April 2009 Archives

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is an album rapidly becoming a standard here at the sprawling First Coffee campus: Dexter Gordon's Go!:

British customer relationship management specialist and IT vendor Concentrix is now providing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 as a hosted offering. 

 

Concentrix has been implementing Microsoft Dynamics CRM as an on-premise product within businesses for years, and the company describes itself as "a strong advocate" of on-premise CRM, but company officials say over recent months they've seen increasing demand for hosted systems. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 tends to be popular among small and medium-sized enterprises more for its front-office functions of Sales, Marketing and Customer Service.

"The hosted model bests suits the requirements of some organizations. We're getting more and more inquiries about hosted, or software-as a-service CRM," says John Odell, Senior CRM Consultant at Concentrix, describing the firm as "product agnostic."

The key difference between Concentrix hosted and on-premise Microsoft CRM, he explains, is that with the hosted version, Concentrix holds the software and data on their servers in a data center. Concentrix personnel run and maintain the software and servers. Users, of course, simply access the CRM over the Internet. 

 

"Just like an on-premise CRM system, companies can use their own data, fully integrate the software with Microsoft Outlook, and Concentrix can configure Microsoft CRM to meet the requirements of individual businesses," company officials say.

Odell says the Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a hosted product option is more popular with "organizations that need lower setup costs, less risk and quicker implementation times. We're catering for businesses that want to concentrate on their key activities, without having to spend money on IT hardware or employ highly skilled IT staff." The sort of company that's happy writing a check once a month to somebody else to take care of all the techy stuff.

 

Despite the increased interest in hosted CRM, Concentrix officials say their bread and butter is still best-of-breed on-premise CRM installations, such as Sage CRM, SalesLogix, and FrontRange's GoldMine as well as Microsoft.

 
Asked if Concentrix expects to see a shift from on-premise to hosted solutions, Odell says "probably the other way around. Hosted is a great way to get started with CRM and install a CRM culture. However, there are some limitations with hosted CRM, and they are by no means suited to everyone. It's likely that businesses that start off with hosted will soon see tangible benefits and, with proven ROI, will move away from a monthly-fee model to on-premise."

Concentrix is based in Mountsorrel, Leicestershire with a satellite office in central London.

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Speaking of the Best Little Software Company in Redmond, Tellme Networks, a Microsoft subsidiary and pioneer of voice services, has announced their mobile voice service combining content and communications. 

 

The voice-based service lets people press one button, say what they want and get it, whether that is to send a text, make a call or search for information. There's a version of this specifically for Windows phones due out this fall. Microsoft officials say this service "puts many phone functions behind a single button."

 

In a recent study conducted by Sanderson Studios and cited by Microsoft officials, more than 70 percent of respondents said that voice is superior to keypad or touch-based methods to perform some of the most popular mobile tasks. This includes looking up a business listing or location (78 percent), sending a text message (72 percent), placing a call (79 percent), getting information such as movies, weather, traffic or sports (77 percent), and getting directions (81 percent).

 

Windows phone users just press the side button of their phone to send a text by saying "text" to open a text box, then speak the text message and say "send" to send it to anyone in their contact list. They can also initiate a call simply by saying "call" and then the name of anyone in their contact list, and search the Web with Microsoft Live Search by speaking their request, such as "weather in San Francisco, California," "pizza in Kansas City," "movies" or "Mother's Day gift ideas." Hint, hint. You weren't going to forget, of course.

"Because it's so intuitive, we believe there is a real opportunity for voice to materialize as the leading user interface for the phone," says Dariusz Packzuski, senior director of consumer services at Tellme. Microsoft officials say it requires four touches and more than 20 keystrokes to find a business with the Apple iPhone, while it only takes one button push and one verbal command to find the same business with Tellme: "Tellme's research shows similar results for other tasks, such as making calls, sending text messages and conducting searches for content such as traffic, movies, news and sports."

Packzuski says Sprint has integrated voice access to the Live Search application on Sprint Instinct phones, and "we've seen impressive adoption of voice with three in every four search queries being initiated by voice."

Tellme will be available for free on Windows Mobile 6.5 phones in fall 2009 when the phones hit store shelves. Initially available in the Windows Marketplace for Mobile store, the service will also be available for free to mobile operators and carriers to embed "on-device."

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There's something about this morning that's calling for a soundtrack a bit higher octane that finely-wrought jazz. So goodbye Dexter, hello Lou Reed, specifically the magnificent Live In Italy. Ah, there we go, that's better.

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Sitel, a business process outsourcing vendor, has announced that Cricket Wireless has selected Sitel to provide bilingual customer care and technical support, taking inbound calls from Cricket customers who are using the company's voice and broadband services.

"Sitel understands that the wireless marketplace is highly competitive," says David Garner, president and chief executive officer for Sitel. "Companies like Cricket are turning to Sitel to apply best practices to ensure differentiating customer care, while reducing operating costs."

The BPO vendor provides customer service for over 16 wireless companies across North America, EMEA, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand. The company has 60,000 associates in 27 countries, using on-shore, nearshore and offshore locations across 155+ facilities around the world. Sitel is privately held and majority owned by Canadian diversified company Onex Corporation.

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Teradata has announced today that UniCredit Group, a financial international institution with branches in 22 European countries, has selected Teradata technology to implement its "CFO Data Warehouse." 

 

The project's starting point is deployment of the Teradata Financial Logical Data Model. The Teradata Financial Logical Data Model supports the concept of load once and use many times, which means that data is collected in one central location and made available for multiple uses across the enterprise.

UniCredit Group will use the data warehouse to support such business initiatives as compliance, cost reduction and other functions. Company officials say the implementation of the CFO Data Warehouse will "guarantee the collection and use of all the data needed to support the principal CFO areas, such as asset and liability management, credit treasury, capital allocation, planning and control."

 

"During these challenging economic conditions, it is key to have detailed and relevant data which allows deep visibility into all divisions of the bank," says Domenico Ambrisi, head of Global Enterprise Services Data Warehouse, UniCredit Global Information Services. "The Teradata system at UniCredit will be capable of providing information based on the needs of the business."

Hermann Wimmer, Teradata president of Europe, Middle East and Africa, noted that "Basel II regulations, the pressure on revenue, demands to reduce costs, and the increased risk of doing business in today's financial environment demand that an institution have an integrated view of its business performance."

The announcement was made at the Teradata Universe, the annual summit dedicated to enterprise data warehousing, now underway in Istanbul.

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Riverturn has followed up on the release of Easy Dials It, a dial application for the iPhone, with an app called VoiceCentral, now available in the Apple App Store. 

 

The idea, according to company officials, is to make using Google Voice "as easy as using visual voicemail." The application offers access to voicemail stored on Google Voice, along with the ability to place calls and send SMS messages.

 

According to company officials it works with either GrandCentral or Google Voice, has a voicemail retrieval capability and lets you listen via earpiece or speaker. It lets you pause, rewind, or fast forward to any point in a message as it plays, create a new contact from the message info and store your password for auto-login. You can also view your call history or SMS conversations, send SMS messages via your Google account get a default startup screen and use everything on your iTouch as well.

