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.
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