February 2009 Archives

The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is one of the greatest compilation albums possible, The Best of Smokey Robinson & The Miracles:

Chordiant Software has announced Chordiant Recommendation Advisor version 6.2, a version which allows real-time Next-Best-Action-driven dialog and interaction management at the business-to-business and household level.

The product's multi-level decisioning capabilities allow Next-Best-Action decisions and recommendations to be made on both an individual and aggregate level at the same time, company officials say, adding that this will enable service agents to work better with customers who "represent an entire company or division within a company, or one or all members of a household."

No doubt there will be companies interested in getting support for hierarchical decisioning for complex relationships in an out-of-the-box product.

Large service-focused enterprises, such as insurance companies, retail banks and telecommunications companies often have hierarchical relationships with their small-to-medium sized business customers. Within these relationships, different products and incentives are offered at the corporate level, the departmental level, and the individual level. Existing relationships at each of these levels must be factored into the decision when determining the next best action to be taken during an interaction.

For example, if an individual customer calls in with an inquiry, the system should be able to cough up offers or recommendations to the individual which fall within the parameters of existing departmental and corporate agreements. So if a particular proposition is relevant for a number of individuals, it may make sense to create an "all-in" offer at the departmental or corporate level.

Recommendation Advisor 6.2 is one of those products that let contact center agents and company representatives negotiate and make offers and recommendations that automatically account for corporate programs at all levels of operation. The same mechanism can also be applied to households, where a proposition can be tailored to a family based on recommendations for individual family members.
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Informatica Corporation, which sells data integration software and services, has announced that Informatica On Demand Data Loader Service was voted "The Best Data Integration Tool of 2008" by Salesforce.com customers, having garnered more four and five star reviews than any other integration application in its category on the Force.com AppExchange.

More than 100 companies around the world now use Informatica On Demand. The product is designed to integrate Salesforce CRM applications and Force.com platform with back office systems. Ron Papas, general manager, Informatica On Demand, said the vendor now offers a range of cloud-based integration services.

Based on Informatica data integration technology, Informatica On Demand is a cloud-based data integration service letting Salesforce CRM customers automate and monitor the synchronization of their enterprise data with their Salesforce CRM and Force.com applications. The company's services are multi-tenant and require "minimal IT resources to implement and manage," the Informaticians promise. The on demand services or data integration platform can be deployed stand-alone or in conjunction with other Informatica products for data integration.

Informatica On Demand is comprised of the flagship On Demand Data Synchronization Service for synchronization between Salesforce CRM and back-end systems, the On Demand Data Replication Service to replicate Salesforce CRM data inside firewalls for archival, reporting and analytics purposes, the On Demand Data Quality Assessment Service to detect and monitor data quality issues such as duplication and missing data and the On Demand Data Loader Service, a free starter service for customers looking to import, export and synchronize their Salesforce CRM and Force.com data.

Informatica On Demand services are generally available on a subscription basis, starting at $500 per month, with a 30-day free trial.
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BigMachines, a vendor of on-demand configuration and proposal software, has announced that it was named among the "Best Apps of 2008" by customers on the Force.com AppExchange from Salesforce.com by receiving the most four and five-star customer reviews over the last year.

BigMachines officials claim "the most joint customers of any configuration and proposal product on the AppExchange," lumping joint customers such as NTT America, Enterasys, Carestream Health, and Teradyne in that assessment.

According to an AppExchange review submitted by Jessica Hoover, who is being mentioned here solely because she has the greatest title First Coffee's seen all week, that of Certified Scrum Master at Rally Software, her company set forth to find a quote tool that could handle a complex pricing model, integrate with Salesforce.com CRM and be handed off to an internal resource for continued maintenance. With BigMachines, "our user adoption is 100 percent," she said.

Kendall Collins, Chief Marketing Officer, Salesforce.com, attributed BigMachines' relentless focus on customer success has resulted in customers naming it one of the Best Apps of 2008 on the AppExchange."
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Verizon Business would like you to know it has completed its annual SAS 70 Type II examination for the company's five IP Application Hosting Centers (Smart Centers) in Germany, Japan, the U.S. and the U.K., and its 15 Premium Internet Data Centers in North America. These are the facilities used to deliver IT services to large-enterprise and government customers.

