The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is Echo and the Bunnymen's "Ocean Rain." A delightful early '80s album filled with snappy and bright music, competent songwriting and fun to sing lyrics, none of which mean a single thing: Neptuny, a vendor of performance optimization products, has introduced Caplan SaaS to provide what company officials call "capacity management for small to medium-sized enterprises who want to set up a small-scale capacity planning and management project." Company officials say Caplan is "able to cover multiple domains in one single product," while having "zero impact in production environments" thanks to its agent-less architecture, out-of-the-box integration to management platform and tools, and what company officials call "the ability to integrate custom data sources." It provides analyses, forecasting and reporting capabilities by means of Web interfaces and dashboards.

The SaaS version of the product "provides all the benefits of the standard edition of Caplan," company officials say, without any infrastructure and maintenance cost. The vendor is billing it as a Capacity Management product available on the market "that complies with the Software-as-a-Service paradigm." According to Butler Group, Caplan SaaS "can also be used as a Proof of Concept for customers wanting to undertake a large deployment exercise."

Features of the product include no setup and maintenance costs as "Caplan SaaS infrastructure is hosted in a high-availability data centre, and all maintenance activities are guaranteed directly from Neptuny's 24x7 support,' company officials say, adding that "no ongoing effort and costs of maintenance is required once the service starts."

The product's Web interface itself is structured "to enable the entire lifecycle of capacity management process - data gathering, analysis and model building and reporting," and such functions. Access to data and functionalities can be restricted by means of Access Control Lists in order to assign roles according to user responsibilities, and data and access security are guaranteed by SSL encrypted communications.... Dovarri, a vendor of Customer Relationship Management and Sales Force Automation software, has announced a multi-year agreement with their newest client, Houston-based Directory One. Owned by Philip O'Hara, Directory One has retained Dovarri to provide CRM and SFA services through Orizon, Dovarri's recently released software.Directory One has been named one of the top two "Largest Houston-based Website Design & Development Companies" in the Houston Business Journal's annual Book of Lists for the past three years. The firm sells Web site marketing services that include search engine optimization, site hosting and design, and consultation services. O'Hara said managing sales and customer service is a concern "with our recent expansion into San Antonio, Austin, Los Angeles and Chicago." Geary Broadnax, Dovarri President and CEO, said "companies like Directory One possess the capacity to take full advantage of Orizon's capabilities.

The news as of the all-important third cup of coffee this morning, and the music is The Rolling Stones's 1978 "Some Girls," alternately dubbed their greatest album "since Exile On Main Street," or "since Sticky Fingers," or "since Let It Bleed." However far back you want to go, all Stones albums since 1978 are measured by it as their standard. And no, none are better: Christchurch, New Zealand- based Donald Hastie has announced a successful year for ERMLive, the most comprehensive product for employee management available today. Since 2005 Donald Hastie, CEO of ERMLive and founder and former director of PayGlobal, says he has been "busy developing and perfecting" the HR & payroll product he says he has "always dreamed of." ERMLive is described by Hastie as "a full featured Employee Relationship Management (ERM) tool designed to enhancing the relationships companies have with their employees," as the culmination of his "almost 20 years HRIS and payroll experience, knowledge of next generation technology and understanding of business improvement processes. The product is a radical departure from traditional rigid payroll systems." Hastie says HR managers "need to be heard at the executive table," and says he developed ERMLive to let them "focus on enhancing the employee relationship in line with the strategic goals of the organization." He says he has taken into account "the mistakes and inflexibilities" of existing payroll software, and introduced new employee management functions that "meet the increasing demands of HR professionals, managers and employees." "Considering the increased investment involved with managing employees, the benefits of an integrated approach between the operational and strategic has never been more important," he says. "ERMLive is designed to...

