By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Lewis Family's great gospel bluegrass song "Keep On the Firing Line:"

 

StraightThrough CRM Solutions has changed its name to Tier1CRM. The change represents the company's "expansion of its business focus from providing financial services CRM products to serving various other market segments, including the retail, high-tech and public sectors," company officials say.

 

The company's niche is selling on-demand CRM products. It's a Premier Consulting Partner of Salesforce.com. By broadening its focus, Tier1CRM figures it can tap into a larger marketplace; as of January 31, 2008 Salesforce.com had over  41,000 customers.

 

Mark Notten, CEO of Tier1CRM, said Salesforce.com's Force.com platform-as-a-service is "effectively an on-demand operating system platform to us."

 

Tier1CRM wants to sell on-demand CRM business products to its clients. "Speed, usability, flexibility and integration are the four keys to success in our users' world," said Mario Lollino, Tier1CRM's Vice President of Product Strategy.

 

The existing StraightThrough ACE product line is now available on Salesforce.com's AppExchange. "StraightThrough ACE is being rebranded as 'Tier1ACE'," Lollino said, adding that the product suite is "being adapted to other areas of financial services such as Retail Wealth Management, as well as to other industry sectors."

 

StraightThrough, the original parent company of StraightThrough CRM Solutions led by financial services industry veteran John Wherry, will continue to provide products to the investment management industry, and will retain the StraightThrough brand and Web site (www.StraightThrough.com). Tier1CRM is a privately held company with offices in Toronto and New York.

 

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Zend Technologies and Parallels have announced that they will collaborate on products to let hosting providers sell PHP applications through Parallels control panels and server virtualization offerings.

 

Officials of both firms say the companies will deliver "product interoperability and integration, define packaging and distribution standards," and pursue "joint marketing initiatives."

Zend products will be certified with the Application Packaging Standard, a new application packaging format designed to help implement software as a service. Using the APS standard, hosting providers will be able to configure technology stacks based on Zend products to enable PHP products for Web applications.

The APS standard is already supported by more than 100 PHP applications for uses "from blogging and collaboration to content management, ecommerce and CRM," said Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels, who said the Parallels-Zend partnership grows the channel for PHP application vendors.

With thousands of Web applications available for individual and business use, PHP is a technology for hosting companies to support, said Mark de Visser, chief marketing officer, Zend Technologies.

 

Zend and Parallels will have an APS-compliant Zend Framework and an updated version of Zend Optimizer later this quarter. Over time, the companies plan to release new versions of all Zend products that support the APS standard, officials of both firms say.

 

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Sprinx Systems, a CRM consultant and product vendor located in the Czech Republic, is now a member of the Salesforce.com network of independent software vendors, Sprinx officials say, adding that "this extends its portfolio of CRM products for which it is certified."

Sprinx Systems is the first Salesforce.com AppEchange ISV Partner in the Czech Republic and is part of 400 selected AppExchange ISV partners of Salesforce.com in the world.

"We are very pleased with this cooperation as it enables Sprinx to further strengthen its position in the international CRM sector with Salesforce.com presence," said Radko Jelinek, Sprinx Director of Sales.

Sprinx Systems sells business administration systems focused primarily on customer relationship management (CRM), company officials say, adding that the company has been in business since 1996.

 

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With the United Arab Emirates economy doing well and the worldwide IT spending growth among SMBs set to increase by 7 percent this year, vendor Emirates Computers, betting on what company officials call "a great uptake of technologies targeted at the SMB sector," held an event for Small and Medium businesses in association with its partners Cisco and 3M.

At the event, which was held at Murooj Rotana last week, Emirates Computers, Cisco and 3M showcased communication products targeted at the SMB sector.

"Small and medium businesses across the Middle East continue to adopt IT and telecommunications products, and are on track to invest more in information and communications technologies in 2008," said Talal Sabih, Cisco product manager at Emirates Computers. "As SMBs in the Middle East increase their levels of investments in IT, and specifically communications, IP telephony and unified communications are essential."

Cisco Unified Communications 500 Series for Small Businesses, one of the showcased products, lets users "unify the benefits of voice, video, mobility, and messaging on a single platform," eliminating the need for multiple servers to run each application.

Combining the applications on a single platform simplifies the installation, support, and ongoing management of the system, while reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO).

It also integrates with existing desktop applications such as calendar, e-mail, and customer relationship management (CRM) programs.

The easy-to-manage product supports up to 48 users in flexible deployment models based on an SMB setup's needs.

Meanwhile, embedded in the Cisco IOS Software that provides call processing for Cisco Unified IP phones, the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express 4.x enables the large portfolio of Cisco access and integrated services routers to deliver a comprehensive set of features commonly used by many businesses.

 

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SNS, a supply chain services provider, in partnership with Boomi, has announced signing a contract for the implementation of a B2B integration product for Alliance Boots, a pharmacy-led health and beauty group in Europe.

 

Alliance Boots chose Boomi Visual Integration Platform to "ensure the synchronization and data integrity" of their CRM database, as well as those of other applications.

The Alliance Boots health and beauty group comprises approximately 3,000 retail outlets, including associates, of which approximately 2,700 have a pharmacy. There's also a wholesale network of over 380 depots, including associates, for over 125,000 outlets.

With a project of this size and the number of different applications to be integrated, the choice of the integration layer application was a big issue, SNS officials say. The integration product will be deployed at all sites, with France as a first go-live.

SNS has done different integration projects around the Gulf and Middle East and was involved in several projects in Europe using the Boomi integration tool, among others.