March 2009 Archives

The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is another of The Beach Boys' unjustly overlooked post-Pet Sounds albums, Wild Honey:

Movero Technology , a vendor of managed IT services for enterprise mobility, has co-sponsored the newly-released Aberdeen Group analyst research report on enterprise mobility, titled "More Mobility - Less Budget: Enterprise Strategies in the Current Economic Downturn." 

 

The study finds that companies "continue to maintain or increase their level of mobility support," with best-in-class companies "increasing their mobility budgets year-over-year as a percentage of total IT spend by 27.4 percent," demonstrating "the importance of mobility in delivering greater productivity and workforce effectiveness."

Melanie Gray, CEO at Movero, said the results show "a rapid uptake in mobility initiatives across a broad range of industries. From health care to higher education to even large automotive dealership networks, it is increasingly rare to find an organization that doesn't have some level of mobility in place."

The study looks at how companies in the top 20 percent across multiple metrics have found "additional efficiencies through consolidating central device management." Oh, it also recommends outsourcing to "highly specialized companies" providing mobile IT services, including device procurement, staging and logistics, invoice and expense management, over-the-air device management and 24x7 certified mobility support, just like companies such as... well, Movero.

John Smolucha, vice president of marketing at Movero, said as the total cost of owning and supporting mobile devices continues to increase, "organizations must adopt a more strategic approach to managing mobility."

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Verimatrix, a vendor of content security technologies for pay-TV networks, has announced Telekom Slovenije as the latest customer of the Verimatrix Video Content Authority System for IPTV. The product is intended to help protect video-on-demand and live broadcast premium content. 

 

The operator's IPTV service, known as SiOL TV with 80,000 subscribers, currently maintains the majority market share in Slovenia, according to the Agency for Post and Electronic Communications.

Telekom Slovenije's subsidiary, Planet9, creates platforms for mobile, Web and IPTV media, as well as producing content. According to Miran Nikolic, technical director, Planet9, Verimatrix's "strong technical leadership position in IPTV security" made VCAS for IPTV a candidate for deployment. Nikolic said Verimatrix's partner ecosystem also helps the telecom "integrate all the components."

VCAS for IPTV is a software-based, renewable content security product that can be updated as required to combat evolving security threats. VCAS for IPTV is tasked with protecting SiOL TV's 120 broadcast channels and library of 800 VOD titles. For the SiOL deployment, VCAS for IPTV will be integrated with Thomson's SmartVision middleware and Sagem's set-top-boxes.

VCAS security has been approved by major studios for protection of premium content, as well as by major broadcasters. It's used by pay-TV operators worldwide.

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Continuing in Central Europe, Bulgarian triple-play operator Vestitel BG , has selected Orca Interactive, a vendor of IPTV middleware and applications and a Viaccess subsidiary, to supply their RiGHTv IPTV middleware platform to underpin their new model-based IPTV service. 

 

Vestitel officials say the IPTV middleware will be deployed to replace the existing product powering Vestitel's current IPTV service, and will be the basis for their Partnership model - "to which multiple Bulgarian operators have signed up" -- scheduled to go live at the end of April 2009.

Vestitel BG, a subsidiary of the Bulgarian natural gas company, is a triple-play operator offering Internet, telephony and video services. The operator launched its own IPTV service two years ago and decided to use the investment in IPTV by launching a managed service to other Bulgarian service providers. Company officials say they liked Orca Interactive products such as COMPASS, a personalized content recommendation platform.

Ahead of the official launch, Vestitel has signed up some operators with the aim of rolling out the service to a nationwide subscriber base within the next two years.

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Sun Microsystems has announced that Speech Design, a European vendor of messaging and mobility products for businesses and network operators, has selected Sun's MySQL Cluster database to "promote carrier grade availability, performance and scalability" of their new messaging offering. 

 

Speech Design's products and services include messaging, call completion and other carrier products. Their open standards-based Thor platform is capable of integrating multiple services on a single system. 

 

The company has developed a new "call completion and advanced messaging" product, designed to address what Speech Design officials say are the "roughly 40 percent of all calls that are never directly connected -- usually due to the recipient being on another call, busy, in an area of poor service, or having their mobile device turned off." Speech Design's product provides users with SMS messages to make it easier to re-connect missed calls.

This system is based on MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition, Sun's open source database, designed and certified for use in carrier grade communications environments, such as Subscriber Data Management systems and in Service Delivery Platforms.

 

Speech Design is using MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition as a key component of the Thor application platform. Company officials say that since doing so, they have been able to improve developer productivity to accelerate time-to-market, achieve 99.999 percent carrier-grade availability with consistent millisecond response times, handle massive subscriber growth through dynamic scalability and provide redundancy across multiple sites through geo-replication.

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Level 3 Communications has announced that the company has expanded its relationship with Telefonica International Wholesale Services to establish a dedicated wavelength network across North America, which represents the largest single capacity commitment in Level 3 history.