This marks the eighth consecutive year for examination of the company's Smart Centers in the U.S., the fourth consecutive year for its North-American based Premium Internet Data Centers (except for a new center in Irving, Texas); and the first year for its international Smart Centers in Tokyo and Frankfurt, Germany.

Ernst & Young performed the yearly examinations, reviewing control objectives and controls at the company's managed and Internet colocation data centers. Specific areas of examination, conducted in compliance with the standards established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, included access to facilities, logical access to systems, network services operations and environmental safeguards.

Control processes and procedures were examined for all of the company's Managed Hosting centers, as well as 15 Premium Internet Data Centers in major cities across North America, including Atlanta, Houston and San Jose. Enterprise customers use the company's managed or Smart Centers to outsource the day-to-day management of their Web sites and IP-enabled business applications. Verizon Business provides the technical service and support.

For customers that prefer to manage their own servers, data networking and voice equipment, Verizon Business offers a dedicated environment in its Premium Internet Data Centers. In this setting, customers can use Verizon Business' Internet connectivity, facilities and infrastructure while using and maintaining their own equipment. Customers also have access, as needed, to additional support from Verizon Business.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the Rolling Stones' 1973 album Goat's Head Soup. I know this is going to come across the wrong way, it's certainly not intended as any sort of criticism, but this is the one Stones album that works best as background music:

If you're looking for a good percentage to increase your efficiency by, how does 100 percent sound?

That's the number given by voice CRM vendor Qire in announcing that the results of research carried out this past December and January, which shows that "UK outbound call centers could be over 100 percent more efficient than they are today," through better use of systems and contact validation.

Qire officials say the research, covering a sample of over 100,000 calls made in the period, concluded that the use of outbound voice contact validation can increase the number of actual customers spoken to by agents -- a.k.a. "Right Party Contacts" -- by over 50 percent on a daily basis.

Just validating user telephone numbers alone, before they're passed to the call center, can reduce call attempts by nearly 30 percent, according to the Qirians, "by removing calls to out-of service numbers."

Over half the calls made were unproductive because they were routed to an answering machine. And even where an automated dialer was in use, the study found, "many of these calls would be passed to an agent, reducing call center productivity."

Guy Cooper, chief executive officer of Qire, said that while "there are still a number of organizations looking to move their outbound call centers out of the UK" such a move can be not only expensive but ill-conceived: "It can also have an adverse affect on customer service and quality. "

Cooper contends that by simply implementing new technologies and simple validation procedures, call centers "can make enormous savings, in fact in some instances well over 100 percent."

Qire's interactive voice messaging products, company officials say, pass the call to a live agent only when the contact is confirmed: "This increases internal call center efficiency, the number of productive calls handled by agents and the gains flow through to the business.
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Always like to report on the hometown news, so since First Coffee lives in New Zealand we're reporting that Atlanta-based Xiocom Wireless has acquired New Zealand's RoamAD , including its brand, trademarks, intellectual property and patents.

"The global market for wireless broadband continues to grow as the need for connected businesses and communities increases in the developing markets," said Jeff Spence, CEO of Xiocom. Company officials added that the acquisition of the RoamAD platform brings to Xiocom a router and network management technology for wireless broadband networks.

Xumii, a mobile social address book, has released a free application for the Apple iPhone combining iPhone contacts with friends from Facebook, MySpace, imeem, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, MSN and Flickr.

The 21,400-square foot London 2 data center would be ready for service during second quarter of 2009.

Using the DataLink feature, QuoteWerks can pull other information from Outlook into the quote as well, such as customer terms, customer sales tax rate, and customer profiles which can be used to determine the appropriate pricing a particular customer should receive. The DataLink feature saves this additional data to the quote file within QuoteWerks.

QuoteWerks can also search the user's Outlook database for a contact by company, last name, or phone number and pull the contact information into the quote. It can search Exchange Public Folders, letting users and their colleagues search for and use shared contact data. Both business and home address entries are supported.

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Key features include dedicated network engineering support, turnaround of changes to customer networks, extended equipment warranties, delivery of spare equipment and access to network reports and analysis.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the Rolling Stones' glorious ramshackle masterpiece, Exile On Main Street, the one rock album you'd want on a desert island:

Surado Solutions has announced the release of Surado CRM Online - Professional Edition, described by company officials as an on-demand/hosted CRM product.