VoiceCentral also supports four ways to place calls with your Google number displayed via caller ID -- call back the person that left a message with a single click, place new calls using the built-in keypad dialer, browse your existing iPhone contacts and select a number to dial or simply return missed or received calls directly from your call history, the way those of us too lazy to create new contacts do.

VoiceCentral costs $2.99, Easy Dials It costs $1.99 and Easy Dials It Lite is free.

Riverturn is a private technology firm specializing in consulting and software development headquartered in Durham, North Carolina.

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is mellow yet complex jazz pianist Bill Evans for what promises to be a mellow yet complex morning, with traces of oak, blackberry and toast:

Freiburg, Germany-based Jedox, an open source software company, has announced the availability of Palo BI Suite 3.0, described by officials as a corporate performance management product for a "single version of truth." Three chords and red guitar optional.

 

Available as a community or enterprise version, with the enterprise version offering extended software assurance and support functionalities. Palo BI Suite 3.0 is now also available on Amazon EC2, which makes it, company officials point out, a BI product "fully operating on a cloud." The suite combines all three of Jedox's core applications -- OLAP Server 3.0, Worksheet Server 3.0 and ETL Server 3.0 -- into one BI platform.  

According to Gartner, by 2012 more than 35 per cent of the top 5,000 global companies will "regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets," because of lack of information, processes, and tools. Given this, Jedox officials contend, it's not a surprise that the market's seeing "greater demand for products delivered via software-as-a-service models."

Palo BI Suite 3.0 is characterized by Jedox officials as an open source BI product that "combines the familiarity and productivity of a Web-based online spreadsheet with the centralized server capacity typical of BI applications, together with multi-dimensionality -- in-memory MOLAP."

Kristian Raue, founder and CEO of Jedox, says the advantage of the Palo BI Suite 3.0 is that it combines a BI core with "the flexibility that our corporate customers and community want, to apply BI to a number of scenarios that monolithic BI software packages could not rapidly adapt to support."

 

Company officials say the Palo OLAP Server 3.0 has new logical algorithms, and offers a real-time aggregation through the multi-dimensional data model. As with earlier products, Jedox's Palo BI Suite 3.0 is available directly from Jedox.

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SugarCRM has announced Sugar Express, described by company officials as "addressing SugarCRM open source users' demand for an affordable product that runs on SugarCRM's on-demand computing platform, the Sugar Open Cloud."  

Sugar Express provides core sales, marketing and support features, Sugar Plug-Ins for Microsoft Office and access to SugarCRM Customer Support. Platform functionality includes the Module Builder to create custom modules and Cloud Connectors, "to integrate third-party data services from companies such as Hoover's and Jigsaw," company officials say.  

 

"For all of its promise, the cloud computing movement is in danger of becoming yet another mousetrap to lock in customers to proprietary vendors," says John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM.

 

Currently over 60,000 businesses and 550,000 people have SugarCRM. The company has invested heavily in an on-demand architecture in hopes of preserving "flexibility and choice that customers expect from open source solutions," its officials say.

Elements of the Sugar Open Cloud include multi-instance architecture for automated instance provisioning, configuration and maintenance, with instant-on deployment that requires only a Web browser. It also has support for Web services for the exchange and consumption of application and data services from around the Web and is built on an, open source infrastructure for portability and no vendor lock-in.  

Company officials say Express has 24x7 monitoring from both within and outside the Sugar Open Cloud. It's being offered as an annual subscription at $499 for up to five users or $799 for up to ten users per year. Sugar Professional is offered at $30 per user per month and Sugar Enterprise at $50 per user per month.

"The benefits of software-as-a-service have been clear for several years," says Denis Pombriant, founder and principal analyst at Beagle Research Group.

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WorkXpress has launched its customer relationship management application for free use by all WorkXpress customers. Company officials call is an easy-to-use tool "for a 360 degree view of customer interactions," while offering customization of the application and its reports.  

Evidently the CRM on offer has the ability to track contacts, accounts, leads, and opportunities, schedule tasks and appointments, automate quote and sales order generation, and interact with inventory and Web catalogs. Further, company officials say, WorkXpress CRM integrates with telephony and e-mail services.

"With the WorkXpress CRM, organizations can manage prospect and customer data... our CRM can be used as is, or customized for a company's unique needs." says Treff LaPlante, president and CEO of WorkXpress, The Company Formerly Known As Express Dynamics.

WorkXpress officials bill their flagship product as a "functional Platform as a Service without programming," providing non-programmers "the ability to create business applications using five building blocks in an intuitive, drag and drop, point-and-click Web-based environment, eliminating the need for coding, data modeling and database querying, while automating common systems administration tasks like maintenance or disaster recovery."

Additionally, WorkXpress offers integrations with other applications such as Skype, FedEx, Google Maps, currency conversions, Google language translation, FTP services, IMAP e-mail services, and others. The company offers a "try it free for 30 days" promotion.
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Now here's a clever idea: In light of all the hyperventilating about economic conditions, which includes increasing cutbacks on business travel, the Independent Oracle Users Group has announced the availability of virtual session offerings for its annual Oracle users group conference.  

 

"Registering for a one-seat license," company officials say, "affords unlimited employee access to virtual sessions." According to the offer, companies that have registered at least one employee for the COLLABORATE 09 - IOUG Forum to be held in early Man in Orlando are now eligible to set up virtual access for their entire company.  

Forty virtual sessions are now available to choose from that will run concurrently with the conference. The Webinar sessions (30 minute, one hour and two hour) can be customized depending on educational interests.

"The virtual attendance option gives companies the flexibility to access COLLABORATE content without leaving the office," says Ian Abramson, president of IOUG. "We recognize companies everywhere are looking for ways to save."

 

Founded in 1993, the Independent Oracle Users Group is a global membership organization for Oracle users, representing "the voice of Oracle technology and database professionals."

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Microsoft has announced what company officials are calling "three major incentive offerings" for its ERP and CRM customers.

The first is Business Ready Flexible Pay, which gives new Microsoft Dynamics ERP and CRM customers in the U.S. "the option to purchase the products today but pay for them in equal payments over three years." Microsoft officials say this isn't just financing with associated interest charges and application processes, but "an opportunity for businesses to manage their budgets." While other vendors have "significantly raised" their maintenance fees over the past year, Microsoft officials claim, Microsoft "has held its enhancement rates steady."

In the second incentive, designed to make it easier for companies to move to Microsoft's ERP, starting in May, select partners will be able to extend their customers an offer to move to Microsoft Dynamics ERP with a 50 percent discount on licensing, and receive a rebate equal to 25 percent of the suggested retail price of Microsoft Dynamics, up to a maximum of $25,000 "to help offset the costs of switching from Sage MAS 90 or MAS 200, or Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne."

 

Thirdly, Microsoft says Dynamics CRM can be purchased as a stand-alone product from Business Ready Licensing. Microsoft Dynamics CRM will still be available through Microsoft's Volume Licensing programs.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is sturdy, reliable Hank Mobley's "Roll Call" album. This guy did a string of great jazz records in the early '60s, including the acknowledged classic "Soul Station," as well as "Workout" and this one, but you don't hear his name as often as you should when discussion of great jazz tenor saxophonists come up:

Ah, here's a dateline from First Coffee's old stomping grounds, Istanbul, with the news that Teradata Corporation has announced that European retailing behemoth Carrefour is expanding its Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse environment to support business analytics within its marketing department.