 

Jose Ramon Vela, CEO of Telefonica Wholesale, says the Level 3 network has the scale necessary "to grow with our needs... across geographically diverse areas."

Under the terms of the 10-year agreement, Level 3 will transport voice, data and Internet traffic for over 250 million Telefonica customers from Europe and Latin America. The dedicated wavelength network includes triverse routes - with three alternative fiber paths - between high-traffic locations and route diversity across the remainder of the network. Level 3 officials say they have dedicated bandwidth along each route for Telefonica to expand with future demand growth.

"Level 3 continues to be a committed network partner for Telefonica and we are pleased to reach a new capacity milestone in delivering this solution for them," says Andrew Crouch, president of Level 3's Wholesale Markets Group. 

Telefonica has a significant presence in 25 countries and a customer base that amounts to 259 million accesses around the world, as well as a strong presence in Spain, Europe and Latin America. It is a 100 percent listed company, with more than 1.5 million direct shareholders.

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American Network has unveiled a Caller ID feature through PhoneCaption.com 's services for Hard of Hearing individuals. Until now, Hard of Hearing (late/accidental loss/difficulty in hearing) callers using captioned telephone services could only see the service provider number and not the calling party's information. 

 

PhoneCaption is now offering a captioned telephone service provider to feature Caller ID pass-through for inbound and outbound telephone calls. This lets Hard of Hearing individuals view their calling party's landline/mobile/IP phone number before answering the call.

 

The service uses technology which allows Hard of Hearing consumers to see caller ID prior to accepting the call and to receive captions while talking on the phone. As the caller speaks, the Hard of Hearing individual receives the spoken words in text captions to be read via the Web or a Cisco 79XX IP phone screen display. 

 

American Network officials say this approach combines technological resources "into a single efficient ecosystem that can take advantage of telecommunication's advanced core technology building blocks including voice, text and video."

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Brook Benton's "Rainy Night in Georgia," one of the very, very few songs you could put on a tape loop and play all day and I'd never get tired of, the Grateful Dead's "Brown-Eyed Woman" being another:

Fundamentalist opposition to the contrary, evidently evolution does exist: Infonetics Research has released the first edition of its biannual Mobile/WiFi Phones and Subscribers market report, finding that "Smartphones are evolving quickly, and differentiation is becoming increasingly based on software and OS rather than form factor." Evidently smartphones were the best-performing segment of the mobile phones market in 2008, the only segment to show unit and revenue growth in the second half of the year.

 

The report states that the economic recession has had a notable impact on the worldwide mobile phones market in the latter half of 2008, ending in flat manufacturer revenue growth for the year ($156 billion), as consumers and enterprises cut device spending. Infonetics analysts forecast an eight percent drop in the total number of mobile phones sold in 2009, to 1.1 billion worldwide, down from 1.2 billion in 2008.

 

Sure smartphones still compete on hardware features that support apps like photography or video viewing, but according to the Infonetics findings, "software and applications that enable a user's preferred mobile uses have an increasing influence on device selection -- personalization will be king."

 

They give the example of the Android platform. Conceding that "it may be a work in progress," they report that the first handset to use it, the G1, is "attracting high levels of interest, and future models are likely be optimized for Web applications like social networking."

 

Open source platforms like Android "are gaining traction and shaping the new competitive landscape," says Richard Webb, Directing Analyst, WiMAX, Microwave, and Mobile Devices for Infonetics Research.

Some things don't change, though: The study found that Nokia maintained its leadership of total mobile phone market share in 2008, due to "its established brand, stability of the newly acquired Symbian OS, and its strong visibility in multiple segments." Samsung held steady in second place, increasing its lead over Sony-Ericsson, while LG overtook Motorola on the rail to claim fourth spot.

 

Symbian retains market leadership of the smartphone operating system market, followed by BlackBerry, which regained its #2 spot after being overtaken by the surge in iPhone units in the third quarter of 2008.

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We'd like to give you some good news here at First Coffee once in a while, and today we have some. Sure you keep hearing that 2009 will be down in the dumps for cellular handset sales worldwide, but ABI Research's current forecasts for 2010 are cautiously optimistic - "if by optimism," ABI officials say, "you mean that we may see shipment numbers stabilize and maintain an essentially flat growth rate rather than falling further."

 

Well, yes, in fact, we'll take that as good news these days. Sure beats all those horrible deficit projections from President Obama's budget.

"ABI Research estimates that worldwide handset shipments will fall by at least eight percent in 2009," says practice director Kevin Burden, echoing forecasts made elsewhere, "and we believe that flat growth in 2010 is the best the market will deliver. We will see neither significant growth nor decline in shipments, and that would actually be a good outcome: the beginning of the upswing back to a more stable growth pattern."

Even if global shipment numbers hold steady at essentially 2009 levels, Burden said, there will be regional variations. He said some regions such as the Middle East and Africa will fare comparatively better, but volumes there are quite low.