The vendor already offers on-premise CRM products for small to mid markets, offline CRM and Web CRM.

Surado CRM Online is, a bit unusually, not pitched specifically to the SMB market, whereas most on-demand vendors are scrambling to hawk their wares to SMBs "traditionally under-served" by vendors in "these trying economic times," or something along those lines. Instead Surado simply bills it as being for "companies of all sizes requiring access to information anytime, anywhere." Now that's what we call inclusive language.

The product on offer combines what the Suradians describe as "the core Surado CRM suite including Contact & Account Management, Sales & Opportunity Management, Marketing and Customer Service." Far from trying to market simply another stripped down bare-bones "budget" package, Surado officials characterize the product as delivering "convenience, power and flexibility for businesses looking to move beyond simple, under-powered single user and work group" products.

One difference with this product is is the ability to start with the On Demand CRM and, "when it makes business sense," move to an on-premise or a complete offline CRM tool.

The release of Surado CRM Online - Professional Edition comes after development, testing and the build-out of a secure data center in Surado Corporate Center, located in the University Research Park in Riverside, California. Company officials say the release of the Professional edition marks "the beginning of a series of On-Demand CRM editions to be released throughout 2009."

"Our vision of providing delivery options, not just CRM products in the CRM marketplace, hits a new milestone with Surado CRM Online," says Sundip R. Doshi, CEO of Surado Solutions.

For a limited time, Surado CRM Online hosted solution is available for $9.99 per user per month for the professional edition.

Nuance Communications has announced that recent trials and deployments of the Nuance Mobile Care product has "proven to reduce calls being directed to live agents by over sixty percent."

The product is engineered to give users the ability to self-solve simple problems, including customer care and billing, directly and instantly on the handset.  This is being pitched as a way to eliminate wait times for customer service agents and reduce costs.

"The growing complexity of mobile handsets and services has led to a significant increase in customer care call volumes and resultant costs to operators," said Tony Cripps, Principal Analyst, Ovum. "Products that let operators fix common problems directly on a user's device without involving a live agent offer both user experience and cost saving benefits, especially important in the current economy."

 Based on aggregate data from deployments and trials of Nuance Mobile Care in North America and Europe, according to the Nuancians, the average live agent call costs approximately five bucks and the average subscriber initiates a call to customer service once a month. With the potential of deflecting over sixty percent of calls with an on-device, self-service options, well, do the math yourself, but it could translate into cost savings and an opportunity to extend self-service to the mobile device.

 Using Nuance Mobile Care as it's installed for clients today, customers can make account inquiries or pay bills directly without having to wait in queue, which has proven frustrating for users. Shocking, that, yes, I know. Who woulda guessed? You go to all the trouble of picking nice music for them and everything. Oh well, some people just aren't grateful for anything. With on-device self-service, Nuance has found, customers "gain more control of when and how they access help, and in a more relevant and intuitive way." 

Nuance officials cite research showing, they say, that nine out of 10 users preferred "the ease and speed" of products like Nuance Mobile Care over "other customer service options."

The product lets customers view their current plan details and upgrade their plan based on usage, and it promises support for a wide range of handset platforms including Windows Mobile, Symbian, BREW and other proprietary operating systems.

Camrivox, a vendor of Computer Telephony Integration software, and snom technology AG, a German developer and manufacturer of advanced Voice-over-IP phones, announce the availability of snom Flexor CTI for Dynamics CRM.

The software is designed to combine Dynamics CRM with snom IP telephony to deliver a CTI-CRM product for SME businesses looking to buff up their ROI, officials of both firms say.

Snom Flexor CTI for Dynamics CRM offers an enhanced customer experience, bringing such call features as on-screen call control, call logging and management reporting for total customer interaction. Delivered over the Web direct to a user's desktop, Flexor CTI requires no additional servers, company officials say.

Camrivox officials contend that the trend towards hosted CRM applications based on SaaS pricing "has enabled SMEs to compete with larger enterprises despite minimal resources." However, they note, "some have an aversion to hosting customer data externally and there remains a demand for on-premise" alternatives. By offering both hosted and on-premise versions, Dynamics CRM can appeal to such customers.

