December 2008 Archives

Pitney Bowes's CDQ, Informatica and Kerensen, DMC's Link 200, Oracle and Regal Beloit,

December 10, 2008 3:44 PM | 0 Comments

The news as of the all-important third cup of coffee this morning, and the music is a faux-live album from the Grateful Dead, Europe '72. The band used the live performances from their tour of Europe mainly as a way to get basic tracks down on a bunch of new songs, mostly of the laid-back country style which comes off better live than in the studio. They came back and recorded the fills and overdubs in the studio and ended up with a pretty good album, as long as you're not under the impression it's a "live album."

Pitney Bowes Group 1 Software has announced the newest version of its Customer Data Quality Platform. With what company officials describe as "enhanced support for global data, access to value-add services in Software-as-a-Service or hybrid deployments, integration of data quality into existing CRM investments and enhanced support for data governance functionality," the CDQ Platform v5.6 is billed as a product for data quality and "geospatial enrichment."

The CDQ Platform is designed to let organizations "reduce data management costs and provide customer insight."

 According to Gartner research, the volume of enterprise data doubles every 18 months, as you would imagine making it increasingly difficult to create a single, 360-degree view of each customer.

The CDQ Platform "provides support for data governance through profiling and monitoring, access to enterprise data in a federated approach, cleansing, validation, deterministic and probabilistic matching, consolidation and geospatial enrichment," according to company officials.

The single integrated platform is delivered via a service-oriented architecture in real-time, batch or SaaS. The technology lets organizations to unify enterprise data, eliminate redundancies and expand overall customer knowledge, company officials say.

New features in the CDQ Platform v5.6 include an openpParser, multi-domain, culture and language specific or agnostic grammar giving users control, visibility and insight into modifying and defining patterns for data cleansing of unstructured and mismatched content and metadata.

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DMC Software, a Sage, Dell and Microsoft Gold Business Partner, has developed Link 200 to keep companies from suffering "the imminent redundancy of particular Sage software, such as SalesLogix version 6.2," according to DMC officials.

The York, England-based firm notes that software "evolves and develops, junior versions are inevitably phased out and this is true of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software SalesLogix version 6.2, by Sage, which has been surpassed many times over with the current version at SalesLogix 7.5."

As version 6.2 is eliminated "so is any relevant support and Application Integration Support with Account software Sage MMS 2.2, now known as Sage 200," the firm's officials say.

DMC officials warn that this redundancy will be an issue for those using SalesLogix version 6.2 and AIS, as "they will either suffer with deleted integration between software or an unsupported version of SalesLogix."

Link 200 provides businesses with processes allowing data sharing and faster administration, freeing up time to focus on strategy and decisions. As of January 2009 a new version of Link 200 is available, with integration between SalesLogix and Sage 200, correlation between accounts information and client history, compatiblity with SalesLogix version 7.2.x through to 7.5.x, drill-down on Sage 200 Sales & Purchase Orders from SalesLogix and other functions.

DMC Software offers bespoke CRM software products and financial software as well as professional services.

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Regal Beloit Corporation, a manufacturer of electrical and mechanical motion control products, has deployed Oracle Business Intelligence Applications to "improve visibility into business operations and enhance decision-making enterprise wide," Oracle officials say.

Headquartered in Beloit, Wisconsin, Regal Beloit is a global manufacturer maintaining facilities in North America, Asia, Europe and Australia. The company sought a business intelligence (BI) product that would help them better understand business performance across such functions as orders, sales, inventory and receivables.

In late 2007, Regal Beloit initiated a five-month BI software vendor selection and evaluation process that culminated in the selection of Oracle. Criteria included ease of integrating data from different source systems, adapters for multiple data sources, ease of customization of ETL and front-end, capability of business users to develop reports and dashboards and having pre-built content for multiple functions.

Regal Beloit initiated its deployment of the packaged, role-based Oracle Business Intelligence Applications in approximately 75 days from start to finish. The company's IT staff estimated that building a custom BI product would have taken them more than a calendar year.

Built on Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus, Oracle's BI applications use the platform's hot-pluggable capabilities to extend intelligence capabilities to a range of data sources including the Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise, Oracle's Siebel CRM, and SAP.

Regal Beloit's BI system incorporates data from disparate sources including two instances of the Oracle E-Business Suite, specifically the Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning module, SAP, legacy applications, and flat files.

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Kerensen Consulting officials say they have partnered with Informatica On Demand to "accelerate Salesforce.com implementation."

Kerensen and Informatica On Demand have agreed to join their offer on the Cloud Computing market. With Informatica's on-demand integration application and Kerensen's Salesforce experience, officials of both firms believe they now can offer Salesforce.com customers "a complete package for their CRM needs."


This technology and services joint offering will allow Salesforce.com customers to maximize the value of their Salesforce product, officials of both firms believe, as Informatica brings its integration expertise to the Cloud Computing market with an on demand integration application that is priced to appeal to "companies of all sizes," company officials say, so they can "achieve the benefits of SaaS integration."

 

Kerensen Consulting will provide implementation services as part of the joint offering.


"We look forward to extending our integration product to even more Salesforce.com customers through Kerensen's professional technology consultants," said Jarrod Buckley, Informatica's Director Channel Sales - On Demand.

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Veramark Technologies, which sells Telecom Expense Management products, has announced that Ralph Rodriguez, an MIT Research Fellow with over 20 years of experience in IT management and entrepreneurship, has joined the Veramark Board of Directors.

"Telecom expense management is undergoing a dramatic evolution, harnessing new technologies and delivering new capabilities," says Rodriguez. "We're in the midst of a communications technology revolution, and one manifestation is the rapid growth of unified communications, with all the opportunities and challenges it presents."

 

He said the "need to manage the cost and complexity of converged networks" is driving change across the industry.

"Having looked at Veramark's strategy, technology and services capabilities," Rodriguez pronounced himself "excited to have the opportunity to help Veramark lead the industry through this transformation."

"We are thrilled to have Ralph on our board and we look forward to his contributions," said Tony Mazzullo, Veramark President and CEO.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.

Everlusion's CustomerHunt, Vindicia, YouTube Rules, Voxify Work Up 100 Percent

December 10, 2008 3:41 PM | 0 Comments

The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is the perfect rock'n'roll wallpaper - the so-called Apple Jam portion of George Harrison's All Things Must Pass. It's little more than half an hour of fine blues-based rock guitar jamming chopped up into five "songs" with titles like "I Remember Jeep" or "Thanks For the Pepperoni." But it's perfect if you want an up-tempo background without distracting lyrics:

Everlusion has announced the release of CustomerHunt 2009, described by company officials as sales and customer management software for small businesses. It's billed as a customer management application "that enable users to boost their sales results with intuitive tools."

It's supposed to help sales people increase individual performance by managing their customer contacts through a selling pipeline and accessing "every detail related to their interactions."

"One of the advantages of CustomerHunt over existing customer management systems for small business is its usability," says Vera Zvereva, Everlusion CEO. "Unlike most of products in this category, being or inheriting the features of the down-scaled enterprise CRM systems, CustomerHunt is designed with the focus on the needs and requirements of its end user - the seller."

Basically the product's built around the methodology of Sales Pipeline. It's split into Lead and Opportunity managers that allow a focus on activities associated with stages of the selling process, foresee "picks and valleys" and are designed to "improve individual sales method."

It also, company officials say, has the ability to track referrals of sales leads, add custom statuses, sales stages and contact groups and generate printer-friendly sales repots and customer contact printouts. Wizards prompt users on how to tune the program to individual requirements and help feed in the contacts from MS Excel, MS Access and CSV files.  

CustomerHunt 2009, Personal Edition is available at the license price of US $189.95.

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Vindicia, a vendor of on-demand payment management software, has announced a new version of its hosted billing product, CashBox. Designed for recurring and one-time transactions, Vindicia CashBox lets online merchants access a variety of services, including a built-in tax engine and support for multiple processors, currencies and languages.

New features include integration with payment processor Global Collect. As company officials describe it, the combination of CashBox and Global Collect "provides merchants with access to global payment methods." The initial integration will support North American and European credit and debit cards along with Boleto Bancario in Brazil.

The product also has a feature called "metering." In addition to providing traditional time-based subscription billing models, company officials say, CashBox lets online merchants support pricing plans based on usage, such as paying for specific numbers of downloads of a movie service, as well as more complex metering capabilities, such as auto refill of game tokens.

With this release, merchants also have the ability to create payment processing routing rules, auto-cancel subscriptions if chargebacks occur, and optimize sales tax calculations based on billing or shipping address information.

"Building and maintaining a loyal, satisfied customer base is job one for all online merchants," said Gene Hoffman, chairman and CEO of Vindicia.

The latest version of Vindicia CashBox is available immediately, with the exception of the metering support which is in limited beta and will be available in January. Pricing starts at $2,000 per month and is based on transactions processed and total online revenue.

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ComScore has released October 2008 data from the comScore Video Metrix service, reporting that U.S. Internet users viewed 13.5 billion online videos during the month, representing an increase of 45 percent versus year ago.

In October, Google Sites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property with nearly 5.4 billion videos viewed (representing a 40 percent share of all videos viewed), with YouTube.com accounting for more than 98 percent of all videos viewed at the property.

Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 520 million videos (3.8 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 363 million (2.7 percent), and Viacom Digital with 305 million (2.3 percent).

Hulu, a joint venture of NBC and Fox featuring full-length broadcast TV programs, ranked sixth with 235 million videos viewed (1.7 percent).

More than 147 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 92 videos per viewer in October. Google Sites attracted a record 100 million online video viewers, or more than two out of every three Internet users who watched video during the month. Fox Interactive ranked second with 60.8 million viewers, followed by Yahoo! Sites (45.2 million) and Microsoft Sites (30.7 million).

The survey also found that 77 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video, the average online video viewer watched 274 minutes of video and more than 80 percent of the 18-34 year olds watched online video, higher than any other age segment. The average 18-34 year old online video viewer watched 4.8 hours of video during the month, also ranking above all other age segments.

About 100 million viewers watched 5.3 billion videos on YouTube.com, let's see if you can do the videos-per-viewer math yourself. The duration of the average online video viewed at Hulu was 11.6 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten.

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Voxify, a vendor of speech technology, has announced that it handled 100 percent more calls for its retail and e-commerce customers on Cyber Monday, December 1, 2008, compared to the daily average call volume for the year.

 

Did you know there was a holiday called "CyberMonday?" Neither did First Coffee. Although, thanks to my New Zealand-purchased calendar book, I do know that December 1 was Westland Anniversary. That's why all the banks in London were shut, no doubt.

 

Online consumers are major drivers of call volume into retail and e-commerce contact centers, using the phone for various follow-up activities, including confirming order status, adding or canceling items, checking point balances in loyalty programs and asking if they can get it in cranberry since they were sure they told their husbands they wanted it in cranberry, mauve doesn't do a thing for them, so they know they told their husbands cranberry but there he sat with his eyes glued to those blasted Red Wings and he said he heard her but now she knows he really didn't, and this kind of thing happens all the time - all the time, honey, you wouldn't believe, why just last week we're driving...

Voxify has deployed speech self-service products to service the most common retail caller requests, with the idea that this allows contact center agents to be used more efficiently. For example, the order status product relieves live agents from the labor-intensive tasks of identifying the caller, asking for order search information, querying backend systems, and reading back order details including estimated delivery dates. You can get a computer to do that, but you can't pay a computer enough to sit and listen how he got mauve instead of cranberry. The union has laws against that sort of thing.

