of its auto body paint, adhesive, and aerosol manufacturing operations.

Deacom ERP Software is a batch process manufacturing system that specializes in controlling the details of complex businesses within the paint, coatings, adhesive, and sealant industries.

As a mixed-mode manufacturer, SEM Products produces and fills its paint by volume quantities and manufactures its adhesive and aerosol products by piece quantities. Prior to its selection of the Deacom ERP System, SEM Products used several disparate software systems to handle its manufacturing process. This structure lacked total integration and ease-of-use.

"After reviewing our existing software set-up, we determined it was necessary to keep our data in one complete software system," explains Brian Goff, SEM Products' VP of Administration/Finance.

The Deacom ERP System will handle the accounting, inventory, lab management, production, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and order entry functions of SEM Products. Full implementation will be completed in April of 2007.

…

Business leaders can now get "immediate feedback" on their organization's customer management effectiveness, with the new CustomerQ online tool launched by CRMGuru.com, in partnership with QuestionPro.

In just 15 minutes online, the assessment generates a CustomerQ score, described by CRMGuru officials as "a composite index of five major customer management attributes."

The score is based on a methodology developed over five years of research into the success factors for both conventional CRM projects and, more recently, Customer Experience Management initiatives.

"Our members wanted more than just another survey that results in a benchmark report weeks or months in the future," said the boyishly handsome Bob Thompson, CEO of CustomerThink Corp. and founder of CRMGuru. "With CustomerQ, we're very pleased to give our members immediate feedback on how their organization's management capabilities compare to others in our global database, to help pinpoint areas where improvement is needed."

The CustomerQ assessment is powered by QuestionPro, a vendor of hosted market research services for the creation, distribution and analysis of electronic surveys.

"In many ways, the increase of electronic commerce has increased the distance between the company and the customer," said Vivek Bhaskaran, CEO of QuestionPro. "Electronic surveys can help become the eyes and ears of a company, delivering the type of feedback that used to come directly from customers."

The free CustomerQ online tool is available at www.crmguru.com/customerq.

...

Plexus Systems, Inc., a vendor of the on-demand manufacturing performance system Plexus Online, has announced that it has attained Gold Certified Partner status in the Microsoft Partner Program, with competencies in Network Infrastructure, Business Process Integration Solutions, and Advanced Infrastructure Solutions.

Plexus Online is an on demand manufacturing performance system, combining the capabilities of enterprise resource planning (ERP), manufacturing execution systems (MES), quality management, customer relationship management (CRM), shop floor integration, and others.

With the ability to manage a single facility or a global enterprise, Plexus Online is used to track and manage aspects of the manufacturing operation, anywhere, anytime, via the software as a service (SaaS) model.

Plexus Online consists of over 350 functional modules.

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

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Aimee Mann doing acoustic versions of some of her best songs, current track "That's Just What You Are:"

Small and medium businesses, generously defined as those with under a thousand employees, in the retail vertical across the Asia-Pacific region outside of Japan are on track to spend a whopping $11.6 billion on CRM and other IT-related investments this year.

Computing -- which includes PC and server hardware -- and IT Services will be the top drivers of retail SMB spending in 2007, according to the latest study by Access Markets International Partners Inc.

Although CRM and ERP/SCM spending in the retail mid-market segment is expected to grow less than 10 percent in 2007, CRM as SaaS (software as a service) is expected to increase two to three times the growth of the traditional application delivery platforms, the study found.

Key countries in the region which will drive retail SMB IT spending this year include Australia, China, India, South Korea and Taiwan, the study finds.

"While retail SMB IT spending in emerging markets such as India, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam are set to grow more than 15 percent year-on-year in 2007, spending in mature markets such as Australia and Singapore will grow less than 10 percent in 2007 over 2006," says Nishant Dave, AMI's Singapore-based Research Director for the Asia-Pacific.

Retail medium businesses, those with between a hundred and a thousand employees, are looking closely at the services delivery platforms in addition to IT infrastructure to enhance their competitive edge, according to the study.

"Both types of companies will face the disruptive threat to their business models from larger retailers which will compel them to re-invent themselves using IT as a competitive differentiator," Dave says.

Among the top five retail mid-market countries in the region, IT spending in China and India is expected to grow double-digit year-on-year in 2007. Storage and security are expected to be the fastest growing IT spending categories among retail mid-market companies in the region, growing more than 20 percent year-on-year in 2007.

Some of the key concerns that emerged from the retail mid-market companies circled around managing customer loyalty, maintaining product prices and management of personnel. As a result, IT managers in these companies are looking to take the next steps in terms of deploying CRM products, upgrading POS (point of sale) systems, setting up inventory and SCM (supply-chain management) products and deploying employee monitoring and service quality measurement systems.

…

Tel Aviv, Israel-based Commit Business Solutions, which sells management software for small to mid-sized computer services and support businesses, has announced the launch of the new major version of its flagship software, Commit 4.0.

Maayan Porat, CEO of Commit, called the new version "our biggest release ever." The vendor generally targets small computer repair and computer services companies as their clientele."

Commit helps its users "maximize their billable time by enabling more efficient capturing of billable hours for labor performed," company officials say, adding that the product "makes it easy to track parts replaced and products sold when handling a service issue."

With the enhanced Commit-QuickBooks Link, users can now generate QuickBooks invoices from within Commit at all levels: Customer, Service Contract or Support Incident. These invoices are based on the labor activity and parts charges logged into Commit by technicians as part of their service activity. As a result there is no need to reenter this information for billing purposes.

The new version of Commit is also fully compatible with Intuit QuickBooks 2007 editions.

Two-way synchronization with Microsoft Outlook, including support for Outlook 2007, is another option introduced in this release. Using Commit-Outlook Sync, users can enter information into Commit or Outlook and be assured that the information is synchronized and current in both programs.

This software release has also been tested on Windows Vista.

...

