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.