The Asia-Pacific region will suffer most in 2009; ABI's research found "primarily as a result of its huge volume of shipments - roughly triple the next largest region." If stabilization does come to the region it'll show up a bit later than it will in North America and Europe, too.

"There are telltale signs that at least some parts of the handset ecosystem may be starting to steady," Burden adds. "Many handset vendors are replacing component inventories after reducing them to very low levels in recent months to keep from overextending as the market dropped. This doesn't necessarily mean the whole market is doing better, but it is good news at least for the component suppliers, some of which were really suffering."

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Ulysse Nardin , a vendor of mechanical timepieces, and SCI Innovations, which earns its keep "uniting technologies and elegant design into consumer products," according to company officials, have come together to create a hybrid-powered smart phone under the Ulysse Nardin brand.

Titled "The Chairman," the hybrid smart phone is considered a marquee product for the Ulysse Nardin brand, as well as the first partnership of its kind for the horologists.

 

It's evidently an open smart phone compatible with most GSM networks around the world and built more with the C-Level executive than teen mall rat in mind, as Ulysse Nardin hints by saying "ease of use is a primary focus." The customized user-interface is easily navigated with a 2.8" touch-screen and oversized numeric buttons for reference and typing. It also has a fingerprint recognition security feature, only permitting the specified owner access.

"Ulysse Nardin has resisted the many offers received over the years to produce other products under the Ulysse Nardin label. We have never found an opportunity that matched the prestige and standing of our brand," says owner and President of Ulysse Nardin, Rolf W. Schnyder. But everybody has their price, so today "I am absolutely thrilled that Ulysse Nardin has partnered with SCI Innovations to release the first hybrid smart phone into the market," Schnyder says.

According to Ulysse Nardin, the smart phone is hand-assembled by "some of the world's best engineers." The Chairman "visually shares many of Ulysse Nardin's iconic elements," including the symbolic anchor on the screw-mounted pusher and the customized Ulysse Nardin winding rotor located on the reverse side of the device. Maybe you're doing a better job visualizing this than First Coffee is, but so far it's not sounding like a mass-market breakout product.

 

The Chairman features a functioning mechanical watch rotor incorporated into its design. This component was designed by Ulysse Nardin for the Chairman, and evidently is similar to an automatic watch that receives power from the force of a rotor, as it charges a built-in battery using the kinetic energy of the moving rotor to supply supplemental power.

The Chairman and its various iterations will have limited production and a service plan which includes internal and external repairs whenever necessary. It will be available for purchase in the fall of 2009 and be offered in solid gold, steel/gold and steel versions. 

First Coffee gets a kick out of company info lines on press releases that read like 19th century novels, so we'd like to note that "since the manufacturer's earliest days more than 160 years ago when its founder, Ulysse Nardin, began making marine chronometers from a mountainous location in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, the watch making powerhouse has continually proved that challenges present intriguing opportunities worthy of exploration. From the time when Ulysse Nardin opened its doors in 1846 in Le Locle, it has been the recipient of 4,300-plus awards in watch making -- eighteen of them gold medals -- and has received the greatest number of patents in mechanical watch making." Movie rights have been optioned.

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Sword Ciboodle, seller of business software and services, has rolled out the first phase of a project for Vhi Healthcare to provide a comprehensive CRM product to "spearhead the organization's customer service improvement objectives." The company is working towards subsequent phases. 

Vhi Healthcare is Ireland's largest and only specialist health insurer with over fifty years experience. (No, First Coffee doesn't know where the comma goes in that sentence without further information.) The company processes more than 500,000 member claims and 1.36 million doctor invoices per year. Seeking to improve its customer service capabilities, it picked Sword Ciboodle as the technology platform that would underpin its customer service. 

The first phase of the project has been rolled out in its contact centers in Kilkenny and Donegal, giving staff "a more complete picture of its members' information" and "access to all relevant customer information." Other elements handled by Sword Ciboodle include member payments and contact history. Margaret Molony, Director of Information Technology, Vhi Healthcare and a woman obviously without a drop of Irish blood, says the product helps them "deal more effectively with a significant recent increase in the volume of customer enquiries." 

Further phased deployments in 2009 could see the addition of such features as computer telephony integration, e-mail blending, cross-selling and up-selling and campaign management.

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Jenzabar , a vendor of software for higher education, has announced a "comprehensive new release" of Jenzabar EX, their enterprise resource planning system. The Jenzabarbarians say the release has "enhancements designed to support a more collaborative working environment."

 

Jenzabar EX Release 3.0 does update the Purchasing, Registration, and Common modules and Financial Aid Manager, as well as the Development and Admissions modules. 

The Purchasing module has been redesigned to offer new requisition capabilities and a personalized and collaborative environment to provide streamlined workflow for module managers, approvers, requesters, and purchasing agents. In addition, users can now access Microsoft Outlook, Excel, Sybase InfoMaker, and the Web directly from Jenzabar EX. A personalized navigation window called "My Workspace" has also been added to provide a customizable and interactive user interface and enable users to collaborate with co-workers.

