June 2007 Archives

Compass Technology, Alliance Bank Malaysia, FrontRange Voice, Open Solutions, Steria, Frost and Sullivan, Cisco, InsideSales.com

June 29, 2007 8:14 AM | 0 Comments
By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
 
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is It’s A Beautiful Day’s album Live In Seattle:
 
Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and independent software vendor Compass Technology will be presenting fundraising software for nonprofits at the Microsoft Partner Solutions Theater during the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver, July 10-12.
 
Nonprofit technology and software pioneer Jeff Shy will lead the presentation of Compass CRM for Fundraisers. With over thirty-six years of experience in developing nonprofit fundraising software products, Shy recently joined Compass as vice president of product management.
 
Compass wants other Microsoft certified partners in the nonprofit industry to join the Compass Channel Partner Program. Compass Partner Program manager Susan Turner explains the goal is to “selectively develop an elite group of Microsoft partners that currently serve the nonprofit sector… participating in the Compass Partner Program gives Microsoft partners the opportunity to compete with Sage and Blackbaud for fundraising and financial management business in the nonprofit sector.”
 
Compass officials claim their Compass CRM for Fundraisers is “the only complete fundraising and donor management software running entirely in Outlook and built on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform.”
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Malaysian industry observer Lee Wei Lian has reported that Alliance Bank Malaysia Bhd group has “committed to invest over RM260 million ($75.2 million) over the next three years to build an enterprise-wide business intelligence platform.”
 
Its group chief executive officer Datuk Bridget Lai, Lee said, wants the business intelligence platform to “enhance its customer relationship management and business scorecards as well as help move it closer to FRS 139 compliance.”
 
Lai was speaking at a partnership-signing ceremony between ABG and business intelligence products provider, SAS Malaysia. SAS was represented by its CEO and founder Jim Goodnight at the signing ceremony, according to Lee. Goodnight is a new member of the International Advisory Panel, a group advising the prime minister on matters pertaining to the development of ICT in the country.
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FrontRange Solutions, a vendor of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and other products for the mid-market and distributed enterprises, has announced the availability of version 5.1 of FrontRange Voice, a communication product.
 
Among the federated products offered by FrontRange, FrontRange Voice 5.1 combines several technologies to create a single IP telephony product developed entirely in software, so customers “just need a PC, a broadband voice provider and an Internet connection to begin calling,” company officials say.
 
In the past, businesses had to buy a Private Branch eXchange from a proprietary vendor, run phone lines to all desk phones, contract with outside sources for telephone lines and buy specialized hardware to connect them. Additional needs included an Interactive Voice Response, an Automatic Call Distributor, a recording product, and more that were required including the necessary integration performed by a specialized service provider.
 
In most cases, this integration was not feasible to small and medium-sized businesses, so they were unable to provide the level of service afforded to large enterprises. But with FrontRange Voice 5.1, the integration has already been done, so customers get integration between the phone system, CRM, IT Service Management and Help Desk.
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Palm Desert National Bank has selected Open Solutions Inc.’s The Complete Banking Solution, a relational core data processing platform for community banks, to address its enterprise-wide data processing needs, according to Open Solutions officials. Based in Palm Desert, California, the bank has approximately $411 million in assets, as of December 31, 2006, more than 5,000 customers and four branches.
 
Built on an Oracle relational database, The Complete Banking product’s open architecture and customer-centric platform is designed to help financial institutions streamline both the front and back office applications with a focus on customer service, providing “a centralized view of its specific relationships with customers, employees and business partners,” company officials say.
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Nice to see government institutions taking constitutent services seriously enough to invest money in improving them: Steria, a European IT services company, has announced a ten year business transformation deal to modernize and update IT systems at Eastbourne Borough Council. The contract, worth €8 million, is supposed to improve the customer experience for Eastbourne’s 90,000 plus residents by “streamlining key services and business processes,” according to Steria officials.
 
Steria’s task is to improve the council’s CRM system so employees can manage and respond to resident inquiries — everything from tax payments to garbage collection — faster, as well as offering customers the facility to serve themselves online.
 
Steria will also be helping Eastbourne in its ongoing efforts to provide interactive maps online, allowing residents to check for planning applications and other relevant developments near to their homes. It will also help provide a ‘Where is my nearest?’ online search facility supplying residents with details of local services, organizations and resources in their area.
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New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Brazil IT Infrastructure Outsourcing Services Markets, finds that the Brazilian markets earned revenues of $1.1 billion in 2006 and estimates this to reach $3.3 million in 2012.
 
The introduction of open communication networks and the prospects of remotely managing and maintaining network elements and applications help the growth of the IT infrastructure outsourcing services markets, the study found.
 
This is generating substantial revenues in the market as customers have higher expectations and are constantly demanding substantial results from the infrastructure-outsourcing project in terms of efficiency and cost reduction.
 
On the demand side, the finance, telecommunications and Government sectors are in some way more advanced in outsourcing theirs IT services. However, in the upcoming years, these verticals are likely to enhance their adoption of new services due to regulation issues, along with the entry of other major vertical markets such as retail and health care as important clients.
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Cisco has announced that it has deployed a wide-area network for its 1,000th customer. The vendor launched its Wide Area Applications Services product in September 2006.
 
Nanometrics Inc., a vendor of process control metrology systems, reports that the Cisco WAAS “enabled a dramatic improvement for the company’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM application,” according to Dave Kizer, director of information technologies.
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InsideSales.com, a hosted Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software product with built-in dialers, has announced its partnership with ActionTrak to provide an integration solution with QuickBooks, by Intuit.
 
QB Link offers the ability to move account, contact, and invoicing information directly into QuickBooks from InsideSales.com’s CRM system with the click of a button.
 
InsideSales.com customers and prospects can purchase QB Link through their Account Executive. ActionTrak will provide post-sales support with each purchase.
 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.

Oracle Contact Center Anywhere 8.1, Maximizer Software, Salesforce.com, RightNow Technologies, IBM, Hot Banana, GOT Corporation, Soffront CRM

June 28, 2007 7:42 AM | 0 Comments
 By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
 
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Willie Nelson’s beautiful, highly underrated The Troublemaker album:
 
Following last year’s acquisition of Telephony@Work, Oracle has announced the release of Oracle Contact Center Anywhere 8.1, what Oracle officials are calling their “first comprehensive multimedia IP contact center product.”
 
It’s a scalable, multi-channel product providing agents with a 360-degree customer view across a wide array of communication channels including calls, e-mail, voicemail, fax, Web and interactive voice response.
 
Traditionally, CRM applications and telephony components have been stand-alone applications from different vendors requiring computer-telephony integrations between voice and data platforms. This makes true multi-channel contact centers costly and time-consuming to implement. Oracle is promising a “complete customer-to-agent” experience using Contact Center Anywhere’s multi- channel technology.
 
The product is built to run on the Oracle technology stack including Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Fusion Middleware. The entire customer lifecycle — starting with a customer initiating communication (phone call, e-mail, Web callback, IVR self-service) to the logging of the activity in the CRM system — will be delivered through Oracle’s CRM and business intelligence applications. It supports out-of-the-box integration for voice calls with Siebel CRM.
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Maximizer Software has announced that it has entered into what company officials are calling “a new strategic alliance” with sales and education research firm ES Research.
 
ESR is a vendor of sales process evaluation and sales training firm evaluation. It recently launched the first Certified Measurement Program aimed at formally certifying the top sales training organizations.
 
Under the terms of the new agreement Maximizer and ESR will share customer bases for mutual cross and up-sell potential, share research and best practices with joint customers in educational events such as Webcasts, and participate in marketing programs aimed at raising awareness of the two company’s offerings and cooperation.
 
ESR CEO David Stein noted that while corporate sales professionals understand the requirement for professional sales training, they understand that “the most sophisticated sales teams harness sales technologies to improve processes and the results they deliver.” 
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Salesforce.com has announced the company’s 2007 annual meeting of stockholders will be held on Thursday, July 12, 2007 at 2:00 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time, 5:00 p.m. on the East Coast. The meeting is to be held at the Mark Hopkins Hotel located on 999 California Street, San Francisco, California 94108.
 
The record date for the meeting was May 22, 2007, and only stockholders of record on that date are eligible to attend the meeting. An audio Webcast will be available to the public on salesforce.com’s Web site.
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RightNow Technologies has announced that Datamonitor research recommends the company’s product be on higher education’s “shortlist for CRM technology selection.”
 
According to the June 2007 report “Decision Matrix: Selecting a CRM vendor in the higher education market,” the combination of being well regarded in the higher education market and “having a robust product makes RightNow a vendor that institutions should put on their shortlist when considering the purchase of a CRM application.”
 
The Datamonitor report also states that RightNow offers institutions “attractive pricing” and “rapid deployment.” Institutions seeking to implement CRM in the most basic to even the most sophisticated ways, Datamonitor says, “will find RightNow Technologies to be an attractive vendor.”
 
In evaluating RightNow’s higher education CRM product, available through the software-as-a-service deployment model, Datamonitor noted that the Bozeman, Montana-based vendor had “the highest score amongst all of the profiled vendors in four of the eight user sentiment categories, including product quality, customer support, service capabilities and client engagement.”
 
The report found a “particularly compelling feature” of RightNow’s CRM product to be the ability to embed other applications, such as a student information system or document management system, using a custom tab.
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IBM has benchmarked the performance of Infor CRM Epiphany beyond 10,000 concurrent users in a real world test, a finding which “verifies the scalability and performance of the CRM product,” according to Infor officials.
 
The scalability metrics benchmark tested Infor CRM Epiphany Sales and Service on their WebSphere application server, exceeding 10,000 concurrent users without any failures in a six-hour test run.
 
IBM tested the product based on information provided by one of the largest banking organizations in the world to establish business scenarios in three defined test scripts. The scripts were based on the level of detail and response required for a customer service representative to complete a customer interaction. These were comprised of 50 percent simple, 30 percent medium and 20 percent complex customer interactions.
 
The test was run on IBM 595 P5 with six processors per each of eight logical partitions. Each LPAR ran three WebSphere application server instances with two processors each. In addition, the test was run on an all AIX platform with an 8-way P5 running a DB2 database with a three terabyte storage area network. Response times were sub three seconds for 90 percent of test activities.
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Hot Banana, a Web content management product from J.L. Halsey, has released its latest version — Hot Banana 5.6 — at CFUnited 2007, a ColdFusion Conference. The Web content management system for marketing, is now 100 percent compliant with Adobe ColdFusion 8, which means it can use the features of the new, soon-to-be-released ColdFusion 8 server platform.
 
The latest Hot Banana release also has new features including CAPTCHA Web form validation, Rich Text Editor enhancements and Web form data integration with NetSuite, a SaaS CRM.
 
Hot Banana now enables the transfer of Web form data to salesforce.com and NetSuite, with more integrations with additional SFA and CRM vendors planned. The product is billed as allowing “non-technical” users to build multi-level Web forms with CAPTCHA validation on basic Web site pages or on advanced landing pages, set up Web analytics, lead source and conversion tracking; and transfer the captured lead-generation data from the Web form to almost any SFA, CRM, database or e-mail marketing product.
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TheCustomer Relationship Management Association has announced it will begin using GOT Corporation’s on-demand CampaignerPro e-mail marketing application. As CRMA’s Premier sponsor, GOT Corporation receives an annual membership for ten employees, visibility at local chapter meetings and can post CRM-related white papers.
 
GOT Corporation joins Oracle, CRMA’s Platinum Sponsor of record. Other CRMA partners include Salesforce.com, RWD, BPT Partners, KnowledgeStorm and others.
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Soffront CRM v. 8.6 has been named by TMC as a 2006 Product of the Year. Soffront CRM v. 8.6 was released in 2006 with such enhancements as increased marketing and sales capabilities, improved customer support functionalities, enhanced automation, and better integration. It’s geared to mid-sized companies or departments of larger companies.
 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.

