July 2008 Archives

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a couple Dexter Gordon '60s albums First Coffee downloaded from iTunes, Dexter Calling and A Swingin' Affair - the latter not to be confused with Sinatra's, of course:

 

Wow, was Cuil ever the technoflop. I mean, that's down there with Microsoft 's Bob and www.ryanleaf.com. What, they just want to be taken over by Microsoft? Showing off their pretty interface? Hard to imagine they want to be taken seriously after putting out a product that brings back search results like that. It's good for more magazine-style searches, like "New Zealand" or "Bob Dylan," but don't try asking who was the tsar of Russia in 1837 or anything like that.

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Sydney-based Tieman Industries has announced a deal with CRM vendor Epicor, choosing Epicor's end-to-end enterprise resource planning (ERP) product to "support the company's needs."

 

The product will be implemented with the assistance of Epicor partner COGITA.

 

Tieman sells transport and material handling equipment from liquid road tankers, warehouse dock products through to their truck tail lifts and vehicle disability access equipment. But hey, you already knew that.

 

The Epicor product is expected to provide "increased visibility to Tieman across the entire supply chain," company officials say, from marketing and sales, production and planning, sourcing and procurement and management.

 

Epicor offered Tieman "a partnership into the future," said Dale Tieman, joint Managing Director for Tieman Industries. "Epicor had the best product to fit our business needs."

 

Epicor is designed to work with make-to-order and mixed-mode manufacturing and distribution companies. Built on a service-oriented architecture, Epicor "enables continuous performance and lean initiatives" and "real-time connectivity between supply-chain applications and partners," company officials say.

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According to industry journal BNamericas, Alejandro Valdés, the telecommunications research manager for IDC Mexico, said that roughly 30 percent of Latin American companies will increase investments in CRM and ERP software technologies this year "to improve their mobility."

 

Valdés based his comments on the results of a recent IDC study, "Latin America Wireless & Mobile Solutions 2008." The study surveyed 460 business executives in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico "regarding their use of IT devices, applications, services, operators, mobile technologies, platforms, operating systems, and purchase processes."

 

95 percent of the executives said mobility was "important in their day-to-day operations," BNamericas reported, as "more than half said they spend at least 10 percent of their workweek outside the office, while 34 percent said they spent between 11-49 percent of their time outside the office."

 

Valdés told the journal that companies are particularly turning to mobile CRM and ERP technologies as a means to improve customer satisfaction. "Mobility means having access to information regardless of the place, time, user, or device," he told BNamericas. "The concept of mobility is not only limited to the use of a wireless network. A person can be mobile by having access to company information or databases through devices such as PCs."

 

About 25 percent of companies surveyed in 2007 had adopted CRM and ERP software, percentages which increased to 38 percent for CRM and 54 for ERP in 2008.

 

The study found that 31 percent of companies said they will increase their CRM investments during the next year, and roughly 26 percent will increase ERP expenditures.

 

"Companies are realizing that, by incorporating mobile technology, they will be able to attract more business," Valdés remarked, adding that "It is not used as it was before. It is a tool, a way to keep clients."

 

IDC recently estimated that the overall Latin American CRM market will grow 15 percent this year, with an annual compound growth rate of 12.4 percent between 2007 and 2012. Brazil is a key market, with strong growth expected in Mexico and Chile.

IDC expects that sales of ERP products in Latin America are expected to grow 18.2 percent this year and surpass $1 billion.

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According to Phoenix Business Journal, Flypaper Studio has rolled out its Flypaper Pro subscription, with more advanced services available for businesses than its free download.

 

The subscription, priced annually at $195, allows for what company officials call "a more interactive version of the program that develops Web sites and training systems that require advanced Flash computer programming."

 

Flypaper Pro lets users track viewer statistics and capture data and includes features to improve the presentation. The company is run by the team that developed ACT! and SalesLogix CRM software.

 

"When we were developing CRM applications, the focus was using software to sell more efficiently. Now, the name of the game is using the Web to sell more effectively," said Pat Sullivan, CEO of Flypaper.

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Clinton, Massachusetts-based Clinton Savings Bank has announced the selection of CRM vendor Open Solutions's imaged-based item processing product, ISCheck, to streamline its check processing operations.

 

Established in 1851, Clinton Savings Bank was, bank officials say, "the first bank to open in the Clinton community," adding that "since its inception, the bank has grown to more than $463 million in assets with more than 34,000 client accounts."

 

Clinton Savings already uses The Complete Banking Solution, cView, interactive voice response, loan origination and the financial accounting suite from Open Solutions. "We were in need of a system that would compliment our existing Open Solutions data processing platform," said Michael Tenaglia, CIO of Clinton Savings Bank.

 

Open Solutions' image-enabled item processing system "drives a wide range of check-processing transports and streamlines a financial institution's operations," Open officials say.

 

Tim Clewley, senior vice president and general manager, Imaged Payment Technologies Group, said with imaging technology banks can "implement products to provide the most cost efficient clearing path, provide unlimited access to image archives, combat fraud or increase fee income."

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Management products vendor Inovis has partnered with Pervasive, which sells data management and integration software, to "expand the number of adaptors Inovis offers for integration with packaged and on-demand enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management applications," according to Inovis officials.

 

In partnership with Pervasive, Inovis will enhance integration with applications such as Salesforce.com, Oracle Siebel OnDemand, Sybase v15, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, Pivotal CRM, Sage, AP NetWeaver XI, RightNow, NetSuite and others.

 

Mike Hoskins, general manager of integration products at Pervasive, said the "vision" of simplifying complex business community interactions and collaboration from Inovis is "a natural fit" for Pervasive's technology.

 

"Together," he said, "Inovis and Pervasive can deliver the power of agile integration to customers in multiple markets worldwide."

 

The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is Hootie and the Blowfish's Cracked Rear View. I'm not ashamed to admit it:

 

A study by the Association of German Engineers (VDI) showed that "half of all German companies do not make use of customer relationship management systems (CRM-systems)," according to the study's sponsors.

 

In most companies, the study found, there is not a systematic controlling of the bidding process -- "75 percent of companies said that bid proposal management is a usual everyday process which is not systematically planned," VDI officials said, adding that "this fact shows that there is still a lot of potential for improvement in this process."

 

Many companies consider customer relation management to be "quite unimportant" -- study officials said that about 20 percent of respondents said that they do not have any particular measures strengthening their relations with customers.

 

In a fairly surprising finding, and maybe something got lost in translation here, the study's sponsors said "one quarter of businesses do not measure their business success regularly." Just reading off the cue cards here, folks, but First Coffee would be open to correction on that stat.

 

80 percent of those companies interviewed are faced with the requirement of more individual and more rapid products which in general increase the cost of bid proposal management, the study found, adding that "to customers, quality and value for money are more important than a price."

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Vettro, a vendor of mobile on-demand business applications, has announced it has joined the HP Software ISV Marketplace Referral Program to accelerate the adoption of its mobile products for HP Service Manager 7.0. Vettro now has access to HP's portfolio of services and content.   

 

As a mobile applications provider, Vettro can "address all phases of the service deployment cycle," said Matt Finkelstein, Vettro's vice president of product management. "We are pleased to work with HP in this initiative."

 

"Customers can reduce costs by decreasing the time it takes to resolve and prevent service issues," said Brad Kern, vice president of worldwide alliances, software, HP. "HP's collaboration with Vettro allows our customers to access HP Service Manager on a mobile product platform."