ICentera, a vendor of on-demand CRM portals for sales, partner and customer communications, has announced today that ADC, a vendor of communications network infrastructure products, is using iCentera's Portals for Mortals in order to extend the reach of its global sales force.

The product is billed by iCentera officials as allowing anyone in an organization to create customized and branded communication portals for any internal or external audience, "in minutes." The latest version of iCentera has Web 2.0 capabilities.

To date, ADC, has created over 70 portals with more than 600 internal users and 3,000.

"The American Marketing Association says 90 percent of marketing is not used by sales. My problem is that I don't know which 10 percent they are using," said Bill Fuesz, Senior Marketing Manager for ADC. "With iCentera we can aggregate information from multiple sources across the enterprise… and then track who is using what and what is working through analytics the portals provide."

ADC officials say they'll use iCentera to let their direct sales organization sell more effectively by delivering sales support materials, such as press releases, marketing materials, sales guidance, and contract information.

"It was pretty simple," stated Fuesz. "We updated the existing portal landing page with information about the new products, including additional content that would support the customer through the purchasing process. We also built out a marketing program that adds content on a regular basis in order to encourage people in the customer organization to come back again and again. The sales rep came to me on Friday with this request and the enablement portal was good to go on Tuesday."

…

ReachForce, which sells CRM data services, has announced the certification of ReachForce Data Services for Demand Generation for salesforce.com's AppExchange.

The product "enhances" existing CRM data in salesforce or discovers new role-based data, according to ReachForce officials.

ReachForce Data Services is billed by company officials as giving marketing and sales teams "the ability to target their initiatives at the right decision maker at the right company, right away." The idea is that by identifying a person's role within an organization instead of just a title, marketing and sales teams are able to better refine messaging to the right buyers, key influencers, and evaluators.

As a result, the product allows salesforce.com customers to request a role-based database from within their Salesforce account for ongoing demand generation campaigns, new vertical market focus or new geography expansion.

"Being certified now opens access to ReachForce data services to all salesforce.com customers," said Suaad Sait, ReachForce CEO. The companies have more than 75 customers in common, including Eloqua, Pavilion Technologies and Intacct.

Apex is the on-demand platform for the next generation of business applications, enabling "a whole new generation of on-demand applications that go beyond CRM," according to salesforce.com officials.

ReachForce is a privately held company backed by venture firm G51 Capital, both based in Austin, correctly described by Ann Coulter as "the Upper West Side with better-looking people."

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

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is an iTunes (version 7.1.1!) shuffle. Current song: The Archies' "Sugar Sugar:"

SugarCRM Inc., a vendor of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, has announced the immediate release of Project Management for its Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise product lines.

Sugar's Project Management offers what company officials call "the advanced capabilities of a standalone project management application" integrated into SugarCRM's CRM suite.

"As companies become more service-based, managing customer and internal projects becomes even more critical," said John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM.

According to a recent on-demand survey by Nucleus Research, 32 percent of on-demand customers are using on-demand CRM and only 23 percent are using on-demand project management. However, future buying intentions in on-demand shift from CRM to project management, with 29 percent of companies planning to buy on-demand project management and 16 percent planning to buy CRM in the next 12-18 months. 

"Managing customers and projects is the next step after acquiring them, making integrated project management a key factor in driving greater value from CRM," said Rebecca Wetteman, Vice President of Nucleus Research.

First Coffee is of the belief that customers don't particularly want to be managed. Any customers who enjoy being managed please do write in.

…

Current song: "You Can't Always Get What You Want," by The Rolling Stones.

…

PAR3 Communications has announced the unveiling of "a new corporate identity," changing the company name to Varolii Corporation.

Ten points if you know what "Varolii" means. No peeking or Googling.

Okay, we didn't either: The name is derived from Pons Varolii, a pathway in the brain that unites intelligence and learning with the ability to communicate. The name, according to company officials, reflects the company's vision of providing enterprise customer interaction products, while using its infrastructure, people and knowledge to deliver customer service.

And, well, Hole In One was taken, and it sounded better than the Pons Corporation.

Varolii delivers via the Software as a Service model, with a fully managed environment.

Nicholas Tiliacos, president and CEO of Varolii, said the new brand identity also represents "a stronger expanded company." In December 2005, PAR3 acquired EnvoyWorldWide, a provider of notification services for business continuity and emergency communications.  The companies have integrated both technologies. 

Varolii sells products ranging from standardized applications to fully customized deployments.  A customer management group focuses on post-deployment results.

…

…

E-mail-to-Lead runs as a Microsoft Office Outlook add-in with Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook add-in on one or more designated CRM user's computer. Company officials say it automatically detects incoming e-mails in Microsoft Outlook and tosses them over to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Leads based on saved configurations, or lets them be used on-the-fly.

CRM marketing automation uses for E-mail-to-Lead include processing Web site form generated e-mail communications into leads, as well as partner provided e-mail leads. You'd like this tool if you're into manufacturer provided leads, or if you want something that gives you automatic processing of buying service leads and solves lead generation vender handling issues as well as field lead consolidation.

…

Current song: Aimee Mann's "Long Shot," the blazing version from Live At St. Ann's Warehouse. If you've ever thought, as First Coffee does, that Mann's one of the best pop songwriters working today but that her studio-recorded songs sound like rather bloodless glass-case specimens, get this CD where the songs are allowed to breathe and live and all the emotion comes through loud and clear.

…

InvisibleCRM, a salesforce.com partner, joined the Salesforce.com Foundation's "The Power Of Us" partner initiative to help nonprofit organizations obtain, implement and maximize the use of technologies to reduce administrative costs and to better achieve their goals.

As part of the program, InvisibleCRM will be implementing a similar model to the salesforce.com Foundation's 1 Percent model. InvisibleCRM officials say the company already donates up to 10 licenses of its products -- Sales Folder, Sales Desktop and Sales Alerts -- to qualified nonprofit organizations.