Enhancements within other Jenzabar EX modules include Registration, Admissions, and Development. The product is offered on the Microsoft SQL Server platform and lets administrative and academic staff access, update, store, and report on data through a common database and a suite of end-to-end integrated modules.

 

The news as of the first cup of coffee, and the music is The Allman Brothers Band on an iPod shuffle, heavy on the Eat A Peach and Hittin' The Note, for First Coffee's money the two best records they've done. Yeah yeah, Live At the Fillmore East this and that, some of us prefer song structure to bloat jams:

Corporate Tracker , a division of Infinata, and Pearson PLC have announced the ability to upload business intelligence, including hundreds of thousands of corporate profiles and millions of key contacts, directly into Salesforce.com CRM client accounts.

Corporate Tracker sells professional intelligence and sales prospects.

Brian Smith, Marketing Manager, Infinata, said because Corporate Tracker is updated every day, "when users connect our data source to their Salesforce.com account they will get up-to-date information on companies as well as executives."

The direct Corporate Tracker-Salesforce.com integration has a point-and-click based installation and lets Salesforce.com users download data into their CRM in seconds. Corporate Tracker officials point out that this "eliminates the need for mapping of fields and uploading of data from an intermediary source."

All Corporate Tracker data is available in Salesforce.com via the system, "including details on mid-level managers such as I/T directors, network administrators, controllers and marketing managers," according to Smith. "The data that we track is the information that sales and marketing teams need." The vendor provides intelligence on 185,000-plus companies and over one million "decision makers."
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Verint Systems and partner Dimension Data have announced that Woolworths Limited, an Australian retailer, has implemented the Impact 360 Workforce Optimization suite in its Everyday Money Customer Service Center located in Parramatta, New South Wales. Woolworths deployed the software from Verint and Witness Actionable Solutions to "support enhanced services to customers of its new range of financial services products," according to Verint officials.

Dhun Karai, Head of Woolworths Everyday Money, says the Impact 360 Workforce Optimization provides Woolworths with a way to get information from customer interactions, "maximize workforce performance, and improve the processes and effectiveness of customer service operations."

The Impact 360 Workforce Optimization suite is intended to help Woolworths' Everyday Money customer contact center by using software features such as quality monitoring and encryption, workforce management, performance management and eLearning. "With quality monitoring," company officials say, "Woolworths can capture and evaluate caller and agent interactions, as well as analyze uptake and decline factors associated with product offerings and services."

 

The product has encryption of recorded customer interactions as a feature, which can be used to help retailers, financial institutions and other organizations protect the privacy of customer information. Woolworths officials say the ability to use quality monitoring together with workforce management should help the company "automate and effectively forecast and schedule staff," as well as help ensure the right call-takers are in the right place at the right time based on caller demand. 

 

The system also comes with scorecards for employee performance tracking and analysis, and eLearning features, such as the ability to convert call recordings into training, for reinforcing best practices.

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CRM Innovation has released Web2CRM a Software + Services application for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. It's billed as a product letting "non-technical CRM users" create a form for their Web site to get visitor data into their CRM system, instead of cutting and copying form data received by e-mail and manually pasting that into CRM.

CRM Innovation officials say the product can be used to "capture new leads, registration page for Webinars, collect information before releasing white papers, or allowing customers to enter service cases on your site." Company officials say Web2CRM can create "any record type in CRM" with the Visual Form Builder.

Offered as a Software + Services, CRM Innovation hosts the technology necessary to design, present and process the form data. It  works with "all implementation scenarios of CRM 4.0 -- On Line, On Premise, and partner hosted," company officials say. Annual subscriptions are $495 per CRM organization, and there is no charge per form submission. Hosting for the form is included.

The user is presented with a visual form designer interface to drag and drop fields from a facsimile of their CRM form into a designer area, and publish the form. All the form processing occurs on the CRM Innovation hosted server -- "no code changes are required on the client's CRM server," company officials say: "The company's site designer can link to the form via a hyperlink, place the form reference in an iFrame or use the 'carry code' option to place the form html tags directly into their Web page. There is no special coding that needs to be placed on the Web site server, its server platform independent."

The visual form designer uses Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 to present an intuitive WYSIWYG environment. Several form layouts and styles are available to the user based on best practice form design standards. The users can select the custom styling option to match their current Web site's look and feel.

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Surgient, which sells IT service delivery and virtualization automation, has announced a Webcast, "Economic Benefits of the Cloud: Beyond a Cost-Cutting Measure," scheduled for Wednesday, March 25 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern time. The presentation features Surgient Chief Technology Officer Dave Malcolm exploring the economic motivators of the cloud in today's economy. And here's a hint: It's not all just about cost reduction.

Of course this economic climate has mandated resource efficiencies and cost cutting, and at the same time IT organizations are in "a strategic position," Surgient officials believe, "and are being called upon to help drive increased revenue." They cite to research done by Gartner, IDC, The 451 Group and Forrester Research predicting that cloud computing will dominate the enterprise in 2009. 

