By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and we’re still happy with the Jerry Jeff Walker for the music, currently have his Ridin’ High album playing:

 

Avocado Security has announced the availability of its Version 2.0 Security & Business Intelligence Optimization Platform, what company officials characterize as “a combined security and BI” product.

 

The product delivers BI with security images by taking the video images from surveillance cameras and translating them into intelligent, usable, business data and statistics, company officials say.

 

“Our technology automates the way we look at millions of security images,” said Kevin Shahbazi, CEO of Avocado Security. “We translate security camera footage into meaningful information, including graphs, charts, and BI.”

 

So now instead of security personnel just seeing “dumb data” from numerous images across video monitors, they can view “intelligent data,” Shahbazi says, “so that actionable, real-time security decisions can be made.”

 

The technology can convert video images from the existing security equipment that comes from one vendor, or from multiple equipment vendors, such as GE, Honeywell, Bosch or Siemens, and translate those images into such usable data as the number of times an elevator door opened, or a high level of traffic at a particular entrance or exit, or, if more traffic is at the loading dock of a hotel than at the front entrance lobby.

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Whitestone REIT, a self-managed Real Estate Investment Trust which owns and operates properties in the Southwest U.S., and Ascendix Technologies, developers of Real Estate Advantage, have announced that Whitestone picked Real Estate Advantage for their existing Microsoft Dynamics CRM implementation.

 

Whitestone REIT originally selected Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a general-purpose CRM across the enterprise.

 

Later they realized they needed to complement their existing Yardi Voyager Property Management product, said Ted Zeck, Vice President of Information Systems: “We plan to assimilate Voyager data into Real Estate Advantage, affording all of our departments with a 360-degree view of property, lease and tenant facts, figures and communication.”

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TempWorks Software, a vendor of staffing software and business service products for the staffing and human resource industries, has announced the migration of more than 40 staffing companies to its on-demand Select Edition staffing software with Enterprise, a Microsoft-certified software product.

 

Featuring resume handling and task management, Enterprise is for talent management and direct hire services to the staffing end-clients. It integrates with the back-office, time-clock and Web services, company officials say.

 

The product has Microsoft Outlook integration, as users can view their e-mail from within the application and create contact records, log messages, save/store documents and schedule new tasks or appointments from received messages.

 

Kellie Wilson, Owner of Kellie Works Personnel Solutions, says Enterprise facilitates a paperless work environment, which “supports my goal of going green.”

 

“TempWorks Enterprise is the millennial form of the old fashioned ATS and CRM. It engages even the most basic user with interactive icons and dragging techniques,” said Dawne Goodrich, EVP of ClasStaff.

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NetCustomer, a vendor of enterprise software support and services, has announced that it is introducing customized support packages.

 

Along with annual maintenance, netCustomer is offering up to 100 hours of free on-demand services that customers can use any time during the year. This offer is good through June 2008.

 

NetCustomer officials say their maintenance and support package is already discounted by over 50 percent compared to the vendor support: “Combined with on-demand services such as custom reports and troubleshooting, customers could save up to 75 percent on their support costs.”

 

Working as an outsourced provider to PeopleSoft, netCustomer supported PeopleSoft and JDE customers for over four years. NetCustomer now offers direct support to worldwide PeopleSoft, JDE, and Siebel customers.

 

“Companies spend a significant portion of their IT budgets in maintaining software,” noted Punita Pandey, CEO, netCustomer. “Working with thousands of ERP customers worldwide, we recognized that in mature applications environments, companies need help with custom code more than the core product.”

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Recently Xactly has announced a new product, Analytics, which company officials characterize as an on-demand application with “rich analytics capabilities on top of post-sales data, versus analytics products existing today for pre-sales data residing in their CRM systems.”

 

General availability will be in early June, the company says.

 

With Xactly Analytics, company officials say, users have ad-hoc reporting capability on all of a company’s sales performance data for custom reports and dashboards. In addition, the product has pre-defined and pre-built dashboards and scorecards for sales incentives, sales performance, product performance and territory performance for executives and management — “that would ordinarily require significant investments of time and resources from IT to set up.”

 

Xactly Analytics is a completely Web-based application available through Xactly’s multi-tenant architecture, which means that “dashboards and metrics are available at anytime, from anywhere in the world,” company officials say.

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Infogain, an Indian vendor of CRM, ERP, and BI products and services, has entered into an expanded services partnership with California-based Compiere, according to Indian trade journal CXOToday.

 

Compiere is active in the open source ERP and CRM space. Under the partnership, Infogain will provide operational support to Compiere.

 

The companies “will hope to use their respective strengths and experience in Open Source and ERP,” CXOToday reports.

 

Infogain will also “seek to exploit has its capability in developing and implementation of professional services for CRM/ERP as also its expertise in developing OPD solutions using open source technology stack.”

 

Recent research from Gartner cited by CXOToday says 90 percent of SaaS providers will use Open Source components in their offerings by 2010. “Specifically,” the journal writes, “Open Source technologies will be used in the operating system, application servers, and databases as a way of cutting costs.”

 

Compiere officials claim over 1.3 million software downloads for its open source enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) automation products.

 

In February Compiere announced the opening of a product development center in Noida, India, located near the capital of New Delhi.

 

The company says the new development center is needed for its recent growth in “capabilities, skills and geographical presence” needed to address the expanding demand for its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products.

 

The center, which is fully operational, is staffed by application software development and test engineers with experience in enterprise application functionality, Java development, Web architecture, automated application testing and customer support.