The vendor also donates one percent of their employees' time in two ways -- via normal technical support, which is made available to nonprofit organizations that have signed up for InvisibleCRM products, and via volunteer events.

"We believe that InvisibleCRM products are engineered to simplify the way users work with salesforce can save nonprofit organization's time dramatically, so they can maximize their strengths fulfilling their missions and devoting more time to people, not software," said Vlad Voskresensky, the CEO of InvisibleCRM.

Future Leaders, an Australian non-profit organization in the area of education, has already used InvisibleCRM applications.

The Power of Us partner program was created to increase salesforce.com Foundation's community benefits by increasing the number of companies committed to a similar method of corporate social responsibility, according to saleforce.com officials.

…

Current song: Crosby & Nash's "Lay Me Down."

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IBM provides a scalable infrastructure that currently supports more than 740,000 users in the SAS70 Type II certified environment.

Axentis sells products to address areas such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Information Privacy, Ethics & Integrity, Legal & Regulatory and Enterprise Risk Management. The recent deal with IBM expands the SaaS facility, including increasing the processing power and SAN data bandwidth by 200 percent.

Axentis uses a pure SaaS model to deliver workflow, reporting, security, and content and learning management products. Headquartered in Cleveland, the company has data centers in Boulder, Colorado and Basel, Switzerland.

"No, no, please don't banish me from headquarters to Boulder or Basel, nooooo… I love Cleveland, I bet the river's never caught fire once in Boulder or Basel…"

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

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Neil Young's Live Rust:

Got an e-mail from a Dear Reader who had the same terrible customer service experience with Orbitz that First Coffee did a while ago:

How did you find Orbitz E-mail address , I also want to write because after booking a flight they never came through with confirmations as they say. Calling a phone number got me talking to some rep in India [which again got me promises ]  NO RESULTS ! 

Very poor business people which I want them to know if you can provide me with their address.   Thanks much.

Now someone explain to me how Caiman.com's still in business.

…

It might be a function of living in Istanbul, where the sports channels are Fox Sports and EuroSport, but First Coffee is enjoying watching cricket. It's quite a simple game -- keep the ball from knocking the sticks behind you by hitting it away, and score runs as you hit it -- and at least as interesting as baseball. In its one-day variety, anyway. I'm still not sure I could take the five-day cricket tests without making it a long tailgate party, which I'm told by a South African friend is how it's done.

I watched Ireland's stunning upset of Pakistan and some of the England - Canada match -- great things to do while practicing bass scales -- before turning the channel, outvoted three to one, to my kids' favorite sport to watch -- sumo wrestling. You get a lot more of that over here, too.  The sports my kids are growing up watching are cricket, tennis, sumo, athletics, biathlon and American football. Not bad fare.

…

ERP Works of Australia officials have announced they will take advantage of iCatchIT KPO Marketing services, according to iCatchIT CEO Jonathan Corners.

Corners and ERP Works Principal Consultant David Gill signed an SLA agreement making iCatchIT the KPO marketing provider for ERP Works. In addition to Web development, software customization, and internal accounting, iCatchIT also offers KPO marketing.

Gill, who describes himself as "an Australian CRM entrepreneur," has formed ERP Works to market the Sage Accpac Integrated CRM & ERP product in Asia. He says he envisions a company that supplies one-stop business products for clients:

"Providing integrated CRM and Enterprise Resource Planning services to our Asian Pacific market is part of our long-range objective and, with the support of iCatchIT, we are in very high spirits now that it is becoming a reality."

ERP Works is a Sage-certified Solution Provider of Sage ERP software, which enables managers to gain access to enterprise-wide CRM services integrated with standard ERP processes, such as A/P-A/R, Inventory, Purchasing, HR, and of course CRM Sales and stakeholder contact.

"We couldn't be more excited. Gill is a valued client, and we are very happy with the level of trust that he has shown us," Corners said. "CRM Works was an early client of iCatchIT 's and this will expand and strengthen our business relationship even further."

ICatchIT Operations Manager for Australia Cecil Casas thinks every new business venture is "a venue for us to show our KPO marketing service and what dedicated staff can do in a KPO environment."

…

This is Family Hour, so First Coffee is happy to report that Olathe, Kansas-based CRM vendors Ruf Strategic Solutions, a database marketing company, is celebrating its 30th anniversary of business success this year.

This milestone is "a tribute to the commitment of four brothers who are keeping the family business running, as well as carrying on their father's dream of entrepreneurship," according to company officials.

Jacob and Sondra Ruf founded the company in the basement of their home in 1976, where Jacob developed decision support software to help organizations increase productivity and efficiency. Although Ruf passed away from colon cancer in 1995, his business is carried on by his four sons: Kurt, Eric, Jake II and Brian.

Kurt Ruf, eldest son and partner of Ruf Strategic Solutions, explained that his father was a self-taught information systems expert: "He was one of the founding fathers of this industry."

Jacob Ruf, along with Martin Baier, family friend and member of the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame, worked together to create the first ZIP code-level marketing system. Ruf decided to expand on this and focus on database marketing, which led to creating the first commercially available relational database and the first business-clustering system using proprietary "corporate lifestyles." They sold companies tools for managing large amounts of data.

"The industry has changed so much since the introduction of the Internet," said Eric Ruf, brother and partner. "Tracking and measuring has become much easier for companies, but they still need a way to decipher mass amounts of data. This is where we come in because it is so important not only to have a strategy to reach your market, but also to have the ability to execute a successful campaign," Eric said.

The Ruf brothers' latest development for the travel and tourism industry is Visitor Analysis, a product promising "comprehensive analysis of actual visitors to a destination. It reveals visitors while providing insight into their travel behaviors and preferences," according to company officials.

"We know that the future of this company lies in the expansion of our current products for specific industries, such as travel and tourism," said Brian Ruf.