 

Earlier this year Vettro announced mobile support for HP Service Manager 7.0 enabling IT organization to increase productivity, improve service level agreements, and better measure IT contribution to the bottom line.

 

Vettro's mobile application for HP Service Manager is packaged with a graphical configuration utility that provides an install directly into the HP Service Manager environment. Data is connected to and from the Vettro mobile IT Service Management application without any custom coding.

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Apisphere, a vendor of location-awareness services for mobile business applications, has announced it will be integrating location-aware field force automation capabilities with ICOMMM's infrastructure asset management software, which provides monitoring and support capabilities for water distribution and sanitary system infrastructures.

 

Customers will see ROI "in the form of faster response times and lower fuel expenditures thanks to the more efficient deployment of service vehicles and crews," Apisphere officials say.

 

ICOMMM's technology is used to assess maintenance and capital improvements requirements and helps to protect water and sanitary system infrastructure. It is integrated with geographical information systems and ties in mapping with work management tools. 

 

Apisphere's Geo-Enabled Mobility platform will be integrated with ICOMMM's infrastructure asset management software to enhance its location-awareness capabilities. The product will target geographical information in real-time, helping maintenance crews access specific relevant information when assessing infrastructure requirements. 

 

"Our utility customers require accurate, immediate data to maintain water and sanitary systems, and to quickly respond to service calls and emergency situations," said Steven Line, CEO of ICOMMM.

 

Apisphere's GEM platform will give ICOMMM's customers navigation capabilities including directions to service stops, route optimization, mobile resource location and tracking, and will automate work assignments based on where available resources are located.

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InsideView has released SalesView for Landslide, a bundled business search and intelligence application available to all Landslide Technologies customers. 

 

SalesView calls itself a ''socialprise application." Company officials explain that it's "designed to use social data in the enterprise by bringing the insights gained from both subscription-based and user-generated sources." 

 

Landslide used InsideView's iView platform APIs and mash-ups to integrate SalesView into their Sales Workstyle Solution in a matter of weeks. SalesView business search and intelligence is now available to all Landslide customers as an embedded, "always-on" application, company officials say.

 

"With InsideView's socialprise application, Landslide's customers can now use data on the social Web to identify opportunities... and speed up their sales cycle," said Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies.

 

SalesView, InsideView's flagship application, brings together social data with enterprise-grade search and intelligence capabilities. Landslide Technologies, Inc. is privately held with headquarters in Pittsburgh. InsideView is privately held and venture-backed by Emergence Capital Partners, Greenhouse Capital Partners and Rembrandt Venture Partners. InsideView sales force automation partners include Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Microsoft and Landslide Technologies.

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BakBone Software, a vendor of heterogeneous integrated data protection products, has announced that its Channel Advantage Partner Program has new elements to help Channel Partners use BakBone.

 

The BakBone Channel Advantage Program's initiatives "reflect BakBone's ongoing commitment to be responsive and easy to engage," according to BakBone officials.

 

Channel Partners now get what BakBone officials say are "greater financial rewards, more streamlined communication, a redesigned partner portal, online certification classes, and a zero-risk proof-of-concept campaign that enables potential customers to test drive a full version of NetVault: Backup before they buy it."

 

BakBone has also recently introduced full adoption of VMware technology and techniques, support for SharePoint, enhanced Oracle database protection and real-time data protection for Exchange, SQL and Windows file system data.

 

Mark Williams, vice president of North America Sales, BakBone, said they offer Channel Partners the opportunity to "work with a company that doesn't compete with them in the sales cycle."

 

Built on the existing BakBone channel program, the new initiatives include new program requirements, new program benefits as well as "a redesigned training and certification curriculum, including online certification," company officials say.

 

There's also a zero-risk proof-of-concept program that allows users to try NetVault: Backup for 30 days with a technical expert onsite to perform installation at no cost to the potential customer.

 

By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is underrated jazz pianist Bill Evans's "NYC's No Lark:"

 

XON officials say the firm has become the first user in Africa of Microsoft's new Dynamics AX 2009 business management product and enterprise suite.

Microsoft released the suite, which offers capabilities for multisite organizations to streamline processes, reduce operational costs and other functions, in June.

"We have 40 people across eight companies and three national offices using Microsoft's ERP system," says Bart van Buynder, CFO of the XON Group of companies. "We are using a total of six modules that our business partner, XON, deployed first in a test environment before going live."

XON sells information and communication technology products, and operates networking and security, ERP and CRM business products, infrastructure, maintenance and other services throughout South Africa.

"We have used Microsoft Dynamics AX since version 1.5 was released in 1999," says van Buynder, adding "which is when we became a value-added reseller of the product through what was then Damgaard, which was subsequently acquired by Microsoft."

Jumana Helal, Microsoft Dynamics group lead at Microsoft SA, said employees using traditional ERP systems "have had to wade through inefficient, time-intensive steps -- enter transactional data, run reports, analyse reports -- before they can do their jobs."

 

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Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council officials say they have chosen Anite to help the Council's Housing Department deliver services to its customers.

 

The Council is implementing an integrated suite of social housing products from Anite as part of a £250,000 system overhaul scheduled to be complete by December.

Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown has updated the way it retains information about its 4,200 social housing properties. Traditionally records and information such as stock control, rents, repairs or housing allocations were kept in numerous disparate local databases many unconnected, could not be cross-referenced and were difficult to maintain.

The new system from Anite will capture and store property information in one central place that can be accessed by all housing employees, providing them with a better overview of any individual case.

The Anite system works by storing all information centrally, allowing employees to reconcile and access up to date information about cases, and cross reference information that has an impact on the decision making process. For example, information about maintenance requests can be monitored against rent arrears, or information about anti-social cases against housing allocation lists.

Anite's open Adaptors will allow interoperability with Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown's chosen CRM product.

 

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Okay, just because First Coffee is your friend, I'm telling you to check out ForRent.com, an apartment resource for searching apartments nationwide and division of Dominion Enterprises. Seems they were running an "If Only Your Apartment Furniture Could Talk" video contest.

 

The winning videos on WinApartmentFuriture.com were selected from more than 50 submissions created by ForRent.com enthusiasts from around the country. Each made a short video creatively telling ForRent.com, through the eyes and voice of their apartment furniture, why they should win $10,000.

The grand prize winner, Brendan Walsh, a 20 year-old student from Steubenville, Ohio, majoring in digital media production at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, contributed the winning video, "Furniture Talk." I know most of this kind of thing is pretty stupid, but you'd be amazed how good some of them are -- First Coffee's favorite is "Sectional Healing," but then again my favorite movies are Airplane! and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. See them at http://www.winapartmentfurniture.com/video/view/26.

"Social media is my life," says Walsh. The consumer video contest was intended to "use the power of social media, extend the reach of the ForRent.com brand and to establish a long-term relationship with brand advocates," ForRent officials say.

 

Social media is leading the shift in the way consumers experience brands. According to a 2008 Nielsen study, 78 percent of consumers trust the opinion of peers over all other information sources and advertising.

 

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Knowledge Integration Dynamics, a Johannesburg-based company selling business intelligence, data warehousing and products, has concluded a partnership agreement with Apatar to distribute its open source data integration suite in South Africa.

 

KID will train and offer support services for the Apatar integration package for integration projects across Mac OS, Windows, and Linux.

