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.