Snom Flexor CTI for Dynamics CRM is intended to complement the existing free snom Flexor CTI for Outlook, as it lets businesses to have a mixed landscape of users -- some with CRM and some with only Microsoft Outlook. All users can still have the same CTI with their snom phones and it allows for an upgrade path moving from Microsoft Outlook to Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Snom Flexor CTI is available for on-demand CRM applications and is also available as a free download for Outlook.

Zoho has announced single sign-on support for Zoho CRM, the company's on-demand customer relationship management application for organizations not afraid to run their businesses online.

One Zoho account provides users with access to all Zoho applications, according to the Zohoians, adding that the single sign-on advantage extends to Google and Yahoo! users, who can now log in to Zoho CRM directly with their respective accounts. Users sign in just once to use all Zoho applications.

"Zoho CRM is a mature product, but that doesn't stop us from responding to customer feedback," says Rodrigo Vaca, director of marketing at Zoho. "Being part of our single sign-on improves Zoho CRM's user experience, giving users access to other Zoho applications with the same account and is the first step to further integration between Zoho CRM and applications like Zoho Mail, Zoho Docs, Zoho Projects, and Zoho Creator."

Zoho CRM can be used for customer relationship life-cycle management, managing organization-wide sales, marketing, customer support and service, and inventory management in a single business system. With single sign-on, Zoho CRM users can log in just once and have access to other Zoho applications without being prompted to re-authenticate using different user name and password combinations.

Users can use the same Zoho account for other Zoho applications that complement Zoho CRM, such as Zoho Projects for project management, Zoho Invoice for customer invoicing, and Zoho Meeting for Web meetings, desktop sharing and remote support.

Zoho CRM is the last Zoho application to become part of the company's single sign-on, which now encompasses all Zoho applications. It's available in Zoho CRM Free Edition, Professional Edition, and Enterprise Edition.

The news as of the second cup of coffee, and the music is a nice workplace CD, Miles Davis's 1969 album In A Silent Way. Not the masterpiece his earlier Birth of the Cool or Kind of Blue is, this is more moody and ethereal, basically two long (18 and 19 minute) digressions on a theme. For those who are into that kind of thing:

SupportSoft has announced the release of its next-generation Dynamic Agent, described by company officials as software making it "simple for enterprises and service providers to automatically resolve customers' routine tech problems, as well as deploy enhanced services."

The business proposition SupportSoft execs are pushing is that in today's economy, "delivering value-added services is arguably the most effective way organizations can differentiate their offerings and generate new revenue." SupportSoft Dynamic Agent, a desktop-resident portal, is designed to let organizations "extend customer support in order to offer additional products, when the time is right," they contend.

The product is made to provide "point-of-pain services" in the form of "1-click fixes," according to the SupportSofties, "that let organizations provide just-in-time support and help customers resolve their own issues." Because if they're solving problems themselves, they're not eating up your overhead to solve 'em, right? Further, by building on their automated support platform, organizations can create a marketing channel to orchestrate new methods of driving revenue, where personalized and timely offers can be presented -- for example, renewals at or before warranty or subscription expiration; additional data storage upon or before reaching storage capacity or the latest bandwidth enhancement during periods of high usage.

Features of SupportSoft Dynamic Agent include targeting and authoring capabilities to gather user, system and activity data to create offers to customers, as well as tools to capture and analyze navigation data and customer demographics when customizing offers.

It also offers "do-it-yourself tech support," auto remediation of common problems so users don't have to call the help desk except for the real toughies. The product also offers what company officials call "show me," "tell me," or "just do it for me" content.

"Our experience has shown us that customers prefer to have tech support capabilities delivered directly to their PCs and applied at the right time automatically," says Michael Sayer, GM & EVP Enterprise Solutions Group at SupportSoft.

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Fox Mobile Distribution, a vendor of mobile entertainment and part of Fox Mobile Group, has implemented Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management as it rolls out new services, to "improve operational efficiency and enable continued growth," according to the Foxes.

Fox officials say they picked Oracle due to its "real-time capability, out-of-the-box functionality and ability to support business requirements."

Wholly owned by News Corporation, Fox Mobile Distribution can reach more than one billion consumers around the globe with mobile products and services such as games, video and made-for-mobile content. it can deliver content in 38 countries on six continents and in more than 20 languages. Fox officials say they'll use the billing and revenue management application to help adapt to diverse market demands, identify areas for revenue growth and "accelerate time-to-market for new products and offerings."