The Voxify self-service products handled increases in calls for order status, order capture, catalog requests, and store location information. Offered as a managed service, Voxify's speech products are judged by their completion rates (percentage of the desired tasks achieved by the customer), a much-watched performance indicator for customer satisfaction.

"In today's market, the key to survival is keeping your customers," noted John Gengarella, CEO, Voxify. "After significant investments to attract consumer spending, retailers can't afford to drop the ball when it comes to fulfillment and post-sale communications."

The Voxify product deploys inbound and proactive outbound speech applications as well as intelligent, personalized customer interaction products.

The company's clients include Continental Airlines, Hammacher Schlemmer, and Wyndham International.

Jigsaw's Research Tab, Netezza and SAS, QAlert in Providence, XTime and Sonic

December 9, 2008 4:29 PM | 0 Comments
The news as of the all-important third cup of coffee this morning, and the music is the peerless Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Cosmo's Factory." As the usually flannel-mouthed Greil Marcus wrote in a rare fit of coherence, rarely in rock history has artistic achievement and popular success aligned so wonderfully as they did with CCR - the band, one of the greatest American rock bands ever, was highly popular, and their best albums were the most popular, and this one is their best:
 
Jigsaw, which sells business information and data services with the angle of "user-generated content contributed by its global business-to-business community," has launched Research Tab, described by company officials as a free resource for "an improved approach to investigating companies online. 
 
"Whether researching companies for lead generation, better targeted marketing or job opportunities, individuals want to be prepared and informed before reaching out," says Jim Fowler, Jigsaw CEO and co-founder. "With Research Tab, the time consuming act of trolling the Web and companies' sites to gather information becomes obsolete."
 
Jigsaw Research Tab uses tools such as RSS and social network sites to deliver aggregated business intelligence. In one view, individuals can access a company's recent news and announcements, Web analytic details, job listings, financial information, maps and more.
It can be used in conjunction with "Jigsaw Unlimited," a newly-released subscription model that gives users access to Jigsaw's database of 10 million business contacts.
 
"We're equipping our community members with the best available resources during this financial downturn," said Garth Moulton, Jigsaw co-founder and vice president of community, listing "Jigsaw Unlimited, Company Wiki, Research Tab along with Jigsaw's free access to company listings."
 
Along with Jigsaw's 1.5 million business contact records and its recently announced company wiki, an open-source resource where any company or individual can promote basic business information, Research Tab is part of Jigsaw's platform for B-to-B.
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Foxwoods Resort Casino has chosen the Netezza Performance Server data warehouse appliance and SAS Marketing Automation software to analyze in more detail its gambling and hotel data of its 40,000 daily customers.
 
In conjunction with Netezza, Foxwoods is expanding its data mart to collect more detailed gambling data and customer demographics for use in micro-targeted marketing campaigns, special offers and comps. Foxwoods wants the SAS products to analyze this data more closely.
 
The application of the Netezza data warehouse appliance in conjunction with SAS Marketing Automation is intended to allow the capture of detailed data from a multitude of departments within the casino, including the hotel, spa, retail outlets, call center, ticketing, food and beverage, and the newly opened MGM Grand at Foxwoods.
 
"When you're welcoming 40,000 people every day, developing strong customer relationships is crucial to persuading them to come back," says Michael Kutia, director of hospitality systems at Foxwoods. "Netezza's speed, coupled with SAS Marketing Automation, lets Foxwoods know our customers like never before."
 
Matt Rollender, director of strategic alliances, Netezza, made the obligatory casino joke, saying "instead of rolling the dice with an unproven product, Foxwoods chose Netezza to get a handle on its customer data and selected SAS to turn that information into action." Glad he took care of it so First Coffee doesn't have to.
 
North America's largest casino, Foxwoods Resort Casino is located in southeastern Connecticut, accessible from Boston, New York, Hartford and Providence. Owned by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, Foxwoods features six casinos with more than 7,200 slots, 380 table games, the only WPT World Poker Room in New England, High Stakes Bingo and Ultimate Race Book.
 
Yankees are glad their forbearers didn't wipe out all the Indians, evidently.
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Speaking of Providence, the city of Providence, Rhode Island has recently launched a Web-based system designed to assist city departments in tracking and resolving citizen service requests.
 
Using the QAlert Municipal CRM system by QScend Technologies, Providence wants to be more efficient about responding to citizen inquires and better at managing city resources while resolving those inquiries.
 
"This is about using state-of-the-art technology to hold ourselves accountable while keeping residents informed, every step of the way, as we work to improve the delivery of city services," says Mayor David Cicilline. "QAlert also provides us with a clearer understanding of constituents' needs so that we can make smarter decisions about deploying resources."
 
Providence citizens contacting the Office of Neighborhood Services at (401-421-CITY) will have their requests entered into QAlert. Each service request is assigned a tracking number and routed to the appropriate department. The system allows residents to be notified via e-mail when an action is taken on the request, and citizens receive final notification when the matter has been resolved.
 
In addition, QAlert also complements ProvStat, the mayor's existing management tool, designed to improve the delivery of city services by collecting, analyzing and reviewing data about city operations. Through QAlert, supervisors are automatically notified when a request lingers for a prolonged period of time with no action taken, providing an increased level of accountability.
 
QScend and its partner, VUEWorks, will also provide Providence with the VUEWorks Work Order and Asset Management software, which fully integrates with QAlert. QAlert also has a customizable Knowledge Base, which can be integrated into the Providence Web site, allowing citizens to enter their service requests online 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
 
First Coffee remembers living in New England in the 1990s when Providence had a reputation for being an unsavory place to live. Cicilline took office in 2003, and has done an exceptional job - since then Providence has gained national recognition for modernizing city operations, reducing crime, expanding its commitment to the arts, establishing an after-school program for youth, creating a new environment for business investment, and improving service delivery to neighborhoods and residents.
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Xtime has announced the deployment of its ServiceCRM software to all Sonic Automotive dealerships nationwide. ServiceCRM provides an automated customer experience, from online retailing and service scheduling, to vehicle drop off and pickup.
 
Sonic Automotive is one of only four publicly traded dealership groups in the U.S. with more than 100 dealerships. Hugh Whiles, Sonic's Vice President of Fixed Operations, says with Xtime "our customers now have online access to pricing, scheduling, transportation, vehicle status and service history."
 
This announcement makes Sonic Automotive the third Fortune 500 public dealership group, in the last year, to adopt Xtime ServiceCRM across all of its dealerships and "highlights Xtime's rapid growth in the automotive service market," according to the Xtimers.
 
ServiceCRM integrates online service retailing, automated service scheduling (customer, dealership and call center), Web-enabled service marketing, shop control and DMS integration into a single product.
 
Sonic Automotive, a Fortune 300 company based in Charlotte, North Carolina, is one of the largest automotive retailers in the United States operating 166 franchises and 34 collision repair centers.
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CDC Software, a wholly-owned subsidiary of CDC Corporation selling enterprise software applications and business services, has announced that a "multi-plant, public company and food industry" firm is expected to implement the CDC Factory manufacturing operations management product at all its North American plants.
 
CDC Software completed the contract with this new customer in October 2008, and expects to implement the CDC Factory product at the company's first plant by April 2009 and complete implementation at all of its North American plants by August 2009.
 
During the evaluation process with the customer, CDC conducted a three-day Factory Performance Audit and Benchmark evaluation and identified potential annualized performance gains averaging approximately $1.0 million per plant, according to CDC officials.
 
According to this benchmark evaluation, these performance improvements are likely to contribute directly to the company's profitability.
 
Mark Sutcliffe, president of the CDC Factory product line of CDC Software, said with "the recessionary climate driving increased demand for economical food-at-home products," food producers are seeking new ways to increase capacity without large capital expenditures.
 
Since CDC Factory is a pre-packaged product for the food and beverage industry, it typically can be deployed in as little as six to eight weeks per plant, Sutcliffe says.
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StreamServe, a vendor of enterprise document presentment applications, has announced that the Santander Consumer Bank of Norway has upgraded to its Persuasion service and is expanding its use throughout its offices in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.
 
The StreamServers say that Persuasion, an enterprise document presentment system, will let the Santander Consumer Bank take information from its back-end enterprise applications, including ERP, CRM, SCM and legacy systems, and "transform it into business correspondence that acts as a dynamic and personalized marketing vehicle for cross-sell, up-sell and brand building."
 
According to company officials, presenting a persuasive, consistent and personalized experience across all communication channels is the goal for Santander.
 
StreamStudio Composer, a component of the Persuasion system, is billed as allowing anyone at Santander with editing privileges to "add, edit or remove text from already designed documents, so last minute changes can be made."
 
Geir Berglind, chief technology officer of Santander Nordic, said by upgrading to StreamServe Persuasion, "we are moving to a single platform that will allow us to take advantage of Composer's user interface to add marketing messages to our customer correspondence and invoices. With this upgrade, we expect to improve our customer relations further and lessen our dependency on IT."
 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.

Neptuny and Caplan SaaS, Dovarri and Directory One, Fonality Agent,

December 9, 2008 4:27 PM | 0 Comments
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.
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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. They are exactly the type of company we are suited for."
 
Dovarri officials say Orizon has "a fundamentally different approach to CRM, with precedence placed on designing an intuitive, straightforward and user-friendly program. Heavy emphasis was also placed on full integration with MS Office, full compatibility between Orizon's online and offline versions, and full compatibility with mobile and handheld devices."
 
Dovarri officials like to claim that 80 percent of the Orizon program "and be learned within an hour."
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Phase 2 International, a vendor of Software as a Service products, has chosen IBM servers for its Microsoft Dynamics CRM hosting capacity "while reducing energy use by more than 65 percent."
 
Based in Honolulu, Phase 2 sells IT products for small and medium-sized companies, following the Software as a Service "leave the driving to us" model. For a monthly fee, businesses can use Phase 2's products to access IT business applications such as hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Customer Relationship Management, Microsoft Team Foundation Server for collaborative project development, document management, Web conferencing, e-mail, and other cloud computing services.
 
Phase 2 officials say their business has "doubled in the first six months of 2008." To provide its clients with Microsoft CRM, Phase 2 uses four-way, quad core IBM x-series 16 2.4 GHz processors with 64 GB of RAM and 3 TB of shared storage, scaling to 15 TB in Q1 of 2009.
 
The IBM servers are advanced server virtualization technology with their iSCSI network-attached shared storage. Phase 2 officials say they improve the security and reliability offered.
 
"As their Microsoft CRM server needs grow, Phase 2's clients can easily expand from four to sixteen sockets, so higher costs only have to be met as needed," Phase 2 officials say.
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Fonality has announced its PBXtra Unified Agent, which company officials say combines phone system, call center, and CRM capabilities "to provide a complete view of contact center operations." With Salesforce CRM and PBXtra Unified Agent, company officials say, users can
"reduce sales and support costs."
 
"The Frankenstein, bolt-on products from other telephony vendors provide only basic screen pops or click-to-call features. Fonality has a more sophisticated approach for delivering contact center products," says Corey Brundage, vice president of marketing and product management at Fonality.
 
For less than $20/user per month (fine print applies), call center agents can use the product: "Managers gain visibility into real-time and historical agent call activity within Salesforce CRM," the Fonalitians say.
 
"Today, contact center managers are often faced with inaccurate or missing data and agents struggle with cumbersome CTI applications, resulting in a poor customer experience," says Richard Gonzales, president of Buvelo Solutions, a Salesforce.com consulting partner.
 
With PBXtra Unified Agent managers can measure, test, "and improve" sales and support processes, view the effectiveness of human resources, salvage opportunities or identify lapses in service level agreements, company officials say.
 