Teradata's products are used by Carrefour to help with marketing activities for over 14 million households, more than half of all French households. Teradata officials say Carrefour is using the tools to try to get "a 360-degree real-time view of its customers across multiple customer contact channels, most notably its brands, hypermarket and supermarket retail stores." Basically the Teradata stuff's giving Carrefour's marketing folks the capacity to manage volumes of data, deployment and the option to process and extract data for business users.

Carrefour officials claim "the largest customer behavior database in France in terms of information management capacity and customer data history." Teradata officials said at this time, "many organizations are integrating enterprise data and updating their information infrastructures."

With its total of 1,230 stores in France the company has massive data volume issues, due to the convergence of the data from its hypermarkets and supermarkets. Carrefour officials say part of the reason they got something like the Teradata product was to support new business initiatives and its concomitant service demands -- while dealing with all the data they already had. Their new enterprise intelligence platform permits a more detailed analysis of data relating to consumer behaviour and purchasing, Carrefour officials say, while allowing for management of various marketing campaigns.

 

Carrefour brand marketers need to be able to manage over 60,000 customer categories and more than 14 million households within its hypermarkets and supermarkets. The retailer gets an average of 50 visits per year, or one visit per week per customer, who purchases from approximately 20 to 25 product lines, with nearly 80 percent of spending with the Carrefour loyalty card.

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Mojix has announced a partnership with SRA International, which sells technology and consulting for Radio Frequency Identification-enabled products, mainly to government organizations.

Using the capabilities of the Mojix STAR system and SRA's expertise in "enterprise logistics, Auto ID programs and government supply chain optimization," the two companies can develop products "built on the capabilities of the Mojix STAR system to government customers," says Ramin Sadr, CEO & Founder, Mojix.

"We look forward to applying SRA's capabilities and deep knowledge of the government supply chain to help clients realize the new value derived from solutions built on the Mojix STAR system," said SRA Vice President and Director, Logistics, George Batsakis. "Mojix technology establishes new avenues for use cases and applications for passive RFID."

SRA's supply chain products are used, for example, in the military's Warfighter through automated asset visibility and management. SRA officials say its products are meant to streamline the deployment process, lower cost and reduce the logistics footprint. As a vendor in Automatic Identification Technology space, SRA uses RFID and Unique Item Identification technologies to manage data across the supply chain network.

The Mojix STAR system is a UHF passive RFID system using digital signal processing and an RFID systems architecture. The ability to read passive RFID tags over long range, determine tag location, and secure and authenticate tag data in one system "changes the economics of RFID," Mojix officials maintain.

Headquartered in Los Angeles, Mojix was founded in 2004 by a team of former JPL/NASA scientists and engineers who thought they could apply discoveries in deep space communications to "refine the precision, reach and scope of RFID technology," according to company officials. The firm is privately held with funding from Oak Investment Partners, Red Rock Ventures and InnoCal Venture Capital. For more information, please visit.

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Autonomy Corporation has announced a new product letting businesses record and archive dynamic Web site content, designed to "address the increasing and complex regulatory requirements for businesses presenting dynamic content on the Web," company officials say.

 

The product combines Autonomy Digital Safe with Interwoven TeamSite to form an offering for including Web content in a comprehensive compliance policy. As Anthony Bettencourt, CEO of Autonomy Interwoven noted correctly, the need to record and produce point-in-time records of Web content for compliance requirements "is becoming a major issue at the world's largest banks, insurance companies, and retailers.

Businesses increasingly engage with their customers through online channels, of course, constantly updating and changing offers while courts and governmental regulatory bodies are demanding that businesses produce an exact record of offers and information delivered to a Web site visitor at a particular time, for use in legal matters and compliance audits. This has become increasingly difficult for businesses trying to deliver a modern Web site experience with rich media and dynamic personalized content, keeping up with all the red tape demanded by government drones moving at the speed of a particularly lazy three-toed sloth shot with a tranquilizer dart.

Autonomy uses the capabilities of its Digital Safe Archive and TeamSite Web content management for a product that helps businesses meet the compliance requirements of the modern Web -- "for example, an insurance company can now produce a record of the exact premiums it offered online to a particular segment of customers during a marketing campaign conducted several months ago," company officials say.

Digital Safe is a scalable, hosted archive service that lets customers outsource the storage and management of e-mail messages, rich-media files, audio files, instant messages, and all forms of Web content. With over ten petabytes of data under management, Autonomy Digital Safe is used by such companies as Bank of America, Charles Schwab, Deutsche Bank, eBay and others.

TeamSite's Web versioning capabilities let businesses capture snapshots of content delivered to customers at exact points in time, including rolling back to content delivered several months or years ago so it can be ingested and indexed by Digital Safe to help organizations meet strict e-discovery and audit compliance requirements, including COBS 11.8 (Conduct of Business), SEC/FINRA regulations, and the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act.

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Definitely seems to be the day for Teradata news on deals with French companies. In another announcement, the company says that Banque Accord, a vendor of payment solutions and consumer credit, has selected the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse, a member of the Teradata Purpose-Built Platform Family, to launch its company-wide business intelligence initiative.  

"After a review of proposals from data warehousing vendors, we turned to Teradata to provide a single source of data," says Phillippe Eymond, head of Information Management, Banque Accord, saying the review and benchmark included "tests of software and hardware scalability, workload management, high query performance, SAS and Informatica integration, and the ease of database administration."

Data from throughout the bank will be integrated in the active enterprise data warehouse and will provide "a global view of banking services, customers and operations," says Eric Joulié, vice president Western Europe and president of Teradata France.

 

The Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse is a member of the Teradata Purpose-Built Platform Family, described by company officials as "a range of data warehouses allowing companies to start small and grow at an affordable price." The family is supported by the Teradata Database, and lets businesses load data and run queries within hours after delivery.

Banque Accord, a subsidiary of Auchan Group, specializes in electronic money transfers, management of cash cards and consumer credit. The firm claims around six million customers in Europe, including three million in France.

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BatchBlue Software, which sells a social customer relationship manager for small businesses and entrepreneurs, has announced that BatchBook now integrates with FreshBooks, an online invoicing and time tracking service and Shoeboxed, a receipt and business card scanning service.  

 

The idea behind the integration of these applications, along with an existing sync with e-mail services company MailChimp, is the launch of the Small Business Web partnership, a movement described by BatchBlue officials as bringing together "like-minded, customer-obsessed software companies to assimilate their products and make life easier for small businesses."

"We know our partners, we are customers of our partners and we feel very comfortable recommending them to our own customers," says BatchBlue President Pamela O'Hara. "Providing a single place to access information from these systems makes a lot of sense from our perspective."

 

The Small Business Web was born when representatives of the founding companies met up at this year's SXSW Interactive Festival. They realized they were already beginning to integrate with each others' products and figured that hey, even more integration would be an asset to small business owners trying to manage their data and run their businesses.

