By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. For American classical music (a clunky misnomer, “classical” music, like “West Coast offense” or “tuxedo,” but what else can you call it?) Copland is as good as it gets, and in many ways the last great classical composer anywhere:

 

Dublin-based Kainos, an IT consulting company, has announced that it has extended its Microsoft Gold Partnership with the addition of the Microsoft competency for Custom Development Solutions.

 

Kainos achieved Gold Certification in 2005. Solution Competencies are the cornerstone of Microsoft’s Partner Program, as they allow partners to define their areas of expertise in specific products that reflect their business model. Kainos now holds Solution Competencies for Information Worker, ISV/Software Solutions, Network Infrastructure and Custom Development Solutions.

 

Brendan Mooney, Managing Director at Kainos, called the partnership a “win-win partnership.” Colin Cassidy, Partner Development Manager, Microsoft Ireland said Kainos’ Gold Partner certification makes them “one of only a handful of Irish companies to have achieved this partnership status.”

 

Kainos designs and implements IT products. The firm was founded in 1986 and is headquartered in Belfast with offices in Dublin, London and Gdansk.

 

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Customer Effective, yet another Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and reseller of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, has announced a partnership with SalesCentric to offer its customers Relationship Charts, an add-on application for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

 

Relationship Charts were developed by SalesCentric to complement Microsoft Dynamics CRM software with visual tools to improve sales performance, forecast accuracy and marketing. Customer Effective is including this functionality in its portfolio of Microsoft Dynamics CRM products.

 

Scott Millwood, CEO Customer Effective, said the Capital Effective offering is intended for organizations in commercial banking, private equity, investment banking, hedge funds and wealth management, since such clients “crave the visual integration and mapping of entities… the rich, graphical look.”

 

With attributes and relationships tagged in the database, users can see relationships and connections between organizations and individuals within the CRM platform. For example, a wealth management portfolio manager could use Relationship Charts to keep a visual of her clients’ information to see which individuals belong to specific funds and the brokers and accounts tied to the total portfolio.

 

Established in 2003, SalesCentric sells add-on software to visually enhance Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

 

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IntoScape, a British firm, has launched Total Commerce Management for NetSuite, an application suite designed to automate and integrate supply chain business processes.

 

Total Commerce Management is powered by the NetSuite Business Operating System. The product automates the merchandising activities of a business “from supplier sourcing and competitor analysis to margin-based pricing calculation” and other functions, company officials say.

 

NS-BOS is a Software as a Service platform for software developers. IntoScape uses the development platform of NS-BOS for its Total Commerce Management for NetSuite to NetSuite customers.

 

By tying into the core business processes supported by NetSuite’s on-demand business suite, the IntoScapers say, TCM automates related business processes, including content management updates for any Web store that makes use of the NetSuite shopping cart and checkout process.

 

The combined NS-BOS and TCM product will be marketed to mid-market wholesale and distribution, and online retailing-dependent businesses.

 

Steve Willock, Managing Director at IntoScape, said previously companies “may have taken weeks to achieve what Total Commerce Management allows them to do in minutes. The human resource requirement to run it is minimal.”

 

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Dow Jones has reported that Salesforce.com said Wednesday it swung to a profit in its fiscal fourth quarter, as revenue “jumped 50 percent” over the same period last year. The CRM vendor also raised its revenue outlook for the full fiscal year.

 

Salesforce.com said net income for the period ended in January rose to $7.38 million, or 6 cents a share, Dow Jones said, compared with $516,000, or break-even, in the period a year earlier. Revenue rose 50 percent to $216.9 million.

 

Analysts have been estimating Salesforce.com would post earnings of 4 cents a share for the quarter, on $208.9 million in revenue, according to FactSet Research.

 

Salesforce.com said its number of subscribers, “a closely watched metric,” Dow Jones said, rose by more than 450,000 to roughly 1.1 million during the year.

 

Shares of Salesforce.com rose nearly 8 percent to $56.80 in after-hours trading following the earnings report.

 

As Dow Jones reported, Salesforce.com raised its revenue outlook for fiscal 2009, to between $1.03 billion and $1.035 billion. The company had previously said it expected revenue between $1 billion and $1.02 billion.

 

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E-autobusiness, a vendor of CRM products for automobile retailers, said its Aeros Software Suite Internet Management and CRM system is now certified by BMW of North America as a BMW iSTAR Certified Lead Management System.

 

Now BMW and MINI dealers using Aeros will receive leads from the OEM’s consumer Web sites directly into the Aeros system. This “eliminates duplication of lead handling activities at the dealership,” according to e-autobusiness officials.

 

Leads from BMW are first scrubbed and in some cases augmented with customer information BMW has in its database and then delivered to the dealership. This iSTAR integration creates a built-in loop that provides BMW with feedback on lead activity, such as whether the lead has been opened or a test drive scheduled.

 

Explaining the benefit of the product, Alan Graham, general manager for Michigan’s Erhard BMW, noted that hey, “time is money.”

 

Based in Charlotte, North Carolina, e-autobusiness’ Aeros Software Suite is a Web-based family of CRM software applications.

 

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Salesforce.com has also announced the availability of the new Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex, a new set of tools and services to enable development of rich Internet applications on Salesforce.com’s Force.com Platform.

 

Freely available at http://developer.force.com/, the new toolkit is designed to help developers create new RIAs using the capabilities of Adobe RIA technologies, including Adobe Flex 3, Adobe Flash Player, and Adobe AIR software, with their Force.com projects and offerings.

 

Developers can also publish applications built with Adobe Flex and deployed on Adobe AIR on the AppExchange marketplace, making them immediately available to Salesforce.com’s customer and developer communities.