 

Why? Of course there are economic benefits of a self-service private cloud. "But," Surgient officials ask, "how can the cloud actually deliver ROI to your organization?" That's what the Webcast will tackle.

 

The presentation will discuss financial benefits of cloud computing in today's economy, best practices and approaches for implementing a self-service private cloud, the true value of cloud computing with true Policy-Driven Self-Service and trade and how to recognize ROI from cloud computing.

 

Malcolm is responsible for product management, software development and data center operations for Surgient's products and hosted solutions. Prior to Surgient, he was the vice president of Product Group at Motive where he built the software development organization from its early beginnings, and was responsible for product marketing and development of the entire Motive product line, which grew from $2 million to more than $65 million in annual revenue during his tenure. Prior to Motive, Malcolm was the vice president and general manager of the Internet Business Unit at Tivoli Systems.
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ABD3, which describes its line of work as "enablers of real life social networking for today's mobile consumer," has announced the availability of the YellowPin social lifestyle tool. 

 

Using a text message, the service lets users bring their online, social network friends into their -- ostensibly -- real lives by sharing their activities and locations in real time. "As well," company officials say, "YellowPin gives users a guide to the activities their friends are engaging in around them, providing different options for social interaction." 

 

You must admit, it's a worthy goal: Transforming online socializing into in-person interactions for people who want to expand and connect their online network to real life activities. Is First Coffee the only one who sees the subtle irony of that being accomplished via an online network tool?

Launching first on Facebook, socializers can update their selected friends or groups via the application online to show where they are and what they are doing or, when using a mobile phone, sending a text message to 555888 with their location. The YellowPin service uses the same privacy settings as the popular social network, company officials say, "ensuring all information and updates are controlled by subscribers." YellowPin officials say they will never publicize any personal information, and will not use GPS or satellite technology to track your movements.

After adding the application, YellowPin aggregates your network of contacts on Facebook, which then enables you to pull information about the happenings around you and their whereabouts. Whether planning a night out with friends or networking for business, people can transform online social lives into real time interactions. Unlike other services, YellowPin:

The service is available to any phone with SMS capabilities, be it a smartphone or standard, candy bar phone. ("Candy bar phone?" Did I miss another marketing buzzword? Hate it when that happens.)

 

ABD3 officials say the service "pinpoints each person exactly where they are," it's not "a 100-yard guestimate," and communicates the activity a person is engaging in, "rather than just longitude and latitude coordinates." And here's First Coffee's favorite marketing point: It "aggregates friends' activity to give a user a clearer view of their social landscape."

 

Sayles Braga, CEO of ABD3, said with mobile slated to be the largest growth area for social networks, "we believe that people should be free to interact with their friends and control their own information in that environment -- not have a machine dictate it to them." With a free first month, YellowPin will cost 99 cents per month after that, billed directly through existing mobile accounts.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the late, great Warren Zevon's live album Stand In the Fire, recorded during one of his brief bouts with sobriety:

Rancho Cordova, California-based Pearson, a vendor of education technology, has announced a milestone in its SASI Customer First Program today -- 70 school divisions in the state of Virginia are migrating from the SASI student information system to Pearson's iWeb-based platform, PowerSchool Premier. 

 

Pearson officials say the SASI Customer First Program is designed to "reward the loyalty of its SASI customers and provide them with updated technology."

In a related announcement Pearson has introduced the SIF Agent for PowerSchool Premier from Edustructures, adding SIF 2.0 capability and SIF 2.0r1 certification to PowerSchool Premier. The idea behind this is to let Virginia PowerSchool users "enhance performance and access to student, staff, and enrollment data." The product, company officials say, is built to meet specific SIF-based state reporting requirements for the Virginia Department of Education.

"Our district needed something to make data-driven decisions," said Kevin Harrison, Data Manager of Bedford County School District, adding that with PowerSchool and the updated SIF component, "we are more equipped" to comply with the state reporting requirements of Virginia.

PowerSchool Premier is described by company officials as a student information system "designed from the ground up" as a Web-based product offering access to real-time data via a standard Web browser, on a Mac or PC.

Pearson's brands include Scott Foresman, Prentice Hall, Addison Wesley, Benjamin Cummings, PEMSolutions, Stanford 10, SuccessNet, MyLabs, PowerSchool, SuccessMaker, and many others.

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Wichita-based BoldChat has announced the release of their research on the effectiveness of live chat technology, saying they've found "a direct correlation between live chat and a growth in sales for online retailers."

 

Company officials give the example that "once a shopper has used live chat, more than two-thirds will actively look for Web sites that provide it as an option."

Bravestorm President and CEO Steve Castro-Miller said the goal of the project was to "quantitatively examine the efficacy of live chat through the filter of prospective buyer behavior. We were interested to know, for instance, how much of a role it plays in boosting conversions. We also wanted to understand whether live chat could be tied to brand loyalty."