The Ruf brothers credit their success to the Midwestern values and work ethic their father instilled in them. "Dad always pushed us to compete, whether that was with each other or in business," said Kurt Ruf. "We are all quite different, but I think that is what makes this company work. We all have our own ideas to bring to the table, yet every one of us has the same goal -- to keep our father's dream alive. If we can do that as a family, then we're doing pretty well."

And that, friends, is what this great country is all about.

…

The Gosport Borough Council has become one of the first UK councils to implement a call center system that live connects to maps and council information via the Web.

A result of developments by Geographic Information Systems supplier GGP Systems and IT developer Status Computers, the system will give call center staff instant on-screen access to addresses, council records and location maps.

Gosport had been using a conventional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, but council officials decided they needed a product that would allow their call center to more easily deal with enquiries on a wide range of council services. A requirement was the integration of CRM, GIS, a central NLPG-standard address gazetteer, and back office systems.

“We had direct experience of conventional CRM systems and investigated all current offerings,” says Mike Glavin, Gosport’s GIS Administrator.”

Status Computers has looked at council requirements from the ground up and has developed the first commercial CRM-type system specifically for local authorities.

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 an iTunes Grateful Dead assemblage, highlights being "Scarlet Begonias" and "Row Jimmy." Get past all the bushwa, all the skeletons and flowers and smoke and stumblebum Deadheads not in possession of a life, and you have an excellent American blues-folk rock band which understood song structure. The guitar work on the longer jams gets real boring real fast, yeah, but maybe that's why you had to take all the drugs to sit through the shows:

Pharmacy benefits manager Cypress Care Inc. has announced that it'll convert from its existing salesforce.com customer relationship management (CRM) product, synthesize its customer data and business intelligence, and reduce its total cost of ownership for CRM technology by more than an estimated $400,000 over the next five years, by switching to Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Marc Datelle, president of Cypress Care, says the "superior use of business IT" is part of the company's rapid growth to more than $100 million in annual revenues in less than six years. "The switch to Microsoft Dynamics CRM will expand Cypress Care's Microsoft software platform, providing the unified technology base needed to accelerate the company's growth," Datelle said.

"We had data about our customers all over the place. Our selling groups were stepping on each other's toes," Datelle said, explaining that they'll use the Microsoft Dynamics CRM to "pull all of our customer information into one universal view -- one that each business unit can take ownership in."

But hey, the really big sports news: New Zealand beat England by six wickets in their group match in the Cricket World Cup. With minnows Kenya and Canada left to play, the Black Caps are virtually assured of winning the group.

Norfolk, Virginia-based CRM vendor Dominion Enterprises, which sells a range of media and information services, has acquired Resite Information Technology, an Internet marketing and Web-based software business serving the apartment management industry. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Based in Bloomington, Indiana, Resite IT has a client base of 80 property management companies, which are responsible for approximately 2,000 apartment complexes nationwide.

The company provides three main products to apartment communities: ResidentHub, for online payment and enhanced resident customer service, LeasingPath, for streamlining the leasing process online and MarketingWebsites, for customizing Web sites for apartment communities.

President and Chief Executive Officer of Dominion Enterprises Conrad M. Hall called Resite an "important new addition to the services we offer the apartment industry."

The flagship properties offered by Dominion Enterprises' For Rent Media Solutions division include For Rent magazine, comprising 85 publications in 190 markets nationwide and ForRent.com, which has over 50,000 apartment listings.

Resite IT's co-founders Brad Wisler, Chief Executive Officer, Mike Trotzke, Chief Technical Officer, Marc Guyer, Lead Engineer, and Greg Starr, Vice President of Business Development and the company's 12 employees will remain with the business under Dominion Enterprises' ownership and continue to be based in Bloomington.

Funny how the West bracket started out with pretty much all of college basketball's storied programs -- Kentucky and Kansas, the two winningest teams of all time, play each other, and the draw also featured such royalty as UCLA, Indiana and Duke. All it was missing was North Carolina.

PacificNet, Inc., a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) vendor with a tidy sideline in gambling technology in China, has announced that its subsidiary, PacificNet Games Limited (PacGames), has launched a new line of gambling products called the Multiplayer Electronic Table Game Series at the 6th International Gaming & Entertainment Expo in Macau, China.

PacificNet Inc. currently owns 51 percent of PacGames and has a preemptive right to maintain the 51 percent ownership in case of any dilution due to exercise of options or warrants by any new investors.

"This is the first time PacificNet has had a chance to showcase our gaming products at a leading international expo in Macau," said Tony Tong, CEO of PacificNet. "After achieving early success in the Macau gaming market we believe that we are ready to expand into other parts of Asia as we see strong demand and opportunities for growth in other Asian gambling markets."

Macau is the fastest growing part of China, and PacificNet officials pronounce themselves "very excited" to be moving forward in their pursuit of the Macau gambling technology business.

One game is SicBo, which originated in China over one thousand years ago and is a game of chance played with three dice that are shaken in a basket or a plastic cup. Usually the dice are shaken on a small plate covered with a bowl, which is then lifted to reveal the roll. In modern casinos the dice are shaken mechanically, and the outcome is keyed into a computer which automatically lights up the winning zones on the table.

SicBo is popular in Asia and widely played (as dai siu or big small) in casinos in Macau. It is played in the Philippines as hi-lo. It was introduced into the USA by Chinese immigrants in the early 20th century, and can now be found in most American casinos. Grand hazard and chuck-a-luck are variants of English origin.

Vormittag Associates, Inc., an ERP vendor for the IBM iSeries, has announced that it has pre-configured its S2K enterprise management software with the Extol International line of business integration software.

Extol sells B2B integration software for both internal and external collaboration. The move is a pitch to mid-market manufacturers' and distributors' growing need for business integration, which if done correctly can help resolve the issues of inaccurate forecasts, poor inventory management, incorrect order fulfillment and unnecessary labor costs, among others, thereby decreasing charge-backs, penalties and fines.