The news as of the first coffee this morning, catching up on some news of a more general nature, and the music is country-Caribbean-rock maven Jerry Jeff Walker's "Hill Country Rain," his 1991 comeback record. A good album, it's not his best - that would be 1975's "Ridin' High": Service provider Iron Mountain Digital, the technology arm of Iron Mountain Incorporated, is now offering the new .tel domain name. The .tel domain "is similar to an interactive business card on the Web, and has been called 'the Google of online address books,'" according to company officials. The .tel domain allows businesses and individuals to store and manage all of their contact information and keywords directly in the Domain Name System, or DNS, thereby displaying the contact information more quickly. "For large businesses with established domain name portfolios, .tel is a way to consolidate contact information and make their company or brand easier to contact," according to the Iron Mountain men. The domain is being pitched to individuals and small businesses as a way to enable an online contact directory "without the need to build, host, or manage a Web site. The domain name's extension began on December 3, the first day of the domain's sunrise period. The sunrise period is reserved for trademark owners and extends from December 3, 2008 through February 2, 2009.

The news as of the fifth coffee, and if you're not awake by the fifth coffee forget it, go back to bed and start over tomorrow. The music is a Beach Boys iTunes mix. Really it's quite wonderful music every now and then, especially if you get their late '60s and early '70s albums, like "Wild Honey," "Holland," "Smiley Smile," "Surf's Up" and "Sunflower." If you haven't heard those you'll be surprised how different they are from "Surfin' U.S.A." and "Fun Fun Fun," as great as their early style is: Fineos Corporation, a vendor of software products for insurance, bancassurance, and government, has announced that Quinn-Insurance, the second largest property and casualty insurer in Ireland, has gone live with its Fineos Claims product. Fineos is now providing comprehensive enterprise claims management for Quinn's private motor lines and will be used by 600 employees at Quinn's insurance operations in Ireland. The second phase of the project will see the expansion of Fineos Claims to cover commercial lines and home insurance.   Colin Morgan, General Manager at Quinn-Insurance, says Fineos Claims is expected to deliver "improved efficiencies in claims processing." In the high claims volume insurance industry, particularly for motor claims, the general industry consensus is that it is critical that insurers can process more claims faster and with greater accuracy, qualities more crucial than in other aspects of the insurance field. Fineos Claims is expected to help Quinn automate its claims process and reduce administrative costs.   Fineos was selected by Quinn following an evaluation of software products available for general insurance (property & casualty) claims processing. Quinn-Insurance has been the fastest growing insurance company in Ireland over the past 12 years, and is now the second largest insurer in Ireland.

The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is a John Fogerty - Creedence Clearwater Revival mix. Fogerty's solo stuff is underrated, but maybe that's because there's not a real stylistic difference between that and his peerless Creedence material. Well, except when he releases a clunker like Eye of the Zombie. Even in CCR's least-distinguished hour - that would be Pendulum - they never bit quite that hard. Really, the lesson of Fogerty's solo career isn't that all his stuff sounds like old CCR, it's that CCR still sounds fresh: Jenzabar, a vendor of CRM software for higher education, says that in a survey the firm conducted higher education CFOs identified "growing budget constraints" as their top concern. Jenzabar discussed financial concerns, major technology developments, and economic challenges affecting higher education at its recent Jenzabar CFO Conference, held in Boston and featuring speakers Kenneth C.

The news as of the fourth cup of coffee, and the music is 1990's Seven Turns, The Allman Brothers' best album released in the thirty-one year span between their other two best studio albums, 1972's "Eat A Peach" and 2003's "Hittin' The Note." Always a dependable live act, the Allmans have been, to put it charitably, hit and miss in the studio: Oracle E-Business Suite Order Fulfillment and Oracle's Siebel Customer Order Management are both positioned as "Leader" in Forrester Research's November 2008 report "The Forrester Wave: Order Management Hubs, Q4 2008."
The research firm evaluated eight order management products for the report. The products were evaluated against 152 criteria. According to Forrester, the Oracle E-Business Suite "led the pack among the Leaders who delivered technologies that support the perfect order."
The research concluded that the Oracle E-Business Suite "articulates a strong, integrated vision for end-to-end order management," and Oracle "delivers a rich go-to-market strategy for the Oracle E-Business Suite."
Forrester's research also found that on the infrastructure side, "Siebel Customer Order Management ranked the highest with the most comprehensive support for inbound order channels. Market, leading areas include support for direct field sales, call center, mobile device, machine-to-machine, and partners."... FrontRange Solutions, which earlier this year acquired SAM products specialist Centennial Software, has announced the launch of License Manager 3.0, the product described by company officials as helping organizations "automate the process of managing software license entitlements." Central to the new features in License Manager 3.0, according to the FrontRangers, is the ability to accelerate the process of reconciling usage against entitlement for Microsoft software licenses through the ability to bulk upload licensing data from the Microsoft CLP report.

