By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the bell tolling for New Zealand's All Blacks and Australia’s Wallabies, two heavy favorites ushered out of the Rugby World Cup by France and England this weekend (if the French had played defense in 1940 the way they played it Saturday the Germans never would have gotten within 100 miles of Paris). It tolls for thee, Southern Hemisphere rugby dominance.

 

Maybe the pool round matches were such cakewalks for pre-tournament favorite New Zealand—Scotland fielded their reserves against the All Blacks in the pool match—they weren't ready for a tough match under pressure. First Coffee watched all four matches, a tough England exposed an overrated Australia fifteen and First Coffee is cheering for England, a most unfancied side when the tournament began, to confound everyone and beat South Africa in the final to win it for the second time in a row.

 

Realistically, though, the title's been gift-wrapped for the Springboks. They'll have to play better against Argentina than they did against Fiji, who scored two tries with a man in the sin bin. But they'll tighten up against the scrappy Pumas, overcome England and hoist a second Webb Ellis Trophy to bookend their Mandela-presented 1995 trophy:

 

Now, on to the CRM news. . .

 

Maxymiser announced the availability of its content intelligence technology for Web site optimization on salesforce.com's AppExchange marketplace. With this technology, company officials said, leads can be targeted with personalized Web content based on previously acquired data found in Salesforce.

 

The idea behind lead intelligence is using behavioral targeting to deliver uplifts in acquisitions online by placing the right content in front of the right person at the right time.

 

By finding optimal site content and calls to action for visitors segmented by criteria such as gender or job title, Maxymiser officials maintain, "it is possible to present the content that is most likely to generate an acquisition event from future visitors." Any data stored within Salesforce profiles can be used as the basis for Web site content optimization, from geographic location to previous order history.

Mark Simpson, MD at Maxymiser, said through this integration with the Force.com platform, clients can now use the CRM data they hold about prospects and clients to help their customers' online interactions.

 

. . . .

 

Ramco Systems, an enterprise applications vendor, has bagged an order for automating Inland Container Depot from Adani Group to provide CRM and other services. Ramco will provide services to the ICD operations of the Adani Group, which recently set up its largest inland container depot in India at Pathi, nearly 13 miles south of Gurgaon, to facilitate its container train plans.

 

Adani Group "caters to the logistics need of the country by creating its own multi-modal links," company officials say. It is constructing silos, warehouses, private sidings and inland container depots at various locations in the country besides entering the field of Third Party Logistics.

 

Adani Group needed a product to help with terminal management operations and bring a "greater degree of integration with its Shippers, Liners and Railways," company officials said. The system was also expected to streamline areas such as container re-handling, rake planning and formation besides an efficient track and trace facility.

 

Ramco will offer a ground-up Ramco Business Process Platform-based Terminal Operating System to Adani that would take care of the train planning, yard management, terminal stuffing for exports & imports, warehousing, containerization, CRM, interface with railways, customs and third-party applications. The idea is for Adani to control their business processes from the commencement of operations.

 

Ramco’s product will cover all the core business processes of container terminal management for their container yards across the country. Adani officials expect the product to provide greater efficiency and transparency in its operations, along with a high degree of automation coupled with container tracking.

 

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Plexus Systems, providers of Plexus Online on-demand software for the manufacturing enterprise, announced that its chief technical officer, Jerry Foster, has been named a finalist in the "Software Idol" competition in San Jose.

 

Five finalists were selected from more than 2,000 votes cast in the competition sponsored by the Business of Software 2007 conference organizers. Winning videos from the finalists can be viewed at http://www.businessofsoftware.org/softwareidol.aspx.

 

Foster is one of the founders of Plexus Systems, where he has been the development and technical lead for over 16 years. While at Plexus, Foster has been responsible for maintaining and improving performance of the Web-hosted "software as a service," which handles nearly 30,000 transactions per second with 35 billion logical page reads per day.

 

As a "Software Idol" finalist, Foster will present on development in a web-hosted environment, titled "Development on the Wild Side." The winning "Software Idol" will be selected by conference attendees during the two-day conference later this month.

 

Plexus Online offers over 350 functional modules, providing companies instant access to vital information and management functions using a Web browser. The on-demand product features enterprise resource planning (ERP) functions such as accounting and finance modules, customer relationship management (CRM) features such as order entry and tracking, manufacturing execution systems (MES) function such as production scheduling and machine integration, and supply chain management (SCM) functions such as supplier quality and traceability.

 

. . . .

 

Business Process Outsourcing and Database Marketing firm TMone announced the appointment of Gregory S. Crosby to its advisory board. Crosby is currently CEO and President of The NextGen Marketing Group.

 

From April 2002 to November 2006 Crosby was group vice president of marketing at McLeodUSA, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based regional competitive communications provider. Prior to McLeodUSA, Crosby was Vice-President of Broadband Services at Sprint Corporation. He also held executive positions at US WEST and TCI Cable in Denver.

 

At McLeodUSA, Crosby oversaw the transformation of McLeodUSA's entire product line and led efforts to launch several new services such as VoIP / Dynamic Integrated Access.

 

. . . .

 

MagSuite.com has announced what company officials are calling an "open-source on-demand ERP/CRM suite" with the release of MagApp, which provides open-source code for an ERP/CRM application.

 

"Our code is based on Microsoft software stack for fast, cost-effective development," company officials say; specifically, "Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Microsoft .net 2.0/3.0, asp.net AJAX, and a hosting platform based on Windows Server 2003."

 

MagSuite.com’s MagApp provides "all infrastructure for developers to concentrate on implementing business logic itself," as there's "open-source code of an existing ERP/CRM application for small and medium businesses," company officials explain.

 

The company uses industry standard technologies, so there is "no need to learn new programming languages and frameworks," officials say. They also offer support and assistance for development efforts and a marketplace of existing magsuite.com users.

MagApp claims to "outperform" its closest competition, which it sees as Salesforce’s force.com, SugarCRM and NetSuite’s NetFlex in "the ease of development and hosting."

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