VAI is selling the S2K software system with pre-built integration to the Extol Business Integrator. To expedite the most commonly used business integration functions, certain S2K functions automatically launch views and maps to Extol Integrator. For example, S2K now ships with preconfigured maps between Extol and most major trading partners; the Extol functionality includes EDI management that integrates with multiple departments and applications throughout the enterprise.

The integration is being billed to customers as allowing them to "perform at superior levels in the supply chains of their customers," and to "manage their own global sourcing."

The S2K/Extol product is being billed as helping small IT teams respond to customer demands and new business opportunities. "Even small supply side companies require a business integration product just to stay in the game," said Steve Rosen, Extol Vice President Marketing. "Supply chain participation is no longer merely sending and receiving documents, like EDI, for example. The large retail, automotive and industrial customers demand a collaborative approach from their suppliers."

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

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is From One Good American To Another by Kinky Friedman & The Texas Jewboys:

Fresh off announcing the release of Siebel 8 for life sciences yesterday, Oracle has announced that UMB Bank, n.a., an independent bank in the United States, has deployed Oracle’s Siebel Sales and Siebel Universal Customer Master. UMB is also deploying Siebel Contact Center.

“With Oracle’s Siebel applications and infrastructure software, we have created an integrated customer information system that brings together data from 11 disparate systems," with the goal of providing "both our front- and back-office personnel with a comprehensive and consistent view of the customer," said Kanon Cozad, senior vice president and director of application development for UMB Bank.

Kansas City-based UMB deployed Siebel Universal Customer Master in its commercial lending and asset management operations. The bank now has a customer data hub that unifies customer information across multiple business units and functionally disparate systems.

The bank, which has operations in Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Nebraska, also deployed Siebel Sales in its commercial lending and asset management operations following a complete redesign of the sales process. 

UMB is using Siebel Sales to automate core sales processes, including sales call planning, follow up and reporting. Bank officials say they hope Siebel Sales will improve the way it cross-sells products across multiple lines of business by "breaking down information silos and giving the sales team a better understanding of the full sales potential of any given customer."

…

"Better management of outsourcing providers" would save North American companies over $300 million a year in improved contact center performance as well as enhancing service for customers, according to research and analysis by software provider Exony.

The company says organizations that outsource contact center operations could realize annual contract savings of 4.5 percent by targeting 10 key areas for improvement. Coincidently enough, Exony themselves offer products to assist in such outsourcing.

Industry statistics cited by Exony officials show that five percent, or just over 3,000, of North America's 60,000 contact centers are outsourced, and of a total of more than 3.3 million agent positions in the U.S. and Canada, 10.5 percent or 354,000, are outsourced.

Exony calculates that improving organizations' ability to measure and manage their outsourcing providers would save $900 per year for each of these outsourced agents, amounting to an annual total savings of $319 million in North America alone. These savings could pay for an additional 15,948 customer service agents, dramatically improving efficiency and cutting call waiting times. Or they could go into shareholders' pockets. Your call (sorry).

Ian Ashby, CEO, Exony said his company's analysis shows "a lack of control is fueling a $300 million-plus black hole that is costing companies in the U.S. and Canada dearly. Already, around 50 percent of companies that outsource are dissatisfied because expectations are not being met and our research demonstrates that these firms are spending too much on their outsource contracts."

Advances in IP technology mean that the outsourcing and VCC markets are expanding rapidly, of course, but the complexity of managing outsourcing relationships and gaining an accurate picture of operations spread across multiple sites and providers is dramatically reducing the benefits organizations are able to achieve. Issues such as increased management and reporting costs, lack of a single view of all operations and an inability to move resources in real-time are all holding back adoption.

Exony recommends better routing and reporting on calls, with the idea being savings through better integration and reporting on telecom links with outsourced providers, and improved management of extended networks for lower administration costs when managing resource changes, such as adding agents.

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Canton, Michigan-based public relations agency, Markit Strategies and PR has announced today it has been named agency of record for CRM vendor Plexus Systems, Inc. in Auburn Hills, Michigan for the second year.

Plexus, a software-as-a-service firm, has released record earnings, posting a 53 percent growth in 2006. It sells the on demand manufacturing performance system Plexus Online, combining the capabilities of enterprise resource planning (ERP), manufacturing execution systems (MES), quality management, customer relationship management (CRM), shop floor integration, and more.

Patrick Fetterman, vice president of marketing for Plexus, called Markit Strategies "integral to the success of Plexus over the past 14 months."

Plexus Online is an on-demand manufacturing performance system, originating internally at a manufacturing company, and was designed to resolve quality challenges, including production, distribution and global supply chains management issues.

Today, Plexus Online is used for other functions, such as accounting, compliance and human resources. Plexus Systems serves a cross section of manufacturing industries (OEM and suppliers), particularly automotive, defense, medical device and aerospace companies. The vendor has partnered with Apax Partners, a private equity group.

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SAP AG has announced more than 80 new additions to its portfolio of qualified SAP All-in-One industry products as partners use the first enterprise service-oriented architecture platform for midsize companies from SAP.

Using enablement programs and tools from SAP to introduce new and upgraded products based on SAP ERP 2005, partners across the globe have introduced an initial 14 new products in the Americas, 15 new products in Asia Pacific and 53 in Europe, Middle East and Africa. SAP made the announcement at the CeBIT 2007 trade fair, being held in Hanover, Germany.

The qualified SAP All-in-One partner products include micro-vertical best practices and, according to company officials, will enable improvements in user experience, analytical reporting and integrated customer relationship management (CRM).

…

Sand Technology Inc., a vendor of CRM and other enterprise information management products, has reported a loss for the year ended July 31, 2006 of $3,926,971 ($0.31 per share), a decrease of 47% against a loss of $7,363,054 for the same period last year ($0.57 per share). All figures are in Canadian dollars.

For the quarter ended July 31, 2006, the net loss amounted to $1,201,521 ($0.09 per share) against a loss of $2,225,178 in the fourth quarter of last year ($0.17 per share).

