April 2007 Archives

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t com

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Slim Dusty's "The Biggest Disappointment:"

Salt Lake City-based Allegiance Inc., a vendor of enterprise feedback management products, has announced that it has closed on a $5.7 million round of funding led by Allegis Capital, with participation from existing investor TPP Capital Advisors.

Nippon Venture Capital also participated in the round.

In conjunction with the funding, the company also announced that Spencer Tall, managing director at Allegis Capital; Nobutaka Mutaguchi, managing partner of TPP Capital Advisors; Todd Rowe, vice president of worldwide mid-market business at Business Objects; and Tyler Smith, former vice president with Altiris have joined the company's board of directors.

The Allegiance Active Listening System is a suite of six Web-based tools currently used by over 1,600 organizations, company officials say, to "collect, manage and respond to feedback from customers, employees, partners and other constituents."

The tools, which include CustomerVoice, EmployeeVoice and SilentWhistle, are described by company officials as able to "collect actionable, real-time feedback and provide organization's management with the information they need to make business decisions, support the needs of the people that support them, and improve loyalty from inside and outside the organization."

Tall called Allegiance "the clear leader in the rapidly growing feedback management category," saying the company's products "have a major impact on the profitability of businesses of every kind."

Adam Edmunds, president and chief executive officer of Allegiance, Inc., called the contributions of Allegis Capital, TPP Capital and NVCC "invaluable as we grow our market share."

Allegis Capital is a seed and early-stage venture capital firm with over $600 million under active management and an investment focus on enabling technologies and infrastructure in information technology and the Digital Economy.

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SplendidCRM, which sells Microsoft-centric Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products for open-source use, has announced the launch of Version 1.4 of its flagship platform SplendidCRM.

The new version, incorporating key .NET 2.0 technologies, allows system integrators to add user-customizable features to applications. The features include .Net 2.0's Master Pages, Themes, Web Parts and AJAX.

Paul Rony, president of SplendidCRM, said the company's "free runtime and free hosting license makes us the most cost-effective platform for the system integrator… the big advantage to incorporating these key .NET 2.0 technologies is that it actually reduces our codebase and simplifies our design."

SplendidCRM, unveiled in 2005, is an open-source CRM application that builds on the design of SugarCRM, the number one open-source product in the field. Splendid CRM sees its added value as being its Microsoft-centric design philosophy -- the product uses pure Microsoft technology stack: Windows, IIS, SQL Server, C# and ASP.NET.

The incorporation of .NET 2.0 technologies allows integrators to add user-customizable features to SplendidCRM using Master Pages, Themes, WebParts and AJAX technologies. Master Pages and Themes are billed as simplifying application development and allowing for an unlimited number of page layouts to be predefined, allowing CRM users to select from a list of layouts.

WebParts makes it easy to define regions that end-users can control, especially on the SplendidCRM home page, where users can hide or move content according to their needs.

The most recently-added technology, .NET 2.0 AJAX, is a technique for updating Web pages without having to refresh the entire page. SplendidCRM relies heavily upon AJAX technologies in its new Order Management system.

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As Writer's Almanac reports, it was on April 30,1900 that the legendary train engineer Casey Jones died in a train wreck:

He was driving the Cannon Ball express from Memphis, Tennessee, to Canton, Mississippi, trying to make up time because the train was overdue, when his fireman warned him that there was another train up ahead. He ordered his fireman to jump, but he stayed on the train, one hand on the break and the other on the whistle. Though the Cannon Ball crashed and Jones was killed, the passengers were saved because of his efforts to slow the train down.

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Medium businesses in China, defined as companies with 100 to 999 employees, are set to invest an upwards of $21 billion to "reinforce their IT infrastructure and products" this year, almost twenty percent more than last year's spending, with the bulk of the spending being on IT services such as CRM, computing and the Internet.

This finding comes from the latest study by New York-based Access Markets International Partners, Inc.: "A sizeable number of medium businesses in China have crossed the first two waves of IT adoption, and are now in the third wave, which focuses on the extension of the enterprise," says Balaji Sreedhar, Singapore-based Research Analyst at AMI-Partners.

The first wave of IT adoption was building the basic IT infrastructure -- personal computers, basic accounting and HR tools. The second wave was connecting within the enterprise, LANs and servers. And the third wave, according to AMI officials, involves "connecting outside the enterprise, such as with suppliers, resellers, channel partners, and customers."

MBs in China are increasingly adopting enterprise software such as ERP and CRM, the study records, finding that "nearly 25 percent of China MBs have adopted ERP and close to 20 percent have CRM software in place." The survey indicates that "further adoption of these two solutions is extremely likely in the next 12 months," Mr. Sreedhar says.

AMI finds that "very few MBs use internal funds to buy IT products," they typically opt for either "financing or leasing options."

The top three priorities for MBs in China this year are deploying high-speed broadband Internet access, networking all hardware in the main office and enhancing IT security and privacy, the study finds.

On the other hand, the top three factors hindering the growth of MBs in China are an uncertain economic environment, especially the appreciating Reminibi against the dollar which, in turn, is affecting exports; the lack of cash flow, and the ever-increasing local and global competition.

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After "years of delay and huge cost over-runs," according to industry observer Randal Jackson, "Vodafone is expected to roll out its new combined billing and CRM system for Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific at the end of next month."

Project Sam, as it is known, was "originally budgeted at $200 million," but Jackson says the cost will now likely be between $500 million and $600 million.

One source told Jackson New Zealand had chosen one of two billing system options for the project, but Vodafone corporately decided subsequently to run with the other.

The core problem seems to have been one of scalability, Jackson says, "that as the business grew, the billing system wasn’t able to scale up… It’s understood the introduction of PXT was offered free for six months, simply because it couldn’t be billed."

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 Billie Holiday's Lady In Autumn.

Infusion Software, a vendor of what it calls "on-demand active CRM" and marketing automation software built primarily for small businesses, has announced Version 5.0, the latest release of its flagship product Infusion CRM.

Company officials say Version 5.0 offers an upgrade path for the company's entire customer base of software-as-a-service users.

The version includes conversion tracking, which allows users to insert a pay-per-click conversion code to the success page of e-commerce shopping carts inside Infusion CRM, "enabling small business to benefit from immediate ROI on specific pay-per-click advertising campaigns," company officials say.

There's also something called "Round Robin Sales Team Assignment Logic," which includes two distribution types available to use with Round Robin assignment -- One Record Per Round, or Random Based on Ratio. Evidently, When creating a round robin for distributing contacts, CRM can users select their preferred logic to distribute the records.

The "Expiring Credit Card Trigger" sounds genuinely useful. This feature allows companies to create a trigger that automatically runs for a certain number of days before or after the expiration date of a credit card. Infusion CRM users can then follow up with customers regarding expiring cards without having to worry about getting their current information on-time.

Infusion Software is a privately-held software company headquartered in Arizona.

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Frankfurt Stock Exchange-listed Update Software AG, a European vendor of CRM products headquartered in Vienna, has taken over 100 percent of German CRM specialist Orgaplan Software GmbH.

The deal was closed in Cologne yesterday.

The purchase price of EUR 5.8 million will be paid on the basis of a two-year earn-out model. With this takeover, Update officials say the company is "continuing its strategy of sector-focusing" and "expanding its technology and competence leadership in CRM systems for the financial services segment."

The addition of Orgaplan will give Update "the largest customer base in the German banking market," Update officials claim, as well as "the most comprehensive portfolio of tailored CRM products for the banking & finance sector." Update CEO Thomas Deutschmann called the acquisition "a further step in our strategy of growth through sector-focusing.

With approximately 200 customers, Orgaplan Software is one of the higher-profile CRM vendors in the German banking and savings bank sector. The company’s customers include more than half of the savings banks and public-sector credit institutions in Germany and a third of the big commercial and agricultural credit cooperatives.

Besides its headquarters in Cologne, Orgaplan operates a branch in Hanover and has around 60 employees. Hans-Ulrich Krauss and Burkhard Demming founded the company in 1987, and developed its CRM software named "Kunden-Betreuungs-Programm." The two founders will remain with the company following the takeover.

Update Software was founded in Vienna in 1988, has over 200 employees and saw annual revenues of EUR 23.4 million in 2006. Its products are used by more than 120,000 employees at over 1,000 companies.

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Mumbai-based blueMango has released Ryo CRM, under the name Ryosuite.com. Company officials say it is a suite of enterprise applications providing on-demand products designed to "facilitate you in managing your businesses effectively."

Among all relevant factors, "affordability”, “accessibility” and "manageability" are the ones identified by blueMango officials as "the key factors for the reluctance of most SMBs to embrace the business application." Keeping these factors in mind, blueMango Solutions is launching the CRM application named RYO CRM, part of their Enterprise Application Suite branded as RYO Suite.

However, there are more applications in production for SMBs to come under RYO Suite, officials say, including RYO Project, RYO ERP, RYO Payroll, RYO Logistic and RYO Billing, "to name a few."

RYO Suite will be launched as an on-demand product using the pay-per-use model of hosted environment. "It is a subscription-based mode," company officials say, where companies can subscribe for monthly or annual usage per user license.

The company is offering a free trial for 15 days, details at ryosuite.com.

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Amdocs Limited has reported that for the quarter ended March 31, 2007, revenue was $706.4 million, an increase of 17.5 percent from last year's second quarter.

Net income on a non-GAAP basis was $114.5 million, or $0.52 per diluted share, excluding acquisition-related costs, which include amortization of purchased intangible assets, in-process research and development write-off and other, and excluding restructuring charges and equity-based compensation expense, net of related tax effects, of $27.3 million.

This is compared to non-GAAP net income of $95.5 million, or $0.44 per diluted share, in the second quarter of fiscal 2006, excluding acquisition-related costs, which include amortization of purchased intangible assets, and equity-based compensation expense, net of related tax effects, of $13.8 million.

The company's GAAP net income was $87.2 million, or $0.40 per diluted share, compared to GAAP net income of $81.8 million, or $0.38 per diluted share, in the second quarter of fiscal 2006. Free cash flow for the quarter was $57.9 million, comprised of cash flow from operations of $91.2 million less $33.3 million in net capital expenditures.

Dov Baharav, chief executive officer of Amdocs Management Limited, said during the quarter "we formally launched our Amdocs 7 suite of products."

Baharav cited "an existing customer in Europe" for whom Amdocs has been engaged to provide a CRM product for "multiple market segments."

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In an article carried by New Zealand Reseller News, industry observer Ben Ames writes that "IBM has a plan to stop the computing delays familiar to users of virtual worlds and online games, simply by adding its Cell gaming chips to its mainframe servers."