The integration features and partnerships let small businesses organize and track contacts such as customers, prospects, vendors or industry acquaintances and monitor their social media activity including blog posts, tweets and bookmarks to gain insights and turn conversations into customers as well as tie invoices, expenses and billing to account communications for faster bookkeeping and better oversight.

 

"I'm always on the outlook for anything that saves me time and makes my life easier," said BatchBlue customer C.C. Chapman, co-founder of new media consultancy The Advance Guard, saying BatchBook's recent integration with Shoeboxed "saves me hours of inputting data."

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is J.J. Cale's "laconic Naturally" album:

Red Bend Software, a vendor of Mobile Software Management products, has announced that it has combined its vCurrent Mobile and vRapid Mobile products into a single tool for mobile software management. 

 

The combined product, called vRapid Mobile, is an MSM client "capable of managing any type of software on any mobile platform or device," according to company officials. The idea is to make it easier to move from updating firmware as one complete image to supporting advanced use cases, where embedded software is managed by individual components. It also lets users enable management of built-in and downloadable applications.

VRapid Mobile will be pitched to device manufacturers, mobile operators and software developers as a way to "independently manage their software assets on mobile devices in a unified and standards-based way across mobile platforms," according to company officials: "With firmware over-the-air updating, manufacturers should be able to reduce support costs and increase consumer satisfaction by remotely updating firmware with software improvements and new functionality." 

 

And by managing software components over-the-air, operators can increase data revenues by adding and updating branded applications and service enablers in embedded software without requiring a complete maintenance release. Developers can speed time to market of new applications and versions, faster than handset replacements cycles, by independently managing built-in and downloadable applications and their software dependencies. 

 

Chris Hazelton, Research Director - Mobile and Wireless at The 451 Group, said recently that as device vendors, mobile operators and now ISVs look for opportunities for growth in a period of slowing device replacement cycles, "the ability to update and manage features of an installed base of devices over the air becomes critically important."

Existing Red Bend vCurrent Mobile customers can upgrade to vRapid Mobile FOTA version 6 for no additional fee. Launched in 2003, Red Bend's vCurrent Mobile is deployed in more than 475 million mobile devices. Founded in 1999, Red Bend is a privately held, venture capital-financed company with offices in China, Israel, Japan, Korea, the U.K. and the U.S.
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The latest version of Bango's mobile analytics service, Bango Analytics v4, provides mobile site owners with mobile analytics in real time "regardless of network connection," company officials say. 

 

Bango officials stress the interoperability of network connections since it's not unusual for smartphone users to swap between WiFi and operator gateway as they move around during the day.

Bango CEO Ray Anderson, concerning the launch, says "History is repeating itself. Businesses have benefited from choosing products like Omniture and Coremetrics to get data of their website traffic. The same thing is happening in the mobile world."

He says the latest version of Bango's mobile analytics service lets businesses track unique visitors whether a mobile user connects via operator gateway, WiFi or home broadband -- even if users change their connection. It also has the capability of its Identifier technology, "so now everyone who interacts with a mobile Web site or mobile campaign has a privacy protected, unique user ID, no matter what type of network connection they use." 

The product lets people see metrics by the hour, so marketers have a better understanding how a mobile marketing campaign is performing in real time so any necessary adjustments can be made. There are advanced filtering and sorting for segmentation of mobile data, "so it's quick to get to the results needed on a case by case basis," company officials say: "Live data is used to provide greater accuracy, rather than pre-cached reports which throw away the original raw information."

A 30-day trial is offered on their home page.
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Sitronics, a vendor of telecommunications, information technology and microelectronics in Russia and the CIS, with a growing presence in other EEMEA markets, has announced two contracts with Sistema Shyam TeleServices, the pan-Indian telecommunications operator, to deliver, deploy and service its CRM and billing system. 

 

The contracts amount to $64.2 million, and are expected to be implemented within three years.

The project will be implemented in three stages, Sitronics officials say, "in direct correlation with Sistema Shyam TeleServices' subscriber base growth." The deployment of the new system, based on FORIS, will enable the Indian operator to service its subscriber base and hopefully streamline its internal business processes.

The FORIS tools are currently used for the networks of 25 telecommunications operators in a number of countries, including Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Czech Republic, Germany, covering over 100 million customers.

Sergey Aslanian, President of Sitronics, said this being the firm's largest project in India, it "will allow us to strengthen Sitronics' position in this promising market where we recently established our subsidiary."

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CRM Text Solutions, a vendor of mobile CRM and marketing products, has announced the release of its text messaging API which lets any software vendor provide a mobile component to their offerings. 

 

This API is built on CRM Text Solutions' patent pending method for routing SMS text messages without the use of keywords. "Within days any software provider can add text messaging to their products through Web services accessing our real-time, two-way text messaging engine," says Stan Bradbury, President of CRM Text Solutions.

SMS providers usually offer a single shared-use common short code. CRM Text Solutions officials are betting on the appeal of their Text Messaging API, which provides access to a stack of common short codes. This technology, they claim, "guarantees an exclusive common short code path between all mobile subscribers and the business they opted-in to," so messages go to the right place without keywords or guessing based on the last company using the common short code.

The Text Messaging API also provides access to a new mobile append tool. "With a 30 percent hit rate and growing," company officials say, "mobile append can match opt-ins to mobile campaigns with head of household, home address and e-mail address information delivered in real-time." This information can then be sent back to a client's database for further marketing contact. 

 

The Mobile Append tool is on top of additional API data services that help convert e-mail lists to text message opt-ins and clean up existing phone data to identify mobile phone numbers already captured.

CRM Text Solutions' Text Messaging API also features opt-in and opt-out help management and exclusive opt-in keywords for any business to promote in their advertising. CRM Text Solutions also has access to a variety of vanity common short codes such as NEWCAR, HOMES, REPAIR and LAWYER.

The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is the boozy, bluesy, ragged brilliance of The Faces, that poor man's Rolling Stones fronted by rock genius Rod Stewart and future uptown Stone Ronnie Wood. No band in history ever sounded like they were having more fun than The Faces, and if the performances were sloppy and drunk, well, everybody had a good laugh and that was the main thing:

Cross Country Automotive Services has announced that the performance of its Instant Dispatch software has earned the company its sixth consecutive annual CRM Excellence Award from Technology Marketing Corporation's Customer Interaction Solutions magazine.

Cross County provides driver and vehicle assistance services in North America, which includes connected vehicle (telematics) services provided through its business unit. Instant Dispatch was developed by Cross Country as a way to try to decrease the time it takes to locate and dispatch the towing and emergency roadside companies that provide help to a disabled vehicle by the side of the road, while capturing customer information and real-time vehicle data. 

 

Company officials say that by sending vital information directly to the towing company, Instant Dispatch results in service vehicles arriving at the scene of a disabled vehicle or a potential emergency situation "an average of four minutes earlier." The company also claims that with Instant Dispatch, "customer satisfaction has seen an increase from 88 percent to 92 percent, as measured by survey data."

CRM Excellence Award winners are selected on the basis of their product or service's ability to help extend and expand the customer relationship to covering the entire enterprise and the entire lifetime of the customer, according to CRM officials.

