EBS-RAD has announced that it has extended NetSuite's One System Architecture with new capabilities for the maritime industry market. The company develops products such as Harbour Mastery, which provides services to the Tampa Port Authority. It has received greater interest from potential customers since becoming a partner of NetSuite's SuiteFlex Developer Program.

 

NetSuite's SuiteFlex development platform allows third-party applications to integrate transaction data—orders, invoices, Web site transactions, shipping records, time tracking, and payroll data—with their applications.

 

At the opening session of the annual NetSuite Partner Conference in San Francisco last October, NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson presented i- Seaports Management as an example of a vertical for the maritime seaports and port authorities management with a virtually integrated command and control center for traffic management, security monitoring and communications coordination.

 

"Seaports and Port Authorities today are under incredible pressure to meet security requirements, improve their communications and information sharing and also protect the environment," said George Walters, President of EBS- RAD, adding that he expects i-Seaports Management would "be attractive to over 8,500 deep-water seaports and 50,000 marinas around the world."

 

SuiteFlex is a development platform that enables the creation of third-party vertical applications within NetSuite, as well as business process customization for end users.

 

. . . .

 

Training company Xpertise has added Siebel training to its portfolio of customer-relationship management (CRM) training. Siebel was acquired by Oracle in 2005.

"We already provide CRM training for other products," said Bill Walker, Xpertise's commercial director. "We also have expertise with Oracle training. Delivering Siebel training is a natural progression for us."

CRM is a notoriously difficult area for training companies, being a field that requires a great deal of specialist knowledge. "You can't wing it in CRM training. You need to know what you're doing," says Walker. "We've developed a good understanding of CRM and have built up quite a specialization in CRM training. It's terrific to add Siebel to our CRM training portfolio."

 

. . . .

 

Opera Software has announced the commercial release of Opera Mobile 9.5, its Web browser for phones.

 

According to market research firm In-Stat, the smartphone market will grow at more than a 30 percent compound annual growth rate for the next five years globally, exceeding unit sales for laptops. Users are downloading more applications and generating higher usage as measured by average revenue per user for operators. The main driver that has fueled this growth is overall user experience on the mobile Web, Opera officials say.

 

Built on Opera's core architecture, the Opera Mobile 9.5 desktop-like browsing experience has features such as zooming and panning to make it easier to navigate and load pages quicker.

 

Opera Mobile is currently shipped on more than 100 million phones with such mobile OEMs and operators as HTC, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and T-Mobile.

 

. . . .

 

Oracle officials have announced that Wind River, a software optimization firm, has standardized its business operations on the Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle's Siebel CRM, and components of Oracle Fusion Middleware that include Oracle SOA Suite, to address "company-wide customer information issues."

 

Wind River officials were looking for "a cleaner, more efficient customer database" and an "effective and streamlined order-to-cash process and better access to information," Oracle officials say.

 

Wind River markets services described by company officials as helping companies develop and run device software "faster, more reliable, and at a lower cost." Scott Fenton, CIO of Wind River Systems, decided in August 2006 that the company was suffering from a negative business impact due to the company's poorly integrated applications and unreliable customer information.

 

Salespeople were unable to obtain an accurate rundown of customers' current product holdings. Orders were often transmitted and shipped improperly due to customer data errors and duplication, resulting in a costly and inefficient order-to-cash process. Sales reports were still created manually and delivered in days, rather than hours, he found.

 

The firm cleansed its data with an upgrade from Siebel CRM Release 6.3 to Release 7.8, and implemented Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Customer Hub for integration between Siebel CRM and the Oracle E-Business Suite.

. . . .

 

Sage Software has announced that IDC Canada has for the second consecutive year ranked the company as the leading provider of enterprise application software to small and mid-sized businesses throughout Canada.

 

The rankings are based on revenue figures researched by IDC for calendar 2006. The report, titled "Canadian Enterprise Applications 2006 Vendor Shares," says that Sage Software maintains its position as the leading provider of Enterprise Resource Management (ERM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Supply Chain Management (SCM) applications to SMB's in Canada.

 

According to the IDC report, Sage's Canadian operations have maintained their SMB market position with its Accpac and Simply Accounting financial applications. Investments in CRM, both SageCRM and SalesLogix, are also beginning to have a positive impact on the vendor's market presence in Canada, the report finds.

 

Sage targets such industries as accounting, as well as hospitality, construction, manufacturing, and real estate. Sage promotes its long term relationship with charter accountants and usage of its products in colleges and university courses. In the SMB space, Sage has strong presence among customers via its presence in education and with such professional organizations as Canadian Management Association.

 

. . . .

 

Bluewolf, an on-demand consulting firm, has announced its expansion into Europe, and appointed CRM veteran U.K.-based Penny O'Rourke as managing director of Bluewolf Europe to drive new business.

 

Bluewolf sells Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) consulting. Founded in 2000, Bluewolf was named by VARBUSINESS magazine in 2007 as one of the "pioneer consultants in the SaaS market," buoyed by consistent year-over-year 50 percent growth.

 

The firm's existing business serves a global base of clients, including the DuPont Corporation, The McGraw Hill Companies and The Royal Bank of Scotland.

 

Before joining Bluewolf, O'Rourke served as Director of Business Services for SurfControl (acquired by Websense in Oct. 2007), where she was responsible for the global rollout of Salesforce.com to the sales, marketing and technical support organizations. At SurfControl, she was also CRM Director and developed the scope and deployment strategy for a global CRM platform.

 

"After eight years of growth in the United States, we are excited to take Bluewolf services to EMEA," said Eric Berridge, Co-Founder and Principal at Bluewolf. Company officials said Bluewolf's initial focus in EMEA will be the vertical markets where its U.S. experience is strongest: media, hi-tech manufacturing, and banking.