Nicknamed the "Gameframe," Ames says that in addition to solving "performance problems in delivering rich graphics for the 3D Internet, future versions could handle business applications like ERP, CRM, virtual stores and meeting rooms, collaboration environments, data repositories and mapping."

Industry observer Ann Steffora Mutschler writes that IBM officials say it'll be a "blazingly" fast and powerful hybrid platform: "Big Blue said the project leverages the mainframe’s ability to accelerate work via specialty processors, as well as its unique networking architecture, which allows the ultra-fast communication needed to create virtual worlds with millions of simultaneous users sharing a single universe."

IBM developed the Cell Broadband Engine chip in conjunction with Sony and Toshiba for use in industries ranging from aerospace and defense to gaming, Ames says, including Sony's PlayStation 3 video-game console.

The idea, says Ames, is for IBM to "create a hybrid machine through the integration of the Cell processor with its System z9 Business Class (z9BC) mainframe server. The z9BC is the vendor's entry-point product for businesses that need less capacity than the System z9 Enterprise Class mainframe."

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 Beethoven's late quartets, specifically Op. 127, 130, 133 and 135:

Sertel S.A., a Spanish provider of integrated customer support and services, has announced that they will deploy Jacada call center products to increase customer service efficiencies and "provide accessibility for visually impaired agents," Jacada officials have announced.

The agreement was developed through Jacada reseller, Datapoint Spain. Sertel S.A. is a customer management company that provides multi-channel service and support including telephone, fax, Internet, SMS, Web, and e-mail.

Mario Medina, communication and technology director for Sertel S.A., said prior to this project, "our visually impaired agents were not able to access the systems they needed to complete customer interactions. We selected Jacada products to provide extended accessibility to our business systems for these visually impaired agents in order to enhance their performance within the customer service environment."

Sertel, part of the ONCE Foundation in Spain, handles more than 25 million customer contacts annually, and has more than 750 operating sites in Spain, which service more than 300 clients across the financial services, telecommunications, tourism, insurance and utilities industries. Thirty percent of the agents working for Sertel have disabilities.

Founded in 1990, Jacada has more than 1200 customers and operates globally with offices in Atlanta, Israel, London and Munich.

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Kintera Inc. has announced that the Maryland Affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure increased online giving in 2006 by 84 percent using Kintera Sphere technology.

Komen Maryland, one of many Susan G. Komen for the Cure affiliates using Kintera Sphere and recipient of Komen's 2006 Affiliate of the Year award, uses Kintera's social CRM system, which includes a content management system (CMS), e-mail and communications, and events technology to help the organization "save lives and end breast cancer forever," according to Kintera officials.

"Kintera's comprehensive social CRM system provides us with the tools we need to efficiently and effectively maintain a substantial online presence that includes event registration and online donation processing," said Patrick Drabinski, public relations director for Komen Maryland.

Building on their use of Friends Asking Friends Kintera Thon in 2005, Komen Maryland's 2006 Race for the Cure had 50 percent more online registrations. Friends Asking Friends, an online event fundraising software application, enabled Komen Maryland's more than 15,000 online registrants to create personal Web pages that show dollars raised and send e-mail solicitations to personal contacts.

Kintera's social CRM platform, which includes Friends Asking Friends, lets Komen Maryland merge the online and offline experiences of constituents into a single comprehensive view of all interactions. Event participants and donors can be added to Komen Maryland's CRM system and new interactions update existing contact records.

The social CRM system also lets Komen Maryland send targeted e-mails and communication. By merging the online and offline data of constituents, Komen Maryland is able to segment its donors based on identified preferences.

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SugarCRM, a vendor of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, has announced that it will host the first ever SugarCRM Global Developer Conference, May 3-5, 2007, at the Sainte Claire Hotel in San Jose.

All the usual suspects, HP, Intel, Microsoft, MySQL, Novell, Pervasive, Oracle and Sun, have signed on a sponsors of the conference, described by SugarCRM officials as "is designed for developers, administrators, users, and managers of CRM projects."

The conference offers over 40 sessions, including a keynote address from SugarCRM CEO John Roberts with special guest Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems. Breakout topics include "Building a Business Around SugarCRM" from community member David Moceri and "Implementing SugarCRM in the Developing World" by SugarCRM partner David O'Keefe. 

Since its founding in 2004, SugarCRM has built a large CRM community with over 30,000 members, including 8,000 registered developers. The product won Customer Inter@ction Solutions' 2006 Product of the Year.

Company officials also promise major Sugar product announcements and roadmap strategies, keynotes on Commercial Open Source CRM from industry executives and community presentations on Sugar modules, dashlets and extensions.

There's more lighthearted fare on offer as well -- Thursday's dinner at the Testarossa Winery will feature the SugarCRM band performing live, and Friday's dinner at Tied House will be accompanied by comedy night.

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Dallas-based Endeavor Commerce, publishers of SmartCatalog, a guided selling and configuration product for CRM and eCommerce, have announced its SmartCatalog product has been selected by Richardson Electronics.

Richardson Electronics is a global company with more than 70 sales offices throughout the world. A significant percentage of the company's products are modified or assembled for customer-specific requirements.

John DeNatale, CIO, Richardson Electronics, said he hopes SmartCatalog can "benefit our quote to order process. We evaluated and selected the SmartCatalog based on its integration with CRM, up-sell and cross-sell functionality, and the ability to deploy guided selling and configuration to the Web."

SmartCatalog lets enterprises increase revenue, decrease cost, and increase customer satisfaction by moving their business intelligence to the point of sale. SmartCatalog delivers sales configuration to ease the quote-to-order process for a sales channel.

And SmartCatalog deploys guided selling and product/service pricing, bundling and cross-sell/up-sell rules to the Web for what company officials call an "intuitive on-line buying experience."

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Virgin Mobile, the British virtual network operator, has selected predictive analytics software to drive marketing campaign optimization and reduce customer churn.

The software from SPSS is supposed to let Virgin Mobile "analyze its customer data and the results of previous direct marketing campaigns to identify appropriate customer segments for new marketing initiatives" targeted at the mobile operator's 4 million customers, according to Virgin officials.

Virgin Mobile undertakes more than 100 marketing campaigns each year. By identifying the most appropriate customers for each of these, the mobile operator hopes to be able to lower campaign costs, reduce customer churn and increase revenue per user from event-triggered marketing activities.

So customers who add additional minutes by a certain amount and are likely to churn can be sent a text message reminding them of the benefits of a rewards scheme, at or close to the time they re-up their minutes, rather than within an ad hoc campaign.

Basically, Virgin Mobile hopes to be able to better predict the likelihood of a customer leaving and take measures to prevent this. Caroline Schmidt, CVM controller at Virgin Mobile, says the SPSS' predictive analytics "enables us to get closer to our customers and predict which campaign will work best for each one."

Customers only receive the communications they are likely to respond to and "we achieve higher response rates and a greater return on investment for each campaign," Schmidt explains. "This is true next-generation CRM."

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 Horace Silver Quintet's Songs For My Father:

Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, an Alcatel-Lucent company, has announced the new Genesys Gplus Adapter for use with the analytics capabilities of the SAP Customer Relationship Management application.

Genesys is probably the first SAP Software Partner to integrate its customer service software with the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence component of the SAP NetWeaver platform. The compatibility of the Genesys Gplus customer service software, integrated with SAP CRM and SAP NetWeaver BI, was tested and verified by Genesys in cooperation with SAP Labs.

The Genesys Gplus Adapter basically lets the Genesys 7.5 suite work with complementary applications, such as SAP. By integrating the Genesys 7.5 suite with SAP NetWeaver BI, SAP's product for business intelligence and information management, companies should be able to use it to orchestrate customer interactions based on the appropriate business processes and "improve their ability to use analytics to understand customer needs," according to Genesys officials.

Genesys 7.5, in conjunction with SAP NetWeaver BI, lets managers apply business processes to each customer interaction.

Genesys, a SAP Software Partner and member of SAP's Enterprise Services Community, has a longstanding partnership with SAP. Genesys makes it possible for SAP software products to support numerous telephony and IP environments with an open platform that allows customers using SAP products to use telephony equipment from multiple manufacturers and integrate with SAP's full range of applications.

Genesys and SAP can now integrate virtually every application needed to deliver customer service through the integration of key systems, including CRM, integrated communications, voice self-service, customer data, analytics and business processes.

In 2006, Genesys became an ES community member and one of the first customer interaction management software suites to reach all three levels of SAP certification, including Powered by NetWeaver/Netweaver Certification, SAP Integrated Communications Interface and SAP R3.

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Take a moment here to wish our Australian and New Zealand readers a reflective ANZAC Day. Here in Turkey there's quite the observance at dawn out at Canakkale (Gallipoli) itself, well-attended by Aussies and Kiwis.

And happy Secretaries Day, for all… what's that? New name? "Administrative Professionals Day?" Yeesh.

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Maximizer Software Inc., a vendor of "affordable, easy-to-use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software applications," according to company officials, has announced the availability of MaxMobile CRM Smartphone, the latest in its suite of mobile CRM products for traveling sales and service employees.

The new product extends the sales and service capabilities of the Maximizer line of CRM products out to traveling employees who use wireless devices running the popular Windows Mobile wireless operating system on Smartphones.

Forrester Research's Liz Herbert wrote in the "Extend CRM Value With Mobility" report issued last June that firms "embrace mobile CRM to improve productivity, increase CRM system adoption, and enhance the customer experience. Mobile CRM is now a must-do for many field sales and service organizations because it allows reps to access and update CRM information anywhere they can use a mobile device."

MaxMobile CRM Smartphone extends the mobile CRM functionality of the Maximizer line of CRM products out to traveling sales and service employees using common smartphones such as the Motorola Q, Samsung Blackjack and T-Mobile Dash.

Made to take advantage of the small screen size and navigational capabilities of smartphones, the MaxMobile phone provides mobile read and write access to service cases, sales opportunities, calendar items, tasks, including Microsoft Outlook e-mail.

MaxMobile CRM Smartphone is seen by company officials as the second stage in Maximizer's plans for complete support of the Microsoft Windows Mobile platform. Launched in 2006, MaxMobile CRM gives Maximizer customers using Windows Mobile-powered wireless PDAs such as Palm Treo 700w, Dell Axim X51v and the HP iPAQ full read and write access to customer information while on the road.

With this release, the Maximizer line of CRM products supports most all mobile platforms, including Palm, Research in Motion BlackBerry, Windows Mobile PDAs and now Windows Mobile smartphones.