Basically the product lets call center managers track and record all call data in Salesforce CRM automatically, view customer call histories, understand how call follow-up times impact profitability, find out the number of calls it takes to convert a lead to a sale, determine which agents are the most responsive, visually rank agent calling frequency and duration and report all leads not called within a specified period .
 
For agents, the product eliminates the need to enter call information or attach recorded calls to Salesforce CRM, and lets users view desktop alerts with inbound caller name, number, even deal size. "Advanced screen pops instantly provide all caller records and history," company officials say, adding that "note-taking window launches automatically for immediate data entry."
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NetSuite has announced NetSuite Release J, what company officials are calling "the first available Software as a Service enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite for the Japanese market."
 
The release has been fully localized for the accounting rules, usage conventions, regulations and taxation compliance of the Japanese market, the NetSuitians say, adding that this new ERP functionality, "combined with NetSuite's SaaS customer relationship management (CRM) and e-commerce capabilities, make it possible for Japanese companies to run the core aspects of their business completely in the cloud.
 
According to recent forecasts from market research firm IDC, for the period of 2007-2012, the Japanese SaaS market compound annual growth rate of 17.3 percent is expected to far outstrip the CAGR growth rate of 5.1 percent projected for traditional on-premise enterprise resource management applications and 5.5 percent for traditional on-premise CRM applications.
 
In addition, IDC estimates that SaaS ERM applications will have a higher CAGR of 26.8 percent as compared with the CAGR of 18.5 percent for SaaS CRM.
 
"We expect that the Japanese business market will appreciate the fact that NetSuite Release J supports the business practices of Japan, such as consumption tax and per-customer billing cycle standard," said Tomoko Akagi, Group Manager of the Software team at IDC Japan.
 
Built over the last 18 months in partnership with joint venture partners Miroku Joho Service and transcosmos, NetSuite Release J introduces what NetSuite officials are claiming are "several firsts" to the Japanese market, including being the first SaaS offering to provide full support for the Japanese accounting system, including native support for Tegata (promissory notes) payments, and J-GAAP-compliant financial statements.
 
"After working in the SMB accounting market for 30 years, we have seen the rise and fall of many business management applications," said Hiroki Koreeda, President and COO at Miroku Joho Service, an accounting software provider in Japan, with 22 percent of the market share. "We firmly believe that the company and the SaaS ERP model will continue to build and grow."
 
Columbia Music Entertainment, the nearly 100-year-old Japanese music company, recently went live on NetSuite Release J for managing its entire online business operations.

Customer Futures, Elephant Talk, SpeechStorm, Cloud9 in the U.K., CampSoftware

December 9, 2008 4:24 PM | 1 Comment
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Horace Silver Quintet's album "Song for My Father." Not sure what you'd call this, bossa nova jazz, or jazz with strong melody lines and cool piano, jazz that sounds like actual songs as opposed to meandering noodling, the album Steely Dan ripped of the intro to "Ricky, Don't Lose That Number" from, you know, that duh-duh, duh-DUH figure:
 
Customer Futures, described by its officials as an "international members-based network to the improvement of customer experience" which is owned by OgilvyOne Worldwide, has published a free report to help firms retain their customers in an economic downturn.

Recently Customer Futures' MD Peter Lavers teamed up with his San Francisco-based associate, John Todor of The Whetstone Edge, to commission what they regarded as "some of the world's top experts in Customer Experience Management" to write short papers on "how not to lose customer focus when difficult decisions have to be made."

The resulting publication, cleverly titled The Importance of the Customer Experience in a Down Economy, originally published for Customer Futures' membership, is now available free for all.

Peter Lavers says the report is "for all business people who are facing tough decisions at the moment. It contains numerous nuggets of good sound advice from 18 different contributors who are some of the world's most respected experts in the field."

The report can be downloaded completely free from Down Economy Publication. You will be asked to register.
 
Lavers speaks of businesses making "right" tough decisions, not ones that will alienate their customer bases and so cause prolonged suffering even when good times return. I hope it also helps those same readers influence others regarding the importance of customers - and the staff that serve them - in these trying times."

Todor notes that while "there are always winners and losers in down economies," winners act "to create competitive differentiation that is meaningful and valued by customers. Losers focus internally on cost-containment and efficiency."
...
 
SpeechStorm, which sells phone self-service products for contact centers, has extended its IVVO phone self-service suite with the launch of a new range of Visual IVR applications, designed to "open a new revenue stream and customer service enhancement channel for businesses."
 
Through a video call on a 3G mobile phone, callers "gain a visual representation of business transactions such as transferring money or checking in for a flight," and leisure transactions like booking cinema tickets and checking sports scores.
 
One advantage the SpeechStormers play up is how the product "dramatically reduces" the time spent listening to voice-based menu options, as "IVVO enables the user to complete the transaction much quicker and more intuitively."
 
Visual IVR, using video as the delivery channel, "offers businesses significant new potential to generate and drive additional revenue and provide innovative customer services improvements," says Daniel Hong, Lead Analyst, Customer Interaction Technologies at Datamonitor. "The continued growth and adoption of the 3G network in Europe and the Middle East paves the way for this new channel."
 
The company points out that IVVO Visual IVR benefits for the caller include a visual, intuitive interface, service not subject to IP/HTTP latency problems between device and server and no downloads "it's delivered as part of a transient video call, so no data is downloaded to the phone which, in turn, improves security as no footprint is left behind when call ends."

Oliver Lennon, CEO of SpeechStorm and a guy who's never called "John," notes that visual IVR is "gaining increasing acceptance in Europe and the Middle East with the growth and proliferation of the 3G network."
...
 
Elephant Talk Communications has announced that it has signed a Heads of Agreement contract with Telecombination International BV, where Telecombination will become a mobile virtual network operator initially for the Dutch market.
 
As an MVNO, Telecombination will launch its product during the spring of 2009 and will focus on both residential and business customers by using the technology of Elephant Talk's mobile virtual network enabler platform, company officials say.
 
"With the technology of Elephant Talk's platform and our partnership with one of the largest media groups in Europe, we believe that we will create a unique proposition to the Dutch market, soon to be followed by the rest of Europe," said Jaap Nieuwenhuijs, together with his brother, Gert Jan Nieuwenhuijs, director of Telecombination.
 
"To compete in a market purely on price is not a winning strategy anymore," remarks Gert Jan Nieuwenhuijs.
 
Martin Zuurbier, CTO/COO of Elephant Talk, notes that his company's IN platforms has a CRM/Billing product resulting in "a wide ranging line of possibilities," and says the company is "entering the next phase in the industry - new MVNO's request complex integration of different systems, like banking, media and converged technologies without getting a higher upfront investment requirement or substantial operational expenses."
 
Telecombination International BV was established in January 2005 and will become a new MVNO in the Netherlands. Telecombination has its roots in Sweden, where a Telecombination sister company has successfully run an MVNO model since 2001.
 
Elephant Talk Communications is positioning itself as an international telecom operator and enabler/systems integrator to the multimedia industry, selling traditional telecom services, media streaming, and distribution services primarily to the business-to-business community within the telecommunications market. The company was ranked fifth on the Orange County 2008 Deloitte Technology Fast 50.
...
 
San Mateo, California-based Cloud9 Analytics, a vendor of on-demand business intelligence apps, has announced its expansion into the United Kingdom and Europe through a partnership with Revenue Insights, a UK-headquartered vendor of B2B sales performance products.
 
Through what Cloud9 officials describe as "a combination of technology and consulting," Cloud9 and Revenue Insights are marketing services aimed at helping Salesforce.com customers in the region "improve forecast accuracy, optimize sales resources and revenue generation."
 
The announcement comes on the heels of Cloud9's recent expansion into Asia Pacific, and represents what Cloud9 officials feel is their "next step in creating a global network of Cloud9 product providers."
 
The company describes its services as helping sales teams "unlock" access to "the hidden asset of otherwise unsaved sales data." With Cloud9, the spiel goes, "executives can base decisions on historical trend insight and focus precious time and resources where they'll have the biggest impact on revenue."
 
Accurate sales forecasts are "necessary to ensure effective resource allocation - you need the right people working on the right opportunities," says Bob Apollo, director and co-founder of Revenue Insights, adding that the right technology is needed to provide "meaningful data about the pipeline - where it's been, what's changed, and where it's going."
...
 
Orlando, Florida-based CampSoftware has announced FMSmallBusiness, described by company officials as "a complete product, specifically designed for small businesses," to track and manage contacts as well as a calendar of events and activities, integrate documents, schedules, projects, letters, invoices, and more.
 
It's a cross platform database which runs on Mac and Windows, using the FileMaker Pro database platform. "Think of it as a CRM with more power," company officials say.

Evidently it runs on Mac, Windows, or a combination of both - "we've designed it to work as either a single or multiple user solution on up to 250 workstations," company officials say adding that it also provides a Web-based iPhone interface to Contact and Calendar Events data. Desktop and Web-based address books and calendars can be updated via vCards and vCal subscriptions also available for iPhone syncing.

"We believe in eating our own dog food," company officials say, claiming that they use the latest version themselves to run their own business. "Using this approach, we are able to make the product better simply by using it."
 
As the product is built on FileMaker Pro and developed from the start with individual customizing in mind, it has a main file and a custom file. The custom file is designed in an open fashion so that anyone with FileMaker experience can make changes or even add functionality.

The product also lets users track time and "stop losing income by tracking time and items using FMSB's built in Timers, Activities, and Events."

 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.

ERMLive, Forrester on Epicor, Salesforce Winter '09

December 9, 2008 4:22 PM | 0 Comments
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... allow management to at all times understand every aspect of the employee relationship."
 
Hastie estimates that the international ERM market is around $15-20 billion annually, and hopes to cut a decent slice of this pie with ERMLive. With what he describes as "few overhead expenses and a lean business model" ERMLive has been profitable from year one. Confirmed contracts are already well in excess of $1 million, and Hastie expect this to climb to $15 million in the next two years.
 
Sales support and service are also provided by channel partners Intergen and HR Solutions. A strategic relationship with Microsoft lets Hastie operate a business "with low overheads," he says, adding that the software is already in use in New Zealand, Australia, Britain and Asia.
...
 
In a recent evaluation by Forrester Research, the report states "Epicor Software ascends to the Leader band in this edition of the Forrester Wave evaluation of order management hubs."
 
The report says Epicor delivers "mostly advanced capabilities across the four key order management cycle business processes."
 
Epicor was among the companies invited to participate in the November Forrester Wave report titled "The Forrester Wave: Order Management Hubs, Q4 2008." The report looked at eight order management products in a 152-criteria evaluation, noting Epicor for its support for end-to-end order processes and product strategies.

Ray Wang, vice president and principal analyst with Forrester and author of the report, writes that adoption of Microsoft tools and technology "provides Epicor with an agile and comprehensive application foundation." Wang singles out the company's analytics, user experiences and support for data in its evaluation.

The report noted that Forrester recommends consideration of Epicor Software for clients considering a product built on Microsoft Visual Studio .NET technologies and for "SMBs up to $5 billion" in revenues looking for "an alternative to the usual suspects."

Founded in 1984, Epicor has over 20,000 customers in more than 140 countries, providing products in over 30 languages. The country's worldwide headquarters are located in Irvine, California.
...
 
Launching Salesforce Winter '09, Salesforce.com is announcing what company officials call "the free exchange of data between every company in its network."
 
Flogging what it claims is "the only CRM built on an enterprise cloud computing platform," Salesforce this week continued its love affair with the concept of cloud computing. Whether they play up cloud rhetoric because they believe it so fervently, or because it irritates Larry Ellison so much, is debatable.
 