SAP & Pooch Inc., Infor CRM, Dassault Systemes, Marketing Management Analytics, Cardiff & Microsoft, WorkStream, Open Soultions

June 27, 2007 7:09 AM | 0 Comments
By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
 
 
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Lou Reed’s 1984 Live In Italy, certainly the best live album Lou’s delivered himself of — yes, better than the iconic Rock’n’Roll Animal. Shame Lou and guitarist Robert Quine ended up hating each other, they sounded so stinking sweet together. Ol’ Lou’s released some pretty uneven material over the years but one thing you can say for him, he knows how to pick guitarists, from Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter to Robert Quine and more recently Mike Rathke.
 
SAP America, Inc., a subsidiary of SAP AG, has announced that Pooch Inc., a luxury product catalog and Web site selling dog products, has implemented SAP Business One for their “e-commerce platform.”
 
The product was delivered and deployed by SAP Business One certified business partner Apollo Consulting of San Francisco. SAP Business One will drive Pooch’s business launch initiatives.
 
Based in San Francisco, Pooch Inc. unveiled www.poochonline.com in May 2007, which will serve as an online retail shop offering, and I quote, “elegant and luxurious products for today’s chic canine,” offering “a collection of innovative accessories and apparel for dogs and 2007 Spa catalog featuring pooch customized pillows, robes, sweaters and spa care products.”
 
Pooch Inc. employs SAP Business One to track inventory, manage contacts with suppliers and wholesalers and expose their products to their customer base. The e-commerce tool will integrate with Pooch Inc.’s online store, slated to launch in summer 2007, to provide a single interface for product catalog, order processing and online customer service capabilities.
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Infor has announced enhancements to its Infor CRM Epiphany product line to allow integration of CRM functionality with the latest releases of Avaya, Lotus Domino, and Crystal Reports, company officials say. Infor CRM Sales 7.0.2 and Infor CRM Service 7.0.2 are now certified to support these platforms.
 
Infor CRM Sales and Infor CRM Service are products designed to centralize customer information and transactions into a single view, creating user efficiencies through each interaction. Access to real-time customer information lets companies “differentiate themselves with consistent customer communication through every step of the lifecycle,” according to Infor officials.
 
The latest version of CRM Sales includes the addition of Infor CRM’s Configuration Module, which “enables companies to standardize the sales and specification process to ensure quality output.” Configuring products and services correctly at the time of the sale helps with maintaining an efficient sales process, and inaccuracy at the time of a sale can lead to problems such as regulatory non-compliance issues, lengthy returns and exchanges, and customer dissatisfaction.
 
CRM Sales and CRM Service are components of Infor CRM Epiphany.
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Dassault Systemes, a French vendor of 3D and Product Lifecycle Management products, has announced an OEM agreement with tech vendor Autonomy to deliver “advanced conceptual search capabilities within DS’s Enovia PLM SOA new user experience and middleware,” according to Dassault officials.
 
As a result of this partnership, DS will deliver PLM enterprise search capabilities that will combine Autonomy and DS 3D PLM technologies, allowing users to “find and act on information more quickly while developing new products,” officials from both companies said.
 
“The growing volume of content, repositories, and digital asset media types available today requires a more comprehensive investment and approach by IT,” said Stouffer Egan, chief executive officer of Autonomy, Inc.
 
3DLive is DS’s lightweight product using real time 3D to search, navigate and collaborate online. The partnership “demonstrates the capabilities of Enovia PLM SOA middleware to serve as an open federation, indexing and data warehouse platform for all kinds of industries, customers, processes and user data,” Dassault officials said.
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Marketing Management Analytics, Inc. has announced the appointment of an old CRM hand, former Accenture executive Keith W. Hopkins, as Vice President, Account Management. MMA is an independent operating unit of Carat, a media services company.
 
The appointment is effective immediately. Hopkins will oversee client service for key MMA accounts.
 
Ed See, Co-President and Chief Operating Officer of MMA, said Hopkins’s “more than 11 years experience in global consulting organizations, particularly with business strategy, CRM and analytics, will provide significant value to our clients.”
 
Hopkins, 44, of Yorktown Heights, New York, comes to MMA from Accenture, where he served as Senior Manager of the Global CRM Service Line. Previously, Hopkins served as Senior Manager of the CRM Service Line at Arthur Andersen Business Consulting and BearingPoint.
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Cardiff, a division of Autonomy Corporation and vendor of intelligent document products, has announced its support of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for content loading and content-centric processes.
 
SharePoint 2007 users can now use Cardiff’s business process management to automate form and document related processes, including automatic data extraction and metadata tagging, intelligent document classification and business process management, which feed into the SharePoint Server.
 
The Cardiff Intelligent Document product can integrate with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to give customers the ability to tie together paper, electronic and mobile content, making it all accessible within their SharePoint Server 2007.
 
Cardiff officials claim the company offers “the only integrated product available that can automate both paper and electronic forms and document driven processes.”
 
During the recent 2007 Asia Pacific Microsoft SharePoint Conference, Canon Information Systems Research Australia, a partner of Cardiff, using a Canon Information Capture product based on Cardiff, applied optical character recognition imaging technology to extract information from Microsoft’s session evaluation forms. Canon then piped information and associated images into SharePoint and powered a live dashboard showing the session ratings.
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Workstream, a vendor of On-Demand Human Capital Management compensation, performance and talent management products, has hired Gary Damiano as the new Senior Vice President of Marketing to round out the company’s executive management team in Burlingame, California.
 
Prior to joining Workstream Mr. Damiano was the Vice President of Marketing for the Oracle On-Demand business at Oracle Corporation, where he was responsible for marketing Oracle’s SaaS-based product line. At Siebel Systems, Damiano was responsible for marketing Siebel CRM On-Demand.
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Open Solutions, a vendor of enabling technologies for financial institutions, has announced that Trinidad and Tobago-based Eastern Credit Union has signed a five-year agreement with Open Solutions for the international version of the company’s enterprise relational data processing platform, The Complete Credit Union Solution, and other complementary technologies to handle the credit union’s processing needs.
 
Eastern Credit Union has its registered office in St. Joseph, Trinidad and Tobago and serves more than 115,000 members. The firm has $150 million in assets.
 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.

Perpetual Sourcing, Ideaca Knowledge Services, SAP Arabia, Jitterbit, Autonomy Corporation, TARGUSinfo, WealthCraft Systems Inc., Triad Software Services

June 26, 2007 8:47 AM | 0 Comments
By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
 
 
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Dread Zeppelin’s Un-Led-Ed. Gotta love a reggae band fronted by an Elvis impersonator doing covers of Led Zeppelin songs. It’s a joke, sure, but a great one — the music’s first-rate. So all together now: “You ain’t nothin’ but a black dog…”
 
Perpetual Sourcing has announced the launch of a CRM developed specifically for staffing. The Perpetual Sourcing CRM is a software product based on the Sugar CRM Platform, configured for staffing and ready to run online or on a company’s server.
 
Perpetual Sourcing LLC “brings best practice sales pipeline building concepts that are well proven in the sales world and applies them to recruiting,” Perpetual officials say, adding that the product is “designed to deliver a proven methodology and supporting technology… via reduced time to fill, reduction of agency fees, automated talent pipeline management, after contact marketing tools, Applicant Tracking System connectivity, detailed reporting and much more.”
 
The product is currently available and ready for deployment at $75.00 per hosting agreement per month with a minimum of 15 hosting agreements. Additional technical and recruiting consulting services are available at an hourly rate.
 
Perpetual Sourcing LLC was formed in 2007 by Todd B. Davis.
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Ideaca Knowledge Services, a Canadian-based technology consulting firm and Gold Certified Microsoft partner, has announced that Catalyst Paper Corporation has implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
 
Catalyst decided to implement something called the “Outlook Sales Portal,” an application bringing together Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft SharePoint Services and SAP data accessed directly from Microsoft Outlook.
 
The focus of the implementation was to provide a single common application for users within the business to access key customer information and record their data. The CRM product lets Catalyst “make more efficient sales decisions, improve product marketing and solve business problems,” according to company officials.
 
“The flexibility and ease of integration of Dynamics CRM provides us with a single tool where our employees can access all their account related information and documents regardless of whether they are online or offline” said Stacey Wells, Manager of Service Assurance, Catalyst Paper.
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SAP Arabia has announced the implementation of SAP Business Suite for Dubai Aluminium Company Limited, a product company officials hope will see the manufacturing giant “increase output substantially” over the next eight years.
 
With phase one of a two-phase project completed in nine months, SAP’s ERP application was rolled out to over 1,600 users on 1 June 2007. Designed specifically for the manufacturing industry, the application will not only automate and manage DUBAL’s business processes, but also assist in financial operations, and production planning, SAP Arabia officials say.
 
“Our aim is to become a demand-driven resources company and to move our entire enterprise-wide processes to a more customer-centric approach, while reducing costs and improving our profitability,” said Abdulla Kalban, CEO, DUBAL.
 
“By deploying SAP, we have adopted a new, more sophisticated and advanced system, that will help achieve our goal of becoming the top five aluminium manufacturer in the world by 2015,” added Kalban.
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Jitterbit, a vendor of open source integration productivity software, has announced the availability of new European training courses to be delivered by certified training partner Hubstone. The first training course, scheduled for July 25-27, will take place in London.
 
Jitterbit Open Source Integration is developed to allow users and developers to connect customer data from a variety of sources and formats, such as ERP and CRM applications, data warehouses, and online marketplaces.
 
“The goal of this partnership is to accelerate the successful adoption of Jitterbit in the European market with enterprise-class professional consulting services and training,” said Sharam Sasson, CEO of Jitterbit.
 
Jitterbit Training is a hands-on training course that emphasizes best practices for managing Jitterbit deployments, and gives attendees the skills to effectively create, deploy, and manage Jitterbit integration projects.
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Autonomy Corporation has announced that the U.S. Department of Defense has granted the company a Special Security Agreement. The SSA will be held by Verity, Inc., a part of the Autonomy Group.
 
The granting of the SSA was the final step in a multi-year process undertaken by Autonomy, Verity and the DoD, which included, among other things, the establishment of a “Cleared Facility,” the inspection and approval of the “Cleared Facility” by DoD officials and the investigation and approval of certain Autonomy and Verity processes and personnel by DoD officials.
 
Under the SSA, Verity will now administrate and hold clearances while working for the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. intelligence agencies and the large systems integrators such as SAIC, Lockheed Martin, BAE, Microlink and Northrop Grumman who service these agencies.
 
The SSA took effect on June 8, 2007 and covers over 140 employees and one U.S.-based cleared facility. No other software vendor in the search space holds an SSA.
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Retailers Crate and Barrel have selected ShopperComplete marketing services from to “better understand customer buying patterns, optimize marketing campaigns and TARGUSinfo ultimately improve sales at more than 145 locations nationwide,” Crate and Barrel officials say.
 
“Seventy percent of our catalog customers make their purchases from our retail stores, so it’s critical for us to identify as many of those retail purchases as possible,” said Doug Rothery, Customer Analytics Manager for Crate and Barrel. “By capturing customer information at checkout, TARGUSinfo helps us optimize customer acquisition through our retail stores, build up our mailing list and follow up with first-time visitors. Without contact information, we’re flying blind.”
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WealthCraft Systems Inc., an IT vendor for financial institutions, has bolstered its presence in China with the opening of the company’s new representative office in Beijing. The new office will try to sell the country’s fast-growing middle class on WealthCraft’s wealth management solutions and services.
 
“The expansion of our Chinese operations is a critical part of our global strategy,” said Kelly Tallas, CEO of WealthCraft. The new Beijing office adds to the momentum that began with the company’s Shenzhen operations, set up in October 2005 and mainly responsible for research and development.
 
WealthCraft “enables firms to realize the great potential in the areas of customer relations management (CRM), financial planning, portfolio management, and order management,” James He, Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing in the Beijing office, said.
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At the recent Middle East Partner Conference organized by Sage Middle East, Triad Software Services was declared as the Business Partner of the Year for Sage CRM for the year 2006- 07 and Rising Star of the Year for Sage Accpac ERP for the Year 2006-07.
 
