The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is the criminally underrated guitarist J.J. Cale, specifically the magnificent, wistfully haunting “Magnolia,” from the J.J. Cale Live album.

 

SugarCRM, a vendor of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, has announced a new reseller partnership with BT.

 

As part of this new alliance, BT, the British communications provider, will offer its 1.2 million business customers SugarCRM’s commercial software products.

 

SugarCRM offers a Web-based interaction management platform for “companies of all sizes in any industry,” according to company officials. Features include visibility into their sales pipeline, with deep reporting and forecasting features, as well as a closed loop between sales and marketing teams with marketing automation tools.

 

“We have looked across the market and developed this partnership,” said Bill Murphy, managing director at BT Business. “This partnership builds on the work we’ve done to date and allows us to deliver a tailored approach for customers.”

 

Added Murphy, “with this announcement we really are changing the way small and medium-sized businesses can think about and buy their business applications, delivering them the benefits of services previously available only to larger companies.”

 

BT will offer its customers “the full array” of SugarCRM software products. The offerings include Sugar Professional as well as Sugar Enterprise. Both of these software products are available as traditional On-Site deployments, or delivered over the Web via the software-as-a-service model.

 

“The combination of BT’s reach in the UK market and SugarCRM’s CRM products makes this “a perfect partnership for the UK market,” said John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM.

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Wanted Technologies Corporation, a vendor of sales and market intelligence products for media companies, has announced that Michael Cunningham has joined its senior

management team as Vice President of Sales and Delivery.

 

In this role, Cunningham will be responsible for the sales and deployment of Wanted’s online recruitment business intelligence, sales leads and market analysis, according to Wanted officials. Wanted Sales Leads and Analytics are designed to help set business strategy and power sales productivity platforms.

 

“Mike has a strong record of executive sales management in larger established companies as well as in smaller high-growth firms,” said Bruce Murray, Wanted’s President and CEO, explaining the move. “His background with technology-enabled Internet companies makes him a great fit for Wanted.”

 

Prior to joining Wanted, Cunningham served as Vice President of Business Development and Field Operations for Peopleclick, a software company providing Talent Acquisition products for the Human Resources market. Earlier Cunningham founded and developed his own technology services company, focused on deploying Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms throughout corporate enterprise accounts.

   

Wanted delivers its proprietary data and analytics via data feeds directly into clients’ CRM systems, where it is integrated at the account level with other client information.

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After development, product building and testing, Creative Cruising, an Australian cruise wholesaler based in Sydney, is now live on Resco, reservation and CRM software from Rescompany.

 

As Creative Cruising represents various cruise lines from all around the world, the different currencies as well as the various cruise packages on offer needed to be combined in the system.

 

Ernie Skalsky, Managing Director and founder of Creative Cruising, said the Resco product lets Creative Cruising “control the costs and margins for each booking in the different currencies managed in the system,” and have the information at hand anytime.

 

“Further, we are able to streamline our reservations operation and greatly enhance the documentation, invoice and report handling for the company with Resco,” he said.

Peter Winqvist, Director of Rescompany Systems Australia, said their database shows the profitability and margins of the various cruises offered: “In addition, the advanced integrated CRM management tools allow users to create targeted marketing activities like direct mailings.”

Creative Cruising is the official Australian representative of Star Clippers, and represents a boatload of other cruise companies.

 

Rescompany Systems sells reservation and CRM software products to the travel and leisure industry.

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Diamond Sponsor of the Web 2.0 Expo, Etelos will “highlight new applications, new partners and new ideas as the themes” for helping businesses with online/offline workflow, according to company officials.

 

Etelos officials have announced new technology that enables what they call “true data ubiquity and application portability beyond simple online and offline synchronization.”

 

This technology is embodied in Etelos AOP Beta, and Etelos will be giving hands-on demonstrations of during the Expo. In addition, Etelos CRM, Etelos Projects and a suite of integrated applications running Etelos App Sync, which company officials say “enables any application distributed through the Etelos Marketplace to share data offline, online and anytime,” also will be shown during the Expo.

 

Etelos will host 20 companies from the United Kingdom at the Etelos booth as part of Web Mission 2008.

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CRM vendor NetSuite has announced a partnership with BT, to distribute, resell and support NetSuite in the UK and EMEA.

 

The BT/NetSuite announcement comes on the heels of NetSuite’s introduction of NetSuite OneWorld, a new on-demand product that enables multi-national companies to manage their company in a single application.

 

In 2004, the Department of Trade and Industry estimated that there are 4.3 million business enterprises in the UK and 99.9 percent were small to medium-sized enterprises, many of whom have requirements for multi-national CRM, ERP and ecommerce capabilities.

 

The majority of these, NetSuite officials say, “still buy separate, expensive software packages to run and manage their business.” Historically, the cost associated with running and integrating data from these incompatible systems is often high, they say, adding that “because of this application fragmentation, the software infrastructure used by many companies does not allow business processes to run efficiently across front and back office functions, nor across geographic boundaries.”

According to recent research by BT Business, client relationships are the most critical factor to the success of UK SMEs -- the research put it at “43 percent”.

 

NetSuite’s integrated business management software suites include one single system to manage business operations, which not only gives SMEs a CRM product but also a business management product that spans accounting, ERP and e-commerce.