…

NetSuite would like you to know that more companies have switched to NetSuite from QuickBooks. These companies, NetSuite officials say, switched to NetSuite for one software product that integrates ERP, CRM and e-commerce, which can accommodate rapid growth as well as "take away the pains associated with using different silo applications."

QuickBooks is widely used by small businesses, but it has limitations for growing companies. The most powerful version of QuickBooks -- QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions -- can only support 20 simultaneous users and only track a finite number of items, customers, or vendors, according to Intuit.com findings cited by NetSuite officials.

Primarily an accounting package, QuickBooks requires a business to buy and integrate separate applications in order to run sales force management, ecommerce operations, marketing and customer support.

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

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

Software vendor Oracle has announced specific enhancements to Siebel CRM 8 for the life sciences industry, with the new features enabling pharmaceutical companies to manage, synchronize and coordinate all customer interactions across multiple channels. 

Siebel Life Sciences, part of Siebel CRM 8, has capabilities designed to help support institutional sales forces, Oracle officials say, adding that the release offers "significant enhancements designed to optimize territory realignments and clinical trial activities."  

The product release is part of Oracle's "Applications Unlimited" program, and offers users choice of multiple deployment options, what Oracle officials claim is "ease of manageability" and integration.

Tomomi Shozen, head of Bayer Healthcare O&I Japan, pronounced his firm "pleased" with Oracle's "continued commitment to and support for the Japanese pharmaceutical industry."

The Oracle-solicited endorsement from the Japanese vendor isn't coincidental, In some regions, particularly in Japan, sales representatives do not target physicians individually, but rather based on their institution affiliations. Drivers behind this approach include the need to recognize the influence of a physician within an institution while accounting for the importance of the institution itself. 

So a lack of physician-level prescribing data, which forces companies to rely on sales revenues by hospital, is also a factor in this approach. Siebel Pharma, a module within Siebel Life Sciences, has account contact targeting capabilities that allow users to treat the association between an account and a contact as a single entity.  Enhancements also allow users to create departments within a hospital and affiliate physicians to them.

And of course there's also Larry Ellison's fascination with things Japanese, as his house attests.

Enhancements to Siebel Life Science's Territory Management module enable broader and more sophisticated territory definitions, company officials say, which they claim will "drive improved sales force productivity." The module also includes a feature that incorporates sales representatives' local knowledge into the territory alignment process prior to activation, minimizing rework and reducing the number of alignments executed for a sales force. 

Territory Management also includes new functionality aimed at simplifying administrative tasks and reducing the amount of data entry required from territory administrators, allowing management to focus on organizational priorities.

Siebel CRM 8 provides a configurable platform to manage, design and monitor complex clinical trials, and has additional task and rules-based capabilities and account origination.  With the product users can track all forms of communication exchanged within a site or across clinical research organizations, central laboratories and other business partners. 

Enhancements to case report tracking capabilities of Siebel Clinical, a component of Siebel Life Sciences, enable users to manage case report forms from a single site.  Another new feature within Siebel Life Sciences tracks the assignment of researchers and other personnel by date to a clinical trial and grants proper rights based on these effective dates.

During the course of a physician call, a sales representative may have a product discussion with one physician, but leave samples with and capture signatures from a different one. A new feature in Siebel Life Sciences allows representatives to quickly select a different physician and either create a new sample drop or modify the original call before it is completed.

…

Centric CRM, developer of Open Source Customer Relationship Management (CRM), has announced the release of Centric CRM 4.1, featuring what company officials describe as "a number of improvements that add both power and productivity to enterprise CRM."

Centric CRM 4.1 introduces Action Plans, a new tool that allows a company to establish workflow best practices, as well as expanded support for a total of eleven database systems.

Other new features and upgrades in Centric CRM 4.1 include support for both Geronimo and IBM Websphere Application Server-Community Edition J2EE application servers, a new Web Content Management System (beta) that users can use to build and manage a fully functional external Web site integrated into their CRM system.

There's also Web 2.0 collaborative capabilities, such as discussion forums and project management, and Asterisk for VoIP voice capability, which lets customer contact personnel to be notified by screen alert whenever an account calls in as well as outbound calling to account contacts at the click of an icon.

The product features portal access to account information for external customers, allowing them to access their account details, trouble tickets and project plans via the Web. And it includes certification on the entire line of IBM hardware and processors up to and including mainframes.

The Centric Public License, a "one version, one license" model, lets users freely download the entire system and use it forever, as long as the source code is not redistributed. Developers own any improvements they make. The company sells an annual maintenance contract to customers wishing professional service and support for Centric CRM.

Centric CRM in version 4.1 has Action Plans tools, which let users build, deploy and enforce best practices for specific CRM tasks such as lead management or trouble ticket resolution.

…

Consona Corporation, formerly known as M2M Holdings, Inc., has announced it has closed on its acquisition of Knova Software, Inc., a vendor of knowledge management and service resolution management. The all-cash transaction announced in December 2006 was valued at $5.00 per share, or approximately $47 million.

Knova is Consona’s sixth acquisition in the last eighteen months. Past acquisitions include Cimnet Systems, Inc., AXIS Computer Systems, Inc., Encompix, Inc., Intuitive Manufacturing Systems, Inc., and Onyx Software Corporation.

The acquisition effectively launches Consona CRM, the new name for the CRM-focused operating division of Consona Corporation, which now houses sister product lines Knova and Onyx CRM. Pete Strom, general manager of Consona CRM, will oversee Knova going forward. The complementary Knova and Onyx products will retain their brand identity and be sold both separately and together to new customers via a shared sales force, Consona officials say.

…

In his keynote address at Convergence 2007 in San Diego, Microsoft Corp.’s biannual event for Microsoft Dynamics customers, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave customers their first look at Microsoft's customer relationship management (CRM) product with a live demo of the upcoming Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM service.

The Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM service is powered by the upcoming release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, code-named Titan, which uses the same multitenant code base to deliver both on-premise and Software as a Service deployments, and allows customers to choose from different deployment models.

Microsoft hopes the Titan release will be seen positively by Microsoft’s global value-added resellers, independent vendors, hosting providers and system integrators. Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, claimed that Titan will let Microsoft's partners deliver product across "on-premise, Live CRM and partner-hosted environments."

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

By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the theme song to Hawaii Five-O:

ARC Advisory Group, an independent research firm in manufacturing and supply chain management, has named Oracle the "leading supplier in the worldwide master data management market."

In ARC Advisory Group's recently published report, titled "Master Data Management Worldwide Outlook Market Analysis and Forecast Through 2011," Oracle is characterized as "the clear MDM industry leader with 39.8 percent market share of total MDM software and services, and year-over-year growth of close to 50 percent.

IBM placed second with 8.8 percent market share.

"Oracle MDM is a core 'Fusion' technology that will enable them to integrate their diverse portfolio of acquired solutions (PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, etc.) and allow them to work together much more effectively," according to Steve Banker, ARC's Service Director and author of the MDM report. 

MDM is -- evidently -- a key component of Oracle's middleware strategy to "aggressively target heterogeneous environments -- products running on different databases, operating systems, and using different data warehouse or analytical products," the report said. 

Oracle sells ERP and CRM applications, "but more broadly," the report notes, "they are a provider of core platforms that help pull together and harmonize all a company's IT assets." 

According to ARC Advisory Group, Master Data Management provides the ability to consolidate and federate master information from disparate systems and lines of business into one central data repository, or hub.

…

Seagull Software, which sells products to "transform legacy business applications into service-oriented architecture assets," has announced that BlueZone Version 4.1 has achieved Windows Vista certification from Microsoft.

Microsoft's Vista certification program is designed to ensure that third-party software applications operating on Windows Vista meet specific technical requirements. It generally deals with third-party software applications in four areas: security, compatibility with Vista, installs and uninstalls, and reliability.

Seagull officials say the company is "one of the first companies to have an application certified for Microsoft Windows Vista," noting that "BlueZone was previously certified on Windows XP."

What it means is that "BlueZone 4.1 takes advantage of the enhanced manageability and productivity features within the new operating platform," said Steve Bireley, vice president product development.

Jeremy Sharp, vice president of sales for Seagull Software's BlueZone business unit, called Vista certification "important to our customers, and now BlueZone has met the stringent Microsoft Windows Vista certification requirements."

BlueZone is one of several application access and integration products from Seagull Software. BlueZone 4.1 is scheduled for general availability in April 2007.

…

Interactive Intelligence Inc., which sells business communications software, services for contact center automation and enterprise IP telephony, has announced enhancements to Interaction Director, the company's intelligent, network-based, pre- and post-call routing system for contact centers.

Designed to help distributed organizations create a "virtual" contact center by more effectively routing interactions across sites, these latest enhancements add the session initiation protocol -- the new standard for Voice over IP (VoIP) -- which, according to company officials, "eliminates the need for carriers in a pre-call routing configuration, thus reducing costs associated with complex set-up, ongoing third-party service, and per-call charges."

It also provides interoperability with SIP-compliant third-party products, such as PBXs, automatic call distributors and gateways.

Michael White, senior vice president of information technology infrastructure for InfoCision, the world's eighth largest outbound contact center, said Interaction Director automated routing rules to process between 40,000 and 50,000 inbound calls daily, distributed across our 28 contact centers. It allowed InfoCision officials to "re-allocate existing fail-over servers, which further increased operational efficiencies," he said.

Interaction Director works in conjunction with the Interactive Intelligence contact center automation software, Customer Interaction Center, which is part of the company's standards-based unified communications software suit. Routing rules can be flexibly pre-configured using ANI, DNIS, as well as real-time statistics, such as average hold time, occupancy, whatever.

Using Interaction Director's new SIP-based pre-call routing, a gateway replaces carrier-based routing by passing instructions directly to the gateway at a customer's site. In addition, Interaction Director's built-in server switchover provides full redundancy across sites.

Also included in this latest version of Interaction Director are new supervisory enhancements, such as new interfaces for viewing workgroup summaries, agent detail, and other critical data, all designed to make analyzing and improving upon existing routing configurations faster and easier.

Interaction Director is marketed to multi-site, outsourced contact centers and teleservices firms, as well as enterprises with internal, distributed contact centers, including multinational companies.

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DealerAdvance, Inc. has announced today that the company will target sales of its proprietary WEBDA program towards the 21,500 new car dealers across America.

Steven Humphries, Dealer Advance CEO, said out of the 21,500 new car dealers, "only about 50 percent have a Customer Relations Management tool in place." He said through his firm's "concentrated sales and marketing efforts," the company can capture approximately two percent of the total market over the next 24 months, "generating over $8 million in sales."

Because of the slowdown in automotive sales and the desire of dealers to maximize the management of their customer relations programs, the market for the WEBDA program has "really heated up," Humphries said. "We are now taking aggressive sales measures, assuring DLAV the maximum amount of business in the shortest period of time."

WEBDA is the newest iteration of DLAV’s CRM application, a Web-based system. The original server-based system is now being replaced in the almost 100 dealerships previously served, according to Humphries.

…

Providence, Rhode Island-based OpenBOX Technologies, which sells Web-based CRM and enterprise software, has launched its OpenBOX v9.0 technology built on Microsoft’s .NET framework, and which works "regardless of which databases are deployed."

OpenBOX v9.0 includes a Data Presentation Layer that enables organizations to access information from their existing databases, such as DB2, SQL or Oracle, into one view. This back-end DPL is invisible to end users. The application can be customized using CSS style sheets, not just at the user interface (UI) level, but also forms and fields. The product uses XML and AJAX.