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Soffront Software Inc., a vendor of mid-market CRM software, has announced that Pavlov Media, Inc. has adopted Soffront CRM. Pavlov Media is a nationwide communications and technology provider that delivers customized high-speed Internet services, digital video entertainment, and telephone services.

Prior to choosing Soffront Software, Pavlov Media spent months evaluating numerous CRM options. "We wanted to improve productivity and efficiency in all aspects of our support areas and to integrate all customer and support data into one system," explained Jason Kenner, vice president, Pavlov Media.

In March 2007 Pavlov Media purchased some Soffront modules to improve integration and flexibility. Pavlov officials said the firm is "currently evaluating the Marketing Automation module and the integration of Asset/Inventory management modules with our accounting system."

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Smart Online Inc., a vendor of Software-as-a-Service for the small business market, has announced an agreement with the Small Business Members of America to offer Smart Online's leading OneBiz application platform to SMBA members.

"Small Business Members of America provides tremendous value to our membership through the discounts and resources we offer," said William Ritger, co-founder and managing member of Small Business Members of America. "By offering the OneBiz platform to our members, we are making high-end business software available at a price that small businesses can afford."

Smart Online's OneBiz platform features integrated daily-use business applications, including accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), salesforce automation (SFA), human resources, shared calendars and contacts, dashboards, business plan and marketing plan writers, among other services.

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Eduventures’ Higher Education Survey on Leadership, Innovation, and Technology has revealed, in a study titled "Prospect Research: Technology and Vendor Evaluation," that -- surprise, surprise -- fundraising is an "urgent objective" for universities, and a major focus for technology investment over the next two years.  

Jennifer Zaslow, senior analyst for Eduventures said that according to the study, one-third of prospect research departments have a system in place for routine reporting between offices, such as the registrar’s or alumni offices.

So a trend toward constituent relationship management is developing among universities. In this setting "CRM" is a set of specialized products and processes designed to mine, manage, and service relationships with current and prospective donors.

“The majority of prospect research departments are concentrating on alumni communication and contributions, although most universities surveyed lack a reporting system between departments,” said Zaslow. Eduventures’ report, Prospect Research: Technology and Vendor Evaluation, is the result of a survey of nearly 40 higher education institutions from across the United States.

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 Jim White's Wrong-Eyed Jesus album followed by The Eels' Daisies of the Galaxy:

Antenna Software, a vendor of mobile enterprise technologies, has announced that it has aligned with AT&T Inc. to sell mobile customer relationship management (CRM) products, based on AT&T's wireless data network, to the enterprise market.

This relationship gives AT&T customers access to Antenna's mobile products for Oracle Siebel and Siebel CRM On Demand on a variety of wireless devices.

AT&T is also using AMP Studio, Antenna's mobile application development environment, part of the Antenna Mobility Platform, to enable Siebel CRM and deploy to its wireless business-to-business sales team on BlackBerry, Palm and Pocket PC devices.

"Our alliance with Antenna Software underscores how wireless data is exploding across the enterprise space," said Jeff Bradley, vice president, wireless business data services, for AT&T in explaining the move. "Companies are now moving beyond wireless e-mail and exploring other business processes that can be extended to a mobile environment using their existing wireless handheld."

Bradley characterized the offering from AT&T and Antenna Software as an example of "next-generation wireless data products."

Officials of both firms called the alliance between Antenna and AT&T a "significant next step" in the companies' five-year relationship, and an effort to make mobile CRM "truly enterprise-ready" using ATT's wireless data network and Antenna's mobile product. AT&T and Antenna will offer dedicated sales and marketing resources for enterprise CRM adoption.

"The next few years represent a transitional period when companies should begin optimizing their mobility initiatives," Michael King, Research Director at Gartner, Inc. has said, adding that enterprises should look to invest in strategic mobile products -- capable of supporting multiple applications, managing devices, and securing data and transport -- and limit tactical deployments that support only single applications.

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Active Modules Inc., a vendor of modular software development, has announced a new version of their Customer Relationship Management application, Active CRM.

The major updates are in the sales and marketing module, and are largely designed to manage leads more effectively and provide a better transition throughout the sales cycle. The leads section was re-written so that it is easier to use and track potential customers. The updated leads section features automated communications and has print and export functions. Custom fields were also designed for leads, customers and companies and allow users to manage specific data for their own requirements, and a template library was also added to streamline communication tasks.

Active CRM 1.1 is a browser-based application that allows for easy maintenance, remote access and minimal workstation requirements. Its role-based security provides organizations with varying levels of data security.

Active Modules Inc., headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina, is a software development company offering products focused around DotNetNuke and the Microsoft .NET Framework.

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Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation, has announced that its data warehouse-driven customer relationship management software has been implemented at Grupo Cortefiel, a retail fashion company based in Madrid.

The CRM modules are being used to analyze and manage customer communications for the Cortefiel brand known as women'secret, a lingerie line, in an initiative to grow the customer base of its new women'secret Club (dubbed women'secret Wonderclub, also known as Club WOW).

Just reading off the cue cards here, folks.

"Only four months after the launch of the Wonderclub in Seville and Murcia, we already have tripled the subscribing customers, and soon we will extend it to the rest of Spain," said Belén Valiente, director of Club WOW at Grupo Cortefiel.

The marketing initiative, enabled by Teradata CRM, is expected to attract new women'secret customers, who can "subscribe, without commitment, to enjoy club benefits and advantages."

"Customers that join Club WOW receive 'wowmoney,' saving 5 percent of the amount spent in its 'wowcard' to use at women'secret during one year," said Valiente. "Also, a 'happy wow' message sends a timely birthday surprise. A 'wowsale' message offers relevant discounts. 'Wowlife' allows a customer to enjoy free exclusive concerts, festivals and trips at the beginning of each season."

Let me know if this is more information than you need. Hey First Coffee just wants to be sure you're aware of all your gift-giving options. Okay, the CRM:

Valiente said that CRM customer event triggers are used to launch timely, individualized promotions. José-Andrés García, sales manager for Teradata in Spain, said Cortefiel and the women'secret business have "already begun to realize value from our enterprise analytics and multichannel CRM portfolio" as they "engage individual customers at Web speeds and with relevant, timely, personalized messages and offers."

Valiente said that Cortefiel needed a product to "fully optimize the relationship with individual customers who require 360-degree visibility." Evidently the Teradata CRM has already produced measurable results, according to Valiente.

Grupo Cortefiel invested in Teradata in 2004 to create an enterprise data warehouse which, they say, improved the quality, clarity and speed of information access across the enterprise. Initially the data warehouse was implemented to transform operational data into knowledge to support a variety of decision-making.

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Informatica Corporation, a vendor of data integration software, has announced that the CANAL+ Group, a French pay-TV vendor, has implemented the Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform and Informatica PowerExchange mainframe access software to "help optimize its customer relationship management (CRM) processes."

In synchronizing changes to customer data across its operational and CRM databases in near-real time, the Informatica product is expected by CANAL+ officials to provide their customer care officers with access to fully up-to-date information, improving the company's customer service to more than 8 million subscribers.

CANAL+ officials say they want to streamline access to information for their customer service centers by improving the performance and reliability of data exchanges between its back-office IBM mainframe and front-office Siebel CRM application.

Instead of relying on expensive COBOL routines to strengthen these exchanges, CANAL+ selected PowerExchange, which uses changed data capture techniques to capture all updating actions to the legacy mainframe databases as they occur. PowerCenter then integrates the updates into the Siebel database so that customer-facing personnel are able to consult accurate views of each subscriber.

The product currently handles between 50,000 and 200,000 daily updating actions for CANAL+, and company officials say the entire thing was implemented in under five months -- "a fraction of the time that an in-house developed COBOL-coded product would have required, and at a much lower cost."

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Happy birthday to mystery novelist Sue Grafton, who got started in writing for a good reason: She was fantasizing about murdering her second husband during a custody battle, but she said, "I knew I couldn't pull it off. So I decided to just put this in a book and get paid for it." The result was 1982's "A" Is for Alibi.

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 Bill Evans jazz:

Oracle has announced that current CRM client Swisscom, a communications provider in Switzerland, has implemented Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management to "deliver and bill for media and entertainment services including ringtone and movie downloads and IPTV."

Swisscom officials say the application is tasked with improving the time to market for new media and entertainment services from nine months to a few weeks.

Swisscom has been using Oracle's Siebel applications for its front-office and customer relationship management (CRM) application to its more than 4 million fixed line and 4 million mobile customers, as well as broadband and IPTV subscribers.

Ueli Hostettler, Planning and Strategy Manager, Swisscom, said Oracle's" vision for delivering media and entertainment services over communications channels" matches Swisscom's goals for technology architecture, allowing the communications provider to "increase customer satisfaction."

Oracle officials say Bebo, a social networking site in the United Kingdom, Ireland and New Zealand as well as the United States, has implemented the Oracle Database 10g to provide scalable infrastructure for its growing social network. The Web site has more than 31 million registered users and garners over 5 billion page views each month and 1.2 million photo uploads each day.

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According to recent numbers from Gartner cited by CA officials, "on average $8 out of every $10 spent in IT is 'dead money,' not contributing directly to business change and growth," much of that spent on CRM, of course. Some enterprises spend 90 percent of their IT budgets "just to keep standing still."

Those comments come from Gartner, Inc.'s "The 2006 Gartner Symposium Keynote: IT Must Think Differently, Act Differently and Be Different to Drive Business Growth," by Mark Raskino, Daryl Plummer, Audrey Apfel, Richard Hunter, and Stephen Prentice, released October 2006.

CA has announced the next product in its Enterprise IT Management line with a Unified Service Model and an accompanying set of Capability Solutions.

"IT organizations continue to devote a large percentage of their time and limited resources just to support existing capabilities," CA officials say, explaining that their new products address this by "enabling organizations to better manage costs and risk, improve service levels, and align IT efforts with the goals of the business."

"IT organizations must overcome complexity and become internal providers of value-added services," said Al Nugent, executive vice president and CTO at CA.

The Unified Service Model is maintained in a Configuration Management Database. CA CMDB is designed to support the Unified Service Model, which is enabled through automated mapping of relationships between IT services and infrastructure components that support those services.

This mapping facilitates resolution of issues and allows IT to prioritize actions based on the importance of those services to the business. "As long as IT operations remained siloed in terms of process and technology, IT organizations will be limited in their ability to adopt a truly service-centric approach to business enablement," said Tim Grieser, vice president, System Management Software Research, IDC.