 

To this end, Castro-Miller says, the survey was structured to get "honest feedback straight from online consumers, and we believe the results provide insight into the positive impact that live chat software can deliver for online retailers."

Here's how it was done: In January 2009, Bravestorm funded a blind survey of more than 250 regular Internet shoppers using an opt-in, third party panel. Out of this live chat research, the firm drew five conclusions:

Live chat is influential during the sales cycle. Respondents indicated that live chat positively impacts their likelihood to purchase. "In fact," study officials said, "58 percent of the entire sample said that if a site offered live chat, that fact alone would positively influence their decision to make a purchase."

Online merchants not offering live chat are missing desirable opportunities. Those that shop more frequently online and those that spend more -- measured either by the average amount they spend when shopping, or the greatest amount they've ever transacted in a single purchase -- are more likely to choose live chat in sales interactions and they rank its positive influence much higher than other groups, study officials said.

Live chat has a loyalty effect, particularly with desirable shoppers. In general, say study officials, "chatters choose the technology over other methods during the sales cycle."

Live chat may be even more critical to service companies than it is to e-tailers. Study officials contend that many site features which respondents indicated would influence their decision to buy are "not relevant to service-only companies, such as product images or product catalogue searching. The found live chat's importance to be "greater for service organizations such as law firms, accountants, and others."

 

Retailers with live chat can improve results by following consumer-driven best practices. 

Bravestorm, makers of BoldChat, offers live communication software including... guess what? That's right -- live chat, click to call and email management tools which enable businesses to take control over customer interactions and drive sales for businesses conducting sales and support online. Bravestorm's suite of offerings is designed with a flexible breadth of capabilities that allow clients to customize and manipulate the software to meet their specific needs. The company is headquartered in Wichita, KS, with customers around the world. For more information about BoldChat, please visit www.boldchat.com or call 1-866-753-9933.
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Chicago-based Model Metrics, a cloud computing technology firm and Salesforce.com partner, has designed and launched a new donation management system for One Acre Fund built on the Force.com platform. The new system automates One Acre Fund's donation process, saving hours of time for what its officials say is its "lean staff."

The Fund is a non-profit organization working to end hunger in Africa.  It provides farm training, seed, fertilizer and market access to what Fund officials characterize as "the chronically hungry on the continent." The organization has earned accolades for its sustainable business model that helps the poorest of the poor in Kenya and Rwanda.

 

One Acre Fund Director of Operations Justin Dunham Burt called the system "completely cutting edge and unprecedented for a nonprofit of our size," estimating that it saves the organization "ten hours a week."

In addition to using the Force.com platform, the new donation management system also uses complementary cloud computing technologies from vendors, including Authorize.net to manage payment, billing and receipt provisioning for donors. Model Metrics officials say they built the integrations between these platforms "to create truly best of breed cloud computing" for One Acre Fund.

Prior to implementation of the new system, donation information was downloaded to an SQL database from One Acre Fund's Web site and manually processed. The new way, information automatically flows between the site, Authorize.net, and the donation management system on the Force.com platform for one-time and monthly recurring donations, eliminating the need to manually prepare charge files. 

 

Fund officials say they also appreciate the reduction in time spent updating donor and donation information, the smaller time frame between payment submission on the Web site and credit card processing and the "significant reduction in time required to respond to donors, update credit card information and provide year-end tax information."

Model Metrics donated half of the project fee to the One Acre Fund as part of its corporate giving initiative modeled after that of Salesforce.com. The Salesforce.com Foundation lays out a 1/1/1 model whereby it contributes 1 percent time, 1 percent equity and 1 percent product to its communities.

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A "significant proportion" of India small and medium businesses, defined as those with up to 999 employees, are suffering right along with everyone else, with tighter cash flow and sharp declines in revenues brought on by cancelled orders or investment plans. Inventory constraints are another problem bedeviling SMBs in India, many are awash with excess products.

These are some of the findings in AMI's latest quarterly tracking study, 2009 Q-1 India SMB: "Impacts of a Game-Changing Economic Downturn: How to Market Effectively & Stay Competitive." The study tracks Indian SMBs during October - December 2008.

Working off the assumption that PC shipments within any country have a very close relationship with GDP and other economic indicators AMI forecasts, based on the current economic situation and India SMB spending in the last three months, that over the next three months "almost 23 percent of SMBs in India are likely to invest in basic IT products such as desktops." This is, AMI analysts say, a marginal drop from the purchases of the last three months. 

 

Other consequences foreseen are lower employee hiring rates and a near-freeze in the addition of branches.

The study finds, probably not surprisingly, that India SMBs are adopting a wait and watch policy for new technology adoption. AMI's research finds that most have not cancelled or shelved their new technology adoption and purchase plans, but simply postponed them: "Future PC purchases by India SMBs are likely to be driven by enhancement of compliance requirements and adoption of various PC-based applications, e.g. accounting software."