What's not debatable is that it does irk Ellison. To some folks, that's its own reward.
 
The Salesenforcers say cloud computing's "unique model" - Larry grinds his teeth - has enabled Salesforce CRM to connect separate Salesforce CRM deployments, allowing companies to share sales leads, contacts, and company information, "without the need for complex integration software." Such as that marketed by... um...
 
Salesforce officials say the new Force.com technology "will allow its customers to extend Salesforce CRM applications through the creation of interactive Web-to-lead forms, which will enable site visitors to signal interest in products and services via a Web site."
...
 
A new study, in the words of study sponsors, "highlights barriers to widespread adoption of mobile operators."
 
Generic customer relationship management (CRM) systems, "fragmented data and poor campaign monitoring and reporting systems" are "undermining the ability of mobile marketers to put subscribers at the heart of their marketing relationships," the study finds.
 
So says a mobile community research report commissioned by Business Logic Systems and conducted by the London analyst firm Freeform Dynamics.
 
Titled "Mobile Marketing Imperatives: Transitioning to a Customer-Centric Approach," the report is based on interviews with chief marketing officers (CMO) and campaign managers at thirteen Tier 1 and Tier 2 mobile operators in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Using the insights into best practice taken from discussions with the panel, Mobile Marketing Imperatives "outlines a set of principles and imperatives that mobile marketers should consider in their path toward a genuinely customer-centric culture," study officials say.
 
The report also shows that at a time when many mobile markets are saturated, panel members are placing ever more emphasis on developing customer loyalty programs, improving customer segmentation and aligning systems and processes.

However, most members of the survey panel agreed that set-up delays, cost over-runs, lack of automation and over-reliance on IT departments affected their ability to execute campaigns. Poor lead monitoring systems mean that non-performing campaigns are often not spotted until they are too late to rectify.
 
And Josie Sephton, principal telecoms analyst at Freeform Dynamics and report co-author, warned that the "combination of suboptimal systems and processes, along with a disjoint between functions can create both frustration and dissatisfaction issues among staff, and perpetuate political problems between departments."

Corporate-wide CRM systems such as Oracle's Siebel, are typically not one-size-fits-all, as was perhaps first assumed when the original business cases were made, the study finds: "The functionality they provide is not always adequate when dealing with the more real-time nature of highly interactive campaigns driven directly via the handset. The end result is the heavy emphasis on manual processing and IT integration workarounds."
 
Still the problems are formidable: "We have invested a lot of time and money into our current systems. To replace them is not an option, nor is it necessary," one study respondent said. "However, it would be a useful exercise to consider products and approaches that could help address our issues without having to change everything."

Infogain Expands, Real Estate Agent Survey, Postcode for Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Convio's VP

December 9, 2008 4:19 PM | 0 Comments
The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is Thelonious Monk's "Brilliant Corners," a landmark album that concludes with the stirring "Bemsha Swing," an all-time jazz favorite of TMCnet Web Editor Michael Dinan:
 
Infogain Corporation, a vendor of CRM, ERP, Integration and Business Intelligence products today announced the expansion of its international operations with the opening of offices in the United Kingdom and the Middle East.
 
Investment in expansion demonstrates confidence in outsourcing growth for Oracle and Red Hat activities, according to one analyst commenting on the move.

The Los Gatos, California-based firm said the move will enable Infogain to meet the growing demand for its products in the European and Middle East markets and support its outreach to new verticals, as well as to "grow its presence among potential European and Middle East partners" and to "expand its portfolio to provide client service in key geographies."
 
Mark Collin has been appointed Vice President - UK & Europe, heading up European operations working with an n experienced senior management team based in Manchester.
 
Having previously established some presence in the UK, Infogain is now investing in what company officials are describing as a "long-term strategy to develop its European market share from the UK, strengthening its sales and consultancy presence with a new management team and a fresh approach."
 
In the Middle East, Neeraj Chhibbar takes the role of Manager - Sales & Business Development for the Middle East, based in Dubai, and will be responsible for markets in UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Yemen. The focus, company officials say, will be on offering end-to-end products on Oracle's Technology platform including Oracle e-Biz and Oracle Retail.
 
Kapil Nanda, founder and CEO of Infogain Corporation, said the expansion "reflects our confidence that we have the right service offering for these markets... to deliver integration, CRM, ERP and Business Intelligence products."
...
 
CRM and analytics vendor Rexer Analytics has announced the results of their New England Real Estate Agent Survey showing "declining levels of sales and agent satisfaction during 2008."
 
Many agents remain "guardedly optimistic," the survey found, with over half projecting that the coming year will be the same or better than a typical year, and 90 percent of agents reporting that they plan to remain in the real estate field "for the foreseeable future."
 
In April of 2008, Rexer assessed the experiences, priorities, and challenges of New England real estate agents through an online survey. In November, the agents who participated in the spring were asked a few follow-up questions about their experiences over the intervening six months and their current outlook.
 
For the April 2008 study 211 agents from the six New England states participated in the survey. To qualify for the study, agents had to have at least two years experience in the field. Forty-four percent were in the field between two and six years, and 30 percent have 20 or more years of experience. Nearly half (47 percent) of those surveyed made $40,000/year or less in the previous year and just over a quarter (27 percent) made more than $80,000/year.
 
It's First Coffee's observation that real estate agents tend to be an optimistic group by nature, a trait borne out by the study: Despite over half (53 percent) experiencing their "worst year ever" or a "worse than average year," less than a quarter (24 percent) projected the next year to fall into these categories.
 
Current market pressures may be keeping many agents from being "completely satisfied" (only 30 percent indicated this highest level of satisfaction), although most do tend toward being content, with an additional 47 percent being "satisfied."
 
About 160 of the participants in that study who provided their e-mail address so that the survey results could be sent to them were contacted again in November for a brief follow-up survey to determine how their last six months had been and to see how their outlook was in comparison to April.
 
Overall satisfaction dropped notably: in April 31 percent of these agents were "completely satisfied," while in November only 13 percent were. Conversely, in April only seven percent of these agents were dissatisfied (indicated by selecting "dissatisfied" or "completely dissatisfied") while in November this number rose to 24 percent.
 
Agents' drop in satisfaction corresponded to their personal experiences becoming markedly worse over the intervening months, with 69 percent reporting that the past six months were worse than similar time periods in previous years (compared with 52 percent in April indicating this was the case for the previous year). While only 23 percent saw the coming year as likely to be a below average year in April, that figure rose to 43 percent in November.
...
 
SugarCRM has announced the release of new Cloud Connectors for SugarCRM, which allow for company and contact data residing in other cloud environments to be called and presented in SugarCRM.
 
The product also has what company officials are calling "Sugar Feeds," which provide a rolling set of notices and alerts based on activity within SugarCRM. These features, as well as new management features for administering modules, will be generally available at the end of this month.
 
"This new functionality integrates business data and social intelligence from the cloud into the SugarCRM user experience," says John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM, adding that the features were intended to provide "immediacy and interaction" from Web applications."
 
The Cloud Connectors connect via Web Services to such third-party data service providers as Hoover's, JigSaw and LinkedIn for account and lead information. Cloud Views provide users a one-click preview of information retrieved, and Data Merge lets users select data from multiple data providers and merge it into SugarCRM.
 
For example: When a SugarCRM user views a new lead within SugarCRM, a pop-up Cloud View will provide information about the company for the lead qualification process. Using Cloud Views, the user can see what connections he has at the company via LinkedIn, or preview detailed company statistics from Hoover's. What he likes he can import into SugarCRM via Data Merge.
 
Other Cloud Connectors available now include Zoominfo and Crunchbase, which are available for download at Sugar Exchange.
...
 
Convio, a vendor of on-demand constituent relationship management software and services to nonprofit organizations, has announced that Fred Waugh has assumed the newly created position of vice president, alliances. Waugh previously served as vice president, marketing.
 
"Over the past year we have opened Convio's software to third party applications, as well as using Salesforce.com's Platform as a Service for our new constituent relationship management system, Common Ground," says Gene Austin, chief executive officer of Convio.
 
Austin says given "the movement of nonprofits toward more choice and flexibility," Convio decided now is the time to "enhance and expand our relationships and the programs and services we provide to partners in the marketplace."
 
He sees Waugh as "qualified to help us strengthen relationships and programs within this community inside the nonprofit market."
 
Waugh is tasked with developing, expanding and strengthening Convio's strategic plans, programs and communication processes with service and technology providers, as well as third party developers who are building applications around Convio's open platforms.
 
He is expected to lead efforts to expand choice for the nonprofit market through integration between applications from multiple vendors via Convio's open application programming interfaces.
 
Waugh joined Convio in 2000, with more than 15 years of experience in technology marketing. Prior to Convio he was with Tivoli Systems, and has also held product management and marketing positions at Compaq Computer, Sun Microsystems and Farallon Communications.
 
He began his career as a business journalist, after which he evidently decided he'd rather work for a living.

Iron Mountain and .tel, Intel and Traffix

December 9, 2008 4:15 PM | 1 Comment
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. During this time, owners of existing trademarks can obtain a .tel domain for their brands, the selection method is first-come, first-served. This is followed by the land rush phase of the launch, from February 2 to March 23, 2009, in which .tel registrations are open to all.
 
Lower priced, general availability registrations open on March 24, 2009 for .tel domain names that remain. Iron Mountain's guidance is that "companies with established brand trademarks should take advantage of the sunrise period if they want to strengthen and protect their brand with a .tel domain for their brand."
 
If companies do not register a .tel domain for their establish brand trademarks during the sunrise period, that brand will no longer be protected, and will be available to anyone during the land rush period.
 
Telnic Limited is the Registry Operator and Sponsoring Organization for .tel. Telnic's CEO, Khashayar Mahdavi, said from any Internet device, "you can enter a .tel domain, and the DNS immediately returns the appropriate contact information allowing you to immediately initiate contact."
 
A .tel domain provides a named listing with unlimited contact information in a global directory, accessible from any device connected to the Internet. This integrates all communication products, such as e-mail, phone, fax, premium numbers, call centers, IVR systems, vanity numbers and VoIP products under a single product.
 
Founded in 1951, Iron Mountain has over 120,000 corporate clients throughout North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific.
...
 
Tel Aviv-based Traffix Systems has announced that it will offer a pre-validated, integrated NGN Control Plane product based on Traffix OpenBloX, and Intel SOA Expressway, a service router designed to address the high speed service mediation, transformation, validation, and virtualization requirements of federated SOA deployments.

To simplify NGN deployment, Traffix officials say they will integrate the Intel SOA Expressway with the Rosetta Gateway product line. The combined product expedites NGN deployment by "addressing common bottlenecks - it accelerates, secures, integrates and routes services and legacy signaling in a single form."

Using Intel SOA Expressway, "we are able to accelerate and secure the NGN Control Plane," said Lenny Ridel, Traffix CTO.

 
Girish Juneja, managing director for Intel SOA Products, Intel Software and Services Group, said the combination of Traffix's approach in the Telco Authentication, Authorization and Accounting market segment and Intel's high performance service router architecture for SOA backbone processing "sets a new standard for cross network NGN service and Control Plane connectivity."

This new announcement places Traffix's Rosetta Gateway as an SOA-based Control Plane product for the NGN networks. The Rosetta Diameter Gateway is now available from Traffix Systems.
...
 
Commtouch has announced that it is ranked Number 32 on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA 2008, a rating of the 500 fastest growing technology companies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
 
Rankings are based on percentage revenue growth over five years (2002-2007), Commtouch officials report that the company grew 3,319 percent during this period. Overall, companies that ranked on the Technology Fast 500 EMEA 2008 program had an average growth rate of 1,297 percent.
 