"In today's challenging business environment, retaining customer loyalty has never been more critical, particularly among automotive-related businesses," said Charles Cavolina, Cross Country's senior vice president of Service Delivery. The company is headquartered in Medford, Massachusetts.
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Navatar Group, a global Salesforce.com partner in financial services, has announced several new customers, including KStone Partners, Kelvingrove Partners and Zebra Capital. The firms are using Navatar's customized CRM for Hedge Funds, a cloud computing application to manage hedge fund and fund of funds operations. 

 

Navatar CRM for Hedge Funds is built and run entirely on the Force.com platform from Salesforce.com and is available on the Force.com AppExchange. The product is designed to facilitate operational functions of hedge funds, with tools to manage investor relations, manage fundraising, track investments, track fund portfolio, generate investor reports and send fund information and newsletters.

 

"Cloud computing is a no-brainer in enabling Hedge Funds to do more with less," says John Quinlan, Head, Sales & Operations, Kelvingrove Partners.

The Navatar product is built and run on the Force.com platform, which company officials say gives it "the benefits of the platform for building cloud computing business applications," as the Force.com platform has security and sharing models, workflow, analytics, customization, integration, and other features.

Navatar CRM for Hedge Funds is 100 percent natively built on Force.com, which means that all of the customer data, as well as all the code is hosted by Salesforce.com as opposed to any external servers. All customers share the same code base, but still have the ability to create their own customizations.

"Within a day, hedge funds can now use this cloud computing application to manage their operations at a very low cost. There is no hardware and no software required," says Alok Misra, Principal, Navatar Group. Navatar CRM for Hedge Funds is now available for a 30-day free trial on the Force.com AppExchange.

Navatar Group, founded by veterans of Deloitte Consulting, deals in cloud computing advisory and implementation services and products. 
...

ONStor, a vendor of clustered NAS products for enterprises and "content-rich organizations," has announced an addition to its Pantera line of integrated storage systems, the Pantera LS 2100 series. 

 

The LS 2100 series is a family of unified IP storage products that provide both iSCSI and NAS support in a single system. Targeting small and mid-sized enterprises, the Pantera LS 2100 packs an array of data management features, what company officials call "self-healing capabilities," and storage management designed for cost savings. ONStor has also incorporated the Zettabyte File System and open source technology into the Pantera LS series systems.

"By moving to OpenSolaris/ZFS, ONStor is on track to be a disruptive force in the storage industry," says Simon Robinson, research director, storage, the 451 Group, adding that he thinks ONStor's "unified message" will play well with small and midrange enterprises "because those organizations desire a single system to handle all of their storage requirements, not multiple silos that require separate management."

Many SMEs use multi-vendor storage systems spread throughout the organization, making storage management difficult and costly. This product's designed to solve that problem.

"Our initial focus was on allowing our customers to choose storage from any vendor for use with ONStor's NAS gateways," says Bob Miller, CEO of ONStor, adding that he believe ZFS "will become the predominant file system standard in enterprise environments."

The Pantera system has RAID Z and RAID Z-DP (RAID 5 and 6) capabilities, as well as unlimited, instantaneous snapshots and block-based incremental replication. The Pantera LS 2130 is scalable up to 48 drives of SAS or SATA and has a list price of $36,000 with 15TB of SATA storage. The Pantera LS 2150 is scalable up to 96 drives of SAS, SATA and SSD and has a list price of $39,500 with 15TB of SATA storage. For more information, visit.

...

Infobright, an open source data warehousing company, has announced that Infobright Enterprise Edition and Infobright Community Edition have been certified by Sun Microsystems for use with the Sun's Unified Storage product line. 

 

The vendor also released the results of its performance testing with the Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System, which demonstrated up to 92 percent increase in query performance compared to the same tests conducted with a competitive storage device, Infobright officials say.

The testing was conducted using a real-world scenario for data analytics. It consisted of 64 different queries running repetitively for several hours against an 8TB Infobright database, varying the number of concurrent users from 1 - 16. The hardware environment included a Sun Fire X4450 server using NFS to connect to a Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System and demonstrated what Infobright officials say was "consistently faster results than a competitive SAN based storage unit."

 

Calling them "alternatives to today's high-cost, high-maintenance data warehouse products," Infobright officials say ICE and IEE are both based on Sun's MySQL database. The Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System scales up to 576 TB per system, and comes with a hybrid storage architecture for reduced energy consumption.

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Leo Kottke's magnificent album correctly titled One Guitar, No Vocals. It's hard to believe there isn't the occasional synthesizer or overdub, such as on the album's masterpiece, "Accordion Bells," but there certainly aren't any vocals:

Avaya, a vendor of business communications software, systems and services, has announced the completion an upgrade to the University of Sheffield's voice network as part of a wider IT expansion and upgrade program planned by the university.

The upgrade, to Avaya's Communications Manager 5.0, is seen by university officials as a move to give the university "a more resilient, scalable IP based phone system, while still protecting the investment made in PBX over the last decade." It gives the university the capacity to increase the number of voice and data connections by 20 per cent, and to move to a converged network, which university officials say is in their long term IT objectives.

The university's 10,000 voice connections have moved to the new system with the result that "jobs such as adding a new voice extension or moving phones, which previously would have taken a couple of hours, now take a matter of minutes," university officials say.

Chris Barrow, product marketing manager, Avaya EMEA, said Avaya has "a long standing relationship with the university, and we look forward to building on that in the future."

Mark Franklin, Voice and Data Support Manager, University of Sheffield, said while the old system "had served us well, we recognized the need for an upgrade. With the advent of unified communications and the university's own expansion plans we needed a solid foundation upon which we could build future functionality whilst still protecting our existing investment. What's more we needed something that would integrate with our existing setup."

Franklin says the upgraded phone system will provide better service to students during busy times, such as clearing and enrollment: "The call center functionality built into Communications Manger enables us to take an 'all hands on deck' approach during busy times. Calls can easily be answered, and correctly routed by a team of people, helping us to process student enquiries far more speedily than would have been possible in the past when, all too often, high call volumes resulted in bottle necks and long call waiting times."

...

Cisco has unveiled a new software-as-a-service architecture and enhancements to its SaaS-based Cisco WebEx collaborative applications, a move seen by Cisco officials as "extending the cloud into the enterprise network infrastructure through the Cisco WebEx Collaboration Cloud and the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers."

The global collaboration market opportunity is currently estimated at $34 billion, according to statistics cited by Cisco officials. To grab their slice of that pie, and to broaden its stature in the security market, Cisco has announced that it is leading the way toward an "everything as a service" vision, part of which is extending SaaS to the enterprise with the company's collaboration and security capabilities, both in the cloud and on the enterprise network. 

The company has also introduced the Cisco WebEx Collaboration Cloud for SaaS, described by company officials as a "purpose-built network designed to deliver collaborative experiences within and between companies." It uses intelligent routing based on location, bandwidth and availability to provide global load balancing and backup for data, audio and video for collaborative applications, including conferencing, instant messaging and team spaces.

