The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Kinks' scorching double live album One For the Road. Anyone who doubted whether The Kinks had the sack of a true rock band, and there are those who, 1964's "You Really Got Me" notwithstanding, have made this charge, alleging that Ray and the lads were a bit, well, twee, need only clamp on the headphones and turn this baby up, especially where they rip "You Really Got Me" back from Van Halen. We're a long, long way from Village Green here, folks:

Deer Park, New York-based SLM Holdings, a Web-based software provider, has announced its acquisition of selected assets of VerticalFalls Software, Inc., a producer and distributor of desktop-based software.

Located in Reston, Virginia, VerticalFalls has developed a Contact Relationship Manager (CRM) product for brokers in the financial services industry. The software is targeted at Registered Representatives and financial organizations that desire to incorporate the niche-specific tools into their business.

Under the agreement, SLM purchased assets of VerticalFalls, including all trademarks, trade names and copyrights to the name VerticalFalls Software.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner," in honor of our opening e-mail…

We start the column this morning with a question which came in yesterday from "Andy:"

I have purchased and used a Starbucks' coffee mug for over six months...Usually, I am charged the grande price, less the 10 cents saving. However, sometimes I am charged the tall price for coffee, also less the 10 percent discount.

Now my question is how much should I be charged. The bottom of this steel Starbucks container claims it is 16 ounces. However, I have carefully measured its contents and only if you fill to the overflowing brim can you get 16 ounces into it.

It truly is handed to me with 13 ounces each morning by the wonderful employees who dispense it. Anyway, how much should one pay for coffee when using your mug?

Excellent question, if a bit misguided on the fact that First Coffee, alas, is not in charge of Starbucks -- were it up to me, my friend, you'd get 17 ounces. But as the self-appointed arbiter of issues arising from the confluence of coffee and customer service, I'd say Starbucks needs to cough up an honest mug that contains 16 comfortable ounces.

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CDC Software, a wholly owned subsidiary of Chinese-owned CDC Corporation, has announced "broad customer adoption of its industry-specific Pivotal CRM and Saratoga CRM" products for the financial services industries.

Specifically, company officials say, second quarter sales for Pivotal CRM for Financial Services increased 71 percent from the same period a year earlier and Saratoga CRM saw a 566 percent increase in the second quarter from the year earlier period.

Across commercial and private banking, capital markets, institutional asset management and retail asset management industries, a growing number of customers are looking for products that allow financial services companies to develop insight into their customers' needs and preferences, CDC officials believe.

"Firms that provide their account executives and their entire client-facing workforce with the right data at the right time will be more likely to win deals and generate revenues," said Kathleen Khirallah, managing director and practice leader, Banking Research, TowerGroup. "The benefits of internal integration will also be felt by senior managers, who will have data they need to assign their people according to potential opportunities."

"Our comprehensive, integrated, industry-specific solutions are gaining momentum in the industry as financial services providers realize that generic CRM solutions do not address their unique business requirements," said Eric Musser, CEO, CDC Software.

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SystemLink, a vendor specializing in implementing ERP and CRM software, has announced the creation of a new office in Tampa, Florida to serve the American Southeast, Caribbean and Central America markets. The group has four offices in America, as well as Dublin, Johannesburg and London.

Bill Williams, president and CEO, emphasized the firm's "deep rooted industry and business process expertise, broad global resources and a proven track record." He said their expansion into Florida was "strategic in order to service better clients and prospects in the Southeast and offer us a base for future growth both in the Caribbean and Central America."

Williams said other new office locations are expected in America and "other parts of the world during the next 12 months."

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Zantaz, an Autonomy company and vendor working the archiving, e-Discovery and Proactive Information Risk Management markets, today announced that Northcliffe Media, a regional newspaper publisher in the UK, has chosen the Zantaz Enterprise Archive Solution to consolidate its 17 e-mail data centers into two, while migrating from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003.

The Zantaz product will also be used by Northcliffe Media for search and retrieval for electronic information and e-mails.

