June 2008 Archives
"Barloworld has been a client of ours for some time, but operated in a segregated technology environment," says Mark Annett, national sales manager at Maximizer business partner and CRM specialist Camsoft Solutions.
The implementation at Barloworld Equipment, which supplies Caterpillar equipment and support to customers in 11 countries in southern Africa that includes South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Angola and Zambia, as you might imagine did present a few challenges to Camsoft, Maximizer's certified business partner in South Africa.
Connecting the branches was important "to ensure that the data that resided at those offices were kept as up to date as possible," says Annett.
Maximizer CRM is also expected to provide an improved opportunity manager, which will allow for "the implementation of sophisticated sales methodologies through a streamlined interface that lets users change sales strategies at any point in the cycle," Maximizer officials say.
With the company providing customers in mining, construction, marine, electrical power generation, and other industries with integrated products that include new, used, and rental equipment options, running marketing campaigns and managing clients are priorities for Barloworld.
West is the author of Digital Government: Technology and Public Sector Performance and the author of numerous reports on the performance of national and international government Web sites. He'll speak about "Trends in Electronic Government." Beginning July 1, West will be vice president of the Brookings Institution, a non-profit public policy organization in Washington, D.C.
"The addition of text messaging capabilities to our gift and loyalty programs opens up a world of possibilities, particularly where customer loyalty programs are concerned," says Ray Clopton, President of Smart Transaction Systems. "Merchants can enable anything from simple, check-your-balance capabilities to special promotions that are tailored to the customer."
STS officials say merchants are finding it much more difficult to get consumers to put another card in their wallets, so "to address this challenge, STS offers the option of cardless gift or loyalty programs. Merchants can allow their customers to register their mobile phone numbers instead of carrying traditional plastic cards."
"Our decision to go with Storis was easy for us. We found their Vision R8 fully integrated Server Business Solution the best fit for our business model," said Brent Agar, Director of Operations. Specifically, "we were impressed with their Inventory Control functionality, which will provide real-time processing of all activity within our warehouse."
Highland Park will use the Vision R8 Core Products, including Business Intelligence tools, InTouch CRM, Relationship Marketing, Logistics, Customer Service, and others.
Vision R8 sells business applications for Big Ticket retailers, based on a real-time system that integrates aspects of retail operations, from Point of Sale, Supply Chain Management, Business Intelligence Analytics, InTouch CRM, Financial Management and eCommerce.
The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is a good album that jazzheads get their undies in a serious bunch about -- John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. It's a good album, sure, you can plausibly argue that it's his best, but come on, guys, it's not even the best jazz album, much less the Second Coming.
Ribbit, which bills itself "Silicon Valley's first phone company," has announced that Ribbit for Salesforce, an enterprise application to link mobile voice communications and Software as a Service (SaaS) business workflow, has registered more than 250 trial customers since the service became generally available last month.
This milestone comes "months ahead of schedule," Ribbit officials say, following a private beta program involving nearly 100 businesses of different sizes and industries.
Ribbit has garnered third party recognition from a variety of sources. IDG's InfoWorld, an integrated media brand for IT decision makers, has selected Ribbit as one of their Top 10 Tech Startups for 2008.
In addition, the company has also experienced a surge in new enterprise applications being deployed or in development. These new applications, such as a medical application for hospital and triage services, are expanding into a number of mission-critical industries.
Real estate is one market Ribbit for Salesforce has tackled. "We build Salesforce.com-powered tools for the real estate market," said Steve Kompolt, CEO, Real Intelligence, Inc. "Residential agents in particular are very mobile, and timely responses can make or break a deal."
"Customers with increasingly mobile sales forces, and influencers in the SaaS industry, see the immense value of accelerating information flow from the field into their CRM systems," said Greg Goldfarb, GM of Enterprise Applications, Ribbit, adding that the "emerging hot spots are real estate, high tech, and financial services."
Ribbit for Salesforce is an AppExchange Certified Application, and is available to all
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Pervasive Software has announced that National Retirement Partners, a network of independent retirement plan focused advisors, has implemented Pervasive Data Integrator to "move data seamlessly between its partner, client and retirement account database and its CRM tool, Salesforce," Pervasive officials say.
NRP's systems integrator,
With more than 115 member firm locations comprised of independent advisors that provide advisory services for more than 5,500 retirement plans and assets in excess of $55 billion, NRP is a large network of independent financial advisors. Because of the new integration with Salesforce, advisors are able to view current data in a customizable and holistic method found through a proprietary CRM on top of Salesforce.
Pervasive officials say their Data Integrator "helps make large volumes of NRP data available and useful across the organization. NRP's customer data, fed into Salesforce through Pervasive, is used for fund analysis and to pull quarterly analytics.
This process enables the creation of one-page scorecards and other compiled documents that contain needed information to present to clients, Pervasive officials say, adding that "advisors also use Pervasive in the broker/dealer processes for the trade and movement of money, especially when dealing with the exchange of commissions."
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CRM vendor CDC Software, a wholly owned subsidiary of
With more than 2,000 employees and revenue in excess of £500 million in the
Since first implementing an earlier version of CDC Software's cWMS 10 years ago, Schneider Electric consolidated two of its warehouse sites, while at the same time expanding capacity to 50 tons of throughput per day, covering 14,000 product lines, resulting in cost savings and higher productivity.
