The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is one of the best albums to listen to while working, Traffic's Welcome To The Canteen:

 

NGenera Corporation has announced it has acquired Talisma, a Bellevue, Washington-based provider of Customer Interaction Management software products.  Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

 

"We're taking content and processes from customer interaction software and mashing that with Web 2.0 collaboration tools," said Steve Papermaster, nGenera Chairman and CEO.

 

"The manufacturer-centric model of product innovation is dead," said Don Tapscott, Chairman of the nGenera Innovation Network and author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. "In Wikinomics I describe how Best Buy's customer service arm, Geek Squad, designs an award-winning flash drive after seeing how customers really use the product."

 

Last month, nGenera launched its nGen Customer product offering, described by company officials as a composite of Web 2.0 collaboration tools and SaaS applications "plus integrated advisory programs." Company officials say nGenera will incorporate the full Talisma CIM suite of applications "as a set of composite on-demand apps into the nGen Customer offering."

 

Talisma's feature set will be extended with nGenera's Web 2.0 collaboration tools -- blogs, discussion threads, wikis, interest groups, organizational structures like tag clouds, polling, Web monitoring, and analytics. These combined capabilities will be used partly to "harvest new product ideas," nGenera officials say. 

 

Current Talisma customers will receive "uninterrupted" service, nGenera officials say.

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Patni Computer Systems has launched "Patni atoms," described by company officials as an offering for communications service providers "to set up core customer- and partner-facing business processes under one consolidated operational model."

Patni atoms is a platform designed for providers needing to provision new converged services. "In the case of a start-up operator in high growth markets, atoms enables the licensing of the systems required to ramp up service delivery in a short period of time," company officials explain.

 

The platform also "accelerates the business transformation program for existing operators and provides a blueprint for future operating models," company officials say, adding that Patni recently acquired intellectual property from Carphone Warehouse "that formed the basis of atoms."

"The product we have co-created has enabled us to complete the first phase of our planned roll out at Carphone Warehouse," said Simon Post, Chief Technology Officer of Carphone Warehouse. "The product will help us manage growth."

Software providers of CRM, billing and product catalog are wrapped in a business process framework powered by the TIBCO platform.

"Patni atoms is a modern take on convergence, applying 'joined up thinking' to the operators' business model," said Colin Orviss, Senior Vice President of Patni Telecoms Consulting. "With the ability to integrate across multiple and discrete platforms at a business process level, Patni atoms takes advantage of newly available integration technologies."

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Opera Software has released the Opera Widgets SDK beta, letting Web developers deploy Web applications on any device, company officials say.

 

The Opera Widgets SDK is based on open, W3C-set standards to employ common Web technologies such as HTML, CSS and media queries, JavaScript and Ajax, in creating Web apps. The SDK has an emulator, libraries, documentation and Opera Dragonfly for debugging. It's available at: http:/www.opera.com/widgets/sdk.

 

Christen Krogh, Chief Development Officer, Opera Software, said features of the Opera Widgets SDK beta include a widget emulator, which lets users "experience how widgets should appear and function across TV, computer and mobile screens."

 

There is also Opera Dragonfly, which can use "the latest cross-device developer tools for easy debugging." Today the Opera Widgets repository contains over 1,200 widgets for desktop, mobile phones and devices such as ARCHOS portable media players. These widgets include games, news feeds, information widgets for travel and weather, as well as Web developer tools for color pickers, pixel rulers and others.

 

Jill Aldort, Senior Analyst of Consumer Mobility Applications, Yankee Group, said "demand to access information, content, and communities while mobile, is high enough such that having a full Web browsing experience is becoming a requirement for mobile phones and devices."

 

Opera Widgets SDK beta is supported by Opera 9.5 and above.

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Epicor Software, a vendor of enterprise business software products for the midmarket, has announced the third annual Non-Profit and Local Government Special Interest Group Meeting in Atlanta, happening today.

 

In the two-day conference, non-profit organizations will work on applying technology in ways to serve their constituents. The agenda includes presentations from Epicor customers and Epicor team members on such topics as increased visibility, cost control, and operational efficiencies.

Conference meetings are built around input from users and will focus on topics specific to the non-profit and special interest groups of Epicor Software.

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Boomi, an on-demand integration vendor, has announced a partnership with CRM manager to help integrate Salesforce.com implementation projects.

 

CRM manager sells implementation and consulting services for Salesforce.com clients. It's using Boomi On Demand for integrating Salesforce.com with other software-as-a-service and on-premise applications.

 

In addition, CRM manager is using Boomi On Demand to integrate its own financial applications with Salesforce.com.

 

Boomi On Demand is designed to remove the integration barrier to SaaS adoption. It's an SaaS application itself, and integrations are built and deployed on the Web with drag-and-drop.

 

Boomi On Demand is an on-demand integration product delivering integration services without the need for hardware appliances, software packages or coding, company officials say. For consultants like CRM manager, Boomi On Demand also provides centralized management of all their customers -- they can "build, deploy and manage their customers' integrations directly from the Web," company officials say, "eliminating the need to visit or 'remote into' customer sites.

 

CRM manager resells Boomi On Demand through its consulting and support program that manages customers' Salesforce.com applications.

 

"Our partners are realizing the benefits that delivering integration on demand can bring their customers," explained Bob Moul, Boomi's president and CEO. "Since a majority of our on-demand growth will be through the partner community, we've been actively building our channel partnerships."

 

Boomi's application is based on its Visual Integration Technology. No coding is required, company officials say, and "once integration processes are built, they are deployed via a lightweight, dynamic runtime engine called an atom"