To qualify for the Fast 500, entrants must have had 2003 operating revenues of at least €50,000 and 2006 operating revenues of at least €800,000.
 
Commtouch CEO Gideon Mantel attributes the company's revenue growth to its "expanding OEM partner base," together with its advanced security technologies: "We have anticipated the market demands for security services and introduced technology to meet the threats."
 
"Achieving sustained revenue growth of 3,319 percent over five years is a tremendous achievement," said Karel Bakkes, partner in charge of Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 EMEA program.
 
Commtouch has also placed seventh on the Israel Technology Fast 50, a ranking of the 50 fastest growing technology firms in Israel. The firm sells messaging and Web security technology for security companies and service providers, founded on what company officials describe as "a datacenter-based approach."
...
 
Amazon Web Services has launched "Public Data Sets on AWS," providing access to a centralized repository of public data sets that can be integrated into AWS cloud-based applications.
 
AWS hosts the public data sets at no charge for the community, and users pay only for the compute and storage they consume with their own applications. Data sets already available include various U.S. Census databases from the U.S. Census Bureau, 3-D chemical structures provided by Indiana University, and an annotated form of the Human Genome from Ensembl.
 
More data sets will be available soon, including a wide range of economic statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and additional scientific data sets.
 
Previously, according to the Amazonians, large data sets such as the Human Genome and U.S. Census data "required many hours to locate, download and customize." Now, company officials say, "anyone can access these large data sets from their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances and start computing on the data within minutes."
 
AWS officials say they hope to "fuel innovation and further accelerate the pace of new discoveries." Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Product Management and Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services, says "we can't wait to see the discoveries and innovations that could stem from this ecosystem."
 
Select public data sets are hosted on Amazon EC2 for free as Amazon Elastic Block Store snapshots. Amazon EC2 customers can access this data by creating their own personal Amazon EBS volumes, using the public data set snapshots as a starting point. They can then access, modify and perform computation on these volumes directly using their Amazon EC2 instances and just pay for the compute and storage resources that they use.
 
If available, researchers can also use pre-configured Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with tools like Inquiry by BioTeam to perform their analysis.
 
"Bioinformatics is a hugely exciting area which is providing much insight into our understanding of biology and, particularly, the genetic basis of many human diseases like cancer and diabetes," said Dr. Glenn Proctor, Ensembl Software Coordinator at the EBI. "Ensembl's approach has always been to try and lower the barriers to entry so that a researcher using a desktop PC in a lab or a laptop in an airport departure lounge has access to high-quality, up to the minute genetic information."

The Future of... IM and PTT, SMS, LCD TVs, NFC, SpinVox

December 5, 2008 3:32 PM | 0 Comments

The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is John Coltrane's My Favorite Things album:

Let's call this one the Crystal Ball Edition of First Coffee, as we peer into the future:

The worldwide market for presence-based telecommunication services, including instant messaging and push-to-talk, is expected to exceed $16 billion in 2009, as an ever increasing number of cellular and wireline carriers provide customized services predicated upon the availability of their end-users.

According to a market research study from The Insight Research Corporation, presence-based telecommunication services such as IM and PTT are "wildly popular in Asian countries" - carrier revenue from presence-based services is nearly 25 percent greater in Asia than North America.

Insight Research's market analysis study, titled "Presence Based Services Market 2008-2013," notes that presence-based services are part of a worldwide push by carriers to create new IP-enabled services for consumers and business users.

The study predicts that consumers of mobile and fixed line telecommunications services are adopting presence-based services along with other IP-enabled services such as location based services, fixed-mobile convergence, file sharing, streaming, and video telephony.

"Presence-based services are all about saving time and effort, so both consumers and businesses see value in these applications," says Robert Rosenberg, president of Insight Research Corp. "These services are no longer being viewed as just teen toys. IM and PTT are also business tools, and we see this market continuing to grow."

...

A report from Portio Research on mobile messaging suggests that SMS will continue to be the cash cow of mobile data revenues for some time to come.

Traffic volumes and revenues continue to confound predictions - not this one, though, of course - and are "expected to keep growing throughout the global economic downturn," according to the Portions. The study estimates the whole mobile messaging industry, worth $130 billion in 2008, will be worth $224 billion by 2013, 60 percent of non-voice service revenues.

The report, "Mobile Messaging Futures 2008 - 2013," asserts that "there is nothing likely to stop continued growth of mobile messaging in the short term, driven by a cocktail of ubiquitous SMS, media rich MMS, enterprise based mobile e-mail and youth-conscious mobile IM."

SMS remains king because there is no cheap, easy to use alternative that will work with all phones and across all networks, not to mention the fact the study mentions: "It is loved the world over." Indeed in the US market, where SMS was a comparative slow starter, use per subscriber per month is now almost double the European average.

Still, we're pikers compared to China, where average users send over 100 messages each month, and the Filipinos leave the rest of the world in the dust, churning out 755 messages per person each month.

Portio also predict a bright future for mobile e-mail even though Japan is the only market where consumer mobile e-mail has surpassed the use of SMS. E-mail is still the most popular form of business communication - relax, you're still normal - and the report suggests that mobile e-mail users worldwide will quadruple from approximately a quarter of a billion users in 2008 to over a billion users by the end of 2013.

The horse to bet on, though, seems to be mobile instant messaging, even though it's still beset by the technical problems of interoperability. Portio foresees exponential growth in mobile IM users, surging from a worldwide total of 111 million users in 2008 to 867 million users by the close of 2013, which translates into growth from $2.5 billion in 2008 to approximately $12.4 billion in 2013.

...
Okay, tell me what you think:

Here's the headline of the news crossing First Coffee's desk - "New NFC Ecosystem and Players Emerge." What does that say to you?

Of course - there's a new power structure emerging in the National Football Conference, as the Philadelphia Eagles, Green Bay Packers and Seattle Seahawks sink and are replaced by on-the-come teams like the Washington Redskins and Arizona Cardinals, with the emergence of key players like Larry Fitzgerald, Jason Campbell and Adrian Peterson.

Right? I mean, what other sensible way is there to take a headline like that?

So imagine First Coffee's surprise when it turned out "NFC" means a technology for mobile handsets that emerged in 2003, and that the article was talking about how while the past five years have seen significant work on NFC standardization and infrastructure, there has been little in the way of full-scale adoption.

 

"What has been lacking is a short-term, realistic view of the potential for NFC in small and targeted rollouts, either by customer segment, bundled application, or regional capabilities," says ABI Research principal analyst Jonathan Collins. "NFC's benefits are obvious if the technology is ubiquitous; but it will not reach that level of acceptance without a rethinking of the way to engender NFC demand in a piecemeal fashion."

NFC's ability to address broad end-user markets with a simple end user interface, namely mobile handsets and payments, as well as multiple other technologies and interactions got everyone jazzed, but even today only one NFC handset is commercially available.

"A new wave of companies and products has emerged, eager to harness the potential of NFC in a range of applications and services that are often quite niche, but that can use NFC today to create value and drive efficiencies," Collins thinks.

NFC peripherals and NFC additions to consumer devices are "emerging alongside contactless stickers and other interim technologies that will help bridge the gap between NFC's usefulness and the lack of broad availability of NFC handsets," the study finds, while "large-scale operator rollouts remain subject to additional trials and the further development of business relationships enabling support for NFC payment and ticketing services."

And the Vikings are going to the Super Bowl once they get a decent quarterback and downfield receiving threat, too.

...

SpinVox, a vendor of voice-to-content messaging, has been named one of the world's most innovative technology companies by the World Economic Forum, capping a year in which 13 telecommunications carriers around the world launched the SpinVox service.

SpinVox, founded in 2003 by Christina Domecq and Daniel Doulton, sells voice to text conversion services. The way CEO Domecq puts it, "in five years we have grown from an idea born of a moment of frustration - when coming out of a meeting, I received 14 voice mails and wondered why I couldn't have those messages converted and delivered as text."

The service is available on five continents in six languages and has more than 10 million users worldwide. Its founding service converts voice mail messages into text and delivers them as an SMS to a mobile phone or as an e-mail to a PC inbox, PDA or smart phone.

The success of this initial service has led to a string of product launches, including SpinVox Blog which enables people to speak a blogpost from any phone, anywhere and have it posted automatically to their blog.

 

SpinVox is also entering the enterprise space with services such as SpinVox CallMail, touted as improving call center workflow and has deals with companies for telecommunications infrastructure. SpinVox was also invited recently to join Microsoft's Windows Mobile Developer Advisory Council.

At the heart of all the services is the SpinVox Voice Message Conversion System (VMCS) which works by combining speech technologies with human intelligence and learning. VMCS as it stands today can convert messages in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese.

When the 2008 Christmas season has ended in the United States, 33.1 million LCD TVs will have been sold to US consumers, according to recent research by MultiMedia Intelligence.

But it's a double-edged sword: While the number of LCD TVs sold moving into 2009 will rise, a steep decline in Average Selling Prices will sap 2009 overall revenue growth.

Further, MMI officials think, market weakness will impact multiple income segments, including households with income below $35,000 as well as households with income between $150,000 and $250,000.

"As LCD TV ownership saturates in higher-income households, growth depends on lower-income families," observes Rick Sizemore, Chief Strategy Officer for MultiMedia Intelligence. "However, this puts the US LCD TV market at considerable risk as economic weakness undermines spending power among lower and middle income households."

The research also found that LCD TV revenue from households with income between $150,000 and $250,000 will declines by over 9 percent in 2009 compared to 2008.

In 2007, US head of households aged 70 years old and older spent US$2.1 billion on US LCD TVs. And in 2012, in households where the US LCD TV purchaser makes between $50,000- $74,999, the total revenue from these household is forecasted to be $7.3 billion.

MultiMedia Intelligence, a market research and consultancy firm, specializes on the markets and technologies for delivering and monetizing digital content and services across multiple platforms. We look beyond the classic 'three screens,' which include TVs, mobile handsets, and computers. We put markets into the broader context of the industry ecosystems that are converging and changing traditional business models.

Fineos and Quinn, Cincom and IBM, IQMS's ERP, SAS and Marketing Store, Retail Software Market Report

December 4, 2008 6:02 PM | 1 Comment
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. Fineos is headquartered in Dublin with offices in North America, Europe and Australasia.
...
 
Software vendor Cincom Systems has joined with IBM Smart Business to sell IT business applications for SMBs on IBM's new Smart Market platform.
 
IBM Smart Business offers technology applications, services and support from a single- window and platform with a single point of contact.

Cincom's Business Intelligence software and Cincom Synchrony contact center and customer relationship management (CRM) tools designed for SMBs will be available on the IBM Smart Market platform.

"The simplicity, innovation, lower cost, and accessibility of a wide choice of business applications in the IBM Smart Market initiative - served by a single point of contact for service, billing and support - will be a powerful and attractive new force in the SMB market," says Pantulu Avasarala, Director, India Development Center.
...
 
CRM business intelligence and analytics vendor SAS has announced that the Canadian arm of The Marketing Store, a branding and relationship management agency, has acquired SAS Analytics for its customer communications offerings.
 
SAS officials say the agency will use SAS to perform value-added segmentation, modeling and analysis of demand generation and communication campaigns it designs and executes for clients.
 
"The Marketing Store provides integrated marketing products to brands in the market today," says Jane Ragotte, Senior Vice President, Digital, Direct & Data, The Marketing Store (Canada), adding that the firm wanted to incorporate an analytical foundation to their marketing products for insight to improve the results for their client base.
 