CA IT Governance products would let IT executives manage demand, by providing insight into the cost and quality of an end-to-end service -- "such as e-mail or CRM," company officials say -- rather than being limited to the management of the infrastructure and labor components that support those services.

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SAP India has announced that MRF Limited, an Indian tire manufacturing company, has selected SAP for Automotive products.

Carefully noting that the tire manufacturer "opted to replace existing applications from Oracle," SAP officials say the tire manufacturer has chosen SAP ERP and SAP CRM products based on the SAP NetWeaver platform.

With global operations manufacturing and distributing tires to more than 75 countries, MRF officials say they needed the SAP products to "improve visibility throughout its entire value chain from raw materials to finished-goods partners in order to better plan for and adapt to fluctuations in global supply and demand."

The new products will let the company integrate data between logistics and finance, eliminating redundant work and saving time and operational costs, officials say.

MRF will implement SAP solutions at its six global manufacturing plants and 100 sales offices including the company headquarters in Bangalore. The implementation is currently underway with a go-live expected in the fourth quarter of 2007. MRF will also establish an automotive user group within the company in its efforts to better user reception and ensure better ROI.

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Canonical Ltd, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, has announced the availability of Sugar Open Source for users of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS edition (Long Term Support).

The "simplified deployment process" and "ease of use" of Ubuntu, combined with SugarCRM's feature-rich business processes, is designed to help companies "build better customer relationships at a lower cost," according to SugarCRM officials.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS is freely available, including security updates for five years on servers, with no restrictions on usage. Businesses can download and install Sugar from the Ubuntu repository using the integration that Canonical and SugarCRM have developed.

SugarCRM's Web 2.0 architecture and AJAX-enabled user interface offers a product in the customer relationship management market. Sugar Open Source has been translated into over 50 languages and over 300 extensions have been built to enhance and extend the application.

"Demand for Ubuntu is growing rapidly among SugarCRM customers who require enterprise-level performance and reliability when running Sugar. Ubuntu offers a great user experience and vibrant community that complements SugarCRM's open source project," said John Roberts, Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder of SugarCRM.

Worldwide commercial support, for Ubuntu deployments where the assurance of a Service Level Guarantee (SLG) is required, is available directly from Canonical's Global Support Services team. Support for SugarCRM is available directly from SugarCRM at http://www.sugarcrm.com/.

Launched in October 2004, Ubuntu is a Linux distribution with millions of users around the world and is free to download, free to use and free to distribute to others.

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Autonomy Corporation has announced the hiring of the Federal sales team from Convera FAST. The team members, who hold federal clearances to service and sell to the U.S. government community, will be based in Autonomy's Falls Church, Virginia offices.

Executives joining Autonomy include the Vice President of Sales and Operations, Vice President of Product Engineering and the Security Program Manager.

Stouffer Egan, CEO of Autonomy said the sales team has been serving the interests of Convera customers, who "represent the majority of the company's RetrievalWare revenue," and that it is important that these customers "have access to continued support, advanced technology and cleared services personnel" which Autonomy sells.

Earlier this month Convera Corporation announced an agreement to sell its RetrievalWare enterprise software business to Fast Search & Transfer ASA for cash.

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 Pirates Who Don't Do Anything:"

If you're interested: Nucleus Research, a vendor of information technology research and advisory services, has released its Siebel CRM On Demand Guidebook.

Available at http://www.nucleusresearch.com/, the book "highlights the experiences of both recent and long-time customers" of Oracle's Siebel CRM On Demand, prescribing "best practices for deployment, fine-tuning and missteps to avoid in maximizing value from Siebel CRM On Demand," according to Nucleus officials.

"In our analysis of Siebel customers we found that the most successful ones saw CRM not as an application to be deployed but as a framework for how their organizations interacted with customers," said Rebecca Wettemann, Vice President of Research, Nucleus Research.

Nucleus found many Siebel CRM On Demand customers were standardizing CRM across multiple geographies and offices without the need for IT resources at each site and providing on-demand CRM as needed for departments or workgroups that don't need access to full Siebel Enterprise functionality.

The Guidebook also provides analysis on how to prevent common CRM pitfalls such as identifying internal "CRM skeptics" and removing the "old school" CRM mindset.

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CRM for nonprofits vendor Kintera has announced that the American Lung Association has renewed their Kintera Sphere software as a service, for use in the organization's fundraising efforts.

The American Lung Association wants Kintera's social CRM platform, including a content management system, constituent relationship management (CRM), e-mail and communications, Web sites, events technology, and advocacy tools.

Todd Whitley, vice president of online services for the American Lung Association, said they've been using the Kintera social CRM system for years, and it has "enabled us to offer a robust Web site that provides an abundance of targeted information on lung diseases from asthma to cancer," as well as "a comprehensive view of constituent interactions and relationships.”

As the oldest voluntary health organization in the United States, the American Lung Association has over 200 chapters across the country. In 2003, the organization’s online donations skyrocketed to $960,000 from $320,000.

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Guess what the world’s largest financial institution by assets is? Nope. Japan Post. Right, that would've been your second guess.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has announced that his company has won a big contract to provide CRM (customer relationship management) to this the world’s largest financial institution by assets, in a deal currently covering 5,000 users.

It's easily the largest deal for salesforce.com in the Japanese market, and the company hopes it will act as a magnet for more deals in the world's second-largest national economy:

“We believe that this initial agreement with Japan Post will become a hallmark to many Japanese companies to realize that if Japan Post has made this important decision that they can make this important decision to go to on-demand computing as well,” Benioff was quoted by Indian industry journal TechWhack as saying.

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First Coffee's former stomping grounds, CRMGuru.com, has changed its name to CustomerThink.com, to better "reflect the Web site's mission of helping business leaders succeed with customer-centric business strategies," according to Bob Thompson, the boyishly handsome founder of CRMGu… er, CustomerThink.

The time was ripe for change, according to Thompson, CEO of CustomerThink Corp. Although the term "CRM" has been a popular buzzword for more than a decade, and theoretically means a business strategy, it has taken on a technology slant in the market that appears unlikely to ever change, he lamented.

"While technology is an important enabling tool, and essential for managing customer information, it's only a portion of our mission," said Thompson, who has admitted to listening to Metallica on occasion.

In Thompson's view, CRM includes customer strategy, goals and metrics, people and organization, process and experience design and technology. Yet what he sees in practice are usually reflections of technology-laden CRM definitions.

His own research, conducted at the sprawling CustomerThink campus which has dominated Burlingame, California since the late 1950s, has found many people actually consider Customer Experience Management to be different from CRM. Other research has found customers evenly split between "tastes great" and "less filling," and that the fifth doctor sometimes knows what he's talking about.

Dick Lee, oenophile and founder and principal of customer-alignment consulting firm High-Yield Methods and a member of the original CRMGuru panel of experts when the site launched in 2000, lauded the move. "The name change from CRMGuru to CustomerThink descriptively clarifies the site's long-time content focus--which is on customer-centric business practices, not the CRM software that sometimes supports these practices," said Lee, who has been spotted occupying courtside seats for Minnesota Timberwolves playoff games.

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Britain's Innov8 Technology, specialist supplier of CRM vendor Sage Software, has partnered with document management and imaging company Version One to deliver "paperless office" technology to Innov8’s 500 Sage 200, Sage Line 100, MMS and ‘Inn’ customers.

This new partnership enables Innov8’s customers to electronically store, deliver, retrieve and authorize business documents such as invoices, purchase orders and dispatch notes directly from their software system. With Version One’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, data from incoming business documents, such as invoices, is also automatically captured, verified and then uploaded to the core finance/ERP system, reducing the time and costs associated with manual data entry.

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Marketing process optimization solutions are "revolutionizing workflows, creating greater efficiencies and reducing departmental expenditures," addressing the needs of marketers "unable to be met with existing customer relationship management (CRM)," according to a new analysis from Frost & Sullivan, titled "World Marketing Process Optimization Solutions Markets."

The study reveals that the market earned revenues of $216 million in 2006 and estimates this to reach $728 million in 2013.

"The MPOS market is a value chain of product suites that provides firms the ability to execute marketing functions including planning, creation of print and digital media, budgeting key resources, collecting and archiving marketing content and digital media, distributing, workflow management and performance analysis," says Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Aimee Roberts.

MPOS products offer ways to help with accountability of workflows, project management and measuring outcomes. The idea is that by enabling organizations to monitor and access individual and team workflows, project cycles are shortened and the company can reduce expenditures and usage of organizational resources.

"Coordination across different media channels has become more complex. The addition of new channels and calendaring channel usage across different campaigns or products proves to be a Herculean task as customers have become less receptive to direct mailings and e-mails," says Roberts.

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 "When You Dance, I Can Really Love:"

The South African Broadcasting Corporation and Microsoft Corp. have announced the deployment of Microsoft Dynamics CRM across SABC's sales and marketing organization.

The product, which was implemented within eight months, will hopefully "improve work-force productivity by automating the entire sales process and providing employees with easy access to real-time information," according to SABC officials.

Phase one of the project was rolled out to 250 employees in the company's head office and is currently being deployed to its network of regional offices.

Over 24 million adults tune in to the SABC's network of 18 radio stations every day, and 19 million adults watch the three free-to-air television channels. SABC Commercial Enterprises, comprising commercial airtime sales across radio and television, program, sport and education sponsorships, and interactive media sales, currently accounts for 76 percent of the SABC's revenue.

"Given the contribution of the Commercial Enterprises division to SABC's overall business, we identified the need for a client-centric approach to manage business leads across various sales units," said Gab Mampone, group executive of SABC Commercial Enterprises. "Our priority was to ensure that the product could integrate with Microsoft Office and Outlook, which are currently standard tools of the trade."

Microsoft CRM automates the third-party movement of customers directly into the Microsoft Dynamics CRM database and integrates it into the division's existing data warehouse for reporting requirements, and feeds into its business management tool.

SABC officials say the deployment of Microsoft Dynamics CRM has resulted in numerous benefits for the SABC, such as simplified customer data entry, improvements in report compilation, job prioritization and general searches as well as one view of all the sales engagements underway.

Warren O'Reilly, director of IMMIX Solutions which assisted with the implementation, the SABC is now "99 percent self-sufficient in maintaining the Microsoft CRM system and training employees."

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CDC Software, a wholly owned subsidiary of Chinese business software vendor CDC Corporation, has announced a definitive merger agreement with Saratoga Systems, a vendor of CRM primarily for large, global enterprises and specific vertical industries which are "additive and complementary to the vertical industries already addressed by current CDC Software" tools, CDC officials say.