 

"South Africa is a developing region, and it is important for us to fill the open source data integration niche," says Sergei Lobanov, Alliance Enabler at Apatar.

 

Apatar already has in excess of 100 users in South Africa and expects KID to rapidly expand its penetration of the local market. KID is Apatar's first South African partner.

 

The companies say they'll be targeting small and mid-sized companies in South Africa with a need for a free, easy-to-use extract, transform, and load tool. They'll be pushing Apatar's visual job designer and visual transformation mapper, which are 100 percent Java-based and "obviate the need for coding of any kind," Apatar officials say, reducing the need for technical skills.

 

Apatar enables connectivity with Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, GoldMine and any JDBC data sources, Amazon S3, Flickr, StrikeIron and CDYNE Web services, and more.

 

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QuickArrow, a vendor of SaaS Services Automation, has announced that they will be partnering with RTM Consulting on a new Webinar designed to provide SMB technology services providers with methods and techniques for competition.

 

The free, one-hour Webinar will take place on Wednesday, July 30, at 12:00 p.m. CDT.

 

During the Webinar, Resource Management expert and RTM Consulting President Randy Mysliviec will discuss how the small and medium sized technology consulting and professional services provider can turn perceived competitive weaknesses, relative to much larger companies, into competitive strengths.

 

"SMBs have considerable competitive advantages due to their speed of execution, specialization of resources, and simplicity of their business models but yet do not always take advantage of these and other significant strengths," said Mysliviec.

 

This Webinar builds on QuickArrow's continued focus on the growing SMB market segment. In March of this year, QuickArrow launched a new Small Business offering.

 

"SMB leaders in the Professional Services space face a unique set of challenges in competing with large, multi-national services providers," said QuickArrow COO, Kevin Bury, adding "traditionally, however, this group has received relatively little attention from P.S. thought leaders and strategists."

 

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Essentia, a developer of software platforms and products for online communities and commerce, has unveiled a new flagship product, EssentiaESP, described by company officials as a community-engagement platform designed for commercial open source.

 

The product is billed by company officials as unifying "social networking, community management, and commerce with content management, software development and collaboration in a platform that supports multiple CRM integrations with administrator defined code for analytics and tracking."

The company also announced the initial deployment of EssentiaESP for the 85,000-member JasperForge community, the open source development portal for the Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite.

 

Currently, company officials say, the options that are available for open source communities are to either roll their own custom environments using point tools or rely on collaborative software development environments "that have community and commerce added as an afterthought."

 

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Ramones' End Of The Century:

 

CRM and other software vendor Epicor Software has reported preliminary financial results for its second quarter ended June 30, 2008.

 

Epicor President and CEO Thomas Kelly said total non-GAAP revenue was "in line with our guidance," with cash flow from operations in excess of $35 million and free cash flow of approximately $13 million.

 

Kelly said Epicor "addressed the three issues that negatively impacted our 2008 first quarter, correcting the events that led to shortfalls in our consulting and international business and making some progress on improving our retail performance," noting that the vendor "fell short due to lower than expected retail license revenues."

 

The vendor is adjusting their second half outlook "to reflect a more cautious approach to our retail business," Kelly said, "as well as to reflect additional investment ahead of the launch of Epicor 9."

 

GAAP revenue for the 2008 second quarter was $127.9 million, with net income of $1.3 million, or $0.02 per diluted share. This compares to 2007 second quarter GAAP revenue of $105.7 million, and GAAP net income of $6.3 million, or $0.11 per diluted share.

 

Non-GAAP  revenue for the 2008 second quarter was $130.6 million, with non-GAAP net income of $9.9 million, or $0.17 per diluted share. 2008 second quarter non-GAAP net income excludes approximately $8.9 million of expenses related to amortization of intangibles and $1.9 million in stock-based compensation, and includes the benefit of $2.6 million of revenue that would have been recorded if NSB's deferred revenue would not have been adjusted to fair value as a result of purchase accounting.

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Egenera has announced that electronic trading systems vendor NYFIX has standardized on infrastructure virtualization products from Egenera.

 

"We needed a platform with high availability and management capabilities to optimize our operations," said Don Henderson, CTO at NYFIX. "With Egenera systems, we're able to provision servers and bring applications to market faster, and with less infrastructure."

 

Egenera systems are platforms that "eliminate the need to rigidly dedicate servers to applications," according to the Egenerians: "Instead, Egenera's Processing Area Network replaces server infrastructure with software, and repurposes and reallocates virtual and physical servers on demand."

 

NYFIX currently uses Egenera BladeFrame EX systems, which include 168 Processing Blade modules based on both Intel and AMD processors.

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RightNow Technologies has announced that Allen E. Snyder joined its board of directors this week. Snyder was appointed to fill a Class II vacancy on the Board of Directors, to serve until RightNow's 2011 annual meeting of stockholders.

 

He also has been appointed to serve on the compensation committee of RightNow's board of directors. Snyder is currently the CEO of Aepona, a leading supplier of telecom service layer products and products to telcos globally.

 

Prior to joining Aepona, Snyder served as CEO of Carrier Access and COO of Openwave Systems. He also held senior executive positions at Oracle Corporation and Digital Equipment Corporation, with responsibilities for product development, sales, customer service, software support, and professional services.

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CRM+ Consulting, a Tampa -based CRM software consulting company and authorized reseller of Sage CRM, has announced the launch of an optimized Web site developed by Hall Web Services of Scarborough, Maine.

The site "keeps the look and feel of the previous design," consultancy officials say, while "implementing Hall's guidelines for organic search engine friendliness and local search optimization."

 

The new site offers resources on Sage CRM Solutions, including Sage Software-produced white papers, demos, and articles geared towards current and prospective customers alike.

CRM+ Consulting officials say they hope the new site "will serve as a resource for prospective customers of their customer relationship management products.

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Open Solutions, a vendor of data processing technologies for banks and credit unions, has partnered with Andera to offer online account opening and funding technologies to Open Solutions' client base. Andera sells such products to the financial services industry.

 

As consumer behavior trends move toward the online channel, Open Solutions officials believe, "the ability to instantly open and fund new accounts electronically is increasingly becoming a top priority for U.S. financial institutions, and Celent analysts forecast a dramatic acceleration in the pace of industry adoption over the next three years."

 

Online account opening is "of great interest to many of our clients," said Mike Nicastro, SVP and CMO from Open Solutions.

 

Andera's product features an 8-10 minute process in which consumers can apply for, be approved for, open and fund multiple banking products in a single session. The product includes such features as electronic signatures, real-time core integration, integration with a variety of third-party risk and data providers, intelligent cross-selling and funding via ACH, credit card or debit card.

 

More than 200 financial institutions have selected the Andera platform, including eight mutual clients with Open Solutions.

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Akken, which describes itself as an "All-in-One on-demand staffing software and recruiting software provider," has released an upgraded invoice design editor.

 

Billing it as "one of the most automated, flexible invoicing tools available on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform," the upgrade is included for all Akken Staffing users at no additional charge.

With the upgraded version "staffing and recruiting companies can accommodate a client's specific billing requirements and create customized, professional invoices with just a few clicks of the mouse," the Akkenites say.

"This upgrade makes it simple for Akken Staffing users to create invoice templates to exact requirements," says Akken's vice president of engineering, Prakash Akkineni. "The biggest impact is the time our users save in the invoicing process, reducing the amount of time to generate invoices from hours to seconds."

