The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a truly great song, "Something You Ain't Got" from the 2006 album Greenland by Cracker, a band that hadn't caught lightning in a bottle like this since their self-titled 1992 debut album:
SpectorSoft, a vendor of iInternet monitoring and surveillance software, says its 2008 Annual Corporate Customer Survey revealed that "more than 70 percent of its Spector 360 employee monitoring software customers benefited from increased productivity."
The survey uncovered what company officials call "conservative savings estimates of from $15,000 for a northeastern United States SMB to $200,000 or more for an enterprise business located in Canada."
"As businesses struggle with a deep recession, organizations will need to be diligent about increasing productivity and lowering costs to survive," said SpectorSoft President C. Douglas Fowler.
According to a 2008 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report, the "cyclical effects of the economic downturn" in 2001 had "a dramatic impact on productivity. After slowing and, in some sectors, declining during the recession that occurred in 2001, productivity growth rebounded, resulting in robust increases over the period from 2000 through 2005."
Spector 360 is marketed as being able to detect employee PC and Internet activity abuse, and review the details via Quick View charts and graphs. Company officials say 72 percent of respondents reported the employee monitoring software helped increase their organization's overall productivity, and more than a third estimated the productivity increase to be greater than 10 percent. "Several noted an increase of more than 50 percent," company officials say.
The product records employees' Web sites visited, e-mails sent and received, chats and instant messages, keystrokes typed, files transferred, documents printed, and applications run.
In addition, through a surveillance-like camera recording tool, Spector 360 shows in exact visual detail what an employee does every step of the way. Further, Spector 360 takes the recorded Internet and computer activities, feeds that information into a database, and provides more than 50 easy-to-read reports.
At IMV Projects of Calgary, IT Manager Ross Benov conservatively estimated the company will recoup nearly $200,000 in lost productivity, figuring that since most of the company's 650 employees make from $30 to $40 an hour, regaining 10 hours of work per employee per year - and factoring in the lower end of the stated compensation range - the yearly cost savings estimate equates to $195,000.
Edward DeAngelis, President of HighTec HVAC -- an SMB located near Philadelphia, said if all business owners used such tools, "they'd save a lot ... more than they realize. You can't comprehend the abuses you will find."
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Numara Software, a vendor of IT service management software, has announced the release of Numara FootPrints 9, the latest version of its Numara FootPrints service desk management product.
Company officials say the product offers support for IT Infrastructure Library version 3 service lifecycle best practices and usability enhancements, including mobile technology.
David Weiss, president and CEO of Numara Software, said the product is being marketed as a "practical and flexible IT service management" product.
Saying Numara Software's approach to the IT service desk would appeal to mid-market and departmental customers within larger enterprises, Paul Burns, senior analyst, Enterprise Management Associates, said with the latest release of Numara FootPrints, "the company has hit on a variety of transforming capabilities, especially the integration of their new Service Catalog with the CMDB."
Numara FootPrints is being marketed on its flexible workflow platform as a tool for managing the service desk and other business processes.
With its Service Catalog, service customers can view a catalog of all the services that are provided by the service desk, see information about those services, select the services they want and submit their requests through any Web browser. With the Change Management functionality, organizations can "extend the value of change management and approval processes throughout the organization with new support for automated customer and supervisor approvers," company officials say.
The new Numara FootPrints Mobile function, "optimized for small-screen use," lets agents access the service desk using the Web browser on their Microsoft Windows Mobile, RIM Blackberry, and Apple iPhone devices.
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Aspire Technologies, a vendor of sales quoting software products for small and midmarket customers, has announced that it has teamed with iMerge BV, the Netherlands based publisher of product data, to provide real-time product data via iMerge's Open ICEcat.biz Web service, to its QuoteWerks user base.
QuoteWerks provides sales quoting products for companies. The product offers real-time price and availability data on products distributed to the IT channel through industry focused distributors D&H, Ingram Micro, Synnex, and Tech Data.
Earlier this year the company announced it was expanding its real-time price and availability offering to businesses in all industries through the launch of the QuoteWerks Real-time Server application. The latest offering, released with Build 43 for QuoteWerks version 4.0, extends the real-time data to include product content including customer-centric product descriptions, product data sheets, and product images for approximately 160 brands including 3M, Canon, HP, IBM and others.
With products in native QuoteWerks databases, the user can opt to update the product with the real-time content, including spec sheets and images, to make the enhanced data available for future use within QuoteWerks.
"Finding useful product descriptions, spec sheets, and pictures for the products our customers are quoting often takes longer that it takes to actually the create the quote itself," says Brian Laufer, Vice President of Operations for Aspire. "The fundamental benefit of QuoteWerks is the speed in which a quote can be created."
The real-time product content feature is currently shipping to new users. Existing customers who wish to obtain this feature must download and install Build 43 for QuoteWerks 4.0.
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ExactTarget, a vendor of on-demand e-mail and one-to-one marketing products, has announced a new release of ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Company officials say the new release has e-mail and marketing automation capabilities including thought-starter templates for several common business scenarios, and is fully integrated within Microsoft Dynamics 4.0, letting marketers "use a single user interface to set up time- or event-based marketing communication programs."
According to a March 2008 Aberdeen Group study, "The CMO Strategic Agenda: Automating Closed Loop Marketing," top-performing organizations are deploying closed-loop marketing processes to generate return on marketing investments.
The new ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM enhancements lets marketers automate e-mail marketing communications based on time, events or actions, use pre-configured templates for marketing automation scenarios, send ExactTarget e-mails to individual accounts, leads and contacts and send ExactTarget e-mails to campaigns, campaign activities and marketing lists.
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Saaspoint, whose officials describe the firm as a "100 percent dedicated Salesforce.com consultancy and integrator," has implemented Salesforce.com's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for California-based Synergex International Corporation.
Synergex specializes in providing products and professional services which let companies develop and use applications. They wanted a CRM product that "enabled transparency throughout the organization."
"We require business intelligence that enables marketing, Salesforce Automation (SFA) and support to share information easily," said William Mooney, VP and general manager of Synergy/DE, adding that "this reduces our dependence on IT."
Synergex recently replaced their existing CRM product, and "needed to maintain the integration between their three business divisions," said Cary Fulbright, president of Saaspoint.
Synergex wanted the new system to duplicate the integration built into the previous CRM product. Saaspoint was able to implement several custom built application programs and to integrate Salesforce.com with Synergex's existing accounting system and their online customer resource center.