The acquisition is expected to be completed within approximately two weeks. With approximate annual revenues of $25 million, the acquisition of Saratoga is expected to be immediately accretive to CDC Software.

The Saratoga CRM products are primarily designed for companies in the chemicals, consumer products, energy, insurance and selected manufacturing industries. Saratoga has more than 350 customers globally, including Allstate, BASF, Blue Cross Blue Shield of GA, Ciba Specialty Chemicals, Dresser-Rand, Konica Minolta and Metropolitan Life.

The addition of Saratoga CRM to CDC Software adds to the company's current Pivotal CRM applications designed primarily for financial services, home building and additional manufacturing industries. CDC officials say the Saratoga CRM applications are also complementary to the Ross Enterprise products for chemicals manufacturers, and the recently acquired Respond applications for complaint and feedback management.

Effective upon the completion of the acquisition, CDC Software will appoint Bruce McIntyre as general manager of Saratoga.

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CallMiner, a speech analytics vendor, and SPSS Inc., a provider of predictive analytics software, have announced they have joined forces.

By aligning CallMiner's speech analytics product, CallMiner Eureka!, with the SPSS predictive enterprise platform, CallMiner and SPSS hope to sell businesses the ability "to not only determine why customers are calling and how calls are handled, but also to take that analysis a step further to determine future customer behavior," according to CallMiner officials.

CallMiner Eureka! is a speech analytics product designed to analyze and report on the content, context, purpose and result of recorded conversations handled by contact center agents. Company officials say it can mine and analyze "every word of every call," as well as captures acoustic data (tempo, silence and stress), meta-data and customer information to provide "a complete picture of all calls and their outcomes."

SPSS sells predictive analytics technology to give organizations "on-demand insight" into both structured and unstructured data, such as call center notes, e-mail, blogs and Wikis. The addition of voice data is a move to let SPSS text mine "huge repositories of untapped information and, at the same time, factor in important attributes like voice stress and emotion," SPSS officials say.

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Oracle has announced that it has "teamed with" Blue Skies, an IT business management consulting firm, and systems integrator Systems Management Inc. to offer the "Interconnect" business assessment methodology for Oracle products for the media and entertainment industry.

Through the program Oracle, Blue Skies and SMI will work to make, oh, just a whole lot of recommendations for customers: "The program aims to help media and entertainment companies examine their strategic business goals and align enterprise IT systems with these objectives to gain significant operational efficiency," Oracle officials say.

Oracle provides business applications and infrastructure software to support the creation and delivery of new media and entertainment services. Blue Skies is a boutique IT business management consulting company that specializes in helping media and entertainment organizations such as Technicolor, Warner Music, Sony and EMI Music to define and execute IT strategies. SMI provides full lifecycle system implementation services and support for its clients. SMI is a member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork.

Interconnect assessments -- conducted by Oracle, Blue Skies and SMI -- combine operational and entertainment industry best practices to help improve business performance and system consolidation, Oracle officials say. Media and entertainment customers can us this program, combined with Oracle's enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, databases and CRM to improve the quality of their business plans.

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Denver-based Optegra, a customer relationship management (CRM) consultancy, has announced the launch of its newest business product for the manufacturing industry -- VRO 360 for Manufacturing.

The product is built on Infor CRM Epiphany, and combines CRM and Enterprise Resource Planning technologies such as Baan, SX.enterprise and BPCS with the standard MS-Outlook desktop and Web portlets.

VRO 360 lets manufacturers "provide internal work teams, such as sales, the capability to use the standard Outlook desktop to create, access and update prospect interactions such as account and contact information," company officials say.

The product is billed by company officials as tying the service, sales, marketing and analytics components of CRM with ERP information such as order histories, multiple quotes and proposals.

"The senior management team, for example, can have a 'user specific' view of CRM and ERP data via a simple Web portlet without having to learn how to use either a CRM or the ERP system," company officials promise.

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 Bob Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again." Once in high school, during a particularly boring class, First Coffee wrote out all the lyrics to this song, one of the truly great songs of the rock era, on his desk. It was a true, although unappreciated, work of art:

Oracle has announced that it will preview the latest version of Oracle's Siebel CRM On Demand, which'll count as its 14 release in three and a half years. The product is engineered to help users "simplify user tasks, reduce clicks and page refreshes, and provide page customization features to personalize work environments," company officials say.

Siebel CRM On Demand also plans to enable integration capabilities so that customers and partners can establish integration between Siebel CRM On Demand and other applications. The new release, company officials promise, "plans significant functionality enhancements across its sales, marketing, services, analytics, built-in call center, and industry edition capabilities."

Anthony Lye, Oracle Senior Vice President, CRM On Demand, says the product's being hosted on Oracle's Grid-based on demand infrastructure with an all-Oracle stack should give customers "levels of scalability, availability, and security at a cost we don't think any of our competitors can match."

Planned capabilities in Siebel CRM On Demand include "next-generation usability," which basically means using the latest in browser technologies such as Ajax, in-line edit, and Web 2.0 constructs. The company also plans to add homepage customization so users can arrange elements on the page, including lists, history, and favorites.

There are also customization capabilities which let organizations embed best practices, streamline data entry and configure different layouts for different types of records, as well as support for complex, cross-matrixed organizations with features that make it easier to setup the system to model their organizational structure and provide access to the appropriate information.

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Nashville-based inBusiness Services has announced their selection by the Independent Community Bankers of America as an ICBA Preferred Service Provider for customer relationship management (CRM) software.

InBusiness Services is the developer of 360 View CRM, a product for integrating a financial institution's core products and services with third-party offerings to "build a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the customer independent of any core customer information file limitations," according to company officials.

360 View CRM was developed specifically for financial institutions and includes functions for managing referrals, incidents, customer touches, personal follow ups, cross-sells, customer ranking and attrition and other needs.

According to the 2006 ICBA Technology Survey, 31 percent of community financial institutions plan to evaluate CRM applications in the next 12 to 18 months.

"As more and more community banks examine the advantages of implementing CRM Software, we are excited to have teamed up with inBusiness Services, which is well suited for community banks," said Dan Clancy, senior vice president of services for ICBA.

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Creative Manager has announced version 8.4.2 of its flagship product, Creative Manager Pro. Expected in early May, the focus this month is on graphical calendaring.

After last month's integration with Apple's Mac OS X iCal and Microsoft's Outlook, Creative Manager Pro "turns it attention inward to allow the user to see a graphical representation of the project schedule across the entire firm," according to company officials.

"For the past few months, we've been focused on integration with outside systems," said Ron Ause, Creative Manager's director of marketing. "This new release now adds more features to our own internal calendar."

The new graphical calendar allow users of Creative Manager Pro to see all projects on one calendar view, and gives users the ability to color-code projects for presentation and review. The product adds features that work with Apple's latest Tiger Mac OS X and future Leopard Unix-based Operating System and Microsoft Windows.

Creative Manager Pro "goes beyond costing to offer full Project Management, CRM, Digital Asset Management, billing and accounting, and Extranet capabilities," company officials say.

Creative Manager Pro is created for ad agencies and other creative design and service firms. It's basically a Web-based integrated project management software and job tracking tool "streamlining the entire firm, from developing new business, to staffing, managing, and executing projects through to accounting and financial reporting," company officials say.

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RegOnline, a vendor of online registration and event management services, has completed integration of its services with salesforce.com.

This integration "addresses the growing needs of the event planning business," RegOnline officials say, as "more event professionals capitalize on automation of their processes with computer software."

The integration of CRM tools into registration software is intended to help improve the efficiency of the process. Specifically, integration with Salesforce allows users to share leads and customers between services.

With the addition of RegOnline to the AppExchange network, RegOnline officials expect that SalesForce clients with event management needs will begin looking at online registration software as a complementary system to their lead-generation efforts.

The addition of CRM software to event management is done on the theory that it promotes understanding of the event planning process as a sales funnel.

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Seattle-based Tableau Software, a vendor of visual analysis software, has launched its Tableau v3.0 data analysis software.

Company officials say it is "designed for information workers in all job functions and industries," as it "enables people to summarize and explore their everyday data with an intuitive interface that generates crisp visual displays."

Tableau v3.0 lets users create fully interactive dashboards in a drag and drop workflow "without any IT support or programming," company officials say, so users can "compare information, including data from multiple sources. For example, you can monitor business performance in a dynamic dashboard using data from Excel, Oracle, and SQL Server simultaneously."

Tableau v3.0 has what company officials describe as "a new class of filters that dynamically update all displays in worksheets and dashboards" as well, letting users "create and adjust a filter and watch an array of visual displays update simultaneously."

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CGI Group Inc. has announced the signing of a contract to implement CGI's Strata product in order to modernize the billing and customer care environment of its partner, Australian communications giant Telstra. The Strata decisioning capabilities will be integrated with a product based on out-of-the-box Siebel CRM, Kenan Billing and Tribold Product Catalog capabilities.

As part of the deployment, CGI will replace Telstra's existing decisioning application used for Credit Assessments and centralize it on the Strata platform for both Credit Assessments and Collections.

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 Reckless Kelly's double live album Reckless Kelly Was Here:

CRM vendor Entellium has announced the full availability of a new version of Rave, its CRM software product sold mostly to small sales organizations.

Rave is marketed on what company officials call "time-saving, efficiency-enhancing features," such as an intuitive user interface, workflow and automation capabilities and a "smart client" architecture that lets sales reps work both online and offline.

Rave was developed using Gamer Influenced Design, an Entellium-grown concept that incorporates many of the elements found in video games. GID gives traditional (read: boring) business software a makeover by integrating gaming design techniques. 

"Rave is CRM re-mastered for sales people," declared Paul Johnston, President and CEO of Entellium, calling it a "fun-to-use package that pure play-on-demand services can't achieve." 

In developing Rave, Johnston said, the company sought "a sales productivity tool that embraced many key features found in today's leading video game designs," because "after doing a great deal of research, we found that gamers and sales professionals are remarkably similar. Both play against the clock, score points and require a play-to-win mentality to succeed."

Based on these similarities, Johnston found there is "a great deal that business software can learn from the gaming world related to product design."

The company said in developing the product they took into account some of the most commonly-heard complaints from salespeople about CRM, including the old one about how CRM products took too long to bring up new pages and save edits, users were required to traverse multiple screens and tabs to input data and suffered click fatigue, not enough routine sales tasks were automated by CRM tools and access to sales and customer data away from the office was unreliable, due to ineffective offline clients.

Rave, which is available for a free trial download at ravecrm.com, is available immediately on a subscription basis at a list price of $400 per user, per year. 