The Cisco WebEx Node for ASR 1000 Series, based on the Cisco ASR 1000 Series aggregation services routing platforms, was also announced recently as one of Cisco's latest network offerings. This product lets the edge router act as a point of presence within an enterprise network for meeting attendees on that network. This reduces bandwidth requirements, enhances video and voice over IP performance, while using the global load balancing and availability features of the WebEx Collaboration Cloud. 

These announcements go along with Cisco's unveiling of five new additions to its security portfolio, designed to bolster the fundamental components of a network security infrastructure.

...

IceWEB's online subsidiary, www.icewebonline.com, has announced it will offer mobile synchronization of its flagship IceMail Hosted Microsoft Exchange software service to Apple iPhone and iPod Touch device users free of charge.

 

IceMail subscribers who have iPhone or iPod Touch devices can sync their e-mail, contacts, and schedules to those devices for no charge.

The product is a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service service starting at $9.95 per month, giving subscribers access to the e-mail and collaboration product Microsoft Exchange. It makes "corporate grade" e-mail available to individuals and businesses without requiring them to make substantial investments in hardware and software infrastructure, the cost of which would normally put such advanced services far out of reach of the companies targeted by the product. 

 

IceMail is billed by company officials as giving individuals and businesses the ability to compete, collaborate, and communicate "on a level most often enjoyed by only the largest and most cash flush organizations - all without needing to buy servers, software, or hire experienced technical staff."

The real-time push synchronization, which IceMail gets by using Microsoft's ActiveSync protocol services, can be configured on the iPhone. All new users, iPhone or not, can test drive IceMail for free for a 30 day period without any commitment. A credit card is required for security purposes but, company officials say, is never billed until users have decided to continue their subscription. IceMail subscribers also receive a free license for Microsoft Entourage for Mac.

...

AT&T is helping Wawa, a 24/7 convenience store chain well-known to any Pennsylvanian in need of beer late at night, move its existing SAP applications to a managed AT&T offering. 

 

AT&T products and services are provided or offered by subsidiaries and affiliates of AT&T Inc. under the AT&T brand, and not by AT&T Inc.

 

The company, with stores in the Mid-Atlantic region, signed a five-year contract with AT&T to migrate and host its existing SAP applications, a landscape that consists of over 30 servers used by more than 15,000 employees.

For minimal impact on stores, the migration of Wawa's key applications onto the AT&T environment is scheduled to occur in less than 18 hours. Following the migration, AT&T will monitor and manage Wawa's SAP product to support the applications. Wawa will also use the AT&T Managed Application Services Tool available via AT&T BusinessDirect, which lets Wawa employees access the SAP system to view, monitor and analyze operations.

 

Julius Colina, IT manager of Hosting Strategy at Wawa, said the company is confident that AT&T Business Solutions "will effectively manage our applications and allow us to focus our internal resources on fulfilling the daily needs of our customers."

...

Quickoffice, a vendor of mobile office productivity software, says Quickoffice for iPhone is now available for purchase in iTunes App Store. It's an iPhone application designed to allow editing of Microsoft Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. 

 

The product also includes file-sharing and content management capabilities. Additional functionality including e-mailing files and drag and drop capabilities, will be available as a free update to customers in the next few weeks.

Obviously this is targeted to road warriors, the mobile professionals and consumers needing access to files while on the go. It gives you the ability, from the airline terminal, to edit and create .doc files and .xls spreadsheets and play around with text format options, such as font size, style and color. You can cut, copy and paste text anywhere in Word, including to another document, and edit bulleted and numbered lists as well as edit Word documents in landscape mode with wider keyboard.

 

It lets you wrap text at any zoom level and eliminate repetitive left and right scrolling, gives you access to MobileMe iDisk accounts and lets you view iWorks, PDF and other common media files while supporting advanced features and functions for spreadsheets, including revise inputs and recalculate, and insert and resize rows and columns. 

 

Hey, throw out your desktop, laptop and netbook. If somebody now invents a collapsible keyboard to plug into an iPhone, like that floor piano deal Tom Hanks danced on in the movie Big, something about the size and consistency of a rubber place mat you can take out of your carry-on and unroll on a bar table in the airport lounge and just use the actual iPhone itself as a portable CPU, we might have a boom on our hands.

David Halpin, vice president of engineering and product development at Quickoffice, claimed the product is "the first iPhone application that provides full editing of Office documents."

In addition, Quicksheet and Quickoffice Files are also currently on sale in the App Store. Quickoffice Files, formerly MobileFiles 2.0, allows users to access their iDisk accounts, email files directly from the app or transfer via Wi-Fi. Quicksheet, formerly MobileFiles Pro, includes the same functionality of Quickoffice Files and adds an Excel spreadsheet editor.

Quickoffice for iPhone has an introductory price of $19.99, Quicksheet is currently sold for $6.99 and Quickoffice Files currently has a price of $1.99. All three applications are available now for purchase in iTunes. Platforms supported by Quickoffice include Symbian, Palm, BlackBerry, iPhone and Android. Privately held, Quickoffice is based in Dallas with offices in London, Ottawa, and St. Petersburg.

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Marshall Tucker Band's first album, cleverly titled The Marshall Tucker Band. It appears we have a law 'n' survey theme going today, so let's get to it:

PSS Systems, which sells legal information governance products, has announced new software bundles designed to provide Global 1000 companies with a legal and EDRM product in a single offering. 

 

The company announced Atlas Legal Governance Solutions, Atlas for IT, Atlas DCF and Atlas ERM which combine to help companies address legal information management, legal holds and discovery across the enterprise. They "help address the root causes of increasing legal and IT costs which result from bloated data retention and compliance," says Deidre Paknad, President and Chief Executive Officer of PSS Systems, and founder of the Compliance Governance and Oversight Counsel. 

 

She says because the Atlas products share a common enterprise governance map and a single code base, "companies can synchronize legal, IT and records management functions across the enterprise to reduce risk, defensibly dispose of data, and materially reduce costs." 

Discovery cost has gone from just a small portion of litigation costs to the vast majority of those costs, yet forecasting practices haven't kept pace with this sea change. A lack of scenario modeling tools has made it difficult to routinely predict cost or negotiate production scope and, as a result, companies resolve matters more slowly and at higher total cost. The Atlas product is designed to address this, as it now embeds continuous cost control into the litigation workflow, eliminates manual data gathering and enables complex analysis. 

"When custodian, volume and price data are readily available and corporate attorneys have tools to continuously forecast costs, they have the potential to reduce scope and avoid substantial expense. Built-in discovery cost forecasting is an exciting, timely breakthrough," says Tom Lahiff, director in PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Practice and a former corporate litigator. PwC is an Atlas delivery partner. 

...

Auckland-based commercial and tech-focused law firm Simpson Grierson has reported the completion of one of the most successful firm-wide IT implementations it has ever undertaken, rolling out the BigHand Digital Dictation workflow system in 2009 to 220 lawyers and 90 secretaries. 

 

Full return-on-investment has been projected to be reached well within 12 months of the start date of the implementation.

Simpson Grierson initially ran a head-to-head pilot between the Winscribe dictation system and BigHand's 3rd generation workflow software. BigHand's voice productivity technology was chosen, with users reporting the interface more intuitive and its features more complete and easier to access.