Akken's invoice design editor lets Akken Staffing users design a template once, as it "pulls the information from the system to create hundreds of invoices simultaneously with one click," company officials say. Users are able to make changes to these invoice templates in real time. For companies using multi-million dollar systems, a change of this type would take days, if not weeks, to implement.

Akken's flagship offering, Akken Staffing, combines e-mail, applicant tracking, CRM, job management, accounting, human resource management, and reporting.

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After implementing a CRM system and other IT products, officials of the city of Newcastle in England says it has been named "among the top three cities in Europe in terms of resident satisfaction on a range of issues, including employment, schools, housing and health services as compared with other major European cities."

 

Continual improvement of service levels from the City Council has a role to play in maintaining the quality of life, council officials say, "as does its IT systems.

 

In 2000 Newcastle City Council pledged to deliver services in a new, customer-oriented way, giving citizens a one-stop access to key council services, regardless of what systems were involved.

 

To address its commitment, the Council planned to establish six walk-in customer service centers able to provide information and deal with requests across all council services. Five centers have now been delivered and the sixth will follow this fall. At the heart of these centers is a CRM application provided by Lagan.

Following a review of IT and related services, the Council put in place a major transformation program to replace the in-house built mainframe applications for Council Tax, housing and benefits with off-the-shelf, best of breed packages.

As Ron Hillaby, application services manager at Newcastle City Council, says "we got to know more about integration, and realized that as we changed to the new packaged systems, substantial work would be required to get the integration in place."

 

Hillaby said the point-to-point products they had previously employed with the CRM system "were not the best way forward. We also became aware that the IT industry was starting to move to SOA and we were made aware of products like Sonic by the Integration Workstream leader on the National CRM project."

They laid its SOA foundation with Progress Sonic ESB (enterprise service bus), providing loosely-coupled integration between Council Tax and CRM services.

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is David Bowie's Young Americans album. Emotionless emotion -- how Bowie, but weirdly it works. When it's over we'll cue up Dolly Parton's The Grass Is Blue for some down-home goodness:

 

ProTrak International has announced an upgrade to their CRM platform, ProTrak Advantage CRM Enterprise 5.0, available now.

 

With the new version, clients may customize the look and feel of their ProTrak screens. The ProTrak client Administrator can add new user defined data fields, including look-up lists, numeric, text and memo fields. In addition, fields may be removed and the entire screen layout re-arranged, company officials say.

 

The Fund Detail option lets users capture data on the funds they are tracking, including fund structure, fees, redemption parameters and risk measures. It also includes the Mail Distribution, Relationship Associations and Activity / Follow-up tracking features.

 

The Sales Opportunity Pipeline has been extended to allow automatic creation or updating of multiple opportunities from a single Activity Note.

 

A number of new formatted reports and graphs have been added in ProTrak Advantage 5.0. Examples include asset-related reports (assets by product, region and investor type), account holdings (ERISA holdings and account / share class holdings by fund) and pipeline opportunity reports (opportunities by product / fund, region and salesrep).

 

Calling Advantage 5.0 a "major release," Simon Koziel, ProTrak's President, said a major emphasis of the company's effort for this release "has been the addition of new tools that give end users more control over their ProTrak desktop without requiring IT support."

 

The product is marketed as CRM for investment managers, hedge funds, fund-of-hedge funds and private equity firms.

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Amdocs Limited has reported that for its fiscal third quarter ended June 30, 2008, revenue was $820.3 million, an increase of 15.2 percent from last year's third quarter.

 

Net income on a non-GAAP basis was $132.5 million, or $0.61 per diluted share, excluding acquisition-related costs, equity-based compensation expense and net of related tax effects of $31.8 million. This compares to non-GAAP net income of $120.6 million, or $0.54 per diluted share, in the third quarter of fiscal 2007 -- excluding costs and taxes of $32.4 million.

 

The company's GAAP net income was $100.7 million, or $0.46 per diluted share, compared to GAAP net income of $88.2 million, or $0.40 per diluted share, in the third quarter of fiscal 2007. Free cash flow for the quarter was $83.2 million, comprised of cash flow from operations of $115.1 million less $31.9 million in net capital expenditures and other.

 

Dov Baharav, CEO of Amdocs Management Limited, said he continues to see "strong demand" at this time, citing "macro-economic uncertainties which may have an impact on our results in the future."

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Sage Software India has announced its new Sage Accpac Integrated Suite with the availability of version 5.5 of its Sage Accpac ERP  business management system.

 

The new suite configuration integrates out-of-box ERP with Sage CRM, company officials say, adding that the new Sage Accpac Integrated Suite "also provides analytical dashboards in Sage Accpac ERP 5.5 and offers a free bundled pack of Insight Business Intelligence tool."

 

"Sage Accpac will enhance the end user experience by introducing 'easy to use' business analytics which can transform business efficiencies," said Thomas Abraham, Managing  Director, Sage Software India.

 

Sage officials say the suite "combines the benefits of ERP and CRM" for integrated front and back office business processes, giving users "insight into what is happening within the business and enhancing collaboration between customer-facing and back office workers."

 

Version 5.5's new dashboard feature provides snapshots of the business designed to help managers "analyze, predict, and manage business performance," company officials say.

 

In addition to dashboards, version 5.5 provides such enhancements as a new Account Rollup feature that supports account consolidation in the general ledger, multicurrency revaluation options, and streamlined processes for managing job tracking.

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In what's described as "the first annual survey of its membership and other open source software and services companies," Open Solutions Alliance officials say they found "much optimism despite a murky economy," with 83 percent of participants saying they would see "a year-over-year increase in revenue in 2008 of open source related software and services."

 

78 percent of survey participants said "the affordable price of open source software" is motivating their customers.

 

The survey also revealed that open source companies are serious about collaboration. Nearly all of the survey respondents -- 97 percent -- reported that they have "active partnerships" with other open source software and services companies.

 

The average survey participant had 10 such partnerships.

 

"We knew that collaboration was important to open source companies, but this statistic was surprising," said Dominic Sartorio, senior director of product management for SpikeSource and president of the Open Solutions Alliance.

 

The survey also shows that 85 percent of participants sell open source products or services that run on Microsoft Windows or otherwise interoperate with Microsoft products.

 

In all 46 companies responded to the survey, both OSA members and non-members.

 

The Open Solutions Alliance is a nonprofit, vendor neutral consortium dedicated to driving the interoperability and adoption of comprehensive open products.

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Bestoutcome Limited, a UK-based consultancy specializing in IT project and program management, has acquired the whole of the issued share capital of ISA Limited, a supplier of business applications built on Microsoft technology platforms.

 

ISA's customer relationship management products are based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM and its software development capability is to Microsoft Gold Certified Partner standards, ISA officials say.

With a forecast this year of annual revenue in excess of £5 million, "a combined IT services enterprise has been created" from the agreement signed on July 18th, according to Bestoutcome officials.

 

Barry Jackson and David Walton, respectively chairman and managing director of Bestoutcome, will join the ISA board, and Thomas Payne, managing director of ISA, will join the consultancy's board.

The acquisition will pool both companies' resources, including "strategic consultancy, execution, and ongoing support," officials of both firms say: "Marketing and sales will be aimed at the retail, finance, media, healthcare, distribution, and construction industries, and other vertical markets."

...

 

Regent Education, a vendor of financial aid management SaaS products for higher education, has announced that it has formed a partnership with TopSchool, a vendor of administrative products for small to mid-size higher education institutions.