Company officials are counting on what they call the product's "simple, intuitive navigational experience" to appeal to such dissatisfied people. It includes a built-in Live Chat feature for 24x7 customer support and pre-built reports and data mining tools for managerial visibility into the progress of each sales rep and their pipeline. 

Other bells and whistles include "Star Rankings," which lets users know where their most important contacts, prospects and deals are at a glance, and "Activity Maps," billed as a way around those "tabular, grid-based views of  CRM data which don't provide an easy way to spot trends, see anomalies or connect different data points."

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CRM and SFA vendor Satuit Technologies, which focuses on the professional investment market, has announced the hiring of Dale S. Gillette, a financial services veteran, to the position of Vice President of Strategic Relations.

Gillette comes to Satuit from Wellington Management Company's Information Services Division, where he served as a systems manager supporting the information technology needs of the Institutional Relationship Management, Marketing, and Business Development teams in 3 U.S. offices and 5 global offices.

Prior to Wellington Management Company, Gillette's experience included management roles with Putnam Investments, Bankers Trust, Chase Manhattan Bank, Security Pacific National Bank, and State Street Bank.

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Astonish Results, a digital marketing and training company for the mortgage industry, has announced the launch of Astonish CRM, a mortgage-focused Customer Relationship Management product with fully integrated event-triggered e-mail marketing.

The product "rounds out the Astonish digital marketing system," company officials say.

"We've always felt that in order to help mortgage companies find, close and keep more customers, we needed to provide them with a CRM / email marketing solution that automated much of the follow-up," said John Boudreau, director of operations at Astonish. He cited the "integrated e-mail marketing capability" as a salient selling point.

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IEnterprises, Inc. and SugarCRM have announced that they will be offering "Mobile Edge for SugarCRM," a wireless "extension" for SugarCRM users to put their SugarCRM available on BlackBerry smartphones. It can be purchased through SugarExchange.

The product uses an open standards Web services interface, integrated to the two SugarCRM product lines. Customers can choose hosted or behind the corporate firewall deployment.

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Questra Corporation, a vendor of Intelligent Device Management products, has announced that the Questra IDM Application Suite version 5.2s, in compliance with industry-standard Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture, is generally available.

Version 5.2s lets users combine device performance data with other business application data. It's the foundation for Questra's own value-added products, including the Questra RemoteService Composite Application version 2.0, which is also now available for purchase.

Generally IDM tools have been freestanding enterprise applications. Now, using industry standards, applications within the Enterprise SOA-enabled Questra IDM Suite can be integrated with other enterprise applications, such as CRM and ERP systems, company officials say.

The Questra RemoteService Composite Application version 2.0, which lets device manufacturers provide automated service notifications, runs on the SAP NetWeaver platform and has "SAP xApps Certified - Powered by SAP NetWeaver" status.

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StayinFront, Inc., a vendor of customer relationship management (CRM) applications, has announced it has won a new contract with BELNET, the Belgian national research network that provides high-bandwidth Internet connection to Belgian universities, colleges, schools, research centers and government departments.

BELNET wants StayinFront CRM to manage all contact, product, order, contract, billing, supplier and customer support data that BELNET has been using several information systems to handle.

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Sage Software has announced the new ACT! by Sage Premium Dual Access licensing, and the ACT! Business Care support and maintenance plan.

ACT! Premium Dual Access enables online/offline access to centralized customer data for sales teams, small to mid-sized businesses, and larger workgroups. ACT! Premium Dual Access also includes one year of ACT! Business Care and is priced on a volume basis at $529.99 per single-licensed user.

Joe Bergera, senior vice president and general manager for ACT! and Sage Software Global CRM, said the vendor designed ACT! to "support an online/offline user experience."

If  read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM 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 Boz Scaggs's Hits!:

Stratature, a vendor of master data management software, has announced the general availability of +EDM Version 4.0, the latest release of Stratature's +EDM platform for dimension, hierarchy and master data management.

Stratature officials bill the product as a "comprehensive MDM security model," bolstering support for Product Information Management applications.

Customers use +EDM for operational and analytical MDM, to support data governance and data quality initiatives across ERP, GL, CRM, data warehouse, business intelligence and financial applications.

Val Lovicz, VP of Research and Development for Stratature, said "although simple in concept, the practicalities of allowing security assignments to any combination of dimension members, across any number of hierarchies, with unlimited master data supported by unlimited business rules, are a challenge."

Company officials say the product's file object management, was developed in conjunction with several customers interested in "tackling enterprise-scale product information management initiatives."

The functionality is being highlighted in the company's marketing for "CPG and pharmaceutical companies storing product images, documents and presentations, this functionality is proving equally useful outside of the product dimension -- such as in the location dimension for storing maps of a store location, or the employee dimension for storing pictures of employees -- anywhere that external documents and images can benefit from being treated as master data," officials say.

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Interesting bit from Reuters this morning, reporting that Microsoft is flipping the switch on its "largest server farm to date -- big enough to house seven soccer fields" today, an installation in Quincy, Washington comprising tens of thousands of computer servers in what Reuters calls "a physical manifestation of the company's giant ambitions to be a force in the world of Web services."

Well, that and the $550 million data center in San Antonio. Hey when you take on Google you need such infrastructure.

The data centers "provide the base infrastructure upon which Microsoft can create a range of web services such as its Xbox Live online video game system to its upcoming CRM Live business software," Reuters observes.

The article quoted Morningstar analyst Toan Tran saying that since data centers are "the basic infrastructure that enable Web services," if Microsoft wants to compete in services "this is the price of admission. The software industry is headed toward Web services, so this is what Microsoft has to do."

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Adobe Systems and salesforce.com have announced the availability of the Adobe Flex Toolkit for Apex, described by Adobe officials as "a set of programming tools that combines the capabilities of Flex and salesforce.com's Apex platform" to enable new Internet business applications.

Using the product, developers can create application "experiences" for their salesforce.com deployments and Apex applications. Developers can also make their Flex-based applications available on the AppExchange directory, and deploy them on-demand and with no additional software required.

The toolkit lets applications access Apex Web services APIs, allowing developers to create end-to-end, rich and innovative Web applications.

The Apex platform's embedded mashup features allow developers to insert services and content from the Web within the native Salesforce user interface. The Flex Toolkit allows the use of drag and drop, rich media and desktop app look and feel to be embedded within Salesforce and Apex applications.

Because these Flex components of Apex applications are browser-based technology, they can be deployed without any additional software or infrastructure, and even packaged and redistributed on the AppExchange.

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Zilliant, a vendor of price optimization and management software, has announced that since achieving "Powered by NetWeaver" certification, it has seen what company officials call a "significant increase" in customers running or planning to deploy SAP applications.

Numerous global corporations including Insight Enterprises, Smith and Nephew, and the Schneider Electric North American Operating Division have selected Zilliant as their data-driven price management product "in part because of Zilliant's compatibility with SAP platforms and applications."

Zilliant attributes this momentum to a combination of factors, including Zilliant's Powered by Netweaver certification and its numerous SAP-integrated deployments.

Zilliant Precision Pricing Suite applies "pricing science" to transactional and master data from SAP to segment and optimize pricing. In many deployments, ZPPS then feeds these profit-maximizing price recommendations back into SAP in the form of pricing guidelines that help sales people get the best pricing possible on every deal.

"Companies are looking for ways to use data from their ERP, order management, and CRM systems to make more informed and profitable decisions," believes Greg Peters, Zilliant CEO.

…

There's an excellent piece by industry observer Mary Hayes Weier on the tech weapons Dunkin' Donuts is using to try to combat Starbucks, including a system built by business intelligence vendor Oco Inc., which Dunkin Donuts CIO Dan Sheehan tells Weier is like "a CRM application with a scorecard built on top," in Weier's words.

Most of Dunkin' Donuts' 5,000 or so franchises are in the Northeast. You give directions in Boston by how many Dunkin' Donuts to pass before turning left.  Starbucks would like a piece of that action. And as it turns out, the private equity group that bought Dunkin' Donuts last year, Weier says, would like a piece of Starbucks' global action: They're planning for "15,000 franchises worldwide," whereas Starbucks has 12,000 stores worldwide, "including 8,800 in the U.S., and plans to add another 2,400 globally this year."

Dunkin' Donuts is wheeling out a system to streamline the process of awarding franchises, on the theory that if they're the first to occupy ground they can fend off Starbucks later. "Salespeople and managers use the system to manage information about these [franchise] customers, including the stage of each potential deal and how financing is going for them," Weier explains.

And this is key -- since Starbucks doesn't franchise they can parachute in anywhere whenever they want, no mucking around with franchisee approval and funding and royalties and all that.

The Dunkin' Donuts system gives company managers "a dashboard-type software application to identify any problem areas so they can keep deals on track," Weier explains: "They can get a geographic view of regions where deals are stalling, and then drill down into a specific account to determine what's slowing down the process. They can identify potential deals in locales that are too close in proximity. They also can identify high-performing areas, and gather best practices from those regions' salespeople to share with other areas. Key metrics they're watching include the average cycle time for getting a franchise deal done, the size of deals, and average cycle time by what type of deal gets done."

Of course the best of all possible worlds would be Dunkin' Donuts doughnuts with Starbucks' coffee. Here in Istanbul we buy pastries at a Turkish-French café along Istiklal Caddesi, walk three doors down and get coffee at Starbucks. Fortunately neither establishment minds the arrangement.

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, this Friday the 13th -- don't spill your coffee all over your laptop or drop it out of a fifth-story building -- and the music is Aimee Mann. First Coffee listens to quite a lot of Aimee. I'd heard the 'Til Tuesday singles, of course, but hadn't paid much attention to her solo career. It was hearing her sing a duet with Jim White on "Static On The Radio" that really hooked me on her voice, and the Live At St. Ann's Warehouse album that sold me on her songs:

Oracle has announced Oracle Siebel Wireless support for Blackberry from Research In Motion, bringing Oracle's CRM applications and capabilities to BlackBerry users.

With Siebel Wireless on the BlackBerry platform, users can access real-time CRM data via mobiles. "CRM is becoming a primary use of mobile and wireless technology among enterprises," noted Mary Wardley, research vice president, CRM Applications, at IDC.

In addition to having access to corporate e-mail, phone and other applications, users can manage customer interactions, service tasks, assess corporate data and collaborate while out of the office. Users can push notifications or data to any user via the BlackBerry push-based e-mail, voice and SMS text messaging channels.

Oracle officials are also pushing the idea that IT departments can use BlackBerry Enterprise Server's over-the-air application management and deployment to "help simplify integration and maintenance as mobile applications evolve."