Recently Triad has extended the Sage Partnership in India through Triumph and has started acquiring customers in India for Sage suite of products.
 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.

CRM David Versus Apple Goliath, Loyalty Lab and Rockler, Auto/Mate CRM, Autonomy, Technalign 2.1

June 25, 2007 8:23 AM | 0 Comments
By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
 
The news as of a second cup of coffee this morning, and the music now is Beethoven’s Third Symphony:
 
Loyalty Lab, Inc., a vendor of loyalty and customer relationship products, has announced that Rockler Woodworking and Hardware, an independent woodworking supplies retailer, has enlisted Loyalty Lab to host a best customer program.
 
Rockler, which operates 33 stores, a Web site and a 156-page catalog, will use Loyalty Lab’s Web-based Customer Relationship Management platform to “manage all aspects of its new retail loyalty and customer management initiative,” according to Loyalty Lab officials.
 
Scott Ekman, Rockler’s Vice President of Marketing, said the Loyalty Lab products are expected to spare the 53-year old retailer “the financial strain of a major software overhaul,” and to help get them “on the right path for best customer management.”
 
In hosting the program, the Loyalty Lab platform will manage shopper enrollments, transaction processing, rewards and accruals. Loyalty Lab also enables integrated marketing and retail loyalty and campaign management, serving as the central core of e-mail, Web-based and POS communications drawing from a single database.
 
Loyalty Lab’s flagship Customer Relationship Manager Suite provides retailers and service companies with integrated and on-demand loyalty program management, e-mail, campaign management, and incentives from a single desktop. Clients include New York and Company, Brookstone, 1-800-Flowers.com, Bally Total Fitness and others.
 
Rockler Companies, based in Medina, Minnesota, began in 1954 as a mail order catalog called Minnesota Woodworkers Supply Company. The company offers thousands of mainstream and specialized products, including manufacturer’s exclusives, for professional and amateur woodworkers.
…
 
Auto/Mate Dealership Systems, ranked “highest for overall customer satisfaction in the last three NADA surveys,” according to company officials, has announced that its AMPS dealer management system has been certified by Chrysler for ARO.
 
This means Chrysler dealers using AMPS can now connect to Chrysler’s ARO parts inventory management system. ARO connects dealer spare parts inventory to a Mopar-controlled automatic daily replenishment order. It’s unique to the industry because it’s based on individual dealer demand. ARO replenishes parts on an as-needed basis, reducing the capital investment that a dealer makes in stocking excess parts.
 
All Auto/Mate Chrysler dealers will be updated to ARO at no charge.
 
The certified interface allows Chrysler to query Auto/Mate’s AMPS DMS every night. Chrysler monitors each individual dealer’s inventory and sales based on what was sold, then ships parts overnight based on what the system tells them is needed the next day. Dealers can maintain control by reviewing and agreeing upon recommended stocking parameters, and may revise them as necessary.
 
Chrysler ARO also offers an order guarantee, whereby if parts sit on a dealer’s shelf for nine months the OEM will buy them back. And if Dealer A in one location needs a part that happens to be aging in Dealer B’s inventory, Chrysler will send a shipping label to Dealer B so they can forward the part to Dealer A.
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Autonomy Corporation, a vendor of infrastructure software for the enterprise, has announced that it has been awarded a multi-million dollar contract by the U.S. government to provide its Intelligent Data Operating Layer Server to support defense applications.
 
Autonomy has a long history of collaboration with many government, defense and intelligence agencies, including: the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, NASA, the U.S. Air Force, the U.K. Audit Commission, the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry, the French Ministry of Defense, and the Irish Revenue Commissioners.
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Go Orbitcoms: Dutch industry observer Ulrika Hedquist has reported that a small New Zealand company, Orbitcoms, based in Whangarei, wants to call a software product it recently developed iPop, but that Apple, Inc. has objected to the idea — twice.
 
Hedquist quotes Orbitcoms CEO Tony Shi, who says Apple is threatening legal action since the Orbitcoms brand name is “too similar to Apple’s iPod.”
 
The software works with Microsoft Corp.’s Dynamics CRM and “allows users to combine their CRM system with a telephone system,” Hedquist cites Shi as saying: “Relevant information stored in the CRM system will then pop up on the screen when a customer phones in. The software can also create a phone call record if required.”
 
The way Shi explains it to Hedquist, “the name ‘iPop’ comes from the screen ‘pop’ and the ‘i’ refers to information, intelligence and integration.” Shi claims to have been “most surprised” when Apple objected to the company’s trademark application.
 
Riiiiight. Shi’s clever in garnering some free publicity for his product, but he’s obviously far too clever to suppose that Apple, makers of the iPod, wouldn’t have objected to iPop, since evidently Apple thinks they own the rights to any lower-case “i” in front of any word in the English language.
 
Shi later changed the name of the software to Orbitcoms iPop, Hedquist said, quoting Shi’s explanation that “I didn’t want to take on Apple head-on for obvious financial reasons.” But Apple objected once again, and Shi tells Hedquist “we are still evaluating our options and deciding what to do.”
 
Shi says he’s sure Apple will take the dispute all the way to New Zealand’s High Court, which would incur costs “in the range of” $35,000 American dollars, expense Shi pronounces “not viable for the product we’re trying to promote,” since as Hedquist reports, Orbitcoms employs six staff, four of whom are engineers, including one software developer.
 
Much better to get whatever free publicity you can via news articles on the fact that Apple’s threatening to sue you. Not bad, Mr. Shi, good on ya. Here’s a tip of the coffee pot to you, good luck with the product, now change the name before Apple gets ticked.
 
Oh, and by the way, this column is now named iFirst Coffee.
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Technalign has released Pioneer Basic CD Release 2.1 of its base Linux Operating System. Release 2.1 on CD is limited due to the space on CD, company officials say, but “upgradeable by installing the missing applications and utilities.”
 
Notably missing from the CD release, that is included on the DVD, is Automatix, Gimp, Guarddog Firewall, and KlamAV Anti-Virus. Each of these can be installed either from Synaptic or from Automatix once installed.”
 
“We had to release on CD since many of our users and Partners have requested Pioneer on CD versus only being available on DVD,” claims Technalign CEO Dianne Ursini. “Pioneer Basic CD Release 2.1 is Technalign Trailblazer ready and when released will be a simple upgrade.”
 
Pioneer Basic CD Release 2.1 represents what company officials consider to be “the most user-friendly version Technalign has released since its beginnings in 2002.” Users can transition from Windows and be” up and running in no time,” they say, adding that consumer users who have little or no experience running Linux “can visit one of over 1,400 Technalign Partners who will perform a Windows to Pioneer conversion as well as walk-throughs and training.”
 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.

CRM and Mobile Web, RFID and Customer Adoption, Good Times in Budapest

June 25, 2007 8:18 AM | 0 Comments
By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
 
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Loudon Wainwright III’s great live album, Career Moves:
 
Yes First Coffee’s back, thank you, Mrs. First Coffee and I spent a wonderfully relaxing week in Budapest, staying at — unpaid hotel plug here — the comfortable and pleasant Normafa Hotel, nestled in green hills a fifteen-minute bus ride above central Buda. Our two boys are at summer camp for two weeks and our daughter stayed with a friend for a week, so we took advantage of a rare opportunity to get away just by ourselves.
 
The hotel itself was half of the attraction, we live in Istanbul and it was such a nice break to be in a clean, green, quiet place, with paths in the woods to walk, a couple days we just hung around the hotel, going into the city for dinner.
 
We saw some folk dancing, stumbled across a quality English book store, a pleasant find, and avoided anything threateningly edifying, as both Mrs. First Coffee and I have seen enough Impressive Old Churches and Museums Showing A Whole Lot of Old Stuff. The best thing that happened to us was getting stranded in a fish restaurant by torrential rains where it was just us, the hotel staff and a group of about twenty Hungarians singing traditional songs to drink lots of Hungarian brandy by. You can’t plan stuff like that.
 
We did enjoy the well-done Golden Eagle pharmaceutical museum on Castle Hill; in a different life Mrs. First Coffee worked as an Auckland pharmacist, and after touring the collection of mortar and pestles, large glass tincture jars, 17th century herbariums and brass scales she said that it makes her realize how little, really, pharmacy’s changed in the past three or four hundred years. Not as many leeches or bleeding people to death nowadays, but the basic approach is remarkably similar, and evidently doctors couldn’t write legibly then either.
 
Nice city itself, Budapest, more interesting than we had expected. First Coffee’s glad he doesn’t have to live on Hungarian food, the Turkish diet is much tastier and healthier, but fortunately Budapest has good foreign restaurants, another nice difference between there and here. It’s a good thing Turkish food’s so good, it’s surprisingly difficult finding good restaurants here that serve anything else.
 
Margaret Island, in the Danube between Buda and Pest, serves for the city the role Central Park serves for New York City, in that it renders it much more livable. Few cars on the island, lots of stuff for kids and families, biking paths and concerts, roller-bladers, and those rent-a-bike places Mrs. First Coffee and I took advantage of: pictures will prove that I pedaled a covered, three-wheel, two-seater “bike” around the island.
 
And upon returning we were pleased to see that in our absence from computers and news — great break, really — the All Blacks had come from behind, scoring two tries in the final five minutes to beat the Springboks in the Tri-Nations Rugby series, and that the predominately New Zealander-crewed yacht sailing under the name “Team New Zealand” defeated the predominately New Zealander-crewed yacht sailing under the name “Alinghi” in the so-called America’s Cup, which should be renamed the Kiwi Cup until some team without a preponderance of New Zealand sailors wins it.
 
Oh, by the way, happy Newfoundland Discovery Day.
…
 
Technology resellers and product providers are poised to add radio frequency identification (RFID) products to their portfolios, but their customers have been slow to embrace the technology, a survey by the Computing Technology Industry Association has shown.
 
The survey found that 84 percent of technology resellers, product providers, systems integrators, and consultants will or may offer RFID products and products in the next three years. But nearly two-thirds of the companies (65.6 percent) said their customers have yet to implement RFID products.
 
Among channel companies with customers who have implemented RFID, most said that less than 20 percent of their customers are using the technology.
 
“The results of our survey are reflective of the RFID market, where rosy forecasts about rapid and widespread adoption have given way to the reality of dealing with a technology whose broader deployment has been challenged by equipment and tagging costs, murky and unclear return-on-investment for supply chain applications, and a workforce skills shortage,” said David Sommer, vice president, e-business and software products, CompTIA.
 
Despite the slower-than-expected adoption rate, companies in the information technology channel remain bullish on future opportunities in the RFID market, the CompTIA survey indicates.
 
Among companies that see their organization offering RFID products and services, 89 percent expect to focus their efforts on hardware installation and maintenance. Just over 46 percent of companies said they will offer software implementation services; 38.9 percent will offer other RFID services; and 31.5 percent plan to focus on software development.
 
Respondents to the survey included companies involved in the delivery of IT products and services. The Web-based survey conducted earlier this year closed with 64 responses.
…
 
“In light of recent news coverage about disgruntled mobile phone customers,” a P.R. official writes, “I thought you may be interested in a study showing that consumers who browse off-portal mobile Web sites and purchase content are ‘low maintenance,’ meaning they require very little customer service, and seldom even ask for refunds.”
 
Indeed, such a survey does sound interesting.
 
“During the month of May,” the agent writes, “Bango reported just 142 refunds per 100,000 transactions; customer queries were closer to 70 per 100,000 transactions. So compelling is the data for off-deck WAP that network operators in Europe are showing a strong preference for this model and in the UK mandating WAP billing through the cross-operator ‘Payforit’ scheme.”
 
In fact, Bango’s study shows that mobile content sales generated through off-deck WAP sites (mobile Web sites) deliver what company officials call “a huge reduction” in after-sale customer care costs.
 