Andrew Holdroyd, logistics projects manager, said the company "needed to upgrade our warehouse functionality and systems to support our growing business volume and new distribution service in a multi-brand environment."
Michael Shrimplin, logistics development analyst for Schneider Electric, said while the initial go-live "covered an 'as-is' upgrade, the latest version of cWMS will allow us to implement additional functionality... these include capabilities such as cartonisation, which will help improve item scanning, picking accuracy and overall quality control."
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Unica Corporation, a vendor of enterprise marketing management products, reports that it has seen "dramatic growth" in demand for marketing automation products in
Unica's customers include 20 telecom companies as well as more than 40 of
Unica officials attribute their success in
These organizations use Unica's software as their main marketing automation platform.
"Unica's focus on multi-channel marketing is key to the success reflected in these figures," said Marcel Holsheimer, Unica's vice president of marketing for EMEA. "The convergence between on and offline marketing is something that marketers can no longer afford to ignore."
In the January 2008 Forrester Wave: Enterprise Marketing Platforms, Q1 2008, Forrester forecasts annual growth in excess of 20 percent over the next five years for the enterprise marketing platforms market.
Unica officials say they are responding to this market demand by expanding the company's presence throughout
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Adweek is reporting that Satuit Technologies, a provider of CRM software, has hired Strategis, an independent shop in
The agency will work with the fellow Massachusetts-based Satuit to "develop a brand image that will "reflect not only who the company is today, but also what the company aspires to be in the future," said Strategis founder and President George Irish.
According to Adweek, the scope of the work "includes presentations, corporate identity materials, trade show booths, marketing support materials, white papers and case studies as well as a print advertising and direct response campaigns."
Strategis was selected, Adweek says, based on its overall reputation and past work for various clients, there was no review for the business:
"Billings were not disclosed. Given the nature of the work, a media budget in the $500,000-1 million range is likely."
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Newly acquired Coda offices on the East Coast and in the Midwest of the U.S. are intended to allow Agresso North America to improve its service to customers and prospects. The newly combined company is ranked as the sixth largest mid-market ERP vendor globally, with over 3,500 employees across 19 countries.
The firm will continue to pitch its ERP product at the segment of the public and private services sector that it terms BLINC -- Businesses Living IN Change. However, the addition of Coda extends the group's strengths into the SMB and enterprise markets.
"With Coda, we can now address new markets in North America as well as offer additional products and increased service capabilities to existing customers," said Shelley Zapp, President, Agresso North America.
By
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water:
By the way, that random gunfire you may have heard last night came from here in Istanbul as the Turkish national soccer team pulled of a fairly unbelievable win over the Czech Republic to stay alive in Euro 2008.
Down 0-2 after 75 minutes of play, Turkey scored three times in the last 15 minutes, with the last two goals coming from Turkish captain Nihat Kahveci in the last three minutes -- let me repeat that: two goals in the last three minutes -- for a 3-2 win and that rarest of all soccer experiences: A genuinely exciting finish to a match.
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Unica Corporation, which sells enterprise marketing management (EMM) products, and the Sogec Marketing group, a Client Relationship Management specialist, have been selected by Unilever France, which sells home, personal care and food products, to manage its marketing campaigns.
Unilever
According to Unilever officials, Sogec was chosen for its data management expertise. The firm hosts Unilever France's consumer databases, where the data is cleansed and segmented, and is available for use for the Unica Affinium Campaign.
Affinium Campaign, combined with Affinium Campaign eMessage, Unica's application for personalized e-mail and SMS campaigns, allows the creation, testing, optimization, deployment and analysis of Unilever's personalized marketing communications.
Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
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Uniqall has announced that it has signed an exclusive distribution and support agreement covering all of
GridborgAmerica will offer the Gridborg HMP Server product as well as support to all North American customers.
"I have found Gridborg HMP Server the most reliable product. It has saved our parent company countless hours of programming time and money," said Brian Anderson, VP Marketing, GridborgAmerica.
Product marketing in
Drazen Dimoti, CTO of Uniqall, said the agreement will ensure "timely support for our product as well as more focused marketing efforts in the North American market."
Uniqall continues the work on software-only Host Media Processing technology and is increasingly focused on interoperability issues with different VoIP carriers as well as specifics of data-center deployments of Gridborg based applications and services.
Uniqall's headquarters and development are based in
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Telcordia, a vendor in the development of IP, wireline and mobile telecommunication software and services, and Gantek Technologies, a vendor of information and communication technologies in Turkey and the surrounding region, have announced that the Telcordia Number Portability Clearinghouse and Telcordia Number Management System were selected by Avea and Vodafone to facilitate number porting in Turkey.
In early 2007
Avea and Vodafone then donated the product to
The Gantek-Telcordia team was selected based on Gantek's experience in the telecommunications sector and Telcordia's "number portability implementations expertise, customer base and readiness," Telcordia officials say.
System implementation and testing needed to be completed in120 days, which has already been accomplished.
"We understand the local culture and unique operating environment in
The Telcordia and Gantek relationship was created to provide local access to Telcordia's number portability products.
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Agresso, an ERP vendor, has expanded its presence in