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Reynolds and Reynolds have announced an integration between their Power Customer Relationship Management application and Callbright's Call Management System. Officials of both companies say that it will enable automobile dealerships to "improve significantly the effectiveness of CRM activities, especially lead management and dealership call tracking."

Callbright sells a Web-based call management system for managing telephone traffic in real time. Its integration into Power CRM means that when a customer calls the dealership, a record containing the caller's information can be added to the CRM system. Dealership personnel also can link new and existing customers together, as well as take notes on calls within the CRM software.

Tony Fowler, vice president of New Product Design for Reynolds, explained that when a customer or prospect calls the dealership, a screen-pop appears that includes the caller's name, telephone number, and available demographics, "even if the caller has never contacted the dealership before," delivered "while the customer is on the phone, instead of after the call is completed."

Callbright actively integrates with Do Not Call lists and "enables dealerships to reach large audiences with pre-recorded announcements quickly and efficiently and to identify which advertisements are the most effective, based on telephone call response rates."

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Cetova will launch C-Plan for its business performance products suite. "C-Plan is another one of Cetova's non- technical easy-to-use products," allowing users to "automate their existing budgeting processes and replace spreadsheets with data management and collaboration," says George Lambrianakos, President and CEO of Cetova.

With its Excel based interface, C-Plan enables non-technical users to view and compare past data trends. Users may enter their budgets manually or they may select from a variety of forecasting methods. They also have the ability to include comments and file attachments documenting their budgeting assumptions.

C-Plan organizes its users within a hierarchy to direct the workflow for the submission of budget worksheets. The workflow also provides notifications for budget submissions, approvals and rejections, which lets users track the progress of their budget cycle.

Cetova's integration with ERP systems means business data such as payroll, CRM, or sales can be integrated for planning and budgeting purposes and then combined into financial accounts, company officials say.

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Spain's Inmersa Technologies has announced the release of Inmersa ERP Suite Open Source, an integrated "Browser Business Technology 100 Percent Internet for Small and Micro Companies 24/7 Anywhere, Anytime," according to the jawbreaker of an appellation, accessible "from any built in Browser Device."

Inmersa is a back and front-office product with ERP, CRM, Web portal and store front capabilities with Content Management System and Portal Creation on Click 100 Percent LAMP -- Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP.

Among others features, Inmersa has functions for sales, buys, dashboards, scorecards, mail reports, billing, finances, services, self-services and others. Company officials promise the product adapts to "any business environment," and focus on the product's use as a "flexible, cost-effective alternative for small and micro businesses."

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Hong Kong-based Affinitiv has "aligned itself with Salesforce.com," company officials say, in "a new partnership to give its customers access to best-of-breed online Sales Effectiveness Technology."

The companies will work together to "help clients implement online technology products and automate the sales processes surrounding their SaaS initiatives," officials say.

Carole Bird, who heads up the Affinitiv Sales Effectiveness practice in APAC, says her company's alliance with Salesforce.com "provides clients with the technology, methodology and processes to achieve great success across the sales organization."

Affinitiv offers Business Strategies and Technology Consulting through its presence in North America , Europe , the Middle East and Asia.

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Proposal Software, Inc. CEO John A. Laurino has announced that the company's proposal management software, Proposal Management and Production System, is now integrated with the widely-used LexisNexis InterAction client relationship management software.

LexisNexis sells CRM software and services to centralize a law firm's collective knowledge about clients and contacts.

By synchronizing access to InterAction software with PMAPS, the same data organized within InterAction can be directly accessed from within the proposal management platform. This is obviously pitched to law firm's proposal teams, who usually respond to RFPs and prepare proposals for new business objectives.

According to John McDonnell, vice president of LexisNexis, InterAction aggregates data such as client profiles, matters, notes and activities, and "transforms this data into the Relationship Intelligence a firm needs to make decisions."

InterAction is used by 80 percent of the nation's largest law firms, McDonnell said, and 30 percent of the United Kingdom's top law firms.

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In other good news, Lagan has announced it has provided its call center software to the city and county of San Francisco to support a new 3-1-1 non-emergency call center.

Lagan's 3-1-1 product will be implemented both city and countywide and across departments including police, fire, public utilities, public health, social services and airport service, totaling over 27,000 users.

The call center hosted a public launch on March 29, giving San Francisco's 800,000 citizens access to city services through one consolidated phone number, 3-1-1. Lagan's services let municipalities provide improved customer service to residents, businesses and visitors by processing and tracking citizen requests and notifying callers when an issue or request is resolved.

Lagan will be deployed initially in the Department of Public Works and MTA (Muni-Transportation) and will eventually encompass departments citywide.

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 grossly underrated Tommy James & The Shondells on an iTunes mix:

Vendor TimeXtender has introduced Quick Cubes, described by company officials as "pre-configured data cubes" for use with the company's flagship business intelligence product, timeXtender 2.0.

Heine Krog Iversen, timeXtender founder and CEO, called the product "business intelligence out of the box." It automates the extraction, validation and transformation of data from virtually any source into Online Analytical Processing data cubes, thereby "eliminating the need for custom computer coding."

Quick Cubes are built for specific ERP systems and industries and can be used right out of the box or as a foundation for a customized product.

Designed for use with Microsoft's business intelligence platform, the premier release of Quick Cubes includes 12 pre-configured data cubes for users of Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Dynamics AX, Dynamics XAL and Dynamics GP. The product promises out-of-the-box analysis for 12 common business areas including CRM.

Based in Denmark, timeXtender is a developer of data warehousing software for business intelligence. The company's U.S. headquarters is in Greensboro, N.C.

…

Byte Software, a vendor of mortgage lending software products, has announced that mortgage lender Kemper Mortgage has selected Byte Software's BytePro Enterprise loan origination software for its branches nationwide.

Based on Microsoft SQL Server technology, BytePro Enterprise provides advanced business rules functionality and flexibility to banks, brokers and credit unions.

Kemper Mortgage chose BytePro Enterprise "for its SQL Server architecture, document management features, and information security emphasis," Byte officials say.

By using SQL Server all loan data is contained in a central database. For an organization with multiple branches, storing the information in a central location enables management to view the entire pipeline without first having to aggregate widespread data. When data is changed, the entire organization sees those changes in real time.

Joe Herb, general manager of Byte Software, said with the product, Kemper Mortgage has "the ability to integrate their in house customer relationship management (CRM) system with BytePro Enterprise."

Byte Software is a wholly owned subsidiary of CBCInnovis, a vendor of real estate settlement services.

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Sage Software has announced the availability of Sage MAS 90 and Sage MAS 200 4.2, the latest versions of the company's enterprise resource planning products.

Built upon years of cumulative input from thousands of customers, Sage MAS 90 and 200 4.2 deliver accounting functionality with simplified personalization features and business intelligence tools.

Sage MAS 90 and 200 4.2 are billed as providing "comprehensive insight into a company's most important data," according to company officials. Basically they anchor end-to-end business management products, provide accounting and financial reporting, in-depth distribution, manufacturing and e-business management.

The Sage products also integrate with CRM, HRMS, Payroll and other business management applications from Sage. In fact version 4.2 features Business Insights Explorer, a comprehensive business intelligence tool and integration with all three CRM products from Sage Software -- ACT! by Sage; SageCRM/SageCRM.com and Sage SalesLogix, as well as the new Sage MAS Fixed Assets management module.

The product offers "preview functionality," with which users can view multiple transaction types in a single view. Version 4.2 users can locate a customer, for example, and preview related orders, invoices and payments without being forced to load separate windows or modules.

Users can also apply filters to any view, displaying data according to preferences, save filtered views for future use or share them with other team members.

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Barcelona-based ClearPeaks, a vendor of business intelligence consulting, training and products, has announced its BusinessObjects XI Release 2 Migration Specialist consulting services.

Business Objects sells business intelligence products to over 35,000 customers worldwide. ClearPeaks has expanded its business intelligence services by adding a comprehensive Business Objects XI Migration product to its offerings.

Via its migration methodology, ClearPeaks' XI Migration Specialists "guide customers through a predefined analysis and planning phase leading to a migration plan and subsequently a successful XI migration," company officials explain.

The consultancy offers pre-defined yet customizable XI migration templates for various customer profiles.

ClearPeaks specializes in converting business information from CRM and ERP systems into customer intelligence, company officials say.

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Design Within Reach Inc., a retailer of modern furnishings, has "extended its appreciation for cutting-edge, contemporary products to its business software," in company officials' words, to say that the San Francisco-based company is replacing its custom- built business management system with Microsoft Dynamics AX.

DWRI chose Microsoft Corp.'s enterprise resource planning system over offerings from SAP AG and other companies for "its easy implementation and system maintenance, overall features versus cost and ability to manage the rapid growth of the company's showroom, catalog and online sales," DWRI officials say.

Joe Martins, vice president of IT for Design Within Reach, repeats an often-heard comment made whenever companies decide further resistance is futile: By buying Microsoft products, "we don't have to be in the software development business."

Microsoft Dynamics AX operates in three distinct tiers, each of which uses standard PC and network technology and standard Microsoft operating systems for both clients and servers. The way Microsofties explain it, the tiered design of Microsoft Dynamics AX "eliminates the need to replace or reconfigure the entire system when new components are added or changes made to specific tiers."

The ERP system developed and implemented by Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Tectura Corp. adds industry-specific features to the core Microsoft Dynamics AX system. These add-ons include functionality to support various order entry and other customer service-related business processes, along with Supply Chain Execution for Microsoft Dynamics AX, a Microsoft Industry Builder initiative product created by Manhattan Associates Inc.

…

CRM vendor StayinFront has announced a three-year contract with Randox Laboratories, a privately owned diagnostic reagent and equipment manufacturer located in the U.K. 

Randox selected StayinFront CRM for Life Sciences, Analytics and Workflow to "manage and facilitate consistent sales and marketing efforts and messaging across its entire sales and distribution network, which includes a representative presence in more than 130 countries on six continents," company officials say.

Yes, once again, Antarctica is cruelly ignored.

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's Whatever:

Our friends from Redmond, the good folks at Microsoft, are addressing widespread customer frustration with the complexity of security products in a new integrated marketing campaign launched today called "Easy, Easier."

The Microsoft Forefront line of business security products is featured in a campaign that combines print and online advertising, a creative Web experience, integrated customer relationship marketing (CRM) and public relations.

The campaign uses humorous metaphors to illustrate how defending against security threats with Forefront is easier than defending against virtually anything else -- including far-fetched threats from aliens, ninjas and zombies.