Compared to the traditional Premium SMS off-deck content model — where refunds can be between 10–20 percent of sales, Bango officials say — through off-deck WAP sites refunds affect fewer than one percent of transactions on average.
 
“This data confirms that the mobile Web model is great for browsing and buying content because the point of payment and download are tightly coupled, leading to fewer errors and low refund levels,” said Bango CEO Ray Anderson.
 
The headline growth in mobile content revenue has been strong, especially off-deck sales where content providers market and sell direct to the mobile consumer and typically bill that consumer through operator-enabled SMS messages.
 
However, CRM problems arise when relying entirely on SMS to drive sales. For instance, the consumer is billed through Premium SMS but then cannot access the content due to connection problems, handset incompatibility or operator network limitations. In contrast, if the user cannot access the WAP site to get their content, they cannot be billed.
 
Or, since the American mobile industry provides clear and concise Best Practice guidelines for services using SMS, the consumer needs to read and understand the terms, i.e., the fine print, either from a text message sent to their handset or on the print of the original advertisement. Shockingly, not everyone does. But with the WAP presentation, the consumer is advised of all the terms of sale on-screen immediately before they are billed without having to refer to separate messages or the original ad.
 
Bango officials claim the company “created the world’s first global exchange for the mobile Web,” a “common integration point for brands, businesses and individuals.” The company has offices in USA, UK, Spain and Germany and is quoted on the London Stock Exchange.
 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.
 
 

CRM’s Pegasystems, Hypercom’s SmartPayments Vista-Certified, Lumen and PostgreSQL, Saaspoint’s TimeTrack, Teradata EPM

June 18, 2007 7:52 AM | 0 Comments
By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
 
 
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the Dust Rhinos’ Sociable — Live. Guinness all around, please…
 
Hypercom Corporation officials say the company’s SmartPayments product suite has become “the first electronic payment processing software to pass certification tests ensuring compatibility with Windows Vista.”
 
The Hypercom SmartPayments Client and SmartPayments Server product lines have earned the “Certified for Windows Vista” designations from Microsoft Corp.
 
The certified for Windows Vista logo helps ensure that Hypercom SmartPayments products work smoothly with Windows Vista-based PCs and enable merchants to make full use of the new security features and other enhancements of the new Microsoft operating system.
 
Hypercom SmartPayments products still maintain their certifications for earlier-generation operating systems, including Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
 
“Products that carry the Certified for Windows Vista logo have met explicit standards of reliability and quality, and have been tested and proven to deliver a superior experience with Windows Vista,” explains Dave Wascha, Director of Windows Client Product Management at Microsoft Corp.
 
Hypercom’s SmartPayments’s products are designed to provide a secure, scalable platform for integrating payment processing solutions with point-of-sale, accounting/billing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Internet shopping cart systems.
…
 
Lumen Software, a vendor of CRM and other commercial open source Software-as-a-Service and portal products, has announced its decision to employ the PostgreSQL-supported LAPP (Linux-Apache-PostgreSQL-PHP) stack for its open source development platform Lumenation.
 
After consideration of PostgreSQL and MySQL, which is part of the LAMP stack, developers at Lumen found that the PostgreSQL database offered “a higher level of functionality and handled large amounts of data and traffic better than the alternatives.”
 
“It’s fantastic to see open source continue to push farther into the enterprise like Lumen is doing. Enterprise-class apps require enterprise-class databases, and PostrgreSQL is the most advanced open source database on the planet,” said Josh Berkus from the PostreSQL Project. “Best of all, PostgreSQL’s source code is available under the most open of open source licenses, the BSD license. This gives the user freedom to use, modify and distribute PostgreSQL in any form you like. Any modifications, enhancements, or changes you make are yours to do with as you please.”
 
PostgreSQL is freely available for commercial purposes,
 
“We picked PostreSQL four years ago based solely on the merits. This isn’t religion for us, we’re just looking for the best. Just this year we did an extensive technical comparison and PostgreSQL is still just plain better for our users,” said Don Keeler, CTO of Lumen Software, adding “I’m not denigrating MySQL. They’re good for a lot of different types of projects, and I can see why they’re popular. But when it comes to the most advanced features that enterprise customers expect and the maturity of PostgreSQL’s features, it’s really not a hard choice.”
…
 
Pegasystems, a vendor of unified process and rules technology, has been named by Technology Marketing Corporation’s Customer Interaction Solutions magazine as a recipient of its 2007 CRM Excellence Award for Pegasystems’ Customer Process Manager.
 
“Pegasystems is elated to have won such a prestigious award for two years in a row,” said Jay Sherry, vice president, Marketing, Pegasystems. “Customer Process Manager continues to prove itself as a powerful, rules-based solution that truly strengthens the call center. Global organizations need to stay ahead of the competition, and Pegasystems provides them with a powerful tool to do that.”
 
Built on Pegasystems’ SmartBPM suite, the CPM framework provides a combination of customer service capabilities that match customer and business intentions at the moment of interaction. This real-time customer response processing is aimed at improving the customer experience and increasing user productivity.
 
“Pegasystems has demonstrated to the editors of Customer Interaction Solutions that their products and services have substantially improved the processes of their clients’ businesses by streamlining and facilitating the flow of information needed for companies to retain their most precious asset...their customers,” said Nadji Tehrani, founder and chairman of TMC, publishers of Customer Interaction Solutions.
…
 
Saaspoint has recently announced the availability of TimeTrack, its salesforce.com’s AppExchange application that enables the recording of time spent of projects and tasks.
 
TimeTrack automates the reporting process by capturing the time electronically, providing a quick and convenient way to record, view, adjust and report time, reducing errors and the time and effort required, when compared to manual recording methods.
 
Built on the AppExchange on-demand platform, TimeTrack is immediately available to download for a free 14-day test drive at www.salesforce.com/appexchange.
 
The product provides the management of any service based business with visibility of how and where people resources are being consumed, along with the tracking of associated expenses. Its new architecture has boosted the performance, look and feel of the application. Its capability for project analysis provides transparency to the labor involved in completing the project and can show you exactly where the time is spent, by task, by staff member or by date, officials explain.
 
“All the costs associated with any organization’s most valuable asset, their people, can now be easily allocated and tracked to calculate accurate billable and non-billable time. This eliminates the administrative nightmare of tracking and allocating time and expenses to particular projects or clients,” said Jay Noble, President, North American Operations, Saaspoint.
…
 
Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation, has announced that Bank Leumi, an Israeli financial institution, has begun using its data warehouse-driven event triggers for event-based marketing.
 
EBM uses software-based rules and triggers that detect, analyze and interpret customer events, transactions, and interactions. The idea is to enable companies to provide timely and personalized attention to customers who may be in decision mode with regard to a product or service.
 
The latest Teradata customer to deploy Teradata EBM technology, Bank Leumi, was ranked one of Israel’s top five companies in 2006 in trade volume, according to a new Business Data Israel report.
 
“Communicating to millions of individual customers through a variety of channels is complex and challenging,” said Itzhak Malach, First Executive, head of operations, information systems and administration at Bank Leumi. “Bank Leumi is using its Teradata data warehouse-driven CRM tools to create relevant dialogues with customers across channels and serve them wherever they are.”
 
Ten years ago, Teradata’s first data warehouse-driven EBM implementation was launched, and numerous Teradata customers across the world have since added event-based communications to their customer relationship management portfolio.
 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.

Verticals onDemand, iCongo in Canada, Ascent from India to Pittsburg, Asia Commercial Bank, Visionael and T-Online France, Creative Manager 8.4.3

June 15, 2007 9:54 AM | 0 Comments
By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
 
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is P!nk's Try This:
 
Verticals onDemand, a vendor of onDemand CRM products for the life sciences industry, and MediMedia Information Technologies, a division of MediMedia USA, have announced that they will integrate their products to provide pharmaceutical managed care teams with what officials from both firms are calling "the first onDemand CRM product pre-loaded with formulary data."
 
For the first time, officials from both firms say, managed care account managers can deploy CRM applications pre-loaded with formulary data. Formulary data will be automatically updated through Web services and the Salesforce.com API.
 
The new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) CRM product, officials from both companies say, makes it "easy to load, update, and route formulary data, empowering managed care account managers with up-to-the-minute formulary details at a glance." Data updates and system assimilation occur automatically, without IT staff intervention.
 
According to both companies, managed care is underserved by traditional IT providers, which typically impose broad-spectrum sales systems on the very specialized area of managed care. Matt Wallach, vice president of sales and marketing for Verticals onDemand, says until now, "there was no easy way for managed care account managers to efficiently support their customers and see critical formulary data at the same time."
 
Verticals onDemand’s flagship products are VBioPharma, for global biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, and VMedical, for global medical and surgical device companies. It's a privately-held company headquartered in Pleasanton, California. MediMedia Information Technologies sells plan specific formulary data.
 
...
 
CRM vendor iCongo has announced that Canada's Lecavalier Auto Parts, a distributor of recycled auto parts and equipment, has selected iCongo's ICE3 suite of collaborative e-business systems. The iCongo e-commerce platform will be used for Lecavalier's retail and wholesale customers, allowing them to conduct their entire order entry and order management processes online.
 
The applications being implemented by Lecavalier include iCongo's ICE3 Business-to-Business Catalog and Online Order Entry System, ICE3 Business-to-Consumer E-Commerce System, ICE3 Customer Portal, marketing and collaboration modules.
 
Roger Fugre Jr., President of Lecavalier, said by using iCongo's ecommerce products, "we will be offering our customers the systems required to obtain important up-to-date product information and to place and track orders more quickly and efficiently online."
 
...
 
Ascent Systems, a professional services firm, has announced the launch of its "Ascent Technology Center," which firm officials say "cuts the total cost of information technology projects by up to 70 percent."
 
The ATC will provide full-spectrum technology services to its clients and is expected to employ nearly 300 people when fully staffed. Ascent offers technology consulting, custom software development, CRM, ERP and PLM systems integration, Web content management, and IT project outsourcing to clients in the Pittsburgh region.
 
"We believe that, throughout the last decade and a half, the U.S. IT services industry has not mounted an effective campaign to reduce the cost of IT projects and has sent the work offshore rather than do it here," said John Twigg, Chief Executive Officer of Ascent.
 
Twigg added that results are being seen in the Bangalore region of India, which has grown its technology industry by billions of dollars and 170,000 workers over the last few years. "So, we are launching such a campaign in Pittsburgh today."
 
Twigg has spoken on the detrimental effects of offshore outsourcing on radio and television programs as well as at numerous technical and business events. He also
represents the interests of U.S. members of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers in meetings with legislators in Washington D.C.
 
Twigg foresees a trend where lower IT costs will let clients of any size to increase their use of technology to be more competitive. "A 2004 Deloitte Consulting study showed that Pennsylvania manufacturing firms lag the U.S. national average in productivity by 11 percent," Twigg noted, adding that Ascent's consulting rates for enterprise resource planning systems will be "close to 70 percent below traditional ERP providers."
 
...
 
Asia Commercial Bank has signed an agreement with Thien Nam Information Technology Company, an international reseller of banking and financial processing systems, to upgrade its core processing platform to the latest release of Open Solutions' product named The Complete Banking Solution, described by company officials as "a relational, enterprise-wide data processing product."
 
Open Solutions sells technology for financial services providers internationally, and has recently signed an international reseller partnership agreement with Hanoi, Vietnam-based Thien Nam Information Technology Company.
 
Headquartered in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Asia Commercial Bank has more than $1.7 billion in assets, 84 branches and 658,000 customers. ACB originally converted to Open Solutions’ TCBS platform in 2001 through a private label reseller agreement that the company had had in the region.
 
Processing independently since that time, ACB will be upgrading to the company’s latest release now that Open Solutions has begun to directly market within the Asia Pacific marketplace. Thien Nam joins Open Solutions list of international resellers such as Thailand-based SLC, Canadian-based Celero, India-based R Systems Inc. and Asian-based CSII.
 