Recommended for vendors seeking to sell to this market is identifying new bundling opportunities to repackage the offerings (hardware, software and/or services) into more complete IT packages that provide value-addition to customers yet enable significant cost cutting: "The 'pay as you use' model is gathering momentum since OPEX is being preferred to a greater extent than CAPEX. AMI's quarterly tracker survey finds that "significant proportions," over 17 percent, of SMBs indicate that they would be "very likely" to invest in software applications if they are available on a flexible monthly, per-user payment structure.

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Houston-based The Planet, an IT hosting vendor, has announced the general availability of its new Storage Cloud service. Customers can choose from an on-premise local node in The Planet's Dallas D2 data center, or from locations on the East or West Coasts, Europe or Asia, through its partnership with Nirvanix. The company also offers Storage Cloud options for organizations that do not require hosting.

Coupled with a server hosted at The Planet, customers get on-premise Network Attached Storage with the access and usage-based billing features of Storage Cloud. All Storage Cloud customers with servers hosted at The Planet are connected through its network. The service is being marketed as a way for customers to "eliminate the hassle of managing two separate invoices, one for on-premise file storage and another for cloud-based offerings," since The Planet Storage Cloud provides both services in a single account.

It isn't completely unknown for cloud storage platforms to surprise customers with inflated invoices due to unexpected and hidden transactional fees. Rob Walters, general manager for The Planet's Storage and Data Protection business, touts what he calls The Planet's "no-surprises philosophy" in avoiding such scenarios.

Pricing starts at 25 cents per gigabyte, with discounts as customers use more. It isn't out of line for other hosting companies to charge between 60 cents and $1 for equivalent NAS-type products. The Planet says bandwidth charges are incurred only for outbound-transactions, and all uploads to The Planet Storage Cloud node are free. The firm provides customers a single account for managing both their hosted environment and storage cloud platform, and the Storage Cloud platform is accessible through CIFS, NFS, FTP and HTTP, as well as an extensible API streamlining integration.

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Simon & Garfunkel's Bookends album. Bridge Over Troubled Water gets all the props, maybe rightfully so, but this is an underrated and unjustly overlooked gem from 1968. Paul Simon's songwriting grew by leaps and bounds from Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme to this, moving from a straight "folky" style to a full rock/pop sound as heard on cuts such as "Mrs. Robinson" and "Hazy Shade Of Winter," and as a result Bookends has their strongest album cuts outside of Bridge:

SAS is announcing help for marketing campaigns looking to deliver "maximum return on increasingly limited investment with minimal technology support," according to company officials: a new Internet-based software product.

SAS Campaign Management, already offered as licensed software or a custom-hosted product, is adding a preconfigured version for rapid creation, modification and management of marketing campaigns, "ranging from simple to sophisticated, multichannel efforts," company officials say. The SaaS offering is probably most likely intended to be used to define more targeted segments, use SAS predictive models to improve response rates, and do stuff like prioritize selection rules, manage multiple channels, automate lights out and triggered campaigns and report on campaign success.

Jeff Levitan, General Manager of SAS' Global Customer and Retail business, describes the product as being useful for marketers looking to zero in on appropriate segments, retain selected customers and drive incremental revenue through acquisition, cross-sell and up-sell programs "without IT or large infrastructure investments."

The product has prepackaged analytical models for improving customer insights and focusing marketing programs on whatever customers you deem important. It also has templates, prepackaged reports and analytics built in. And as befits a well-constructed SaaS product, "a Web browser is all that organizations need to manage customer lists and start creating campaigns," SAS officials say.

It includes response models predicting clients' likelihood to accept certain offers, customer segmentation models identifying the most profitable customer segments and opportunities to migrate customers into more profitable segments, campaign checklists showing tasks required to complete any given campaign, approval steps providing necessary checks and balances in the marketing process and e-mail notifications alerting users to campaign status.

And if -- let's hope -- your company's requirements grow over time, SAS officials say that businesses can migrate to a more customized hosted product or to an on-premise implementation.

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Soffront has announced today that Technology Marketing Corporation's Unified Communications magazine named Soffront's CRM a recipient of its 2008 Product of the Year Award.

"We are proud to receive this prestigious award," said Manu Das, Founder and President of Soffront. Rich Tehrani, TMC President and Editor-in-Chief of Unified Communications magazine, noted that Soffront "has proven it is committed to quality and excellence while addressing real needs in the marketplace."

A full list of Product of the Year winners will be published in the March/April 2009 issue of Unified Communications magazine.

Soffront basically focuses on selling CRM to the mid-market. Its product capabilities include sales, marketing, customer service, knowledge base, help desk, project management, order processing, defect tracking and the like. Soffront is privately held, debt-free "and profitable," company officials say.

Launched in July 2007, Unified Communications magazine is devoted to "educating enterprise decision makers on why and how they need to deploy unified communications," according to TMC.