TopSchool sells a student lifecycle management product consisting of a student information system at its core, integrated with a customer relationship management system (CRM), student and faculty portal, reporting suite, and support services.

 

Through the partnership, Regent Enterprise will be integrated into TopSchool's SLM as the financial aid module.

 

Matthew Schnittman, TopSchool's President & CEO, said with complementary delivery models, "our partnership with Regent supports our goal to provide institutions with products to serve their students and manage their operations."

 

TopSchool's SLM system provides an information management product, described by company officials as "a CRM to aggregate and manage leads, a customizable student and faculty portal, a student information system, an ad-hoc reporting suite and a customer service model."

 

 

By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the second cup of coffee today, and the music is The David Crowder Band's "Turkish Delight." FYI, today's First Coffee Fun Fact for those of you who saw the Narnia movie or read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe -- "aslan" is the Turkish word for "lion," and "jadde" is the Turkish word for "witch." C.S. Lewis had traveled in Turkey before writing the book and was impressed with it:

 

Infor Public Sector has announced that the city of Rockford, Illinois, heretofore known to the world as the place in the 1980s which launched a successful petition drive to get The Rolling Stones to play a concert there, to First Coffee's knowledge the only city to ever succeed in that, has selected its community development and regulation software.

 

Infor Hansen CDR, for Building Permits, Code Enforcement, and Neighborhood Development and Planning will be implemented by the city. Used by more than 100 municipalities nationwide, Infor Hansen CDR is designed to help "increase operational efficiency, cross-departmental communication and transparency, and citizen satisfaction."

 

The new software will be integrated with Infor Public Sector's CRM software, used by Rockford since early 2007 to address citizen issues.

 

Rockford officials said the selection of Infor Hansen CDR was due in part to Infor Public Sector's online access tool, Infor DynamicPortal, which integrates with the call-in and citizen service functionality of the CRM product.

 

DynamicPortal provides contractors, developers, and citizens Internet access to the licensing and permitting process. With this system, builders are able to apply for permits, make payments, track progress and status of permits and inspections, and reschedule inspections online, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

 

Rockford citizens can use the online portal to input service requests and check the status of previously submitted items.

 

"We received support from local developers, contractors and builders in favor of implementing the system, to increase the efficiency of conducting business with City Hall," said Glenn Trommels, director of IT for the City of Rockford.

 

Building "on the foundation of our successful CRM implementation," Trommels said, the city "chose to again partner with Infor Public Sector."

 

Previously, Rockford relied on a system using multiple spreadsheets to enter and record data for permits, planning and code enforcement. Rockford processed over 7300 permits in 2007.

 

. . . .

 

Coghead, a platform-as-a-service provider, has introduced a new flat-rate pricing option, as well as Coglet Builder and open API tools which company officials say "together provide a way to give a broad number of users access to a slice of application functionality."

The Limited User pricing model is a flat-rate price of $50 per month letting an unlimited number of users -- customers, prospects, partners, suppliers, Web visitors -- interact with relevant slices of Coghead applications.

 

It's being billed by the Cogheads as "an economical and easy way for businesses to make a piece of their Coghead applications -- such as forms and list data -- widely available to an unlimited audience without logging into Coghead."

 

It's generally designed for users who occasionally access applications, or for applications that have small numbers of active users and a large number of less active users.

 

. . . .

 

Ever Ready Mortar, which sells ready to use mortar to the building trade, has installed the Rostrvm blended call center product to "support its outbound sales and inbound customer service operation," Rostrvm officials say.

 

Several call center technology providers were invited to submit a tender, but Rostrvm Solutions was selected, as Stacey Baillie, Call Centre Manager at Ever Ready Mortar, said: "Rostrvm demonstrated a willingness to meet the requirements on our wish list."  

 

The Rostrvm software suite integrates with Ever Ready Mortar's existing Sage CRM system, allowing the call center to manage both sales campaigns and inbound customer service calls in the form of a blended product from a single easy-to-use database.

 

The system also allows for multiple outbound campaigns to run alongside each other, and can prioritize campaigns and schedule call backs.

 

Rostrvm software has tweaked Ever Ready Mortar to include features for its inbound customer service operation, an identifier allowing agents to provide a personal service, a distance calculator to establish delivery costs and a routing product enabling calls outside of office hours to be routed to the nearest depot.

 

. . . .

 

LoopFuse and Acquia have announced the availability of the LoopFuse OneView integration module for Drupal, designed to let marketing organizations "extend their LoopFuse marketing automation processes across their Drupal Web sites."

 

Using LoopFuse's Web analytics and campaign management capabilities, Drupal site owners can track activities and connect with customers who participate in their community-based Web sites.

 

LoopFuse is the marketing and sales automation suite offering organizations the ability to generate leads from their Web site, score and route leads, marketing campaign capabilities, full Web analytics support, and full CRM integration with most major vendors.

 

Roy Russo, LoopFuse's CEO, noted that "more and more CMOs are seeking to build interactive, community-oriented Web sites to deepen their engagement with customers."

 

The integration between Drupal and LoopFuse OneView will allow LoopFuse customers using Drupal for their content management system to have their Web sites instrumented with LoopFuse tracking, "providing analytics on Web site visitors without the need to modify any Web site code," LoopFuse officials say.

 

It will also allow for the automated capture of Web site registrations within LoopFuse, so marketers can assemble their Web sites and integrate their marketing automation product without relying on their IT department to develop custom applications and integrations from scratch.

 

"As a commercial open source vendor, it's critical for us to automate our marketing processes from initial contact on Acquia.com through to qualified opportunity in our CRM system," said Jeff Whatcott, Acquia's Vice President of Marketing.

 

. . . .

 

NewMarket Latin America has announced UniOne Consulting has signed a contract to implement Oracle's Business Intelligence Suite - Enterprise Edition for Distribuidora de Medicamentos Santa Cruz, a wholesale distributor of pharmaceuticals, medical and surgical supplies throughout Brazil.

 

The project is expected to be multi-phased, and Unione has started on the first phase of the project, scheduled to be complete in January 2009, for the customer's Department of Sales.

 

While UniOne pronounce themselves "excited" about this opportunity, the terms of the contract are being kept confidential at the request of the customer.

 

UniOne, based in Sao Paulo, Brazil, also has an office in Santiago, Chile, and focuses on providing Business Intelligence, as well as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Business Performance Management (BPM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) consulting services throughout Latin America.

 

Tue 7/22/2008 10:34 AM

By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is something different -- Poison's "Something to Believe In." Went to an 80's theme going-away party here in Istanbul last week for a friend moving back to Finland. First Coffee dressed in argyle and khaki with an alligator shirt and Topsiders -- luckily I haven't changed my wardrobe appreciably since 1985, I was all set -- and hair bands a la Poison were well-represented.

 

CRM vendor Salesforce.com has announced that Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, a Fortune 500 financial services membership organization, is standardizing on Salesforce for Wealth Management.

 

The company is deploying Salesforce for Wealth Management and will use the Force.com Platform and the Force.com AppExchange to build custom applications designed to "improve client engagement as well as the productivity of financial representatives," according to Thrivent officials.

 

Thrivent Financial is one of the 43,600 companies comprising the Salesforce.com customer base as of April 30.