...
 
Visionael Corporation, a vendor of service automation and delivery management software and services, has announced that T-Online France has selected Visionael's Network Resource Manager to automate delivery of its triple play services to residential customers.
 
With the Visionael product, T-Online France was able to use open interfaces to its CRM, billing and activation systems to enable delivery of services. This is critical in the French market, where its competition for Triple Play services includes ISPs, Alternative Carriers and Cable MSOs.
 
Visionael's product also enables T-Online's France customers to go directly to the Web site to subscribe for services. Now, T-Online France users can select IPTV or VoIP services or increase their DSL speed, and the service will be delivered without manual central office provisioning or a truck roll for on-site installation.
 
...
 
Creative Manager, the vendor of Creative Manager Pro software, has released version 8.4.3 of its flagship product, Creative Manager Pro.
 
Last month saw Creative Manager Pro "improve its Ad Agency software internally and externally," company officials say, with improvements allowing the user to "see a graphical representation of the project schedule across the entire firm." Externally, the Ad Agency Software expanded its server base to its Australian and New Zealand clients.
 
This month, Creative Manager Pro, which offers Project Management, CRM, Digital Asset Management, billing and accounting and Extranet capabilities, has added 52 enhancements in four key areas: Accounting, Project Management, Media and Reporting.
 
The list of enhancements is broad. For instance, campaign budgets now have several new options for tracking actuals to the budget. Users can now pull in actual figures by Item, by Project Type or can specify which budget item each project goes to.
 
No installation or conversion are necessary, and all updates are at no cost to users of Creative Project Manager and Creative Manager Pro. All client logins and vendor logins are always free. Creative Manager Pro's new features work with Apple's latest Tiger Mac OS X and future Leopard Unix-based Operating System and Microsoft Windows.
 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.

Centric CRM, Pika Technologies, Maximizer Wins Award, Customer Experience Management, IBM's BladeCenter

June 14, 2007 7:45 AM | 0 Comments
By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
 
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is P!nk’s Try This:
 
Centric CRM, a developer of open-source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology, has announced the company will receive investment funding from Intel Capital, the venture capital arm of Intel Corporation.
 
Centric CRM will use the funds to pursue growth opportunities forecast for the CRM technology industry, company officials say.
 
After more than seven years of continuous development, David Richards, CEO of Centric CRM said, the investment from Intel Capital “will be used to fund additional product development, and to expand our sales and marketing activities to capitalize on the rapid growth in our space.”
 
According to Gartner’s “CRM Software, Worldwide, 2006-2011,” the CRM market’s growth “remained strong through 2006, due to business confidence generating solid vendor performance. Growth is expected to moderate in 2007 but remain healthy throughout the forecast period, with a compound annual growth rate of 11.7 percent.”
 
The rapid growth in the CRM technology market is being fueled by an increased business focus on strengthening customer relationships, Centric officials say, as well as an increased acceptance by businesses of open-source and Software as a Service (SaaS) business models.
 
Centric CRM delivers its software using both hosted and on-premises methods, allowing its customers to choose the approach that works best for them.
…
 
Pika Technologies, a designer and manufacturer of plug-in media-processing hardware and software, has released the latest MonteCarlo software development kit. The SDK includes updates to GrandPrix, PIKA’s application programming interface, that makes the design of their application “quicker and easier,” according to company officials.
 
The GrandPrix API is designed to work directly with low-level APIs and provides mechanisms that allow applications to access the finer control provided by these low-level APIs. In addition to the call-progress analysis function included in this latest release, GrandPrix provides an abstraction of call signaling in analog, digital and IP, and call control for SIP, ISDN, CAS and analog with Caller-ID.
 
Many modern call centers rely on predictive dialers to place calls. Predictive dialers are computerized systems that automatically dial batches of numbers while using algorithms to determine availability of agents and calls answered, then adjusting dialing patterns based on real-time data.
 
Call-progress analysis is used by contact centers using predictive dialers to determine such things as if a call placed by a predictive dialer is answered, whether it is a live person or an answering machine on the other end of the call. This lets a call transfer to an agent, or leave a message on the answering machine, or disconnect to redial at a later time.
 
Richard Hardgrave, President, Electronic Voice Services, says most predictive dialers on the market are “complex to deal with.” The problem is that most predictive dialers have a long lag time, he said: “A recipient picks up the phone, says ‘hello,’ but doesn’t hear anything for a few seconds. This gets people’s guards up because they suspect they’re being called by another telemarketer.”
 
In Frost and Sullivan’s “World Outbound Dialing Markets,” analyst Seema Lall predicted the market will reach $204.9 million by 2011.
…
 
And let’s note that Maximizer Software has received TMC’s Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine’s annual ‘CRM Excellence Award’ for the successful Maximizer deployment at a major North American Resort Real Estate Marketer.
 
“The Eighth Annual CRM Excellence Awards commend the companies that have proven to be true CRM partners to their customers and clients. Maximizer has demonstrated to the editors of Customer Interaction Solutions that their products and services have substantially improved the processes of their clients’ businesses by streamlining and facilitating the flow of information needed for companies to retain their most precious asset — their customers,” said Nadji Tehrani, founder and chairman of TMC, publishers of Customer Interaction Solutions.
 
CRM Excellence Award winners are chosen on the basis of their product or service’s ability to help extend and expand the customer relationship to become all encompassing, covering the entire enterprise and the entire lifetime of the customer. The CRM Excellence Award is based on hard data, facts and numbers demonstrating the improvements that the winner’s product has made for customers.
…
 
Industry consultant Bill Porter has written a quick and easy intro to Customer Experience Management, in his view the logical next step after CRM.
 
“Research has also shown that there are now specific keys companies can use to implement CEM and the best experience possible for their customers,” Porter writes. “On the process side CEM seeks to measure customer expectations all the way from early customer encounters in the buying process — customer identification and customer acquisition — through support help requests and additional purchases of products and services throughout the customer life cycle,” or the customer retention phase.
 
On the product side, he says, factors like partnership and transparency matter a lot while customers “traverse the phases above with a supplier or vendor.”
 
His essay runs through what he sees as the three distinct phases of CEM, with the first phase of the CEM process, which he identifies as more supplier or vendor-centric in nature, being more generally known as Customer Identification, the point where “a company must decide what the market or customer needs.”
 
Phase two of CEM involves Customer Acquisition, “also known as the sales phase.” Once a buying decision has been made, Porter says, “research again serves a critical need in CEM by collecting data on the sales win-loss process to determine a customer’s perceptions gained on the winning and losing supplier.
 
And finally is Customer Retention, “the last sequential phase of the customer experience which continues over the life of the customer relationship.” The essay’s worth a read for a quick introduction to one of the newer buzzwords bouncing around.
…
 
This might be a little techy, but if you’re interested, IBM has previewed what it calls the industry’s first blade computing system designed to help smaller firms simplify the management of technology needed to operate a small business — from servers, to phone systems and antivirus applications — in a single system.
 
IBM’s new BladeCenter “S” can help reduce the 25 to 45 servers used by an average mid-size company by up to 80 percent. It’s sized to sit on a desktop, plug into a standard 110 volt power outlet often found in home offices, and manage storage and up to six blade servers at a time.
 
Designed to integrate applications most commonly used for business functions -- such as antivirus/firewall, voice over IP, e-mail, collaboration, back-up and recovery and file and print applications — the new system is intended to run in a typical office environment.
 
According to industry analyst firm Gartner, mid-size businesses run 25 to 45 servers on average to power business functions. Approximately 10 of those servers are typically appliances designed to perform a single or specialized set of server functions such as storage, security and Web serving.
 
Britain’s Devon Health moved its core enterprise applications to a single IBM BladeCenter system with six blade servers, and today one IT administrator manages the company’s file server, Web server, print server, database server, CRM application and backup domain controllers, all housed in one integrated BladeCenter system.
 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.

Maximizer, Aspire and Sage, SafeHarbor, INova, Lagan and Macfarlane

June 13, 2007 11:25 AM | 0 Comments
By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
 
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The New York Dolls’ surprisingly good “reunion” album, One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This:
 
Maximizer Software, a vendor of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, has announced that West Coast Environmental Law, a not-for-profit law organization, is using Maximizer CRM in a not-for-profit setting.
 
The organization, which analyzes environmental law, is using Maximizer to manage day-to-day client relations as well as relationships with donors.
 
Based in Vancouver, West Coast Environmental Law a legal advocacy firm providing their expertise free of charge to those involved in legal matters that affect the environment. As a not-for-profit organization, West Coast Environmental Law needs to serve its group of legal advice clients as well as manage relationships with its financial backers whose donations fund the organization’s programs.
 
“With very modest resources to devote to information technology,” firm officials said, the organization “required an easy-to-use client and donor relationship management system that could be quickly customized to support its specific requirements.”
 
“Not-for-profit organizations have many of the same challenges as their corporate peers without the financial and human resources to meet those challenges,” noted Peter Callaghan, Chief Sales Officer, Maximizer Software.
…
 
Aspire Technologies, a vendor of sales quoting software products for the global small and midmarkets, has announced its partnership with Sage Software’s Small Business Division as a recognized third party add-on for Peachtree Accounting editions.
 
The partnership represents the first quoting product to be recognized and listed as a Peachtree 3rd Party Add-on Solution.
 
Integrated with Peachtree since 1999, QuoteWerks integrates with Peachtree Accounting’s Complete Accounting, Complete Accounting Plus Time & Billing, Peachtree Accounting, Premium Accounting, and Quantum products.
 
The QuoteWerks Peachtree link is designed to send orders into the user’s Peachtree accounting software. “Only orders are exported to Peachtree, so the user’s accounting software does not become cluttered with dead quotes and prospects,” explains John C. Lewe, IV, President of Aspire Technologies and architect of the QuoteWerks link to Peachtree. “A business can use the QuoteWerks Peachtree link to eliminate double entry and the associated errors.”
…
 
SafeHarbor Technology Corporation won a Stevie Award for Best Overall Company and was recognized during the 2007 American Business Awards recently. This award brings the total to 16, of industry honors and recognition that the CRM vendor has received.
 
Hailed as “the business world’s own Oscars” (New York Post, April 27, 2005), The American Business Awards are described by SafeHarbor officials as “the only national, all-encompassing awards program honoring great performances in business.”
 
Nicknamed the Stevies for the Greek word “crowned,” the awards were presented during ceremonies at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City. The ceremonies were hosted by Larry Wilmore of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, videocast live on the Internet, and broadcast nationwide on radio.
 
SafeHarbor officials describe their business as “moving customer service to the Web,” saying the company’s SmartSupport product is designed to “help clients develop a culture of customer self-service through technology and business practices.”
…
 
INova Pharmaceuticals (Australia) has signed with CRM vendor NetSuite distributor NetReturn to supply and implement NetSuite in five of their regional branch offices.
 
The offices are located in Australia, South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. Combining accounting, ERP, CRM, eCommerce and inventory management into one online application is a traditional feature of NetSuite products.
 
NetSuite competes against mid-market systems such as Microsoft Great Plains, SAP Business One and Sage AccPac, emphasizing its “complete front-office to back-office integration” and “lower total cost of ownership,” according to company officials.
 
INova will use NetSuite to manage expenditure and accounting across the regions. INova will go live with NetSuite at the start of the financial year, 1st July, 2007 after disabling the present 3M infrastructure on the 30th June, 2007.
 
INova was formerly known as 3M Pharmaceuticals. The re-branding took place in April of this year, after Australian private equity firms Archer Capital and Ironbridge Capital acquired 3M’s pharmaceuticals business in the Asia-Pacific and Africa regions in November 2006.
 
iNova Pharmaceuticals develops and markets a range of over-the-counter and prescription medicines to Australasia, Asia-Pacific, South Africa and other international markets directly and also through other pharmaceutical companies and agents.
…
 
Sevenoaks District Council is improving services to its 109,000 citizens with a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) product from Lagan integrated with a contact center supplied by Macfarlane Telesystems.
 