Valerie Fogg, Information Services Director, Simpson Grierson, says aside from lost or wiped tapes, "one of the main problems with our old analogue-based system was that we couldn't see the workload pipeline or manages our resources effectively. Whether a tape had one or 15 client documents on it was a mystery, and the urgency of each doc was impossible to judge against other client files. As a result we had to operate with more resources than we perhaps ultimately needed in order to account for peaks of work, and we also relied too heavily on temporary cover."

 

Another big positive has been the control on overall output quality, Fogg says: "Those earlier in their career often feel they are better off typing themselves, but they often lack the production skills to put everything in a consistent corporate style or format. We have seen younger lawyers now embrace the digital technology, even if they also send a portion of text they have typed themselves, as they can then accompany that file with voice notes or further instructions regarding formatting. The lawyer can then use the workflow to track the job or task through the system, and will be automatically notified when it is completed. So the task management aspect comes into play nicely too for those who are not your most prolific users of dictation."

Typists in each office can also work on dictation for their national work group unconstrained by physical location.

...

Los Angeles-based Passenger, which works in private online brand communities, has announced research data and an accompanying white paper by Sector Intelligence analyzing how companies are currently using social media as part of their corporate marketing and product development strategies, finding that "interactive communities provide deeper insight into customers' needs than traditional market research."

 

The white paper "examines how 16 Fortune 500 food & beverage, financial services, automotive, retailers and sporting goods brands are involving customers directly in the planning and development of company products, services and marketing initiatives, as well as the corporate social media strategies themselves, via private online communities," according to Passenger officials. 

 

The study found that interactive communities have also "increased customer advocacy and loyalty, and can help avoid consumer backlash as companies develop their public social media presence." 

"Never before has the impulse for consumers to connect with brands been expressed and acted upon on such a large scale, and never before have so many disparate individuals come together to help produce products and services that would be in turn distributed on a mass basis," says Craig A. Honick, managing partner, Sector Intelligence. "The brands we interviewed in this study documented that direct conversations through private social networks are improving the climate for innovation in tangible ways." 

Samantha Skey, general manager, Passenger, says the survey demonstrates that "private online communities are shifting the way brands think about communicating with their customers, and the dialogue that results from these communities is proving to be a catalyst for significant change within organizations." 

The study's highlights include findings that 86 percent of respondents report that private online communities provide richer insight into customer needs, 33 percent report that the community input alone has actually changed product designs and marketing plans and 43 percent report they use fewer focus groups as a direct result of engaging in collaboration via the private online community while 36 percent report conducting fewer surveys 

Sixty-four percent say the community has improved the context for decision-making within the company, and fully 96 percent report that their marketing department is deriving value from collaboration with customers, with 71 percent reporting the same for market research and 66 percent reporting a positive impact on product development. 

Sector Intelligence drew the conclusions that word of mouth is likely to become a more central part of a company's future marketing strategy as they learn to integrate loyal customers into the brand strategy, conversations happening in private online communities are unique from other forms of research such as focus groups, some of the more conservative brands have shied away from public social networks because of the risks involved, companies are investing in tools and services that will help them listen to and learn more from their customer base and private online communities can enhance internal collaboration within larger brands in diverse sectors.

Sector is continuing to develop the Brand-Life Continuum Report™ and the Brand Sustainability Index™, tools which measure and benchmark the nature and depth of how organizational and personal brands are integrated in the daily lives of target market groups. The tools make extensive use of ethnography, word of mouth research, and quantitative modeling and are often paired with social media applications that track and analyze online consumer conversations.

...

Customer Operations Performance Center, a consultancy on customer contact centers and vendor management operations, and Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals, a professional society of customer care consultants from the Fortune/Forbes 1000, have released results of what they say is the first ever multi-industry benchmarking study for customer care. 

 

The findings, according to officials of both firms, reveal detailed customer satisfaction data for the household and personal care, food and beverage, retail and consumer goods, pharmaceutical and medical devices and the travel and hospitality industries. Since 2005, COPC and SOCAP have conducted similar annual customer care benchmarking studies of the automotive industry.

Participants in the survey include over 40 companies across five verticals with combined annual revenue of over $170 billion. It looked at ten customer satisfaction and operational categories such as complaint management, quality monitoring and operational metrics.

 

According to the results, 98 percent of the firms provide customer service or post sales support (which were the two percent, he wondered idly), and 80 percent-plus use more than one support type.  Twenty-one percent don't measure customer satisfaction, 24 percent measuring customer satisfaction do not consistently achieve defined performance targets and 65 percent have an external customer service center.

 

And while 95 percent have a quality monitoring process, 89 percent do not use offshore support sites and 33 percent use "temporary" agents to reflect the degree of seasonality in their business.

"We will supplement the SOCAP member findings with global benchmark findings and best practices from our 1,200+ audits in 50 countries," says Cliff Moore, chairman and co-founder of COPC.

COPC officials say they will present the results of the customer care benchmarking study this week during the annual SOCAP Symposium in Chicago, and that each of the survey participants will also receive a detailed benchmarking report.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is as classic as classic rock gets -- The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers, pure solid 24-karat rolled gold:

ArrivedOK, a product described as a "personal flight arrival tracker and arrival messenger," is now available in the Japanese and Russian languages and open for beta testing in most countries of the world. 

 

The service -- you're really a bit surprised nobody thought of this before -- lets air passengers automatically notify others about their arrival to airports worldwide by e-mail, SMS, via blogs or Twitter, thereby letting them save on international roaming charges.

Developed by Eyeline Communications, ArrivedOK lets travelers enter flight information and recipient e-mails or phone numbers before take-off. When they reach their destination and turn on their cell phone, the service locates it in the local mobile network and sends out a brief arrival message to the recipients listed. The system bypasses the heavy international roaming charges for voice, text and mobile e-mail services which sneak up and bite you on the rear when you're traveling abroad. Not that First Coffee has had that happen, oh no.

"So why can't they just check to see if the flight's arrived?" someone may ask. See, this way, your personal arrival is noted instead of flight status in general, so when you oversleep your nine-hour Dubai layover, or miss your connecting flight in Heathrow, you don't have anybody tapping their toes at the airport for hours while you're still over the Atlantic Ocean. Not that that's happened to First Coffee either, no siree. No personal experience there, spending two hours traveling out to Ataturk Airport, waiting three hours and returning home empty-handed only to have to go back later that night.

 

"Unlike other flight tracking services, which are based on general flight data from dispatcher centers, ArrivedOK tracks one's actual appearance in the destination airport, so one's friends and colleagues are 100 percent sure the person is landed," says Andrey Deriabin, Director Business Development at Eyeline Communications.

Therefore ArrivedOK has rightfully been selected as an Official Honoree in The 13th Annual Webby Awards in two categories: Best Use of GPS or Location Technology and Experimental & Innovation. ArrivedOK is currently translated into Japanese, French and Russian and is available as free public beta in most countries of the world.

Eyeline Communications is incorporated in Austin, Texas and has offices in Singapore, Russia, and CIS, counting an 80 million-strong subscriber base in Europe and Asia for its carrier-grade B2B products and mobile services.

...

