The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is Echo and the Bunnymen's "Ocean Rain." A delightful early '80s album filled with snappy and bright music, competent songwriting and fun to sing lyrics, none of which mean a single thing:

 

Neptuny, a vendor of performance optimization products, has introduced Caplan SaaS to provide what company officials call "capacity management for small to medium-sized enterprises who want to set up a small-scale capacity planning and management project."

 

Company officials say Caplan is "able to cover multiple domains in one single product," while having "zero impact in production environments" thanks to its agent-less architecture, out-of-the-box integration to management platform and tools, and what company officials call "the ability to integrate custom data sources."

 

It provides analyses, forecasting and reporting capabilities by means of Web interfaces and dashboards.

The SaaS version of the product "provides all the benefits of the standard edition of Caplan," company officials say, without any infrastructure and maintenance cost. The vendor is billing it as a Capacity Management product available on the market "that complies with the Software-as-a-Service paradigm."

 

According to Butler Group, Caplan SaaS "can also be used as a Proof of Concept for customers wanting to undertake a large deployment exercise."

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

The product's Web interface itself is structured "to enable the entire lifecycle of capacity management process - data gathering, analysis and model building and reporting," and such functions. Access to data and functionalities can be restricted by means of Access Control Lists in order to assign roles according to user responsibilities, and data and access security are guaranteed by SSL encrypted communications.

...

 

Dovarri, a vendor of Customer Relationship Management and Sales Force Automation software, has announced a multi-year agreement with their newest client, Houston-based Directory One.

 

Owned by Philip O'Hara, Directory One has retained Dovarri to provide CRM and SFA services through Orizon, Dovarri's recently released software.

Directory One has been named one of the top two "Largest Houston-based Website Design & Development Companies" in the Houston Business Journal's annual Book of Lists for the past three years. The firm sells Web site marketing services that include search engine optimization, site hosting and design, and consultation services.

 

O'Hara said managing sales and customer service is a concern "with our recent expansion into San Antonio, Austin, Los Angeles and Chicago."

 

Geary Broadnax, Dovarri President and CEO, said "companies like Directory One possess the capacity to take full advantage of Orizon's capabilities. 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.