The combined system is intended to “streamline efficiency and improve customer interaction as well as support Sevenoaks’ strategic plan to expand the range of services it currently provides,” according to municipality officials, who say the system has already raised the number of citizen enquiries resolved on first point of contact from 55 percent to 69.9 percent.
 
The installation makes use of integration between Lagan’s CRM software and Macfarlane Telesystems’ CallPlus contact center software. The two products have been integrated for Sevenoaks District Council at the Agent Desktop via an integrated screenphone that ensures Customer Service Representatives can view information residing on disparate systems in an integrated way.
 
This enables CSRs to deal faster and more easily with enquiries, and also handle multiple enquiries on a single call — thereby improving efficiency and delivering a more professional service.
 
The Lagan/Macfarlane product is already live for services at Sevenoaks District Council including street scene, community development and environmental services.
 
Brian Hatt, Customer Services Manager at Sevenoaks District Council, said the CRM and contact center product “has already delivered tangible benefits and is helping us achieve our vision of meeting Government targets of 80 percent call resolution.”
 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.
 
 

Starbucks CRM: The Java Jive or the Customer Vibe?

June 12, 2007 9:41 AM | 1 Comment
Dear David,
 
I own and operate a coffee roastery as well as two retail locations in K--. I don't normally comment on articles such as yours but this time I can't help myself.
 
In the coffee world there are two types of people, coffee people who minor in business (us) and those who are business people that minor in coffee (s.bucks). Unfortunately for us coffee people, there are far too many people like yourself who are wanna bes who just don't get it. Coffee is not about a shiny cup, it is about a quality product inside the cup.
 
Too many hours to count go into my product in the hopes that more people will get it than don't. To those that get it kudos to them, for those that don't then too bad for you for you are more than likely a follower in all aspects in life and easily herded. It is too easy to look at every situation from a business perspective, coffee should not be one of them.
 
There is a huge difference in product quality between coffee establishments run from a boardroom and those operated by people who are truly passionate and knowledgeable about their product. Boardrooms decide how to increase profit margins by decreasing product quality, all the while fully understanding that people like yourself will never even notice because you are so busy staring at all the shiny things on the shelves and trying not to talk to anyone.
 
Those of us who make up the top five percent of the real coffee world are at the same time trying to decide the best way to increase the quality of our product in the hopes of really making a lasting impact on our profession. A banana frap has no place in a coffee shop, if you feel the need to drink them then go ahead, just understand  that you're comments hold no relevance in the real coffee world.
 
Instead of writing a coffee column perhaps you should focus on what seems to interest you more. Procedure automation and marketing ploys 101.
 
John
 
Hi John,
 
Um, interesting comments, I agree with much of it, I'm wondering what I wrote that set you off so much?  Let me know, please.
 
Cheers,
 
David
 
Dear David
 
Wow, sometimes I guess everyone has a bad day. I  sincerely apologize for my personal comments, I do however firmly believe in everything else I wrote. Although it may have sounded like it, I am not a disgruntled independent coffee shop owner, in fact I really love my job and I have never expected anyone to like my coffee  based solely on the fact that I am local and independent. Our motto is "don't like us cuz we're local -- love us cuz we're better."
 
My frustration comes from the fact that some of us are doing some really worthwhile quality-driven things in the coffee world that set us so far apart from the "usual suspects" that to be even grouped in the same category is off base. I definitely feel that everyone is entitled to spend their money where they wish, I only ask that those who want  to write about coffee educate themselves properly by researching those who are the true leaders in this  field.
 
Some of what you said in your article is definitely true, i.e. independents raising the bar for themselves in the other facets of a business (cleanliness etc.) is something that should be addressed. Obviously there are many factors that go together in order to be successful and appealing.
 
I just believe that attempting to produce the highest quality product is the most important. Ironically I became a huge Schultz fan after reading his book two years ago, in fact I encourage everyone in the coffee business to read it. It is a company that was originally grounded and driven by  its passion for coffee, unfortunately it has subsequently become a slave to marketers and accountants who have to answer to shareholders and therefore should be discussed in the business pages and not coffee forums.
 
Once again I apologize for my personal attacks, this will be the first and last time I discuss coffee in this way. If you feel like replying feel free I would gladly discuss other coffee topics with you. If you are ever in K-- drop in and I will spot  you a coffee.
 
Sincerely,
 
John
 
Hi John,
 
Don't worry about the personal stuff, I'm a big boy and I can give as good as I get. It's clear you're passionate about your coffee, which is admirable. I'm still not exactly sure which article of mine you saw, I'm guessing it was the one I did a while ago on Starbucks and the impact it's had on independent operations such as yourself.
 
If I remember correctly I said -- or tried to say -- that the great benefit of Starbucks is how they set the floor for acceptability of coffee, for not only coffee quality but the overall customer experience. This is, of course, franchising's great contribution to raising the quality of the customer experience: a franchise sets the minimum standards.
 
Coffee quality first: In America before Starbucks, if you went out to a decent restaurant, even a rather pricey one, and ordered coffee you were liable to get burner-scalded ditchwater. I used to wait tables at a fine white-table restaurant in Washington, D.C., entrees $25 a pop, I know whereof I speak. Sometimes I'd talk the people out of ordering the coffee, or not charge them for it, I felt so bad about the lousy quality. Now as a general rule you get good coffee in such places. It's something that, thanks to Starbucks, restaurants are paying attention to now. Heck, even McDonald's is trying to upgrade their legendarily bad swill.
 
My point in the article I think you saw was that if you're offering at least as good quality coffee and customer experience as Starbucks, you don't have much to worry about if a Starbucks opens down the street. You and I agree, as you say independents need to raise the bar overall. Yes, the bar here is the overall customer experience, not simply the java. Which must be slightly irritating to you as coffeeheads like yourself focus on the quality of the warm brown liquid itself, whereas I and most coffee shop patrons focus on the quality of the overall customer experience. 
 
You were right in your first e-mail when you deduced that my profession is writing about customer satisfaction and relationship issues and, tangentially, marketing issues. I use coffee shops frequently as examples since they're the finest microcosms of customer service I know of, the white rats, fruit flies and Petri dishes of Customer Relationship Management.
 
You say you're not a business guy, you're a coffee guy. Great. We need more coffee guys. But a coffee shop isn't a laboratory, it's a social setting attracting people for different reasons. If the coffee's bad you're not going to be successful, no matter what else you do. And I hate to break the news to you, but while most of us -- again, thanks to Starbucks -- now know good from bad coffee, we still can't tell the difference between good and great coffee. But we can tell the difference between a good and bad customer experience.
 
Obviously you have a much finer palate for coffee than the rest of us, for you it's the actual beverage that's the important part of a coffee shop experience. You remind me of my best friend from D.C., Paul. We always had the hardest time going out to restaurants because he was as discerning about food as I am about music. We'd try six or seven places before we found one where the menu satisfied Paul -- I'm relatively indifferent as long as it's not Japanese -- and the volume, genre and quality of music and general atmosphere were acceptable to me.   
 
We were both about having a good experience in a restaurant, what was important to each of us is what determined the quality of our experience, and the restaurant which paid attention to the overall experience, which offered acceptably good food, atmosphere and service got our dollars. Paul would walk out of a restaurant if the smell was off, and I'm not talking about rotting fish, I'm talking about the smells emanating from the kitchen discernable only to poodles and Siamese cats. You think I'm kidding. Other restaurants I could tell from the sound waves on the sidewalk I wouldn't like, so we wouldn't bother going in. The wonder is that we didn't starve.
 
So for you a cup of finely-roasted, properly brewed coffee is the thing.  You'd probably have a good experience with a cup of first-quality coffee in the Internal Revenue Service's waiting room. For most of the rest of us customers, who simply can't taste what you can in a cup of coffee, the overall experience depends on the atmosphere, and yes the quality of the coffee being up to a minimum standard of acceptability, as well as things like the furniture, the books and magazines, whether the tables wobble or not, the other patrons, the décor, music, the staff, et al.
 
What Starbucks gets right is what any successful franchise -- Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, the Church of England -- gets right: they always hit the customer's minimum standards. Walk into a Starbucks you know it's not going to have lumpy, uncomfortable furniture, it'll have good lighting, the music won't be terribly good or bad but sufficient background. The service will be competent and the coffee drinkable. If you want a relaxing afternoon, meeting friends or working on a laptop, that's all you're ask for.
 
Yes there is better coffee than Starbucks to be had. Yes there are better bookstores than Barnes & Noble, yes there is better preaching than that generally offered by the Church of England, but when you walk into one of those places, you know basically what you're going to get. Competing coffee shops, bookstores and churches around one of those outlets needs to be at least that good. If they're not, well, they probably don't deserve to be in business in the first place and aren't going to last long. 
 
There's a reason franchising took off after World War II, when we built interstate highways in America: If you're on the road, which Americans were, exponentially so, after interstates, and you don't know the local quality, you know you can always go to a familiar franchise and have something acceptably good. It might not be the best quality to be had in the area, but you know you won't get nasty surprises wasting your money. 
 
(For a parallel think of beer brands. They're nothing but reliable franchises to opt for instead of taking a flier on the local brew.)
 
If everyone stayed in the same place their whole lives there would be no reason for a franchise, everyone would know the quality local places, because if a franchise outlet is the finest coffee, food, books or preaching to be had in your area, then it's fair to assume the quality of such was pretty low before the franchise showed up.
 
Which, in America, before Starbucks, local coffee quality was and, too many times the overall local coffee shop experience. One highly underreported consequence of Starbucks is not how just coffee quality among independents has improved, but what better quality tables, chairs, et al you now find in them.
 
It drives people like you nuts, I know, and mystifies you to no end why coffee quality isn't the deciding factor – "But my coffee's so much better than that Free Thai Massage Coffee Shop's, I can't understand why they're more crowded." But it isn't. I learned this running a coffee shop on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey for a year.
 
Because a coffee shop isn't selling coffee, it's selling a pleasant customer experience. If you're just selling coffee all your orders are to go, right?  Your customers enjoy your high-quality coffee, but they want to enjoy, or at least not be turned off by, the tables, artwork, music, staff, meeting friends temperature – more than once I've had to walk out of coffee shops here in Istanbul which are so hot I'm uncomfortable. 
 
It's not uncommon to refer to the cup of Starbucks coffee you buy on your way in as your "table rental." I maintain Starbucks could save on overhead by simply selling one-hour table rentals, forget the cup of coffee they now dole out to people who just want a table.
 
Yes the coffee has to be good in any coffee shop, but only acceptably so. It does not have to be the best. The overall experience is what draws customers to your coffee, except in rare cases your coffee does not draw them to the overall experience.
 
Because, really, for most of us appreciating coffee is maybe, at most, half the quality of the coffee itself, and at least half what you call the "shiny cup" customer satisfaction issues of atmosphere and service quality.  For coffee quality to be 90 percent of the satisfaction is unusual. Most of us will enjoy a cup of average quality coffee in highly pleasant surroundings more than a cup of gourmet-quality java in a bus terminal.
 
The ideal, of course, is someone with your coffee sensibilities and taste running the beverage side, someone like me taking care of the atmosphere and Paul in the kitchen and ordering the muffins and whatever. John, Paul and Dave's Coffee Shop. We could call it Where's George and Ringo?
 
Since you're both a roaster and a retailer you have to hold down both sides of the business. It sounds like your heart's in the roasting, but your mortgage is paid from the retail. Kind of like a pharmacist having to sell lots of other stuff in his drug store -- it's not what he's into, but he has to do it to be able to do what he wants to do. As long as you pay attention to where your high-quality coffee fits in your customers' overall experience it sounds like you'll do fine.
 
Cheers,
 
David
 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.
 