By David Sims David at firstcoffee d*t biz   The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Jim White’s Drill A Hole In That Substrate And Tell Me What You See:   BCG Systems has implemented Microsoft Dynamics GP for 5C Image Services, a division of Rentwear, Inc., a business uniform and apparel rental company.   5C Image Services provide both regional and national companies with apparel rental for their locations. 5C Image Services staff members do the research needed to partner with local apparel rental companies in each location to service the client. The company then provides centralized billing for every location’s rental needs.

By David Sims David at firstcoffee d*t biz   The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Grass Roots album Temptation Eyes:   Sage Software has announced availability of the new ACT! by Sage 2008 product family including ACT! by Sage 2008 (10.0), ACT! by Sage Premium 2008 (10.0), and ACT! by Sage Premium for Web 2008 (10.0).   “New customizable dashboards anchor this year’s product releases,” company officials say, and “allow individuals and workgroups to access priority sales opportunity and activity details in a comprehensive graphical view.”   Additional ACT! 2008 enhancements include editable list views2, multiple contact assignments per opportunity, and expanded workgroup security, among others.   Today’s ACT! 2008 product announcements coincide with the 20th anniversary of ACT!. Sage officials like to say that ACT! “established the contact management software category” with its introduction in 1987. Whatever the history, there’s certainly no denying that today ACT! is the number-one selling contact and customer management product with more than 2.7 million registered users and upwards of 41,000 additional corporate customers.   Joe Bergera, executive vice president and global general manager for Sage CRM Solutions, said the new dashboards “deliver rich visual analysis capabilities that were once only found in enterprise CRM systems.

By David Sims David at firstcoffee d*t biz   The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Tom Waits’s Blue Valentines album:   Okay, now this is my kind of CRM, CRM Farms: Boise, Idaho-based Redneck Gifts and Hillbilly Creek have announced the gift basket to end all gift baskets, featuring Hunters Reserve’s wild game (venison, wild boar, and pheasant) summer sausage, Poorfish Dehydrated Water (think about that) and CRM Farms-supplied non-flatulent Chili Makin’s.   Hillbilly Creek plans on expanding the line of gourmet food products (!), by adding more of Daisy’s Old Time Confections homemade chocolates and candy. No word yet on the mayonnaise and ketchup sandwiches or Roadkill Helper.   Michelle Larsen, owner of Redneckgifts, along with IdahoGiftBaskets has been operating her gift baskets business since 2001. …   Oregon Catholic Press, a major publisher of liturgical music and worship resources, has signed an enterprise software and services agreement with IBS to install IBS Bookmaster software for CRM and other functionality for publishing and book distribution.   The new system will include inventory management, advanced warehouse management, CRM, financials, rebates and commissions, subscription management, royalty management, e-Commerce and book production.

By David Sims David at firstcoffee d*t biz   The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is something by Bach, the name of the piece escapes me, sounds like a typewriter — heck, all Bach does:   IBM has announced new technology designed to “arm professionals with the ability to combine information from different sources to create just-in-time applications” needed to “help close a big deal, deliver an important presentation or just get through the weather,” according to Big Blue officials.   Key to employee productivity, these situational applications, or mashups, blend Web services like news feeds, weather reports, maps or traffic conditions, with enterprise content and services from databases, spread sheets and documents.   IBM Lotus Expeditor 6.1.1 software is a standards-based managed client that can extend mashups in the enterprise to a wide variety of desktop, laptop, and mobile devices on the market, to give customers access to business information from mobile customer relationship management (CRM), among others.   Lotus Expeditor provides this mashup capability for Lotus Notes 8 and Domino 8, the newest version of IBM’s collaboration platform available to customers this month.   Company officials say enhanced security features give administrators control of the desktop, which means end users have role-based controlled access to the applications. Other features include a server-managed composite platform — spanning desktop and mobile — that integrates and aggregates applications and information, so using Lotus Expeditor software, developers can incorporate elements from disparate sources including Microsoft .NET, Swing, native, Eclipse-based components and Flash.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a continuation of the Alice Cooper and Jimmy Buffett iPod mix we tried out yesterday. Surprisingly it works well, if you stick to the Coop's early '70s albums, the Killer, School's Out and Billion Dollar Babies-era stuff, back when hard rock bands still knew how to write actual songs, and Buffett's mid-70s work, from Living and Dying in 3/4 Time to Son Of A Son Of A Sailor:

Worldwide total software revenue for software as a service (SaaS) within the enterprise software markets is projected to surpass $5.1 billion in 2007, a 21 percent increase from 2006 revenue, according to a recent study from Gartner.