Hey easy's great, but users would probably be really impressed by a Microsoft security product improving on the company's dismal effectiveness record. In early March industry observer Mark Hachman noted that AV-Comparatives.org, "a group of IT graduate students who have published formal analyses of antivirus tools since February 2004," tested the current batch of products and "placed Microsoft's OneCare anti-virus solution squarely at the bottom of the list."

"In each of three categories," viruses, macros, worms and scripts, Hachman wrote, backdoors, Trojans and other malware, and a third category, combining the results of the first two, "OneCare received the worst score out of 17 products tested." In fact, it did so poorly that, as industry observer Paul Thurrott noted, "OneCare Live 1.5 was the only security product not to be certified by the Web site." But hey, the humorous metaphors had 'em rolling.

The goal of this campaign, created by McCann Worldgroup San Francisco, is to emphasize Microsoft's competitive differentiation in making security products easier to deploy, implement and manage.

"We wanted to connect with the customer in a new and different way," said Rob Bagot, executive vice president and executive creative director at McCann Worldgroup San Francisco. "By using humor in a relevant fashion, we can engage and inform IT professionals at the same time."

Humor is also revered among advertisers for its ability to make people sort of, well, forget about a lot of things. And accomplished admen McCann Worldgroup know their stuff -- "feedback from customers worldwide indicated that many enjoyed the fact that Microsoft was using IT-relevant humor as an entry point into a serious conversation on security," Microsoft officials pointed out.

"The approach was seen as highly engaging and standing out from the typical marketing in the security category," one Microsoft official noted, and First Coffee has to agree, given the recent study, Microsoft does, uh, stand out rather prominently in the security category.

"I like that it was original and entertaining. It was very clever, eye- catching and memorable, which makes you want to learn more about Forefront," said "an IT professional" cited by Microsoft as one "who participated in a focus group about the ads."

No word on whether the same guy was as impressed with Microsoft's distinctly less entertaining overall security record.

Microsoft says the ad campaign features "real customer stories from leading global organizations such as the Vienna International Airport, SAS, and Cable & Wireless, which illustrate how Forefront products have helped customers easily enhance the security of their infrastructure and simplify the reporting and management of their security products."

"We've heard loud and clear from business customers that security products not only need to provide the greatest level of protection but also must be easy to manage and integrate with existing infrastructure. This ease of use is one of the key competitive differentiators that Microsoft brings to the market with its Forefront security products," said Steve Brown, director of product management for security and access product management at Microsoft.

And leave 'em laughing.

…

The Wall Street Journal is reporting this morning that the technology gained in Salesforce.com Inc.'s recent acquisition of start-up Koral Inc., "will be used in a new service to help customers' employees find and manage documents and other content."

Terms of the acquisition, to be formally announced today, weren't disclosed, the Journal noted: "The new service is designed to make it easier for employees to find and share files such as text documents, videos and presentations."

Reuters tech reporter Michael Kahn cited AMR Research analyst Jim Murphy as saying the Salesforce product "would likely appeal to existing customers or businesses looking to get software over the Internet," in Kahn's words. Murphy questioned the impact on Microsoft, saying SharePoint has established itself after grabbing share from smaller players in the past few years. Murphy told Kahn any claims of it being a SharePoint killer are "overly aggressive."

Industry observer Alexei Oreskovic says Salesforce's concept of the value of the new service, titled ContentExchange, is "its ability to interconnect so-called unstructured content, anything from e-mail messages to Powerpoint presentations. Employees can tag their documents with various labels, descriptions and ratings that make it easy for other workers to retrieve the information."

Oreskovic quotes Bruce Francis, Salesforce.com's vice president of corporate strategy as saying "for the first time we are planning to deliver an application that will touch every corner of the enterprise. And that's a big change for us."

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Customer Connect Associates has hired Michelle Seamster as CRM Consultant, with responsibility for CRM implementation, database development, web development, and data analysis, company officials say. Seamster comes to Customer Connect from Huber Engineered Woods, where she worked as an application developer and CRM analyst.

With a BBA in Marketing, Michelle worked for Huber, both in North Carolina and in Virginia, from 1996 until this year. Huber is a client of Customer Connect.

In related news, the Cornelius, North Carolina-based CRM consulting firm has added three new partners to the list of firms that will collaborate on their "People Ready CRM" event, called an informative "deminar" -- a combination seminar and product demonstration -- at the Charlotte, NC Microsoft offices on April 24.

Along with Microsoft and the Sales Leadership Council, Customer Connect will cooperate with Pervasive Software, ettain group -- First Coffee's getting slightly irked with this e.e. cummingsization of brand names, just use capitals, kids, come on -- and Professional Network Consultants.

Founded in 2000, Customer Connect Associates sells their LUCK process for "creating more profitable relationships." Clients include Travelocity, SAS, LandAmerica, AMF, BB&T, Fairfield Resorts and AAA.

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FYI: Creston plc, a British publicly traded marketing services holding company, has officially entered the United States market with the appointment of Steve Blamer as Chief Executive Officer of Creston plc US Holdings Inc.

Creston offers a range of services spanning advertising, public relations, digital marketing, market research, direct marketing and customer relationship marketing (CRM), among many others.

Blamer is charged with identifying similar leading acquisition targets in the U.S., specifically high-growth businesses with established top tier client lists.

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 Ben Harper and the Blind Boys of Alabama's There Will Be A Light:

Tel Aviv-based Algorithmic Research, which sells standards-based electronic signatures (digital signatures) and data security products, and Top Image Systems Ltd., which sells data capture products, have announced what ARX officials call "an extended worldwide technology and sales alliance that will help customers manage information more efficiently."

Through this partnership, the companies hope to sell products for customers to "expedite data capture processes, improve internal controls and enhance compliance with regulations," ARX officials say.

Top Image Systems' eFLOW is a single end-to-end product designed to process information from different sources and through a business's applications, including document and content management applications, ERP or CRM.

The product can handle invoices, checks, purchase orders and other information. EFLOW allows access to financial information at any time, thus facilitating compliance reporting for regulations governing business and financial information.

ARX’s CoSign is described by company officials as "a non-forgeable, standards-based electronic-signature solution" integrated with eFLOW. CoSign provides users with a way to affix legally-binding electronic signatures to documents, records, files, forms, and other electronic transactions. Users can sign multiple document-format types, including those from Adobe, Microsoft, IBM, and others.

"The combination of these complimentary technologies offers a compelling solution for any financial, commercial and governmental organization wishing to comply with the growing number of compliance reports required by federal and state government regulatory organizations," said Gadi Aharoni, CEO of ARX.

…

HitachiSoft will begin offering the SaaSWare SynchroMax service, linking scheduler functions from Hitachi, Ltd.'s Groupmax groupware software with Salesforce, the on-demand CRM application from salesforce.com, Inc.

The launch of this service, Hitachi officials say, marks the company's first foray into integrating Salesforce with various applications using SaaSWare.

HitachiSoft has further plans to expand the service with SaaSWare, centered on linking Salesforce with software packages and services offered by HitachiSoft, software packages held by other Hitachi group companies and backbone systems such as ERP, generalizing HitachiSoft's in-house systems.

Before this partnership with salesforce.com, HitachiSoft was a reseller offering system integration services involving Salesforce.

SynchroMax is built using the Apex on-demand platform from salesforce.com. The product can synchronize the Groupmax scheduler with the Salesforce calendar and ToDo List functions, thereby eliminating the need to enter data in both applications.

HitachiSoft is also offering "Total Service Integration" with its SaaS business, combining SaaSWare with its consulting and integration services based on experience and know-how from installing Salesforce internally for several thousands of users," company officials say.

HitachiSoft plans to continue to integrate Salesforce with other existing services such as piX terra, a satellite image ASP, using SaaSWare, and also to apply it to business systems such as internal regulation, sales management, production management, and document management.

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SoftwareProjects, an Internet marketing and Web development firm, has announced that it has completed integration with the UltraCart shopping cart. This lets merchants using UltraCart manage their UltraCart-powered stores from a single interface.

UltraCart technology is a customizable e-commerce service. SoftwareProjects Payment Center is a Web-based CRM and ERP system designed, company officials say, to "consolidate all information relating to a business including customer data, financial transactions, help desk and analytics into a single interface."

Supported shopping carts include: InstantEStore, XCart, Yahoo! store, Ebay store, OSCommerce and now UltraCart.

The company is waiving all setup fees for existing UltraCart merchants, throughout April 30. The company was established in 1996 and is  headquartered in Atlanta.

…

Compact Solutions, a vendor of data management products, has announced that it is organizing its services around vertical industries. The first of its Industry Practices has been created to serve financial services companies.

Charles Leinbach will be Compact Solutions' Practice Director for Financial Services.

"Our goals are to help our financial services customers succeed in their large-scale data management initiatives, whether processing large transaction volumes, addressing data quality, or the analysis and storage of large datasets," said Pankaj Agrawal, Compact Solutions' chief executive officer and CTO.

The idea to organize around vertical industries "developed naturally," company officials say, noting that Compact Solutions began as an enterprise information integration vendor, specializing in Ab Initio technology. The idea behind EII is for corporations to use what Compact Solutions officials term the "massive amounts of data" usually residing in disparate silos throughout the enterprise.

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Okay, we're in a good mood here at First Coffee, we'll give a tip of the coffee pot to SugarCRM for signing on as the Title Sponsor of the Los Gatos Bicycle Racing Club's Cat's Hill Classic bicycle race.

SugarCRM provides commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software in several deployment options, including on-demand, on-premise and appliance-based methods.

The Los Gatos Bicycle Racing Club has presented the Cat's Hill race continuously since 1974. The SugarCRM Cat's Hill Classic, totally a volunteer project of the Los Gatos Bicycle Racing Club, is one of the oldest grass roots cycling races in the US.

The Los Gatos Bicycle Racing Club has selected the Alex Smith Foundation and the Los Gatos Skateboard Park as the designated charities for 2007. The Alex Smith Foundation was established by Los Gatos resident and 49er quarterback Alex Smith to help foster care youth transition into adulthood, via developing and promoting programs in six basic areas: Mentoring, Education, Housing, Internships, Jobs and Advocacy.

For all registration information, race information and directions, please visit the race website at www.catshill.org.

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Dealerskins, a division of Dominion Enterprises and vendor of automotive dealer Web products, has announced a partnership and integration with DealerCentric Solutions to incorporate the DCS "Get Pre-Approved in Seconds" program into its Web sites.

The program approves customers online based on dealer-defined credit criteria. The "Quick App" is customized to the look of the dealer's site and can be integrated into Lead Generation and CRM systems.

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