The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is Arlo Guthrie's "Victor Jara" from his "Amigo" album, a song which never fails to remind me of a wonderful girl I knew in college, who had exactly the sort of social passion Arlo sings about so well here. I could see somebody writing a song like this about her one day. Hopefully with a happier ending, and without the electroshock or bone smashing: Politicker.com, an online political news network which operates seventeen political news sites across the country, has announced that it is has changed managed hosting providers, leaving Amazon EC2 for Voxel. Voxel sells managed hosting and content delivery network services. It provides managed hosting and content delivery network services for other political leftist sites such as Daily Kos, Air America and Observer.com. According to the Politickerians the problem was "primarily due to unanticipated scalability difficulties" with the popular cloud offering.

A special edition of First Coffee, as we're eating leftover turkey for dinner and ham sandwiches for lunch, we'll take a look at some interesting pieces that slipped by as we were watching the Detroit Lions take their annual drubbing. They may not necessarily have to do with CRM specifically, but they're pieces my editor wanted covered, and they should be of general interest. The music is starting at the top of the "Most Played" list on iTunes for the past couple months - Ry Cooder's "5,000 Country Music Songs," Robert Earl Keen's "Feeling Good Again," The Grateful Dead's "Brown-Eyed Woman," MFO's "Bodrum," Alan Jackson's "I'll Fly Away," Aimee Mann's "The Moth," great stuff like that. And for this special evening edition the wine is a Lindeman's 2007 Merlot, a nice Australian table wine. Hey there are some perks to working at night: WhiteFence.com, an online comparison-shopping marketplace for residential home services and utilities, is touting its services to save money on home phone, Internet, electricity and other bills. "With the winter season providing higher energy costs and reasons to cut back on non-essentials items, there is no time like the present to find ways to be more energy efficient and lower monthly bills," company officials said. From comparison shopping to bundling services to home services tips, WhiteFence offers a variety of services to take a bite out of winter bills and save some money in the coming months. Company officials say shoppers at WhiteFence.com can compare head-to-head the cost of TV service, high-speed Internet access, electricity, natural gas, long distance phone and a suite of other services to see if they are currently getting the best deal: "People can compare plans without the hassle of calling several companies, then switch to lower their monthly bills." The service also lets users combine multiple services like local phone, high speed and television in a bundle. Bundling services can be a cheaper alternative to buying services from several different companies, and getting one bill from one provider can be preferable, too. For people in states with deregulated electricity or natural gas, WhiteFence.com offers the ability to shop around to find the best rates and switch providers without interruption in service.

The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is Alan Jackson's nicely understated gospel album "Precious Memories": Tel Aviv-based Meezoog.com (Beta) will be launched this week as what company officials are calling "the first trust network for dating." The idea, according to the Meezoogers, is to let singles "find their matches in a safer environment, with some help from their family and friends." Yes, the global online village yenta will be listening in, so make nice. Meezoog uses technology which company officials say "reflects real-life connections on the Net and to measure social trust between people." Sort of like Facebook's "Mutual Friends" and "People You May Know" features mashed up to a whole new level.   The company also claims to be "the first social network to employ a profound technology to address the usage of fake identities and profiles. Unlike prevailing approaches, it claims to imitate the societal way people build their trust with other people." Company officials explain that this means Meezoog's "social trust," or "social proximity," reflects "people's relationships in the real world and the ways in which they are connected to each other." The nut seems to be that while Meezoog aims at single individuals, it also includes family and friends that act as "introducers" and vouch for their dear ones. Singles looking for matches get the search results organized in order of "social proximity," where people who are more socially trusted appear first: "In every profile, a social proximity gauge indicates the trust rank between the two people as well as the best human paths that link them," company officials say. First Coffee supposes you have to see this in action to appreciate it, but the overall concept sure sounds an awful lot like your friends setting you up, with your family getting their two cents in. Today Meezoog's Social Layer includes Facebook and Meezoog.com, and will soon include additional platforms and social sites such as OpenSocial, according to the Meezoogers, and others.