Basically Fox wanted to create simplified billing plans incorporating various payment options, product and service bundles and customer types, as well as maximize revenue and minimize loss associated with fraud and revenue leakage. The vendor says it has reduced rating run times for all transactions and reduced errors by removing nearly all manual intervention in the rating process as well.

"Our previous billing system was not flexible and required much customization, which translated into higher costs," says Markus Peuler, managing director and senior vice president, finance and administration, Fox Mobile Distribution.

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Amdocs, a vendor of customer experience systems, has announced 2008 saw the expansion of its managed services offerings "with service providers around the world."

Highlights from the 2008 calendar year include "a significant expansion of a seven-year agreement with AT&T for its legacy ordering and wholesale platforms," to include legacy customer care and billing applications and "new multi-year agreements to support Sprint's Xohm initiative and MetroPCS, supporting both Amdocs and non-Amdocs applications."

Additional highlights from 2008 include new wins and expansion agreements with Tier 1 and Tier 2 service providers in Europe and North America, according to the Amdocents.

The vendor has expanded its managed services offering to include more services, including application management and business process operations, infrastructure management, data center operations, and full hosting. It also offers managed services offerings for both business- and operational-support systems. There's also a new "Managed Transformation" offering, enabling service providers to modernize or consolidate systems while presenting operational and capital savings.

Like other on-demand vendors, Amdocs figures it's in a good place for today's economic conditions. According to Gartner, "Although things look gloomy for the larger economy, the potential for outsourcing to address immediate cost pressures and long-term recovery goals will be unprecedented. Organizations that understand and avoid the pitfalls of cost-focused outsourcing and apply business-outcome-focused outsourcing will be successful."

The company reported revenue of $3.16 billion in fiscal 2008, and claimed over 17,000 employees serving customers in more than 50 countries around the world.

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Dexterra has announced the launch of a new online mobility calculator, designed to help IT leaders "better understand the financial benefits of mobilizing their company and workforce," according to company officials.

"At a time of belt tightening and budget cutting across industries," the Dexterrians contend, "investment in mobility technology is now vital for organizations looking to sustain revenues and glean additional efficiencies from their day-to-day business processes."

The mobility calculator provides what company officials characterize as "simple, demonstrable evidence of these benefits," requesting basic information about an organization and the way in which it operates, before calculating "the percentage by which that organization can lower costs or increase workforce productivity."

The fact remains, according to Michael Liebow, CEO of Dexterra, that over the last two years "advances in smartphone technology and lower costs for mobile services, combined with the ubiquity of high speed mobile networks have made it possible to affordably equip an entire mobile workforce. 2009 will be a big year for business mobility - it is a maturing technology with rapid acceptance, and we are experiencing an economy that will drive people to it.  No company would ditch essential tools like e-mail or anti-virus in a downturn economy just to save money. Mobility has now achieved the same status."

Adopting a mobility strategy does not have to involve replacing legacy systems like customer relationship management (CRM) software, accounting solutions or proprietary business systems, and it doesn't mean companies have to reinvent internal processes or the work habits of employees, Liebow says: "A winning mobility strategy is task-centric. It is built on the processes already in place and plays to the way employees want to work.  Mobility lets people complete the things they need to do every day, as they happen, instead of having to disrupt an office worker, find a place to connect a laptop, or return to the office."

Liebow makes a good point when he notes that "whether a business embraces mobility or not," its employees most certainly will, as desirable consumer devices such as Apple iPhone, BlackBerry Storm and T-Mobile G1 become increasingly affordable: "Staff are going to start using these devices for work purposes, even if the company has not sanctioned their use, posing management and control issues that could very well puncture network security and disrupt mandatory compliance requirements such as Sarbanes Oxley."

 

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is one of those rare all-star tribute albums that actually works, Folkways: A Vision Shared. It's the songs of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly as done by such acolytes as Bob Dylan, Taj Mahal, U2, Little Richard, Sweet Honey In The Rock, Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp and Arlo Guthrie.  It's the best lineup I've ever seen for a tribute album to anyone, and it's a natural fit, as the artists obviously know the music well and respect it, probably because they cut their own musical teeth on it:

From the high tech hub of Lenexa, Kansas comes the news that CRM Innovation has released InLine Help, described as an add-in product for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. Evidently it lets users create a customizable Tool Tip message for CRM users when they're entering information into CRM 4.0 form fields.