 

Betsy Ordal, vice president of Field Development at Thrivent, said Salesforce was chosen for its "rich functionality, delivery model and for the positive reviews we heard from other firms."

 

The organization is using the Force.com Platform to customize the product and integrate it with existing applications, including its corporate e-mail system. Thrivent Financial is also using Force.com AppExchange applications.

 

. . . .

 

Bango has unveiled technology designed to help Web site owners "measure the value of mobile sites," by counting unique visitors browsing their site, company officials say.

 

This new site analysis capability in the latest release of Bango Analytics, v3.0 "complements existing campaign analysis functionality and features enhanced image tag technology to identify unique users," the Bangovians explain.

 

Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango, said with this new version, "mobile Web site owners can now get a real picture of the value of their mobile Web site."

 

With site analysis added to its mobile analytics service, Bango now provides two metrics sought after by site owners -- unique visitors and conversion rates from mobile marketing campaigns.

 

Results of a recent survey of more than 550 mobile Web site owners, commissioned by Bango, found that 80 percent of respondents said "the daily, weekly or monthly number of unique visitors" was the "most important" data point for them.

 

Other important data were "conversion rates and effectiveness of mobile marketing," which polled 71 percent, "new or repeat visitors" 58 percent and "information about the handsets your visitors use" was cited by 54 percent.

 

Bango provides two techniques for capturing mobile metrics: link tracking for campaign analysis and page tracking for site analysis. 

 

Bango officials describe the new site analysis feature as "easy to implement -- one line of html code is placed in each page to be tracked without the need to install anything on the server. A site summary report provides a high level view on the key metrics for a mobile Web site, including unique visitor numbers."

 

Capturing an accurate picture of the number of unique visitors is more complex on mobile than on the PC Web, since "cookies aren't reliable on mobile phones and IP addresses belong to the network operator rather than the end user," Bango officials say. They explain that for each individual that clicks on an ad or browses a site, a privacy protected Bango User ID is created, compiled through WAP gateway profiling, data from browser analysis, session information and network interactions. 

 

This unique user ID lets Bango distinguish between new and repeat users.

 

. . . .

 

Opera Software's State of the Mobile Web report, just released, finds that six out of the most popular phones models for Web browsing with Opera Mini are from Nokia, two are from Sony Ericsson, one is from BlackBerry, and one is from Samsung.

 

In the United States, nine of the top 10 phones for Opera Mini are BlackBerries. The report can be viewed in its entirety from http://www.opera.com/mobile_report/.

 

"People want the Web on their phone regardless of the type of phone they have," said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. "Our list of top phones shows both smartphones and feature phones. It proves that given the right experience, many more people will use the Web on their phone. Accessing the Web on your phone is not a luxury limited to who has the most expensive phone model."

 

The State of the Mobile Web, June 2008 report also finds that usage continues to grow as more consumers find value in accessing full Web content on their mobile phones. People using Opera Mini viewed more than 3.2 billion pages in June, up 9.4 percent over May.

 

Completely free for anyone to download and use, Opera Mini is available from http://www.operamini.com.

 

. . . .

 

EasyLobby, a vendor of Secure Visitor Management and photo ID badge printing products, has announced the appointment of Chris Selland as Vice President, Marketing and Business Development.

 

Selland, the man with the greatest radio voice alive, will lead EasyLobby's corporate identity and product positioning, demand generation, corporate communications, and strategic alliance initiatives.

 

"Chris will be a major catalyst to help expand EasyLobby's brand awareness worldwide, and grow our global network of customers and partners," said Howard Marson, CEO of EasyLobby. "He brings a deep understanding of branding and marketing, is a well-known evangelist for customer success."

 

Chris joins EasyLobby with experience in Marketing, Business Development, and Corporate Development strategies for a number of technology and research companies, including SoundBite Communications, Yankee Group, Aberdeen Group (now Harte-Hanks) and others.

 

EasyLobby was founded in 1997 to sell software products for electronic, secure visitor management.

 

. . . .

 

"For many prospective car buyers, walking into a showroom is considered about as pleasant as having a tooth extracted," auto industry veterans Clint Burns and Kirk Sladen correctly observe, adding that "they anticipate being ambushed at the front door by an overeager sales staff."

 

Burns and Sladen say they have developed a software product designed to make the sales staff more efficient, "eliminating the need for salespeople to hover at the front door."

 

Burns' development of a customer-satisfaction index for veterinarians led to the development of a CRM tool for the auto industry, and then to The Next Up. This Web-based product manages the showroom floor by delivering real-time traffic information and productivity reports. The product also provides a customer count.

 

"Dealerships are seeing increases in sales, even with a down market," said Sladen.

With The Next Up's Web-based and text messaging features, the sales staff is aware of the dealership surroundings at all times. This allows the front of the dealership to have only the necessary sales staff needed and the others to be doing something elsewhere.

 

Sales staff "will now have the time to contact previous customers to follow up, set appointments, act on referrals, and never miss the opportunity to meet new customers," Burns says.

 

"The Next Up is designed for any size dealership," said Burns, "from dealers who sell 40 cars a month to those that sell 1,000."

 

No contract is required for a dealership to use The Next Up; agreements are on a month-to-month basis. The Next Up provides all equipment at no cost.

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Bob Dylan's underrated album of folk and traditional songs, World Gone Wrong. Superior versions of "Jack-A-Roe," "The Lone Pilgrim" and others show that Bob never lost his mastery of folk music:

 

CDC Software has announced the general availability of Pivotal CRM 6.0, described by company officials as "a newly-designed customer relationship management platform based on Microsoft.NET technology."

 

Pivotal CRM 6.0 has a redesigned platform giving users out-of-the box, task-based navigation, forms and portals with "the look and feel of Microsoft applications," and "which have the ability to model complex workflow."

 

Pivotal 6.0 is integrated with Microsoft Outlook (including calendaring, task and e-mail capabilities) within the platform.

 

Mark Williams, CRM architect and team leader at CareerBuilder.com, noted that using the system he was able to "configure the new 'Links' feature to see my Pivotal contacts in Outlook, and I got 'Activities' to show up in both places with bi-directional synching."

 

Pivotal 6.0 also embeds SharePoint, which lets users deploy SharePoint Server 2007 with SharePoint Designer 2007, and lets them implement a new feature in Pivotal 6.0 called SmartPortal, a Pivotal portal which allows IT professionals to set-up pre-defined portals by functional area.

 

For example, a portal can be designed for sales people, customer support representative and others specific to groups within an organization. End users, including mobile users, can then personalize their own home page by adding new Web parts and modifying existing Web parts.

...

 

Sales Simplicity Software, a vendor of sales automation, CRM, marketing and reporting tools for home builders, has announced what company officials call "widening acceptance" of its products among Canadian homebuilders.

 

Since the beginning of the year, SSS officials say, "a growing number of Canadian homebuilders have selected Sales Simplicity Software's applications," joining over 200 Canadian and U.S. builders who use Sales Simplicity Software products.

 

"We are pleased with our success in Canada," says Barry Forbes, president of Sales Simplicity Software. "There are similarities among homebuilders in Canada, Australia and the U.K., and we were able to provide functionality that works in all three of those target markets."

 

Many North American builders are taking the time now to retool and position for what company officials see as "the coming upturn in the housing market." Most of the company's recent clients on both sides of the border are replacing older sales and CRM systems that either haven't met expectations, or aren't prepared for software-based process management.

