By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is the good old-fashioned basic rock’n’roll that never goes out of style — The Rolling Stones’ “Jiving Sister Fanny:”

 

VCustomer, which sells customer care and technical support products, has announced that it has — once again — been named as a Rising Star in the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals 2008 Global Outsourcing 100.

 

VCustomer’s ranking as a Rising Star required a minimum annual growth of 33 percent, company officials say. The rankings are published annually in Fortune.

 

With more than 40,000 members, IAOP is a standard-setting organization and advocate for the outsourcing profession. It ranks companies based on what it perceives as quality after a review process. The final rankings are based on “a weighted average of the judges’ scores on demonstrated competencies, size and growth, management capabilities and customer references,” vCustomer officials explain.

 

VCustomer sells contact center services with self-service options and automation features.

 

Lori Inuzuka, vice president of vCustomer Global Operations, said she believes “this recognition is a reflection of our commitment to our clients to consistently deliver high quality, cost-effective customer care and technical support services.”

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Enterprise Enabler, which bills itself as “out-of-the-box support for SaaS applications,” including specific support for Salesforce.com, is now available.

 

The product allows for “the integration of real-time sales performance into views of the state of the business and key performance indicators,” company officials say.

 

EE also contains capabilities for data and application integration, along with specific support of enterprise portals like Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. It’s being presented to the market as “a platform for real-time Business Intelligence and Sales Pipeline information system at a fraction of the cost of other implementations.”

 

The adoption of hosted Software Applications, or Software as a Service (SaaS) is forecasted to continue to grow at a fast pace, EE officials believe, “especially in areas like CRM. SaaS adoption in the enterprise does not come without its problems, notably the need to integrate SaaS application data with business back-office information.”

 

“The combination of Stone Bond’s Enterprise Enabler and Microsoft SharePoint allows for cost-effective business performance analysis, regardless of where the data of interest resides”, stated Pamela Szabo, Chief Information Officer at Stone Bond Technologies.

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Lyris has announced that Hot Banana Software, a Web content management product that’s part of the Lyris HQ integrated marketing platform, has been certified on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.

 

Lyris HQ is an on-demand marketing platform putting a marketing technology suite into a single sign-on dashboard interface.

 

Blaine Mathieu, Chief Marketing officer, Lyris, said Salesforce users can use Lyris HQ to manage e-mail marketing, Web analytics, Web content and PPC campaigns.

 

To receive certification, Hot Banana’s external and composite systems were evaluated to confirm they met Salesforce.com’s security standards and requirements. Other tests measured Hot Banana’s compliance with industry-standard security criteria.

 

Salesforce.com customers can deploy Hot Banana via the AppExchange to build multi-level Web forms with CAPTCHA validation on basic Web pages or on advanced landing pages. The product can also be used to set up Web analytics, lead source, and conversion tracking and transfer the captured lead-generation data from the Web form to Salesforce.

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InterSystems Corporation has announced that Saturn Corporation, an InterSystems application partner, has launched what Saturn officials call “an aggressive initiative” to sell its Eprísa customer relationship management (CRM) product worldwide.

 

Built on InterSystems Caché software, Eprísa is being implemented in multiple locations with the Dutch healthcare foundation Hospitallbroeders the first organization to go live with Caché-based Eprísa online.

 

InterSystems sells database and integration software. Its product line includes the InterSystems Caché object database, InterSystems Ensemble rapid integration platform, and InterSystems HealthShare platform for regional and national electronic health records.

 

Saturn sells online database management services and other back-end processes in the fundraising, membership and commercial marketplaces.

 

Saturn President Fielding Yost said his company “wanted to get to a new-generation look and feel, increase our product’s flexibility and integrate with other applications and processes.” Saturn opted to redevelop Eprísa from the ground up, and to “jump-start it by bringing in Caché experts to work with our developers.”

 

Millennial Technologies, a software and design firm based in Canton, Ohio, partnered with Saturn on building the new CRM application. “By using MTI’s experience with Caché, we slashed the time needed to build Eprísa and to begin deploying it,” Yost noted.

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EXpresso Corporation, a vendor of online community products for businesses, has joined the Etelos ecosystem and is now distributing its line of business products through the Etelos Marketplace.

 

The Etelos Marketplace is a place for businesses to find, try and deploy Web applications. Currently featured on the Etelos Marketplace, eXpresso is billed as “able to reach a spectrum of businesses seeking to build a best-of-breed suite of applications that integrate into their workflow,” by company officials.

 

eXpresso Vice President of Business Development, John Howard, believes the eXpresso / Etelos relationships will “give us the kind of visibility we need to reach our target audience of businesses that share files among dispersed staffs and suppliers.”

 

The eXpresso application is built on a SaaS framework. eXpresso business communities (the first application is Microsoft Excel) use an invitation process and are governed by a system of rights and privileges. Changes to a file in eXpresso are documented in real time and generate an audit trail detailing changes down to the cell level.

 

By distributing this Web application through the Etelos Marketplace, eXpresso is able to lower its cost.

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Xactly Corporation, a vendor of sales performance management, has announced that Data Domain, a vendor of deduplication storage systems, has selected the Xactly Incent on-demand sales compensation management application.

 

The company will use Xactly Incent and the Xactly Modeling module to “automate and streamline its incentive compensation management process end-to-end,” according to Xactly officials, “across approximately 275 users.”

 

“In replacing our currently manual, spreadsheet-based compensation management process with Xactly Incent, we gain a more accurate, economical and powerful tool,” said David Schneider, senior vice president, worldwide sales, Data Domain. He added that “tight integration with Salesforce.com’s CRM application” factored into the decision.

 

Xactly Incent is an on-demand SaaS product that lets users design sales compensation management programs. Xactly Incent can be added modularly.

 

Along with Xactly Incent, Data Domain also selected the Xactly Modeling module, which lets Data Domain perform simulations on plans, plan changes and special incentive programs to gauge their effectiveness.