When you're filling out CRM forms it lets you create a of custom tooltip message displayed on mouseovers of labels or controls. The tooltip messages are created from within a CRM entity -- Tool Tips -- and are viewable by users who are members of the CRM team associated with a tool tip.

Tool tips can be of a simple text format or be stylized using HTML code applied to the text. Stylized tool tips can even have hyperlinks to external files or sites. But not just anybody gets to do this, oh no. Tool Tip creators are CRM users granted rights to create and save tool tip entity records. And relax, technodolts -- the company promises that "no programming is required to create tool tips. All tool tip management occurs within the CRM interface."

This product can be used by development teams to self-document the customizations they are implementing. It's also useful for initial user training, and can provide remedial assistance and support new users that come on to the system after the initial CRM roll out.

Once a user no longer needs a tool tip they can be removed and won't be visible any longer. It is even possible to have more than one tool tip message per form attribute -- in other words, you can create an instructional message for different groups of people using the form, such as one for sales and the other for marketing.

The product works when online, offline or in IFD mode, and it works with ISV.

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Kallos Solutions officials say the company has released the next version of 'K-Serve' Enterprise Software products in the areas of CRM, HR, ERP, Planning and Retail Outlets. All the products are described as "Web ready and available on a hosted or on-premise model."

The primary focus of these products, according to the Kallosians, is towards the "next 10,000" enterprise software buyers in India. What's that? Good question, First Coffee didn't know either. Evidently Next 10,000 Customers in India are typically smaller companies who cannot afford costly products, yet, according to Kallos officials, "do not want to compromise on functionality and also obtain functionality relevant to their industry and business." Sounds reasonable enough.

Kallos believes that there's a silver lining for their business in the current world economic climate, as officials contend that a slowdown is good for K-Serve, since "organizations are able to see the importance of gearing up their internal productivity for the next growth stage," and "customers can buy the products in a modular manner depending on their budgets and priorities." For example, they say, a company can buy a basic HR and payroll product and expand to any of the eight products available in the category of Human Capital Management, as future needs may dictate.

In this particular release, however, company officials say the focus was to render the ERP and HR products more "world class." Combined with the HR and CRM product, K-Serve is being marketed as a platform for service organizations like BPO's, KPO's, telecom, IT services, retail, and professional consulting services. It comes with an extension building kit for adapting the technology to individual situations as well.

Kallos Solutions has been around since 2003. Company officials say its products are used in over sixty "customer locations," including America, Britain, France and Australia as well as India.

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QScend Technologies has introduced several new features to its QAlert Municipal CRM software, designed for citizen service request management and 311 call center products.

Web-based QAlert now includes such features as a full-blown knowledge base, customizable reporting and charting, and a citizen self-service center.

QScend President Keith LeBeau said the product can be implemented as a full 311 call center product or "in a decentralized environment, in which several departments may be entering non-emergency citizen issues."

"Governments can choose to use QAlert in its simplest form, grow their citizen service initiative step by step," or launch QAlert with all the bells and whistles ringing and whistling from Day One, added LeBeau.

In this latest release the company's knowledge base lets call center personnel access a variety of articles related to service request types. Responders and decentralized call takers also have this information available. There's also functionality for a citizen self-service center, allowing municipalities to let citizens search through questions and answers and articles before they submit a service request online. Organizations can implement this feature just as an FAQ area as well, and turn on the citizen account feature to allow account holders to review the progress on their existing service requests, as well as provide updates to those issues.

The customizable reporting feature is designed to let department heads, managers, and administrators create whatever type of report or chart they want. Every report can be scheduled for e-mail delivery in a variety of file formats, or e-mailed by users to users and non-users alike. Reports and charts can by created from scratch or by editing the existing system reports.

With QAlert, citizen service requests or complaints are entered by city staff or citizens themselves. Each entry is automatically assigned a ticket number and routed via e-mail to the department responsible for handling the request. Citizens can be notified each time an action is taken, or just when the service request has been addressed and is closed. The QScendians say it can be implemented on any Internet site, "regardless of the content management system of software in use."