 

The company also recently announced its Property Management Software, which includes a single-family residential home sales-and-CRM system, and a suite of software products for multi-family and condominium sales.

 

Sales Simplicity Software is based in Chandler, Arizona.

...

 

Software vendor Cincom has announced the availability of its Quotation and Proposal Management product, described by company officials as "the latest component in Cincom's new enterprise sales portal software, called Cincom Acquire." 

The product is designed for companies that sell complex products and services, and "seeks to fill the gaps in traditional CRM- and ERP-based systems such as guided selling, channel and distributor collaboration, sales and product configuration" and other functions, Cincom officials say.
 
The component can be integrated with a product configurator, business rules engine, workflow management, or other components. 

Specifically, the Cincom Acquire Quotation and Proposal Management product provides a centralized quotation database, customer and contact information, knowledge-based document configuration and automated generation of complex proposals based on document templates, among other functions.

 

Cincom Acquire is being marketed to manufacturers selling industrial engineer-to-order or configure-to-order products as a way of streamlining their sales, design, and proposal processes by "delivering product and sales knowledge to the point of sale."

 

It's built on the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server architecture, and uses Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, and Project. It claims "out-of-the-box" integration with SAP, salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and other systems.

...

 

Britain-based sales-i, which describes itself as a "real-time sales acceleration service for front line sales people," has launched its sales intelligence service into the US market.

Since January this year, sales-i has acquired 70 new customers and has signed a deal with Integra, an office supplies and IT dealer group in the UK and Ireland, company officials say. Integra has white labeled the sales-i service, rebranded it as Sales Alert and offers it to Integra members. "Close to 25 Integra dealers have signed up to the service since its launch three months ago," sales-i officials say.

Sales-i officials say they're confident they can mirror their British success in the USA, "and if early signs are anything to go by, it looks like USA business supplies companies will be as enthusiastic about the service as their UK counterparts," company officials say.

 
Kevin McGirl, co-founder of sales-i, said the US office supplies market is "six times larger than the UK, a huge market for sales-i to tap into. We expect sales-i mobile to be a big winner in the US, making information available to front-line sales people on their cell phones and Blackberries."

Sales-i launched sales-i mobile in February this year. The product gives sales professionals visibility of sales information and customer buying alerts delivered to their cell phones.

Sales-i already integrates into CRM systems including Salesforce, Netsuite, Microsoft, ACT and Goldmine.

...

 

Infogain, a vendor of open source products and services, and commercial Linux and middleware provider Red Hat have announced an enterprise reseller agreement.

 

The agreement is described by Infogain officials as "a strategic step to accelerate adoption of Linux and JBoss into the enterprise market." As a certified Red Hat Advanced Partner, Infogain will offer the Red Hat Applications Stack, including enterprise versions of Linux, JBOSS, and Hibernate as well as customized services.

 

Infogain will use this partnership to "help its customers build products with reduction in total cost of ownership," the Infoganians say. Infogain's clients will be able to integrate JBoss Enterprise Middleware into their software product.

 

"The open source initiative is gaining tremendous momentum in the market enterprise, this alliance is a logical step," said Glenn Gramling, Infogain's Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, adding that "Red Hat will integrate with Infogain's open source best practices and methodologies."

...

 

As it appears First Coffee is the only publication online not to offer an opinion on the Brett Favre situation, let's rectify that -- as soon as he asked to come back the Packers should have welcomed him with open arms, of course, and said sorry Aaron, but that's life in the NFL, we'd rather have a Hall of Fame-bound, Super Bowl-winning MVP quarterback under center. He gives them the best chance to win in 2008, and they came pretty close last year. Granted, their season ended on yet another boneheaded Brett Favre play, but without him they're a 7-9 team at best. Now of course, with all the bad blood, they should just trade him and if he doesn't like it, tough beans, he can "retire" again.

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 Kinks' Sleepwalker. I can't decide if this 1977 effort is an uninspired record or simply The Kinks refocusing their career as an arena rock band. Certainly Ray Davies has written better -- far better -- songs than most of those here, but three or four are gems:

 

EtherSpeak Communications has announced the development of a product for ShoreTel's UC system to connect to SIP trunking services "natively," EtherSpeak officials say, meaning ShoreTel customers can now get IP-enabled communications "without any additional investments, hardware or even new firewall or gateway requirements."

 

EtherSpeak's new product, dubbed "SureTrunk," lets ShoreTel customers connect SIP networks with traditional fixed-line PSTN directly. EtherSpeak's product has been certified through ShoreTel's Technology Partner Program and is available to ShoreTel resellers.

 

"We recognized the need in the market for a product that offers added flexibility through integration, yet hedges the risk of additional hardware investments," explains Neil Darling, managing partner at EtherSpeak Communications.

 

As a certified TPP product for ShoreTel's UC products, SureTrunking means customers can mitigate the risk associated with SIP trunking by migrating with or without an enterprise edge device such as local PSTN gateways, ISDN Basic Rate Interfaces or Primary Rate Interfaces.

 

EtherSpeak's SureTrunk is certified for ShoreTel's UC system, version 8.0 and is expected to fully support future software builds.

 

Sandra Gustavsen, senior analyst at TelecomTactics, the Telecom Intelligence Group, noted that "U.S. businesses considering a managed SIP trunking option are motivated primarily by the financial benefits of the product, so a managed product with a predictable monthly cost is appealing."

 

Small businesses, in particular, will appreciate "the ease of adoption -- no start up costs with the EtherSpeak product -- and the benefits that SIP trunking can bring," Gustavsen said, adding that a hosted option may prompt a smaller business to take advantage of SIP trunking since "they can do so without costly risks."

...

 

SpeechTrack.com, an online hosted call recording system, has announced improvements to its Web service during SpeechTrack's beta program.

 

The SpeechTrack service allows users to record, track and access telephone conversations anytime and anywhere using any phone. "If you can get a dial tone, you can use SpeechTrack," states Jim Stockert, Vice President of Sales and Marketing.

 

The product lets the user sort through recorded files online so they can find a file easier. Users can delete files that they no longer need and keep their files better organized and up to date.

 

The search functionality also was built out of feedback from the SpeechTrack beta users. It allows SpeechTrack users to search on five different call information tags associated with the recordings -- Call ID, User ID, Phone Number, Date of the Statement, and the Name that the SpeechTrack user assigned to the recording.

 

This lets users who record several calls access and find their calls quickly and easily.

 

The SpeechTrack service offers hosted call recording self service. Monthly membership is $2.99 and recording is $0.10 a minute.

 

SpeechTrack is owned and operated by Calibrus, a vendor of customized hosted business products.

 

. . . .

 

MobileSphere has introduced slydial, described by company officials as a free voice messaging service that connects you directly to someone's mobile phone voicemail. MobileSphere officials say "it's the best way to save time, avoid an awkward conversation or relay information without interrupting your friends, family or business contacts."

 

Checking in with a boss, friend, "significant other" or parent has never been easier as slydial, in one of the finest statements in support of any product released this year,  "provides the illusion of communication without the hassle of engaging in a time-consuming conversation."

 

To slydial someone, simply dial 267-SLYDIAL (267-759-3425) and follow the voice prompts.

 

Users can join MYslydial for free, company officials say, and become a registered user to use offered features, including "Dial By Name." Once you add someone as a slydial contact, you don't have to remember or enter their full phone number anymore -- "just dial 267-SLYDIAL and enter the first four digits of their slydial nickname to connect to their mobile voicemail."