Ajay Handa, Director of Business Intelligence and Analytics, The Marketing Store (Canada), says he believes applying SAS Analytics to segment and model the customers' data, at the front end of the campaign planning process, "will help improve overall response rates by delivering more targeted and relevant offerings to our clients' customers and prospects."
 
According to Handa, SAS will also be used to analyze the performance of campaigns to help enhance planning and results for future campaigns and forecast demand from client campaigns.
 
In Canada, The Marketing Store's client list includes McDonald's, Nissan, Diageo and Unilever. TMS is part of a global network headquartered in Chicago with offices in Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, London, Birmingham, Madrid, Paris, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Sydney, Toronto and Vietnam.
...
 
IQMS, a vendor of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, has announced the release of SmartPage for EnterpriseIQ. SmartPage provides an intuitive portal that allows users to create customizable views of ERP functions, report requirements, e-mail, key performance indicators and more, on one screen. 
 
The vendor is hoping that putting the ERP system and other commonly-used applications on one screen that SmartPage will be seen as a way to speed productivity.
 
Company officials are billing the SmartPage EnterpriseIQ product as giving customers the ability to create, save and share unlimited user roles, so employees "from the top floor to the shop floor" can get benefits from the system. Among other features, SmartPage provides unlimited RealTime production monitors giving shop floor feedback from remote or local business units. 
 
Security is also enhanced through single, secured login functionality, designed specifically for role based programs. And links to e-mail programs, the Internet and customizable KPIs allow switching between programs on one screen.
 
Other features of the SmartPage interface include access to all extended ERP areas, including quality, engineering, accounting , manufacturing, customer service, maintenance, HR, production, and more.
 
There are also customizable charts and graphs with drill-down capabilities, what company officials call "RealTime Production Monitoring Speedometers" that filter by manufacturing cell or ePlant, and direct CRM access with calendar, calls, tasks, support and meetings by user or for all users, as well as e-mail integration.
...
 
Despite unfavorable economic conditions in countries such as the United States and Japan, the prospects for the retail software market look particularly promising in the emerging Asia Pacific and Central and Eastern European markets, according to an analysis from Frost & Sullivan titled "World Retail Software Market."
 
This upward trend will continue, the analysts believe, "as retailers in these regions continue to focus on Business Intelligence , analytics and customer centric products."
 
The research firm found that the retail software market earned revenues of over $9.31 billion in 2007. Of this, software licensing accounted for $3.07 billion in 2007 and will reach $5.88 billion in 2014.
 
The study found that retailers have been substituting their legacy systems for modern day products built on industry-leading platforms, "facilitating the flow of business information across the entire value chain." The implementation of these products, the study's authors found, "helps manage performance enhancements by offering a perspective of all business information within the purview of the enterprise or retail chain."
 
As these products offer extensive performance enhancements, there is a wide scope for the uptake of advanced end-to-end products as well.
 
"The primary driver of the growth of the retail software industry is the growing focus on business integration and optimization," concludes Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Prasanna Prakash. "Using end-to-end products, retailers can reduce their total cost of ownership and make more informed business decisions on a day-to-day basis."
 
Besides reducing TCO, retail software also assists in providing uniform brand communication across various channels. Optimization across the various processes and channels allows the retailer to respond better to customer requirements.
 
Retailers are also turning to retail software products, particularly customer-centric products and BI, to build customer loyalty and try to improve the customer shopping experience through merchandise and promotions management.
 
Products such as customer relationship management (CRM) enable retailers to target premium customers using customized promotions and advertisements, thereby increasing the customer lifetime value  involved.
 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.

Agresso's ERP Study, Open Solutions and Osoyoos, Volante and UBC, InterCall's Upgrade

December 4, 2008 2:51 PM | 0 Comments
The news as of the all-important third cup of coffee, and the music is an old high school favorite, The Kinks' live album "One For The Road." Long one of First Coffee's favorite bands, they were admittedly a bit twee and fey on studio recordings, but this is one full-blooded, muscular, hard-rockin' live album:
 
Agresso has reported a change in ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) buying habits for the first time in 15 years as companies look for a faster ROI in the face of a global recession.
 
The vendor recently reported strong third quarter global results with a 37 percent increase in revenues (28.8  percent in North America) including new orders in the $1 million-plus category. The Agressians throw an elbow as company officials point out that "this compares to market rivals like SAP, who announced an unimpressive nine percent year-over-year decline in new license revenues" over the same period.
 
"ERP buying habits are changing," says Shelley Zapp, president of Agresso North America. "The downward trend we see in SAP licensing revenues suggests that organizations are unwilling to invest in a product that hooks them into a never-ending cycle of need-spend-need-spend... unnecessary IT spending is no longer an option."
 
Agresso officials cite a survey of nearly 900 users by Technology Evaluation Centers, aimed at determining the impact of ERP products on an organization's perceived ability to make changes, reporting that 70 percent of ERP users feel "notably disadvantaged" by their existing systems.
 
According to another survey, conducted by the Business Performance Management Institute, only 11.2 percent of respondents could keep up with business demands to change processes.
 
Earlier this year, the TEC prepared a report detailing the ability of different ERP vendors to manage a list of business change scenarios. An analysis of these results determines that Agresso users "can expedite required changes to their ERP product to support over 95 percent of the change areas studied," whereas SAP and Oracle systems "require application development conducted by external IT consultants to support more than 95 per cent of these changes," Agresso officials say.
...
 
Osoyoos Credit Union officials say they have selected The Complete Credit Union Solution: DNA, the latest version of the relational core data processing platform from Open Solutions, a vendor of technologies for financial institutions in the United States, Canada and other international markets.
 
The credit union serves the community of Osoyoos, British Columbia, and it's nice for First Coffee to report once in a while how technology benefits people who don't live in the Boston-D.C. East Coast Amtrak corridor, Silicon Valley or greater Chicagoland. When it says it has a "commitment to its members," a phrase heard ad nauseum from the global corporations, you know they're talking about the people they see at the bakery and at church Easter services.
 
There's also a swell of summer residents in the resort town who require away-from-home banking services, and that seasonal swing factored in the decision to choose TCCUS: DNA and Open Solutions, according to General Manager D.W. "Bill" Collins.
 
"Our basic goal is to provide the same or better service to our members that they would receive if they were anywhere else," he said. "The town is mostly a retirement community. New residents to the community are sophisticated consumers who expect the same service here that they would get in Vancouver, Calgary or Edmonton."
 
There's your municipal marketing tag line - "Osoyoos: All The Sophistication of Edmonton Without The Freakin' Wind."
 
TCCUS: DNA uses an Oracle relational database and open architecture platform. The product is expected to help the credit union streamline both front- and back-office applications, as well as provide a centralized relationship-based view of members, accounts, products and services.
 
"The CRM program looks like a far simpler and more valuable method to doing the proper analysis of our business," said Collins, who added that another factor in the credit union's decision was the simplicity of the product - "in a day or two, a teller or MSR is comfortable processing a job."
 
Plus, as Collins says, "I've known people at Open Solutions for 20 or 30 years. That came across for the staff - if there's a problem, they can call them up and know who they're talking to."
...
 
Traditionally, say Volante Systems officials, restaurateurs "have looked at the front of the house for ways to increase profitability and productivity." That means the dining room and bar, for those of you who didn't spend high school and college busing and waiting tables.
 
"But by doing so," they add, "they're overlooking a very important opportunity to take control of their business and their costs. And that opportunity doesn't reside on the floor -- it's found in the back office."
 
The University of British Columbia's food service operation isn't making that mistake - Volante officials say UBC has implemented a new Volante POS system in lieu of one described by UBC officials as "a plethora of different technologies and topologies, comprising of a mix of old style cash registers and rudimentary POS systems spread throughout the university."

Their most pressing need was the ability to process 2,500 students at lunchtime while managing the school's many different residence meal plans at the same time. "Processing 2500 students in an hour and a half used to cause database overload," says one UBC official. "Our old system had lots of hiccups."

Nowadays, hospitality technology is focusing more than ever on convergence and getting all systems into one. Here's where products such as an efficient POS and back office system come in - if you can't handle the connections between POS terminals on the floor, the kitchen, the back office and the inventory backend, it doesn't matter how cold your beer or how fluffy your soufflés, you're not going to be as profitable as you could be.
 
Integration with the back office, says First Coffee, a veteran of many years in the restaurant industry's trenches, means that managing inventory and food and labor costs becomes much easier. Real time access to data can help you determine good sellers quickly and avoid the worst five words in the restaurant industry - "Sorry, we're out of that."
 
Throw in some customer relationship management tools, and the bottom line is further boosted with the ability to implement customer loyalty programs, create gift cards, or track customer transaction histories. Volante sells just such CRM tools, employee management features and a full reporting suite.
...
 
InterCall, a conferencing and collaboration services vendor, has announced the launch of InterCall Online, an online account management tool designed to "streamline the way companies manage conferencing and collaboration services," company officials say.
 
Free to InterCall customers globally, InterCall Online is touted as giving administrators ways to tinker with the way workers use virtual meeting tools like Web conferencing and telepresence.
   
Basically the product lets conference leaders manage and control all conferencing services, edit user profiles, create new leaders and change account settings, schedule, update or delete pending conferences and view detailed billing and usage reports.
 
InterCall Online is being released as an upgrade of the previous online portal. "Users will notice a new look and feel that's more intuitive, user-friendly and provides easier access to account information," says Scott Etzler, president of InterCall, adding that "underneath the hood" are improvements such as a stronger infrastructure."
 
The product lets customers set up additional security requirements for joining a meeting and allow meetings to continue after the leader leaves. Call management features are designed to make it easier for users to control their conferences through the online interface, such as muting lines, recording the conference, dialing out and even changing entry tones.
 
The company's U.S. presence is augmented by a global reach "that extends to Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, India, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan," company officials say. So they obviously have experience with hairy online collaboration scenarios themselves.

Jenzabar, Vantage CRM Platform, The Salvation Army and Blackbaud

December 4, 2008 2:49 PM | 0 Comments
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. Green from The Campus Computing Project and Michael K. Townsley of Stevens Strategy, who addressed CFOs from institutions of higher education.
 
Jenzabar held a CFO conference at the Harvard Club of Boston for client executives who also attended the 2008 MIT Sloan CFO Summit.
 
The survey found that the top concern for CFOs, regardless of institutional type, was increasing constraints on institutional budgets. Other top concerns varied depending on the type of institution where the CFO serves - whether public or private institutions, research universities, small undergraduate colleges, or community colleges - but included the need for more effective fundraising, increased competition for students, and rising healthcare and energy costs.
 
Almost half the institutions in the study noted that they are currently engaged in both cost-cutting programs and active plans to increase revenue.
 
During the Jenzabar conference, keynote speaker Kenneth C. Green, Founding Director of the Campus Computing Project, spoke about major shifts in IT and emphasized that higher education is a service industry. Continuous developments in technology have raised the level of expectations of students, faculty and administrators and increased pressure on institutions to provide the same services students experience as consumers in other aspects of their lives.
 
Mike Townsley is a Senior Consultant at Stevens Strategy, a management consulting firm that specializes in higher and secondary education, and also the Dean of Undergraduate Studies and a professor of business at Becker College in Worcester, Massachusetts. Townsley spoke about the economy from a financial perspective and discussed credit, home equity, family income, and their affects on a higher education institution's tuition, investments, and overall financial planning. "Expanding target markets, creating partnerships, and building cash reserves are some of the strategic approaches to coping with the economic downturn," Townsley told the group. 
 