GeNUIT and KTL, IFS, National Bank of Dubai, VoIP Unlimited and Zultys, Sage and Qqest

June 11, 2007 12:42 PM | 0 Comments
By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
 
A second cup of CRM coffee this morning, and the music is still Aimee Mann’s Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse, it’s one of those albums I can’t seem to get out of my mind or off the iTunes player these days:
 
GeNUIT, Inc., what company officials like to think of as “an emerging name in enterprise software products,” has announced that KTL Solutions, Inc. has signed on as a Promys Authorized Reseller.
 
KTL will be providing the fully integrated Promys PSA suite to professional services organizations across the Mid-Atlantic United States. Promys is a business management application designed to deliver performance indicators and other information. It can be accessed remotely.
 
After evaluating a variety of applications, KTL selected Promys to be an offering of Professional Services Automation in its portfolio of technology products which also includes software and application installation, system integrations, custom development, consulting, training and support.
 
In addition to reselling Promys as a standalone product, KTL will be developing an integration utility to facilitate a plug-and-play scenario with Promys and Microsoft Dynamics GP.
 
Stephanie Smith, Certified Account Executive, KTL Solutions, said there are cases where the Dynamics GP modules, such as CRM and Field Services, “could satisfy the customer’s functional requirements, but are not within their budget and would not give them the flexibility they need.”
…
 
IFS, an enterprise applications company, has announced the North American launch of its Business Analytics offering, an Office Business Application that makes IFS Applications enterprise resource planning (ERP) software accessible to users of the 2007 Microsoft Office system.
 
Business Analytics is the first deliverable of the IFS Intelligent Desktop initiative, which company officials say will integrate IFS Applications with the 2007 Microsoft Office system “to make these applications more broadly available to enterprise customers.”
 
The product provides “secure and traceable integration between Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and IFS Applications,” according to company officials.
 
IFS North America President and CEO Cindy Jaudon said her firm is doing ongoing work with Microsoft on the Intelligent Desktop initiative, “in particular, extending ERP, enterprise asset management (EAM), supply chain management (SCM)” and other tools, such as maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO); product lifecycle management (PLM); project and contract management; customer relationship management (CRM); and corporate performance management (CPM) capabilities.
 
“Integration between IFS Applications and the 2007 Microsoft Office system will help our mutual customers increase productivity using the innovative Business Analytics OBA,” said Eddie Amos, senior director of Developer and Platform Evangelism at Microsoft Corp.
 
IFS was founded in 1983 and now has 2,600 employees worldwide. It sells component-based ERP software with IFS Applications, now in its seventh generation, which is available in 54 countries in 20 languages.
…
 
Crediting the bank’s CRM project as a contributing factor, the National Bank of Dubai recently accepted the Asian Banker Award for Best Retail Bank in the UAE for the year 2007. Mr. Suvo Sarkar, Group Head-Retail Banking, received the award on behalf of the National Bank of Dubai in Shanghai.
 
NDB was selected by an international panel consisting of figures in the world of Retail Banking. Winners were selected on the basis of a scorecard of ten categories used to rank banks and their retail banking units. Among the criteria used are retail banking performance, long term prospects, retail sales figures, how well the retail bank is managed and the quality of staff training.
 
“NBD is committed to providing our customers with innovative value-added products and the highest levels of customer service,” said Suvo Sarkar. The bank has expanded its branch and ATM network to one of the largest in the country, and “a new 24/7 state-of-the-art call centre supported by CRM technology has recently been launched,” company officials say.
 
NBD’s new product launches include the NBD-Dnata credit card, the first joint venture between a bank and a travel company in the region, as well as NBDirect, the first payroll card in the country. In addition to the successful NBD Home Loans product, the bank recently launched NBD Office Loans for commercial property, and has emerged today as a leading player in mortgages.
 
The bank’s range of investment and Bancassurance products was recently supplemented with the introduction of the NBD-HDFC Bank NRI services for the Indian expatriate community.
 
National Bank of Dubai was set up in 1963, and is the oldest locally incorporated bank in the country.
…
 
VoIP Unlimited, a service provider for the UK market, and Zultys Technologies, the developer and manufacturer of communications products, have launched a new combined bundle of VoIP services to “fortify their positions in the UK market and complement their hardware offerings,” according to Zultys officials.
 
Through Hampshire-based Zultys distributor Siracom, VoIP Unlimited, a wholesale SIP specialist and an approved Zultys partner, has been selected to provide SIP trunking and numbering services to the UK channel.
 
Siracom believes that presented together, the proposition can only benefit the channel. VoIP Unlimited has already started working with Siracom’s resellers on SIP and VoIP projects in the retail sector.
…
 
Sage Software announced today that Qqest [sic] Software Systems, a direct marketer of time and attendance products, payroll services, and asset management and maintenance software, has deployed a customized Sage SalesLogix CRM and Sage MAS 90 ERP product.
 
Early reviews are good: Qqest officials say they have experienced “a 28 percent revenue increase initially deploying Sage SalesLogix, and integrating it with Sage MAS 90 ERP.”
 
The company continues to measure month-to-month revenue increases in the tens-of-thousands of dollars. Qqest cites improved employee productivity and higher customer retention rates as additional benefits of its Sage Software product.
 
Burke Plummer, president of Qqest, said upon deployment of Sage SalesLogix “our sales went up $70,000 from the previous month.”
 
Prior to Sage SalesLogix, Qqest was using three different databases that could not share data. All sales leads were tracked manually by individual employees, slowing the sales process and making accurate oversight of the sales team difficult. The lack of a centralized database made it difficult for support representatives to respond to customer requests, if the associated sales representatives were unavailable.
 
Qqest evaluated five CRM systems and selected Sage SalesLogix for its “customization capabilities, ease of use, and ability to integrate with the company’s existing Sage MAS 90 ERP system.”
 
Sage SalesLogix was initially implemented for 25 Qqest employees, and currently is used by 130 employees. Looking forward, Qqest has begun a project to upgrade its Sage MAS 90 ERP software to Sage MAS 500 ERP.
 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.

Oncontact Software, Vettro, 5 fifteen Ltd, Salentica Systems, ReachForce

June 11, 2007 12:28 PM | 0 Comments
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 wonderful Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse:
 
Oncontact Software has announced the release of Oncontact CRM 6.0, the CRM software to “update its graphical user interface and visual style to complement Microsoft Windows Vista operating system,” according to Oncontact officials.
 
Based on the Microsoft.NET platform, Oncontact CRM 6.0 is designed to help mid-market organizations automate pertinent business information. Company officials claim it is “the only CRM product available to offer project management capabilities.”
 
“Our CRM product is the first to integrate the updated look and feel of Microsoft Windows Vista, making it easy to use for customers already familiar with the Windows Vista interface,” said Jon Zimmerman, president, Oncontact Software.
 
Oncontact CRM 6.0 stores customer information on one central screen, allowing users to communicate with potential prospects and existing customers. Additional features include Microsoft Office 2007 compatibility, Lotus integration, a time billing module and an advanced search function.
 
The product is compatible with industry-standard products including Microsoft SQL Server. Customer service and a help desk management system are available to track service inquiries, incidents and problems. The product is offered at one price per user.
…
 
This just in: Roger Federer is determined to be human after a thorough dissection by Dr. Rafael Nadal in Paris yesterday. The operation, which revealed a lack of heart and will in the patient, formerly thought to be an inhuman tennis machine, took just over three hours and was pronounced by Dr. Nadal a “complete success.” Reached for comment, Federer simply said “Wait until Wimbledon.”
…
 
Vettro, a vendor of mobile on-demand business applications, has announced it has elevated its Oracle PartnerNetwork membership status to Certified Partner and has recently completed validation of its integration of Vettro 360 Sales to Oracle’s Siebel CRM On Demand.
 
Vettro 360 Sales for Siebel CRM On Demand allows Oracle customers to use existing software and hardware investments for sales operations in the field. Vettro is currently deploying its mobile product for Siebel CRM On Demand for Dot Hill Systems.
 
Vettro 360 Sales for Siebel CRM On Demand provides mobile users with the ability to access, create, and manage business information in real-time from standard wireless smartphones or PDAs. All data captured in the field is updated dynamically in Siebel CRM On Demand. The application is built on the Vettro 360 core architecture, which allows all related information, such as customer history, accounts receivable, support and knowledgebase, to be linked for the mobile user.
 
Company officials say Vettro 360 requires no additional infrastructure investments and is installed over the wireless network “in a matter of minutes.”
 
The Vettro 360 suite of applications complements the Oracle product portfolio via pre-built, standard integration adapters and facilitates an end-to-end Service Oriented Architecture across applications used by mobile and desktop users. It also has plug-and-play with advanced mobile capabilities such as GPS, Bluetooth peripherals, RFID, point-of-service transactions, and printing.
…
 
Strangest thing: Last week my kids found a young crow, unable to fly, walking around the grounds of our apartment complex. Poor thing, I said, with so many cats around it won’t last long. But we saw it two days later and I was surprised it had lived so long. It was by the tennis court over the weekend, and today my son saw it walking past our front door. I guess cats learn early in life not to mess with crows.
…
 
Publishing products provider, 5 fifteen Ltd, “celebrated developments” in its Web-based advertising booking system, ad Depot, at a customer event held at The Imagination Gallery, London recently.
 
5 fifteen officials said the software, launched last year, is now enhanced with Microsoft Dynamics CRM to enable exchanging information between systems. This CRM product is designed specifically to help track customers and their ad workflows, from first contact through to purchase and post-sales.
 
The latest technologies integrated into ad Depot were explained by representatives from Microsoft, Wave2 and 5 fifteen, highlighting the latest advancements in online data management and business processes applied to total advertising management.
 
Ad Depot is a browser-based, Service Oriented Architecture compliant product adhering to emerging standards for advertising interchange. It’s designed entirely in.NET and Java with no proprietary legacy application underneath. The system consists of a number of inter-connected components including products for real-time sales visualization, automatic make-up of classified and display advertising and financial management.
…
 
A little birthday shout-out to Salentica Systems, a vendor of Client Management products based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which has announced its tenth year in business with “accelerated growth and a move to a larger premises.”
 
You read so much about what poor levels of customer service CRM firms give out themselves — much of what you read is true, by the way — that it’s nice to hear about companies doing well by their customers and growing as a result.
 
Since its inception in 1997, Salentica has grown its customer base to include more than 60 financial services firms worldwide. These include mutual fund wholesalers, investment banks, institutional asset management firms, private wealth management companies, retail brokerages and insurance companies.
 
As of May Salentica has relocated to larger offices at its Canadian office in the heart of Toronto’s financial district.
 
Awards and achievements over the past decade also include Gold Certified Microsoft Partner, Microsoft Presidents Club and Microsoft Impact Award Winner — Rookie of the Year.
…
 
ReachForce, Inc. a vendor of OnDemand Data Services, has announced that it has secured a $1 million in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank in addition to its $3.2 million in Series A funding from G-51 Capital and private individuals.
 
The vendor, launched in October 2005, will use the additional capital to “fuel accelerated customer acquisition, new product development and technology initiatives,” according to company officials.
 
ReachForce sells OnDemand Data Services for CRM — customers of companies such as salesforce.com, Siebel/Oracle CRM, MicrosoftCRM, and others.
 
In conjunction with the funding, ReachForce has also added two new members to its Board of Directors — Theresa Garza, Venture Partner with G-51, and Lauranne Jarrett, Partner with G-51.
…
 
MAS Consulting, a leading provider of simple and cost-effective marketing products to the Sage Software reseller community, has announced that they have published the inaugural issue of a new quarterly newsletter — Sage Nonprofit Solutions.
 
The new Sage Nonprofit newsletter focuses primarily on Sage MIP Fund Accounting. MAS Consulting is trying to expand the breadth of marketing products beyond the “MAS” product line to partners across the entire Sage Software community, including Sage Timberline Office, Sage MIP Fund Accounting, Sage CRM, Sage Accpac ERP, Sage FAS Fixed Assets and Peachtree by Sage.
 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.
 