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Wolters Kluwer Health has announced that its customer service organization has earned the "Center of Excellence" certification from Benchmark Portal and the Center for Customer-Driven Quality at Purdue University. The company was specifically noted for its service to its global health industry customers, including students, professionals and institutions in medicine, nursing, allied health, pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry. 

The certification followed an audit benchmarking operational performance in WKH's Hagerstown, Maryland customer support center against the performance of comparable facilities. Auditors measured a variety of areas including call center metrics, operational costs, and customer satisfaction. WKH officials say "many" of the facility's 150 employees were interviewed to evaluate work environment, organizational culture and corporate philosophy. 

The results placed Wolters Kluwer Health's performance among the top 10 percent of more than 20,000 customer service centers evaluated.

The Wolters Kluwer Health Hagerstown operation handles all domestic and international requests for Wolters Kluwer Health's medical journals, clinical and educational books and online products. The center also provides technical support for all of the company's nursing Web sites and online portals for its numerous books and journals.

The "Center of Excellence" designation is awarded to organizations that, in the eyes of the center, meet "objective and quantitative criteria standards" set by Benchmark Portal researchers, who look at things like operational efficiency, service level standards, process management, customer satisfaction, leadership resources and employee training.

Benchmark Portal is the custodian of the Purdue University Center for Customer-Driven Quality database of contact center metrics, the largest in the world.

Wolters Kluwer Health is a division of Wolters Kluwer, a global information services and publishing company with 2008 annual revenues of $4.9 billion and operations in over 35 countries across Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. Headquartered in Amsterdam, its shares are quoted on Euronext Amsterdam and included in the AEX and Euronext 100 indices.

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CompanionLink Software, a vendor of synchronization products, has announced a two-way sync product between ACT! by Sage and Google.

When used together with the free Google Sync service for phones like iPhone and BlackBerry, CompanionLink for Google, according to company officials, "works as a connector between ACT! by Sage, Google and the latest smartphones." It basically lets ACT! users sync their contacts, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, calendar events, calendar details, contact notes, and alarms and reminders with their Google or Google Apps account: "Complete two-way sync ensures that any change to data in either ACT! or in Google is automatically updated."

Once ACT! data is in Google, users can use the free Google Sync (Beta) service to push data to their iPhone, BlackBerry or Windows Mobile device. CompanionLink for Google ensures that any changes made on the phones will show up in the ACT! database.

"We wanted to extend Google's free over-the-air sync service to the ACT! community," said Rushang Shah, Director of Marketing at CompanionLink Software. "With CompanionLink for Google, users can get a two-way sync between ACT!, Google and their phones for less than thirty bucks."

CompanionLink for Google sells for $29.95 -- less than thirty, what the man said -- and comes with free technical support. The software supports two-way sync with both personal Google accounts and Google Apps accounts. A 14-day evaluation version of the software is available at www.companionlink.com/google.

CompanionLink Software sells data synchronization products for mobile phones, PDAs and CRM software. They're also an OEM synchronization and products provider for companies like Sage Software, NVIDIA, Google, and Royal Consumer Electronic Products.

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Integra5, which sells "next-generation communication experiences" across TVs, PCs, mobile and DECT phones, and Sybase 365, a subsidiary of mobile messaging services vendor Sybase, have announced a partnership to "allow mobile operators to extend their reach" by putting social, SMS-centric applications across multiple devices using Integra5's new MediaFriends application suite.

According to CTIA, American SMS traffic grew to more than 75 billion messages per month in 2008, up from 7.2 billion per month in 2005. Boy, if that were the basis of the American economy we wouldn't be worrying 'bout no stinkin' recession. Combining Integra5's ability to deliver communications with Sybase 365's mobile messaging technology is an effort on the part of both firms to respond to the evolving communications patterns, and to give mobile operators more ways to drive consumer usage and increase SMS messaging traffic -- "at an even greater rate than today."

There you go, there's a goal, because hey, 75 billion messages per month isn't up to snuff. Office pool on which month hits 100 billion. First Coffee has March 2012.

Deployed in the mobile operator's network, Integra5's platform routes SMS messages between the Sybase 365 mobile messaging platform and users' mobile phones, TVs, PCs and DECT phones. In addition to mobile operators, the partnership lets video providers and programmers deploy TV-based services that incorporate SMS, such as Integra5's MediaFriends TV Chat, with no wireless network requirements.

Gregory Dunn, vice president, Americas, Sybase 365, said his company "plans to continue innovation in integrated mobile messaging, and realizes the synergy between social media networking and SMS as a fertile bed for continued development."

Integra5's MediaFriends is a suite of social media applications that allows users to participate in real-time group or one-on-one chats using mobile phones, TVs, PCs and DECT phones. The first phase of the suite, MediaFriends TV Chat, lets viewers, using a remote control, invite friends to watch TV programming together and engage in chats by sending text messages via their mobile phone and view the conversation directly on the TV. The next phase -- MediaFriends PC Chat -- lets users view and participate in multi-device chats directly from their PCs.