Jenzabar is headquartered in Boston - my, strange place for a company in the education biz - with regional offices located across the United States.
...
 
Vantage Communications, a vendor of managed services, has announced that it is "further expanding" its suite of cloud computing based products for small to medium-sized businesses to include a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) product: vPlatform CRM.
 
The vPlatform was designed by SaaS vendor Vantage to "address the needs of SMBs," company officials say, touting its "ease of use, which enables better user adoption rates and immediate return on investment."
 
"With assistance from Vantage's FastTrack Implementation teams, businesses are able to transition from existing CRM systems to Vantage vPlatform CRM within days instead of months," company officials say.
 
Everybody's running around like Chicken Little under the mistaken impression the economic sky is falling - folks, get a grip, we're not even in an officially-defined recession yet, we have yet to see a single quarter of negative growth, never mind the two consecutive ones that define a recession, so let's hold off on the Great Depression Redux talk, shall we? Wall Street lost $1 trillion in value in November - but later gained $1.2 trillion in the biggest five-day rally in history. The pendulum's still swinging.
 
First Coffee has no doubt, however, that the FUD atmospherics pumped out by the media, which rarely has a clue how the actual economy actually operates, will prove a boon for SaaS vendors as customers shy away from big-ticket purchases, preferring to rent until they see that no, all we ever had to fear was fear itself, as a famous socialist once said.
 
Okay, rant over.
 
Recent research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company shows that over a five year period businesses may lose as many as half of their customers, and of course it's the received wisdom that the process of acquiring a new customer can be a long and costly one, sometimes costing six to seven times more than retaining an existing customer does. In comparison, businesses that boosted customer retention rates by as little as five percent saw an increase in their profits ranging anywhere from 5 percent to 95 percent overall.
 
The vPlatform CRM includes, then, customer retention and revenue enhancement tools, sales force automation tools, marketing campaign ROI analysis, analytics and reporting capabilities and business intelligence.
 
"We have been hearing from our customers that their CRM systems are riddled with hidden costs and overly complicated to integrate and manage, resulting in a low volume of use among employees and less than expected results," says Robert Phelan, President of Vantage Communications.
...
 
Blackbaud has announced that The Salvation Army Southern Territory has chosen Blackbaud Enterprise CRM as its centralized database to support the sharing of cross-division information, facilitate improved reporting and streamline operations.
 
At a national level, The Salvation Army raised $2 billion in 2007 and recently ranked No. 2 in The Chronicle of Philanthropy's "Philanthropy 400" list of organizations that raise the most funds from private sources. Though donations grew at a national level by 23 percent last year, growth in request for aid has surpassed that amount in recent weeks.
 
Salvation Army officials say they're "faced with the tough job of bridging the gap between donations and the rising demand for services" due to the economic downturn. So get those bell-ringers out there. Double shifts. Onward Christian soldiers. When the coin into the red bucket rings, the homeless wino out of poverty springs.
 
When it came time to report at a Territory level or to respond to a regional disaster, TSAS previously faced a significant manual effort to create a connected view of constituent information. Executive-level views were augmented manually to add missing information. Financial and fundraising reporting required manual processes and consumed valuable staff time.
 
Commissioner Max Feener, who leads TSAS, says it was not only the technology that led us to Blackbaud, "but their people and their expertise with federated organizations."
 
TSAS leads the mission of The Salvation Army in the southern United States across nine divisions representing 15 southeastern states and the District of Columbia. The Salvation Army across the nation is committed to its branding promise of "Doing the most good" by providing services to the marginalized. Nationally, 29 million people were assisted in 2007.
 
Additionally, each chapter or "Unit" of The Salvation Army provides region-specific services that make a positive impact within its local service area. TSAS constituents include a broad network of volunteers, soldiers, officers (ministers), congregations and partners in outreach and delivery of services. The Salvation Army, founded in 1865, is, in fact, a fully-fledged evangelical Christian denomination like Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, et al.
 
Major Ron Busroe, TSAS secretary for community relations and development, says the Army's previous system did not easily support sharing and did not interact easily with third-party applications. With Blackbaud Enterprise CRM, he says, "will be able to integrate our disaster relief system and quickly find responders that are available across the Territory, improving the speed and impact of our disaster relief response."
 
"Blackbaud is focused on helping faith-based organizations improve both the financial and spiritual impact of their work," said Mark Fetner, who heads up Blackbaud's efforts to serve the faith-based community. "The Salvation Army is a leader in meeting human needs and doing the most good. We look forward to helping expand the social and spiritual impact of The Salvation Army in the Southern United States."
 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.

Majestic Consulting, TrueShip and Mac OS X, Info@Hand Training, Information Builders

December 4, 2008 2:48 PM | 0 Comments
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a wonderful blues album, Sweet Home Chicago, featuring what can really only be described as the Jewish Blues Ax Attack - brilliant blues guitarists Barry Goldberg, Harvey Mandel, wunderkind Mike Bloomfield, as well as gentiles such as Charlie Musselwhite, Ray Strazza and Bobby Jones:
 
Majestic Consulting Group has announced an e-commerce product described by company officials as "customizable to accommodate simple to complex online order systems integrated into CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software products."
     
The product allows users to order online, check the status of their orders, view their order history, re-order and edit the order history for new orders and "integrate information into a CRM package."

By having this information available to account managers, customer service and executives, company officials say, "it allows for information to be digested, allowing information to be used for management decisions. This is what CRM is all about, having a 360 degree view of your prospects and customers."

Each eCommerce product will have a customized integration to your CRM software product. "The system is flexible enough to push or pull selected data components to and from any CRM and ERP software," the Majestics say.

MCG also represents Microsoft CRM and SalesLogix CRM software.
...
 
What's being described by company officials as "the world's first global training and support resource for Info@hand," an online business and marketing management product for small to medium business, has been launched by US-based CNP Integrations.
 
The info@hand customer resource business management suite is a Web-based platform developed by the Long Reach Corporation of Canada, and built upon the Sugar CRM open source framework.
 
It's not uncommon for companies to find themselves spreading data out across a number of systems, stretching resources and people close to their limits. This product's feature set and capabilities are designed to avoid that, company officials say, by centralizing data, marketing, sales support, and customer service efforts.
 
CNP Integrations has put some of the most frequently asked questions and issues facing new info@hand CRBM users in its knowledgebase for 24/7 access.
 
Clients can sign up for subscription-based training seats or get training bundled with seat licenses for info@hand. CNP can also create custom user training documents and interactive modules for corporate branded training initiatives.
 
The first four interactive info@hand courses developed by CNP Integrations focus on concepts for end user training, and have over 80 interactive modules supported with documentation and testing from CNP's Joomla based Learning Management System.
 
Users can even print out certificates of completion to verify with managers they have successfully completed training. Several administrator training modules and more are planned for release in early 2009.
 
CNP's training for info@hand covers basic functions including; adding and editing leads, contacts and accounts, managing dashlets, managing forecasts, scheduling meetings and calls, project tracking, and more.
...
 
TrueShip, a - what else? - shipping software developer for small and mid-sized businesses, has announced support for Mac OS X users with the introduction of ReadyShipper 4 Mac.
 
Based on TrueShip's ReadyShipper software, ReadyShipper 4 Mac fills, in the estimation of company officials, "a need for businesses who use FedEx for shipping," since it integrates the complete range of FedEx shipping services, including domestic and international services and customs documentation.
 
ReadyShipper brings integrated shipping for e-commerce, order management and accounting systems, and the TrueShippers describe it as a client-based product designed to import, organize and ship orders. The product's design and workflow is engineered to "expedite the shipping process and eliminate errors associated with manually sorting shipping documents and re-keying address information."
 
The basis of the product, as far as company officials are concerned, is their claim that ReadyShipper 4 Mac is a business shipping product "previously unavailable to Mac users. Business customers who use FedEx with a Windows PC for shipping can now use a Mac to provide the last mile in ecommerce fulfillment."
 
 ReadyShipper 4 Mac features a native Mac interface for creating labels, packing lists and e-mail tracking confirmations  with Order Inspector and batch shipping capabilities.

The software also includes an assistant that "identifies common shipping mistakes before they happen," company officials say, and a database for high-capacity shipping. The product has Stamps.com as a standard option so users can ship via USPS as well as FedEx.
...
 
Information Builders, a vendor of operational business intelligence products, has announced partnerships with six firms in software as a service (SaaS), fraud protection, and case management products.
 
MegaMation, Accertify, 41st Parameter, Creative Data Solutions, and ScottTech have co-developed specialized products using WebFOCUS and iWay Software.
 
"Companies do not just want technology. They look for products that solve problems," said Gerald Cohen, CEO of Information Builders. "Web-based access to report sharing and distribution has been available only to organizations with the IT infrastructure required to support such products. For small and mid-sized organizations with limited resources, the alternative has been static reports via e-mail or hard copy, which is time-consuming and leads to conflicting data."
 
By encouraging and promoting the integration of Information Builders technologies and applications into third-party software, Information Builders officials say they want to be included in products that "maximize technology investments." To that end the firm has "sought out and collaborated" with product partners to improve  its business intelligence and integration products.
 
With new partners in SaaS, fraud protection, and vertical management products for logistics and the public sector, Information Builders hopes to be able to expand their market presence.
 
Generally organizations today are looking to optimize information and business processes with products that eliminate the need for capital expenditure on software and hardware, and of course shortening deployment cycles by several weeks or months, and reducing the reliance on IT resources for deployment and maintenance is a plus in anyone's book. That's basically what Information Builders is shooting for here by partnering with SaaS product providers.
...
 
Betcha didn't know there was a wave of baby Jesus thefts, did you? First Coffee didn't either.
 
Each Christmas season, according to LightningGPS officials, "hundreds of religious organizations are targeted by vandals and pranksters who steal or deface" outdoor decorations such as baby Jesus, Santa and menorahs.
 
"Some are taken as trophies, most are lost forever," company officials intone, adding grimly "the financial and emotional cost to the congregation includes the cost of replacement and the pain of explaining the event to small children."
 
Trophies - "Yeah that's my 1989 college water polo MVP one there, that one's Top Sales for the Tri-State Area in 1995, that's the baby Jesus from the Methodist church's Nativity display in 2000, that's Second Place in the Kissiwamee Over-30 Softball League in 2004..."
 
Help is on the way: LightningGPS, a vendor of GPS Tracking Devices, which has historically lent GPS Trackers to churches, schools and towns, is offering the free Christmas rental publicly to schools and churches across the country through their distribution partnership with BrickHouse Security.
 
A GPS Tracking Device can track objects virtually anywhere in the world and is small enough to covertly fit inside most everyday objects.
 
But with GPS tracking, an individual or police can go online and track the item on a map anywhere it goes, and boy, won't those criminals be surprised - "Awright punk, drop Jesus and put your hands on your head nice and slow, y'hear?"
 
"The theft or destruction of Nativity scenes is a rising problem," says Todd Morris, CEO of BrickHouse Security. "Every year we hear how the sanctity and harmony of the holiday season was ruined by a few Scrooges." First Coffee wasn't aware that Ebenezer Scrooge made a habit of nicking Jesuses on the way home from Scrooge & Marley, we need to reread that this year.
 
BrickHouse Security, a distributor of LightningGPS products, is also offering custom hidden cameras in an effort to catch thieves this holiday season.
 
"Daddy? The sheep's eyes are... creeping me out, it's like they're... following me."
 
Any church or school looking to sign-up for a free GPS Tracking device to use through the holiday season at no charge, go to www.lightninggps.com/free-gps-tracking.html.
 
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.