CRM Surging in Western Europe, SM-Plus 2.07, L2 Fuse, Cutting Edge Pharma CRM Reports, Jenzabar, NCR CRM, Intervoice

June 8, 2007 12:19 PM | 2 Comments
By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
 
 
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, for this Bowie fan’s money, a better overall rock listening experience than the ridiculously overpraised Ziggy Stardust. I put Station To Station above the Zigster, and Diamond Dogs if I’m feeling particularly seedy. No, around these parts, pilgrim, Siggy Freudust is throwing elbows with Lodger, Stage and, heck, Let’s Dance for inclusion on the list of the Thin White Duke’s Five Least Maddeningly Inconsistent Albums:
 
Research firm IDC has issued a report finding that the Western European CRM applications market grew by 6.3 percent in 2006, beating last year’s forecast by almost one percentage point and reaching a value of almost $3 billion.
 
IDC officials say they see no reason the up tick won’t continue.
 
The report, titled “Western European CRM Applications, Forecast and Analysis 2007-2011,” finds that early CRM adopters, especially in the financial services and telecommunications sectors, are investing in CRM again, while the low-end segment is seeing a significant impact of software-as-a-service, according to Bo Lykkegaard, IDC’s program manager for European Enterprise Applications as reported on industry journal Web site WiseMarketer.
 
IDC’s forecast breaks down the CRM application market by deployment model, finding that revenue from on-demand CRM applications grew almost 40 percent during 2006 and is expected to maintain this momentum.
 
IDC expects on-demand CRM applications to make up almost half of the net market growth of the entire CRM market in Europe during the five-year forecast, and believes that the net effect of on-demand is market expansion as the ease-of-deployment of on-demand attracts first-time buyers of packaged CRM software.
…
 
Single Source Systems, Inc., a vendor of service business software, has released a new version of its SM-Plus service business software product for aftermarket product service and support organizations, independent service companies and service-intensive equipment distribution organizations worldwide.
 
Company officials say all functions integrate with existing ERP, CRM and supply chain systems.
 
Built on a Microsoft-based technology architecture, the new SM-Plus version 2.07 offers such features as support for complex service contracts, incident escalation, Service Level Agreement compliance, service parts inventory management, new equipment sales and mobile field service.
 
SM-Plus is an integrated information system that manages and maintains both company-owned and customer-owned assets, and provides service business process support, including call taking, scheduling and dispatch, field service, depot repair, work order management, preventive maintenance, service contracts, purchasing, inventory control, and costing for a total enterprise service management product.
 
“Our latest benchmark research shows that leading companies are more and more adopting integrated service-specific technology products,” said Steve Roth, SVP, Strategic Service Management practice at Aberdeen Group.
…
 
L2, Inc. has announced the presentation of customer case studies as part of its presentation at DM Days New York. The company will present demonstrations of its Fuse technology that helps marketers deliver multi-channel campaigns
 
The product, L2 Fuse, helps customers use their CRM systems and campaigns to get over 25 percent response rates at one-quarter the cost, to drive better than 300 percent ROI. Fuse, a Web-based software, includes L2 service support to help customers develop campaigns that include sending out dynamically-generated direct mail pieces to prospects, leading recipients to their own PURL.
  
Each PURL contains a pre-populated form to make it easier for prospects to respond. PURLs are used to provide customized information to existing customers, direct prospects, and encourage participation in a product demonstration, which collect and update customer data to build a quality database for ongoing CRM and marketing efforts.
…
 
Pharmaceutical business software vendor Cutting Edge Information has announced the release of the new “Patient Communications Library.” The new collection is comprised of three primary research studies, all geared toward solving common problems many pharmaceutical companies face in the areas of patient adherence, direct-to-patient communication, customer relationship management (CRM) and overall patient education.
  
Used together, the three reports in the collection will allow pharmaceutical companies to “build a comprehensive strategy to increase the effectiveness of interactions with patients,” according to company officials. Findings from the three-report package cover topics ranging from patient program budgets to organizational support structures for patient education, CRM, and patient adherence and disease management programs.
  
Download free online summaries at www.cuttingedgeinfo.com.
…
 
Jenzabar, a vendor of CRM and other software and services for higher education, announced that last week’s client conference was “the largest event in Jenzabar history.”
 
JAM 2007 hosted more than 1,300 attendees, including Jenzabar users, client executives, industry partners, Jenzabar client services and technical staff, and thought leaders within higher education. The theme of last week’s event was “Building Stronger Communities,” and numerous sessions focused on how Jenzabar’s product, constituent relationship modules (Jenzabar CRMs), and learning management system can be used.
 
Representatives from public, private, two-year, four-year and specialty schools came to the conference, which featured more than 325 user information sessions covering the entire range of Jenzabar’s product and service offerings.
…
 
Meijer, a family-owned chain of 177 superstores in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky, has deployed a new marketing tool that optimizes delivery of individualized promotional offers to Meijer customers.
 
Provided by NCR Corporation and Teradata, a division of NCR, the Enterprise Offer Management product includes NCR’s Copient Logix software and Teradata Customer Relationship Management (CRM), an analytical software portfolio.
 
Meijer Director of Retail Systems Elmer Robinson said the Enterprise Offer Management “greatly enhances our ability to manage the promotional offers that we extend to shoppers at the checkout and, potentially, at other touchpoints in the future. It provides a ‘closed loop’ product, from data warehousing to campaign management, to offer optimization, to content management to multichannel execution.”
 
Enterprise Offer Management comprises the processes and technologies that enable retailers to create, manage, execute and evaluate promotional programs. Software components include Teradata CRM, which “helps retailers understand the needs and preferences of different customer groups and automates the delivery of personalized communications through the best channel,” company officials say.
…
 
A coyly-unnamed global financial services firm, with “operations in more than 50 countries” has extended and expanded its existing hosted services agreement with Intervoice to use Intervoice’s expertise and capabilities in voice portal, contact center and VoIP technology over the next four years, according to Intervoice officials.
 
Based on the customer’s minimum commitments, Intervoice is valuing the contract at approximately $17.0 million over 4 years, subject to certain cancellation provisions.
 
Intervoice has been providing hosted services to enterprises in North America since 1999.
 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.
 

Gartner Calls for CRM Nominations, ACT!9.0 by Sage, Tableau Founder in AAAS, SierraCRM, SPSS Management

June 7, 2007 3:12 PM | 0 Comments
By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
 
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Prince’s Purple Rain:
 
Ever see all those companies and vendors cited as being in Gartner reports, and wonder “How do those guys make it in?” Here’s your chance, friends.
 
Gartner is accepting nominations for its fifth annual Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Excellence Award. Nominations will be accepted via an online entry form from any end-user organization that has “exhibited excellence in placing its customers first with successful CRM implementations,” according to company officials.
 
Nominations must be submitted by July 13, 2007.
 
Enterprises are invited to enter and work within a case study framework to describe their CRM initiatives and why it demonstrates CRM excellence. A team of Gartner analysts, along with various media partners, will evaluate and select three finalists based on the Eight Building Blocks of CRM, which include vision, strategy, “valued customer experience,” organizational collaboration, information, technology and metrics involving internal and external measures of CRM success and failure.
 
“Companies that use a strategic framework to estimate, plan and promote their CRM initiatives, while building up their capabilities in small piloted steps, are twice as likely to achieve planned business benefits as enterprises that pursue projects without a framework,” said Adam Sarner, principal research analyst at Gartner.
 
Three finalists will be chosen by August 13, 2007. Each finalist will be asked to present their CRM use case to conference attendees at the Gartner Customer Relationship Management Summit, scheduled for September 17-19 in Hollywood, Florida. The winner will be announced during the conference.
…
 
Sage Software has announced ACT! by Sage for Financial Professionals 9.0, a contact and customer management product that provides data management, activity tracking, reporting and sales productivity tools for financial advisors, brokerage firms and teams of financial services professionals.
 
ACT! for Financial Professionals centralizes prospect and client data in a single, secure database and helps individual advisors and teams use contact, account, investment and financial planning information, and assists with regulatory compliance tracking.
 
Users can synchronize contact, calendar and to-do information with their Palm OS or Pocket PC devices. Purchase of ACT! for Financial Professionals also includes one year of ACT! Business Care maintenance and support.
ACT! for Financial Professionals is the second ACT! industry product. Sage Software introduced ACT! by Sage Premium for Real Estate 9.0 in May 2006.
…
 
Tableau Software, a vendor of visual analysis software, has announced that Tableau Co-founder and CTO Pat Hanrahan has been elected to the 2007 Class of Fellows by The American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
 
The Academy was established in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John
Hancock, and others to a) copy French institutions, and b) “cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.”
 
The membership of the Academy encompasses 4,000 Fellows and 600 Foreign Honorary Members and comprises members from mathematics, the physical and biological sciences, medicine, the social sciences and humanities, business, government, public affairs, and the arts.
 
Your most humble servant has not yet been elected. I’ll let you know when that happens. Please start holding your breath now, as I’m all for cultivation, interest and happiness.
 
Among its Fellows are more than 160 Nobel Prize laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners.
 
“It was my enormous privilege to nominate Pat for inclusion in this illustrious group,”
said Dr. Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science &
Engineering at the University of Washington.
 
In addition to Dr. Hanrahan, this year’s class of new Fellows includes former Vice
President Albert Gore, Jr., former Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day
O’Connor, New York Mayor and businessman Michael Bloomberg; Google Chairman
and CEO Eric Schmidt and pianist Emanuel Ax.
…
 
SierraCRM Inc. has released a process management engine for SugarCRM, the open-source customer relationship management software. The new engine, designed to help users capture more new business and create a “customer-for-life” environment, is offered in both full-featured and “lite,” configurations. The latter, with fewer functions, is available as a free download.
 
“This new module allows any company using SugarCRM to streamline and automate many daily tasks involved with customer acquisition and management, freeing up time to focus on selling and servicing customers in a more effective and automated manner,” said Bill Convis, SierraCRM chief technology officer.
 
He described the SugarCRM open systems model as the “first true commercial-grade CRM that users can download and set up for free.”
 
With the new module, the workflow engine takes care of communications to a new lead, contact, opportunity, or case along with scheduling and follow-ups, Convis explained.
 
Financial institutions have generally found it has become a necessity to differentiate their services with higher regard being placed on customer service. According to a survey conducted last year of 35 financial institutions across the United States, 94 percent said it was “critical” or “extremely important” to improve the customer’s experience.
 
SierraCRM’s full-featured version sells for $499. SierraCRM Inc. was formed in 2004 by Bill Convis, a consultant in the CRM industry since 1996 when he joined Clarify, Inc. Convis left Clarify in 1998 and started Sierra Software Solutions, a Clarify Consulting and Implementation company.
…
 
SPSS Inc., a vendor of predictive analytics software, has announced the appointment of Alex Kormushoff to Senior Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations, reporting to the Company’s President and CEO Jack Noonan. Rich Holada, Senior Vice President of Technology, will now report to Noonan.
 
Consistent with the company’s succession plan, these management changes are being made in connection with the resignation of John Shap, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales, who will be leaving the company for another career position, and the resignation of Jon Otterstatter, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, who is leaving the company to devote more time to personal matters.
 
Kormushoff is a technology veteran with nearly 30 years of industry experience. He joined SPSS in 2005, having previously served as interim CEO for BroadVision, where he also held the positions of Executive Vice President for Worldwide Operations and Senior Vice President for Worldwide Professional Services.
…
 
The Midwest’s largest publicly held savings bank, Flagstar Bank, the primary subsidiary of Flagstar Bancorp, Inc., of Troy, Michigan, has recently selected Open Solutions Inc.’s The Complete Banking Solution, a relational core data processing platform for community banks, to address its enterprise-wide data processing needs.
 
Flagstar has 156 banking centers in Michigan, Indiana and Georgia. Additionally, the bank has 72 home loan centers in 18 states, is one of the leading originators of residential mortgage loans, and originates loans nationwide.
 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.
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