The market is poised for strong growth through to 2011, when worldwide revenue will reach $11.5 billion, the tech research firm believes. And Gartner analysts say adoption of SaaS varies widely across software markets, contributing as little as 1 percent of total software revenue in some markets and over 75 percent in others.

In enterprise content management and search, SaaS adoption is in the range of 1 percent to 2 percent of total software spending. Within e-learning and Web conferencing, SaaS accounts for more than 60 percent and 70 percent of total market revenue.

"SaaS adoption is highest in applications that support simplified, common business processes or large, distributed virtual workforce teams," says Sharon Mertz, research director of Gartner.

By David Sims David at firstcoffee d*t biz   The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Lenny Kravitz’s Lenny:   Today for your shot of java we have an interview with Talisma’s Brad Birnbaum, promoted this past March from Vice President of Product Development to Chief Technology Officer:   FC: Why did Talisma decide proactive service made sense now? BB: Our decision to add proactive service and sales to our company’s focus was the next logical strategic move for Talisma. We’ve offered proactive service capabilities to our customers in the past, but with CIM 8.0 we enhanced those capabilities and added new features to enable agents to not only improve support but to take advantage of sales opportunities. The main reason why we’ve done this is because of significant customer interest.   For example, proactive support is an agent sending a notification to a customer before the power is scheduled to go out. Proactive sales is an agent sending a customer a personalized product offer while monitoring the customer’s shopping behavior.   FC: What are some of the benefits Talisma CIM 8.0 offers? BB: They basically center around the expanded proactive capabilities, and the two new channels added to the CIM Suite, Talisma Campaign, and Talisma VoIP.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a song I can't get out of my hea:- Elvis Presley's "Long Black Limousines:"

Good news to pass on: it's been rumored that Paul Greenberg has been asked to do another edition of CRM at the Speed of Light. This is pretty well one of the few standard works on the subject, thanks to his publisher for realizing this and having Paul update it for what would be edition 4.0.

Today we have an interview with well-known CRM figure Pat Sullivan, founder and former CEO of ACT! and SalesLogix, who has recently joined the board of Infusion Software, whose CRM program is, according to Sullivan, "built specifically for small businesses -- which is really the last great opportunity in the CRM software market."

Sullivan is considered by some to be a pioneer and visionary in the sales automation industry and is attributed with creating the contact management software category. Sullivan most recently took public and sold ACT! and SalesLogix to Sage Software.

He was named one of the 80 Most Influential People in Sales and Marketing History by Sales and Marketing Management Magazine, twice awarded the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award and recognized as one of the 10 most influential people in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) industry by Sales and Marketing Management Magazine.

He currently serves as the CEO of Jigsaw Health, a company dedicated to helping those who suffer from chronic conditions.

"Of all the software companies in the market, Sullivan chooses Infusion to be aligned with," an Infusion official said. "Sure validates their Web-based CRM application as an emerging player in the small business software space."

FC: Regarding your joining the Board -- why Infusion Software, over all the other companies in the CRM space?

PS: The fact they are totally focused on what I consider the last bastion of opportunity for CRM: small business.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Cracker's Greenland:

Business software vendor Logix Microsystems has announced the acquisition of ReckonUp, a customer relationship management (CRM) product, from Prize Corporation for $4 million.

ReckonUp is a Web-based tool for automobile dealers to "improve operating efficiency and manage database of current and prospective clients," according to Logix officials.

"This acquisition will further accelerate our vision to become the leading provider to the $650 billion automotive dealership market," Logix Managing Director Sanjay Soni said in a communique to the Bombay Stock Exchange.

The company has acquired the assets related to the CRM product, which include the team, customer base and technology platform, for an all cash deal, Logix said.

Prize Corporation provides Web-based applications to automobile dealerships.

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Sage has launched a customer relationship management (CRM) system, Sage 200, aimed at the small to medium enterprise market. David Pinches, Sage head of product management, said the product would be pitched to firms of over $100 million.

Industry observer Nick Booth writes that "whereas SAP is approaching the market from a high end enterprise level, Sage claims its product is more grounded.