Forrester Places Oracle, FrontRange's Launch, Rimini Street and UBid, Tectura and Microsoft, BigMachines and EPrize

December 4, 2008 2:45 PM | 0 Comments
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. This data can then be automatically reconciled against a full audit of the network, establishing how much software is installed and in use on the network against the organization's entitlement.
 
The product sounds like it'd be pretty useful for customers of volume licensing deals such as Select or Open License agreements, where this sort of information is important for negotiations and renewals.
 
License Manager 3.0 also has the ability to centrally manage entitlements for Microsoft server products that use either Client Access Licenses, such as SQL Server, Exchange and Terminal Services or per processor licensing.
 
Company officials say this includes the ability to create and manage CALs based on per device or per user.
 
Andy Burton, Vice President of the Infrastructure Management Group at FrontRange Solutions, said for the vast majority of organizations, "the first port of call when managing their software estate is to make sure they are accurately licensed across their Microsoft estate."
 
With many organizations buying PCs pre-loaded with Operating Systems and business applications, the ability to differentiate and manage OEM licenses, frequently more restrictive than software purchased through other channels, is important to maintaining an accurate view on license entitlement.
 
License Manager 3.0 also has an integrated version of the Centennial Discovery audit product, creating a single product for both the collection of software inventory data and the processing of license entitlements.
...
 
Rimini Street, a third-party maintenance and support provider for enterprise software, has announced that online auction retailer uBid.com, part of Enable Holdings, an asset recovery products company, has confirmed its earlier decision to switch support for its Siebel system to Rimini.
 
Since moving to Rimini Street Support, uBid.com has achieved what the Riminians characterize as "significant annual support cost savings."
 
UBid.com, with over five million registered customers and more than $1 billion in cumulative product sales, buys brand name excess inventory and auctions it to consumers through its online site. Consumers also have access to excess inventory through uBid.com's new sister site RedTag.com, which offers brand name merchandise in a fixed price format.
 
As part of its IT plan, uBid.com sought to reduce annual software support costs while continuing to use its existing Siebel software investment. "UBid.com relies on its Siebel CRM system," said Sally Dahl, vice president, Seller Solutions Center, Enable Holdings. "After a detailed review and comparison, we found that Rimini Street delivers better support and more responsive service compared to the software vendor."
 
Seth Ravin, president and CEO, Rimini Street, claims that his company's "other Global, Fortune 500, mid-market, and public sector organizations" achieve average savings of "more than 50 percent in annual support costs." Company officials claim Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and SAP licensees save "at least 50 percent in annual support fees and to remain on their current software release without any required upgrades or migrations through 2020 and beyond."
...
 
Tectura Corporation, a vendor of business consulting services, has been chosen to be part of Microsoft's Technical Adoption Program for the latest Microsoft Dynamics release -- Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009.
 
TAP is designed to provide "a consistent experience for Microsoft partners to obtain real-world customer feedback on Microsoft pre-release products," according to the Tecturians. The goal is to improve customer and partner experiences in evaluating and adopting Microsoft technologies.
 
Tectura is one of eight Microsoft Dynamics partners asked to join Microsoft's software experts in this initiative.
 
One of the major goals of this TAP initiative, Tectura officials say, "was to test the new Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 release along with one of Tectura's ISV products." Evidently, the way it worked was that each Microsoft Dynamics partner that was part of the TAP team ran an upgrade project with a selected customer. Andreas Voss, product manager for Tectura Germany, chose Tectura Process Manufacturing, a product used by more than 180 clients around the globe.
 
Explains Voss, "Our client was already considering updating their ERP product. Plus, they wanted to improve the organizational processes within the company. Integration between their ERP and Microsoft Office was one of their goals. Upgrading to Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 provided an excellent opportunity to reach their objectives."

A "major functionality component" of the Tectura product, company officials say, is personalized role centers.
 
"What we have done with the Technical Adoption Program will make next steps for other partners who must also update their products, much more streamlined," Voss says.
...
 
BigMachines, a vendor of on-demand configuration and proposal software, has announced that ePrize, a vendor of interactive promotions, has replaced its previous sales configuration tool with BigMachines with the goal of "simplifying ePrize's quoting process and streamlining their sales cycle."
 
EPrize creates interactive promotions. The company has launched over 5,000 promotions in 36 countries, company officials say. The firm deployed BigMachines for "sales configuration, quoting and proposal generation, hosted with BigMachines' data hosting services."
 
Drew Bennett, SVP, Product Development of ePrize, said they chose to migrate to BigMachines "because they are able to provide the product we need to support our business, and we can maintain and update the quoting and configuration tools ourselves using on-demand administration features."
 
Godard Abel, CEO of BigMachines said the vendor "has been expanding its customer base into new markets, and with ePrize, we continue to provide products into the online media and promotions space."
 
Since 1999, ePrize has launched more than 5,000 promotions for 74 of the top 100 brands (as ranked by Advertising Age), including Coca-Cola, Dell, General Motors, The Gap, Yahoo!, Southwest Airlines, P&G, Disney and Subway. Headquartered in Detroit, the company also has offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, and London.
 
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BackOffice and SAP, IDC's BI Study, Zicam on T-Mobile, Five9 in Carolina, Consona and Solid Works

December 4, 2008 2:43 PM | 0 Comments
The news as of the all-important third cup of coffee and the music is Dusty Springfield's "The Look of Love." Yes, there is life in Dusty outside of "Son of a Preacher Man." She never hit it big in the States, but she was one of England's most popular Swingin' Sixties crooners:
 
BackOffice Associates, a vendor of SAP data products, has announced the offering of a competitive bundle of their Boring Go Live data migration toolset with their active and passive data governance products for delivering business data.
 
The BackOfficers say the bundle will provide SAP customers a product for "achieving the data quality required to implement and operate SAP products."
 
BackOffice Associates has provided data migration and data governance products exclusively for SAP since 1996. The vendor's products "focus on eliminating risk associated with inadequate data quality, and letting SAP customers realize the benefits from their SAP ERP projects," company officials say.
 
Evidently some SAP customers have attempted to implement SAP only to find their data was not ready for the rigors of a fully integrated ERP system. "A successful SAP implementation requires data that is ready for SAP," company officials reasonably contend. "This means you will need experts in SAP data migration and data governance with a proven methodology and Web-enabled tools specifically built for the job."
 
BackOffice has delivered over 400 Boring Go Live data migrations for SAP customers worldwide, according to Patricia Kennedy, President and CEO of BackOffice Associates. The company is headquartered in South Harwich, Massachusetts with offices in Europe, Australia, India and Mexico.
...
 
Research firm IDC has completed a study focused on "defining pervasive business intelligence and its key indicators, identifying key influencers, and highlighting best practices for organizations moving toward pervasive BI," according to company officials.
 
Long-term trends picked up by the study suggest that "the market is in the early stages of a BI product adoption cycle that will extend the reach of various decision support and decision automation products to a broad set of new user groups," IDC officials say:
 
"These user groups will span all levels of an organization and will be involved in a spectrum of strategic and operational decision making."
 
IDC's research "defines pervasive BI as a set of six specific indicators and then identifies five key factors as having the strongest influence on BI pervasiveness," says Dan Vesset, research vice president, Business Analytics at IDC. "These factors include degree of training, design quality, prominence of governance, prominence of performance management methodology and non-executive involvement, all of which positively influenced BI pervasiveness."
 
The IDC multi-client study, "Improving Organizational Decision-Making through Pervasive Business Intelligence: The Five Key Factors That Lead to Business Intelligence Diffusion," began with the development of a measurement model based on end-user interviews and IDC's expertise in the BI market.
 
The goal, IDC officials say, was to identify dependent and independent variables that would help to define pervasive BI and the factors leading to it. The findings highlighted in this study are based on 22 end-user interviews and a survey of more than 1,100 additional end-user organizations in 11 countries.
 
IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, a technology media, research, and events company.
...
 
Every once in a while news hits your wire that makes you go... "Huh?"
 
Matrixx Initiatives, maker of Zicam Cold Remedy, has announced the launch of the Zicam Cold & Flu Companion mobile application for the T-Mobile G1, an Android-powered phone. The same mobile application will be released for the iPhone in mid-December.
 
The application lets... uh... we'll just quote company officials here: it "enables on-the-go consumers to take charge of their health by checking cold and flu activity by zip code, among other features."
 
That's right. "In time for the start of cold and flu season, this application allows active users to access up-to-date information from any location," company officials say. Evidently they know there's a market out there - in mid-November Google launched Flu Trends, a Web service that can show if the number of flu cases is increasing in areas around the United States.
 
The Zicam Cold & Flu Companion mobile application provides greater detail than this service, according to the Zicammers, by "showing users the percentage of sick people in any given zip code, what types of symptoms are most prevalent and which ones to look out for in a specific area." How such information is collected, accurate statistics on who has the cold in a certain area, is beyond First Coffee's ken.
 
The application also keeps users "updated on the latest cold and flu news... so they are prepared no matter where they are." I must say, it does sound wonderful.
 
Tim Connors, vice president of marketing at Matrixx, says knowing the latest cold and flu news and "understanding the cold, flu and cough activity in a localized area" can aid consumers in "being aware of the risks around them."
 
The application is currently available for Android-powered phones at the Android Marketplace on the user's T-Mobile G1 device and will be available in mid-December for the iPhone at the iTunes App Store
 
Matrixx develops and sells over-the-counter healthcare products using drug delivery systems. Zicam, LLC, its wholly-owned subsidiary, markets and sells Zicam and Nasal Comfortproducts in the cough and cold category, and Xcid antacid in the digestive health category.
...
 
Five9, a vendor of on-demand call center software, has announced the multi-year deployment of its call center software platform at Carolina Call Center.
 
A vendor of customer service to the education sector, Carolina Call Center delivers consultative support to parents, students, and educators looking for additional instructional programs to augment the classroom.
 
"We've been supporting the educational mission of the Carolina Call Center clients for a long time," said Mike Burkland, CEO of Five9. "Through our relationship we've helped Carolina Call Center scale up and down, depending on seasons, economic cycles, and client acquisition."
 
According to Bryan Ackerman, owner of Carolina Call Center, "Our business looks for products that align with our vision for quality and flexibility." He noted that much of his business arises from clients' needs changing with global economy shifts, and their looking for "flexible work settings, including work at home."
 
Five9 claims clients in many industry applications in deployments on five continents, including education, marketing services, mortgage and loan, and municipal services.
...
 
Consona Corporation, a vendor of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and customer relationship management (CRM) software and services, has announced that Consona ERP products - Made2Manage ERP, Intuitive ERP and Encompix ERP - now integrate with SolidWorks 2008 3D CAD software, "allowing access to business and production information between the systems."
 
SolidWorks 2008 is engineered with the intent of helping companies "design better products more quickly," according to company officials. The software includes what the SolidWorkers characterize as "over 250 enhancements and innovations that break new ground in engineering efficiency."
 
According to SolidWorks Director of Marketing and Alliances Efrat Ravid, among the product's new features are a time-saving user interface as well as 3D graphics. Ravid said the new product builds on the company's SolidWorks Intelligent Feature Technology, "accelerates better product design, and includes more advanced design analysis capabilities than any other CAD software."
 
Company officials say designers and engineers can use the Consona ERP products together with SolidWorks software to "align information between the business and design sectors, eliminating hours of duplicate data entry and preventing production disruptions caused by revision discrepancies through synchronization and system integration."
 
Other new features include the ability to search the ERP database for existing item IDs and access ERP item cards, create and edit new item records and bills of material within the ERP product directly from SolidWorks.
 
Consona, formerly known as M2M Holdings, is owned by Battery Ventures and Thoma Bravo.
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