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Sage North America has announced the general availability of Sage MAS 90 and 200 Extended Enterprise Suite version 1.2, their business management suite designed for SMBs.

This latest release expands the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and fixed asset management capabilities on offer, according to the Sagians.

Company officials say the product has what they describe as "a unique combination of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), CRM, fixed asset management and business intelligence functionality," including the embedded business intelligence applications Business Insights Explorer and Business Insights Dashboard.

The product is pitched as having "a number of CRM enhancements to help sales and marketing efforts," such as letting users create and graphically view multiple sales relationships between primary entities, such as a holding company and its subsidiaries, or "many-to-many" relationships where multiple sales representatives sell into various divisions of the same company: "For marketing, professional mass e-mail campaigns can be enhanced with advanced editing and also benefit from a new, multi-language spell checker."

There's also a branding toolkit included, which lets users modify the look and feel of CRM screens, including adding logos to match a company's corporate identity. It has updates to the latest tax rules, rates and IRS forms so that users can comply with the tax law changes that may impact current or upcoming tax years.
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RightNow Technologies has released the latest version of its on demand customer relationship management (CRM) product, RightNow February '09, which includes new product registration capabilities.

It's the RightNowians' belief that since the Internet has created massive changes in the way consumers buy, whether it's an outdoor grill or a digital camera, consumers are now going directly to manufacturers for service and support. "A decade ago," company offcials say, "manufacturers had little interaction with the end consumer, instead relying on experts at a local store who could tell consumers everything they needed to know about any product on the shelf. Now customers have a direct line to the name on the label, and they expect the manufacturer to be ready to provide information whenever they want it."

In the past, "customers would go back to their local camera store to learn how to use their camera," explains David Dentry, general manager of technical support at Nikon. "Now most of the larger retailers don't do that, so consumers come to us directly and we need to be prepared to help them."

This is the dynamic that RightNow seeks to address with beefing up the product registration capabilities in their latest product: Manufacturers, "faced with the new role of providing customer service and support," are looking for ways to understand and engage with their customers.

"Product registration information is the first step in understanding our customers," said Maryellen Abreu, director of iRobot's global technical support, "and knowing our customers, specifically what products they have purchased, is important to customer retention. We can build more robots, but we can't manufacture more customers."

With the product registration capabilities in February '09, companies can gather feedback to fuel future product development as well as proactively communicate relevant sales offers such as warranties, accessories, and upgrade offers based on the products customers currently own.

The idea is to make it easier for customers to find the information they are looking for based on the products they've registered, and create service requests with a single click that will pre-populate the incident with product information as well. The product can also let consumers view a consolidated list of all products registered.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a nice Donovan mix on the iTunes. Poor Donovan -- his career was holed below the waterline pretty much from the get-go in America when he came out around 1965 with inane comparisons between him and Bob Dylan, the American media dismissing him almost out of hand as not "the new Dylan" after all. Such idiotic things rock critics find to write about, there was never any sense in judging Donovan's work by Dylan's than it is judging John Grisham's novels by Stephen King's. As a result Donovan's strong, solid body of work was pretty much lost to Americans:

Cisco has announced new products designed "specifically for small companies," according to the company, including the Cisco Spam and Virus Blocker, a security appliance described as providing "protection for a business's network and data from viruses and malicious e-mail attacks while mitigating spam."

There's also the Cisco NSS2000 and NSS3000 Network Storage Systems, desktop, network-attached storage devices designed to protect data and let employees share information, and the Cisco Smart Business Communications System Release 1.4, a collaboration and communications system to connect offices, employees and customers "from anywhere at any time," according to company officials, "now with a wireless desktop Internet Protocol phone with Bluetooth capabilities."

The news is seen by Cisco officials as "building on" the November 2008 announcement of Cisco's $100 million "global strategic initiative to provide dedicated products, services and support for small businesses, including the formation of the Cisco Small Business technology group."

The Spam and Virus Blocker is a security appliance that's designed to stop spam, viruses and other e-mail threats. Company officials claim "incredible accuracy, with only one in 1 million false positives," and "no tuning or ongoing administration, as security updates are automatically sent from the monitoring network."

The NSS2000 and NSS3000, part of the Cisco Small Business series, are desktop, network-attached storage devices designed to "prevent disruptions that come from losing business information," letting users "back up every version of every file from every PC and server," and "store and archive digital files like video from an IP video surveillance camera.

