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 U.S. based Salesforce.com customers using Professional Edition and above.

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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, Echo Lane, used Pervasive integration to develop a data integration product to "support NRP's business growth and provide its network of advisors a competitive advantage," NRP officials say.

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 China's CDC Corporation, has announced that Schneider Electric has gone live with its upgrade to cWMS Release 10, a warehouse management system part of the CDC Supply Chain suite.

With more than 2,000 employees and revenue in excess of £500 million in the U.K., Schneider sells electrical distribution and automation control products and services in the country and has rapidly expanded its logistics operations over the past 10 years.

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 Europe as well as Asia Pacific, resulting in an increase in revenue of more than 100 percent in those regions for the first six months of fiscal year 2008 compared to the same period one year before.

Unica's customers include 20 telecom companies as well as more than 40 of Europe's financial services organizations, including what company officials characterize as "half of the Forbes 30 top-ranking businesses in the financial services category."

Unica officials attribute their success in Europe to "both new and continued user adoption by Bank of Ireland, BBVA, Commerzbank, Fortis, ING, Nationwide Building Society, O2 Germany, Unilever and Bel Group," among others.

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 Europe. In addition to its EMEA headquarters in the UK, the company also has offices in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain.

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Adweek is reporting that Satuit Technologies, a provider of CRM software, has hired Strategis, an independent shop in Stoughton, Massachusetts as its first lead agency.

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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