 

There's also "Click 2 slydial." From your computer click on the "Click 2 slydial" icon next to your slydial contact and slydial will call your phone. Once you answer, you will be connected directly to that contact's voicemail.

Slydial is "easy to use, connects to all major U.S. wireless carriers and calls can be placed from any mobile or landline phone," the Slydialers say.

 

"Unlike standard text messages, which limit users to only 160 characters and do not convey emotion, leaving a slydial message allows users to control their message length and context with a personalized voice message," company officials say, pointing out that "while not everybody uses text messaging, voicemail is universal."

 

There are rewards to this job, and discovering products like slydial is one of them.

 

"Over the past few months as part of a successful test program, thousands of people have slydialed and discovered various uses for the service, such as canceling a date they never wanted to go on in the first place, confirming appointments with business contacts and avoiding a lengthy conversation with a chatty relative," the company said.

 

Slydial is the first application launched using MobileSphere's new patent-pending VMS 2.0 mobile voice messaging technology.

 

First Coffee's Product Of the Year so far. Hard to imagine anything topping this one.

 

. . . .

 

StrongMail Systems, a vendor of products for marketing and transactional e-mail, has announced that Lasso Data Systems, which sells on-demand CRM software for the real estate industry, has implemented StrongMail.

 

The "number one feature" of Web-based real estate software is "its ability to handle large volumes of e-mail," said Rick Talbot, vice president of client services for Lasso. "With StrongMail, we have complete control of our on-premise product, allowing us to achieve full integration with Lasso software."

 

Prior to StrongMail, Lasso relied on an in-house developed mass mail product that had limited reporting capabilities. Lasso's R&D team knew how many e-mails were sent, opened, and invalid, but they could not see why or how many e-mails were blocked or bounced.

 

With StrongMail, said Talbot, "from domain throttling to detailed reporting, we get everything we need, plus the ability to control the server in our data center, integrate with our software, and scale to meet our future needs."

...

 

Appirio, a vendor of products for the adoption of on-demand products, has announced it has secured Series B financing of $5.6 million. The funding was led by Sequoia Capital, the investment firm behind Google, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, and PayPal.

 

This round of financing follows a Series A investment earlier this year, which brought in $1.1 million from Salesforce.com and angel investors.

 

Appirio, founded in 2006, sells both products and professional services using Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service technologies from such as Google and Salesforce.com.

 

The company's service offerings are billed as helping users lower operational costs and improve business agility through on-demand systems. It also offers a product portfolio that "connects the clouds" between Google, Salesforce and Amazon, company officials say, letting customers "adopt and extend these on-demand products within their organization."

 

 

 

 

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Ben Harper's There Will Be A Light album:
 

CRM AddOn U.S. and The AddOn Store have announced that the two companies have formed a partnership, which officials from both firms characterize as "beyond a standard corporate relationship."

The deal combines the software Add Ons from The AddOn Store with the distribution network of CRM AddOn U.S. "In addition," company officials say, there's "the creation private custom Web stores for other Independent Software Vendors and an increase in marketing and distribution for all products."

The combination of CRM AddOn U.S. and The AddOn Store is intended to give customers a way to use software products. The Act! Certified Consultants represent a large group of customers shared between the two groups, officials of both firms say.

This merger will become an asset to ACC's in connecting businesses with Add Ons and consultation opportunities: "The AddOn Store's product list and industry knowledge of business technology software (including ACT!, Goldmine, Microsoft Outlook and QuickBooks), along with CRM AddOn U.S.'s distribution network and sales & marketing services, makes the partnership a resource for all customers," partnership officials say.

Both companies will continue to operate their Web sites independently and CRM AddOn U.S. will offer its products on The AddOn Store's site as well

CRM AddOn U.S. is the authorized fulfillment partner for CRM AddOn Factory, a Germany-based company specializing in the creation and support of add on applications for ACT!.

. . . .

Tarrytown, New York-based Datacap, a vendor of document capture and forms processing software products, has announced that it has contributed $5,000 to the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing on behalf of Cycle Faster 2008.

The Horace Mann School in Boston trains deaf and hard of hearing high school students for careers in imaging and ECM.

Datacap's Cycle Faster program, which kicked off its fourth year at the AIIM Expo on March 3, brings together the primary companies of the scanning and enterprise content management industry to raise money for worthy causes, including the Lance Armstrong Foundation. So far, more than $21,000 in donations has been raised.

The 2008 gift was presented to the Horace Mann School on July 14 at the annual golf benefit AIIM New England holds for the school in Watertown, Massachusetts.

Scott Blau, Datacap CEO, said their goal to raise $100,000 is "ambitious, but within our reach, and the money will be well spent helping cancer survivors and students at Horace Mann lead happier, more fulfilling lives."

. . . .

CDC Software, a wholly-owned subsidiary of CDC Corporation and a provider of CRM and other applications and services, has announced that Red Gold, a tomato products manufacturer since 1942, will implement the CDC Factory global manufacturing operations management (MOM) product for "increasing capacity and reducing costs throughout its entire plant network," company officials say.

That would be production plant network, not tomato plant network. Presumably.


With the rising costs for materials, packaging and fuel, Red Gold wanted to identify and implement new cost reductions. This led Red Gold to select CDC Factory, which is expected to help "increase line efficiencies, improve labor use, reduce changeover times, address variability and minor stops" and other functions.

CDC Factory will help with workforce decisions to drive improvement from the shop floor, Red Gold officials say, adding that the product provides "real-time visibility into detailed operating metrics including production rates, yields, usage and per-unit cost."

Red Gold had previously attempted to implement a Performance Management system on an initial pilot line, but it didn't meet their expectations.

"Food commodity prices have risen to record levels and are wreaking havoc on profit margins for virtually every food manufacturer," said Mark Sutcliffe, general manager of CDC Factory.

Red Gold, America's largest privately held tomato manufacturer, operates three processing facilities in Elwood, Orestes, and Geneva, Indiana.

. . . .

SmartFocus, the marketing software company, has begun implementing its Intelligent Marketing Software and services for Chelsea Football Club.

Chelsea FC wants SmartFocus to build "a single customer view, consolidate all data sources to gain a consistent view of its supporters." It will also integrate the SmartFocus software needed to conduct marketing campaigns and track and analyse responses.|

Chelsea FC, one of the most high profile and successful soccer teams in the world, hopes to be able to access data to "create customer insight and gain a deeper understanding of supporter, market and product relationships to plan and deploy high performance marketing campaigns," club officials said.

The product will be built by SmartFocus, hosted on Chelsea FC infrastructure but managed by the SmartFocus Managed Services team

Natalie Waddell, head of CRM at Chelsea Football Club, said with the right tools "we will be able to understand our consumers better, communicate and tailor our campaigns more effectively.

Chris Underhill, CEO of SmartFocus, said today's most successful soccer clubs "are also major international brands, and what happens off the field is becoming increasingly important alongside the success on the field."

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Lead management firm Marketo, focused on "accelerating the Revenue Revolution it declared last week," according to company officials, has announced the addition of sales authority and industry luminary Barry Trailer to its Board of Advisors.

Co-founder of analyst firm CSO Insights and described by Marketo officials as "an expert on sales processes and methodologies," Trailer is expected to provide guidance as Marketo tries to develop products to "align sales and marketing to drive bottom-line impact," company officials say.

After last week