The Cisco Spam and Virus Blocker price ranges from $2,599 to $5,399, with regional variations, depending on the number of users and subscription length. The Cisco Network Storage Systems devices start at $595, with regional variations.
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CA has announced the release of its CA ERwin Data Modeling Suite, a product described as combining data modeling, data profiling and reporting capabilities aimed at "data architects at midmarket to Global 2000 companies."

Sean Graham, vice president, software engineering for data modeling at CA, says the product is pitched at data architects looking for profiling and modeling tools "at a lower price point than has traditionally been available."

Now generally available, CA ERwin Data Modeler is integrated with Exeros' data profiling technology as CA ERwin Data Profiler, offering a data profiling and modeling product starting at a suggested retail price of $8,000. The product's used to help analysts understand data in legacy systems, in the hopes of "simplifying the task of ensuring accurate and structured data for use in applications, data marts, data warehouses and Master Data Management hubs," CA officials say.

It has metadata exchange to share business and technical information with data management tools, including Oracle Business Intelligence, Cognos, SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management and others. There's also support for application development with Microsoft Visual Team System Edition 2008. Support for Oracle eBusiness Suite in CA ERwin Saphir Option "allows modelers and analysts to selectively discover, document and reuse ERP metadata to facilitate numerous business intelligence, data and application management and governance initiatives," CA officials say.

Shawn Giordano, vice president of sales for Programmer's Paradise, said "from a data quality perspective, the ability to get insight into multiple data sources and systems at one time with the new data profiler is phenomenal," continued Giordano.

Suggested retail price for CA ERwin Data Modeler and CA ERwin Data Profiler is $3,995 per seat for each product.
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Interprise Software, a vendor of ERP/CRM business products, has announced that it has signed an exclusive licensing agreement for ASPDotNetStorefront's e-commerce product, "ASPDotNetStorefront for Interprise Suite".

According to the Interprisians the product will be added to the Interprise Suite product portfolio and marketed as "Interprise eCommerce."

Gary Harrison, president of Interprise Solutions, said the ASPDotNetStorefront product is intended to simplify the lives of customers and resellers "by having a single company that can develop, sell, and support the product." The agreement is characterized by Interprise officials as part of the company's strategy in the "platform-driven ERP and CRM business software" arena.

Interprise Software's flagship product, Interprise Suite, provides customers with a view of their customers through enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), accounting, e-commerce and point-of-sale tools.

ASPDotNetStorefront is a privately held company headquartered in Westlake, Ohio. The company's products include DotNetNuke based e-commerce sites. Interprise Software is a Taylor Corporation company. Its flagship product, Interprise Suite, offers "business processes in a single location, from ERP and CRM to accounting and e-commerce/point-of-sale tools," according to company officials.
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CRM and sales functions are taking priority over "less critical tasks" as small business juggle priorities to deal with bandwidth issues, according to a recent finding published by author Suzy Frisch.

Web traffic has doubled over the past 15 months, but poor bandwidth choices may hinder the growth of those businesses over time, she writes.

In an article titled "The Future of Bandwidth," Frisch says IT directors are "finding themselves tapped out of bandwidth as customers increasingly turn to the Internet for information, and employees conduct more remote business operations. As a result, small business growth in 2009 is dependent upon IT directors choosing bandwidth with the capacity to expand as this trend continues to grow."

Companies who have maxed out their T1 lines are now forced to prioritize bandwidth usage, Frisch states, "giving sales and CRM functions priority over less critical tasks, such as human resources operatives. Other small businesses are gravitating toward new technologies that offer more bandwidth for less money."

The most popular and cost effective option, she found, is Ethernet Transport Services. According to Frisch, Ethernet Transport Service has become the de facto alternative to T1 lines, offering 20 to 40 megabit speeds and costing 25 percent less.

Forrester Research has reported that the number of small businesses will boom throughout 2009 -- a trend that has also occurred during the last three recessions.

"People currently running small businesses, and those starting new ones, may not realize how crucial it is to make the right bandwidth decision," says Jeff Williams, Vice President of Enterprise Sales at American Fiber Systems. "It's important to think five years ahead -- after a few T1s, there's nowhere else to turn, and that's when it becomes outrageously expensive."