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

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The New Riders of the Purple Sage's "Louisiana Lady:"

TomorrowNow Inc., a vendor of third-party maintenance and support for enterprise software applications, has unveiled the newest version of its patent-pending TomorrowNow Support TechnologyT which, according to company officials, "enables the company to deliver real-time, high-quality support response services globally."

By the way, First Coffee isn't sure if that "T" on the end of the product name is supposed to be there or not, if it's a truncated "TM" or what. We'll let it go for now.

With its broad applicability, company officials say, this technology can also be used by any service organization needing "always-connected," around-the-clock emergency support. Such as, oh… yours?

TomorrowNow uses the company's proprietary technology not only to route and solve problems with clients' enterprise business applications, but also to monitor and track the routing and response system's health. The technology can monitor the availability of service engineers' handheld devices including pagers and mobile/smart phones such BlackberriesT to ensure that emergency response equipment is working and in continuous contact with TomorrowNow's support center.

TomorrowNow's case response process contractually guarantee 30-minute standard response times, as compared to existing vendor-supported maintenance programs, which TomorrowNow officials say "typically offer standard response times of 24 hours or more."

Emergency Response Model for Support Problems TomorrowNow's 24-hour-a-day, follow-the-sun support model is based on the company's patent-pending system, built on IBM's Domino development platform, Microsoft.Net, and Java.

Greg Nelson, TomorrowNow's CIO, is of the belief that this technology "can be beneficial to any organization where instantaneous diagnosis and real-time responses are crucial."

When an emergency response engineer's device is unavailable, the system can respond in a number of ways. It can send notifications to other engineers, managers and IT staff or automatically route the request to any number of technicians. In this way, an alternate service engineer can respond until the remote communications device is back online.

The system also automatically reroutes the request to an available engineer if the client's assigned service engineer is on the phone or otherwise assisting another client.

…

According to a recent customer survey conducted by managed Web hosting provider Rackspace Managed Hosting, nearly 36 percent of responding SaaS customers do not know the uptime guarantees provided in the SaaS vendor Service Level Agreement although, the survey found, "security, application uptime and network connectivity are among their top technical concerns."

The survey also concludes that 49 percent of enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) customers do not know where the infrastructure behind their SaaS application lies, whether it is hosted internally with the SaaS provider or through a third-party hosting provider.

"What this survey tells us is that infrastructure issues are top concerns to SaaS customers, but unless they make infrastructure a priority on the due diligence 'check list' during the purchasing process, they will be left in the dark and ultimately open to unwanted outages or compromised data," said John Engates, chief technology officer, Rackspace Managed Hosting.

Ten points if you can guess what line of work Rackspace Managed Hosting is in. No, manufacturing precision carburetors for heavy machinery is not right.

"SaaS providers need to clearly communicate their hosting and infrastructure details in the Service Level Agreement, drilling down to security promises, uptime guarantees, network connectivity, data backup processes and more. This way, customers are aware of their SaaS provider's service obligations, and they can rest assured their mission-critical applications such as e-mail or Customer Relationship Management software will perform as promised," Engates advised.

Publishing teen magazines? Uh, no, try again.

The Rackspace's SaaS survey found that customers value application uptime differently for each category of SaaS application. E-mail and business productivity applications, such as spreadsheets and document creation, were listed as the most critical applications when it comes to availability with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications running a close second.

In music to some companies' ears, SaaS customers value application uptime enough to pay significantly more for increased uptime guarantees. The Rackspace survey found thirty percent of SaaS customers would pay "at least 25 percent more" for four extra minutes of guaranteed uptime per month, taking them from a 99.99 percent uptime SLA (i.e. approximately four minutes unplanned downtime per month) to a 100 percent uptime SLA (i.e. zero minutes unplanned downtime per month).

Guess again where Rackspace earns their bread? Yes, you in back… leading extreme adventure tours on the South Island of New Zealand? Sorry, thanks for playing.

Overall, the Rackspace survey revealed that SaaS is making significant traction in the small-to-medium size and enterprise market with 51 percent of respondents using a SaaS application and 72 percent of those users considering additional SaaS applications. Rather than a brief IT trend, 69 percent of respondents believe SaaS is the preferred software delivery method of the future, indicating infrastructure scalability will be top of mind.

The methodology for this research involved sending an email survey via a third-party research tool, Clicktools, to 2,788 of Rackspace's customers -- there's a hint -- with annual revenue ranging from less than $1 million to more than $1 billion. Nearly 15 percent of survey recipients responded to the questions, and the majority of survey respondents' annual revenue ranged from $0 to $49 million.

Fifty-eight percent of respondents provide software services over the Internet and therefore are classified as SaaS providers. Detailed information and the full survey report can be found at http://www.rackspace.com/downloads/surveys/SaasSurvey.pdf.

...

SugarCRM Inc., a provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, has announced the opening of Sugar Europe in Dublin.

Some guys get all the luck… hey Rich, we volunteer to open TMC Europe in Dublin.

Based on growing demand across Europe, Sugar officials say, the new office will "foster close relationships with SugarCRM's customers, partners and user communities across the continent." Clint Oram, a co-founder of SugarCRM, will serve as General Manager of Sugar Europe and will lead the European team from Dublin.

Over the last three years, company officials say, SugarCRM has seen "widespread adoption across Europe," with its strongest growth in France, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Currently, about one-quarter of SugarCRM's commercial customers are located in Europe and more than 30 percent of Sugar Open Source downloads take place in Europe.

…

Read where Ms. Rodham compared herself to JFK yesterday. Boy, where's Lloyd Bentsen when you need him? Yeah, tell me JFK, the man who started the Vietnam War, is the person you want to be comparing yourself to at this point in American history. The only more tone-deaf politician alive in America is Jean-Francois Kerry.

Interesting, isn't it, that Democrats are always trying to find the next JFK and Republicans are trying to find the next Ronald Reagan?

After all, there's still BWI airport to rename.

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