Kickfire and Sun Microsystems have announced a joint MySQL Enterprise marketing agreement for what officials of both firms are calling "the world's first high-performance MySQL data warehousing appliance." The companies will work together to promote the Kickfire MySQL Appliance to data warehouse prospects as part of Sun's MySQL Certified Storage Engine Program.

Kickfire is a diamond sponsor of this week's MySQL Conference & Expo, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, where Bruce Armstrong, Kickfire's chairman and chief executive officer, will deliver a keynote address.

The Kickfire appliance is targeted at the data warehousing mass market, where Sun's MySQL open source database has a large installed base. Company officials emphasize its price/performance ratio as its marketing lead, pitching it as "high performance affordable to the masses," along with the fact that as a plug-and-play appliance it doesn't need the IT resources or data warehousing expertise smaller firms typically don't have lying around. 

"We are looking forward to helping Kickfire promote their data warehouse for MySQL Enterprise," says Mark Herring, vice president, MySQL and Software Infrastructure marketing, Sun Microsystems, calling their product "compelling" for organizations looking to deploy data warehouses less than ten terabytes in size.

MySQL is generally regarded as one of the most, if not the most popular open source database software in the world. Kickfire's offerings are based on a patented SQL chip that packs the power of dozens of CPUs into a small, low-power form factor. The appliances scale from gigabytes to terabytes and are based on Linux and commodity hardware.

...

Web Help Desk, which sells hosted help desk software, has announced a Lite Edition which will be marketed to small to medium businesses, K-12 schools, collegiate departments and governmental agencies as both a hosted SaaS application or on site installation.

In today's economy a lot of organizations are figuring it makes sense to pay a little more attention to customer service and retention. This means finding tools that can help them provide better ROI, and the Web Help Desk Lite Edition is being marketed to this need. "Organizations demand measurable value in their investments and are seeking alternatives to expensive, heavyweight software packages and hard to maintain in-house products" says Web Help Desk, VP, Terry Siddall.

The Lite Edition has what company officials consider a strong feature set along with simple implementation, ease of use and a good user interface, backed by a technical support team.

The product has a customer support Web portal for end users to submit service requests, view ticket updates, and seek self help or view auto-suggested solutions from the knowledge base, as well as an e-mail-to-ticket conversion function so "service requests submitted via e-mail do not fall through the cracks and breach SLA," company officials say.

Support staff may add notes (and hidden notes) to each ticket from the Web or via e-mail, and every update to a ticket is recorded by user name and time date stamp. Companies can use their current LDAP or AD directory for log-in authentication and to schedule imports of customer data. It also lets users run a variety of help desk reports to measure productivity and gauge customer satisfaction.

The SaaS option comes with a "try it before you buy it" hosted trial period.

...

 

Sitel, a global business process outsourcing provider, has launched what company officials call "a new Continuous Improvement standard."

The firm has established an Office of Continuous Improvement that reports directly to the global head of operations and is responsible for ensuring consistency across Sitel's 440+ clients and 155+ sites, "developing a global learning culture where all 60,000 associates are on a continuous improvement track," and delivering ongoing process improvement initiatives "with measurable return on customer investment," according to company officials.

The office has a global Black Belt organizational structure with oversight for operational support disciplines including lean Sigma Process Improvement to the site level, project management, client & operational reporting and leadership development and training.

"Our client's partner with Sitel to provide customer care," says Chad Carlson, executive vice president of operations for Sitel, adding that the company "views each non-value added call as a defect."

Sitel's Continuous Improvement platform uses operational talent within Sitel and from the industry, including processes and advanced technologies. Warehoused data, accessed through global dashboards, provide a real-time global view of operational metrics, letting Sitel Black Belts "identify trends and apply Lean and Six Sigma methodologies to understand and fix the root cause of the issue," company officials say.

Sitel recently appointed Mike Patterson to lead this strategic global office. He reports directly to Carlson. The company is privately held and majority owned by Canadian diversified company Onex Corporation.

...

Convergys Corporation has announced the availability of Product Control Manager 2.0 within itsBSS/OSS portfolio. This new version of the product includes features that provide enhanced support for product change management, dynamic data modeling, and real-time integration with external systems.

Available now, it's a centralized product catalog and lifecycle management system for the creation and use of product and service data, covering the technical, commercial, and price definition of products. It's billed as something to help communications service providers manage their products across all network and service domains and reduce the costs associated with managing a product portfolio.

"We have seen a shift for service providers - in their customer base, competition, and in the market at large - all of which point to a need to introduce more products faster, and to make product management tools more responsive," says Bob Lento, Convergys President of Information Management. 

 

Convergys official's claim 2.0 has "several enhancements" over prior releases, including alerts when changes occur in constituent definitions of products for on-going maintenance, change management, and modeling efficiency, as well as enabling the creation of "more flexible and dynamic product definitions that can incorporate data from external systems through use of pre-defined data look-ups." In other words, administrative users can create, and then register, in Product Control Manager one or more value reference methods or validation reference methods. Product modelers can select a reference method as the means to retrieve details (such as "external data look-up") of a parameter in the product definition.

 

It also lets users create "a richer description of products, where as part of the product definition, modelers can specify the desired presentment of product data by external systems, such as an ordering portal." Product modelers can also specify the sequence in which an orderable item in a product or a configuration choice is presented.

 

The news as of the first cup of coffee this morning, and the music is Rev. Gary Davis's classic country blues album, Say No To The Devil. The Jefferson Airplane's Jorma Kaukonen is only one of the more high-profile rock artists who've been heavily influenced by the good Rev. Davis:

 

Kickfire has launched an analytic appliance, with what company officials say is the performance capability of large commercial database systems, to the mass market. 

 

The data warehousing mass market is essentially deployments in the gigabytes to low terabytes which, according to IDC numbers cited by Kickfire officials, represent "over three quarters of the total market." Kickfire's analytic appliance targets the MySQL segment, which company official's peg at 12 million active installations and with a brisk growth rate of over 30 percent a year.

The MySQL market does present some pretty big challenges to existing data warehousing vendors, as customers down here want the performance -- but are a lot more price-sensitive than larger customers. They have limited data warehousing expertise and few IT resources, and early-stage data warehousing deployments of the kind typical in the mass market generally have mixed workload characteristics which other vendors cannot support.

Targeting of the mass market in an economic downturn is "right on the money," says Wayne Eckerson, director of Research for The Data Warehousing Institute. "This is an under-served market."

Price is certainly put forward by Kickfire as a competitive selling point, as the product starts at $32,000. It has an SQL chip which company officials claim "packs the power of 10's of CPUs," as well as a column-store engine with full ACID compliance. It's being touted to greenies as a good combination of small form factor and low power consumption. And of course with a plug-and-play design, users don't need a lot of pricey data warehousing expertise and IT resources. The appliance also has features like Active System Monitor, which notifies users of any potential system anomaly, and runs standard MySQL Enterprise.

 

Kickfire is backed by venture capital firms Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, The Mayfield Fund and Pinnacle Ventures.

...

Lasso Data Systems, which sells Customer Relationship Management for the real estate industry, has announced that in Q1 2009 "twelve new developers" selected Lasso's home builder sales software for their residential development projects. 

 

During the quarter, clients selected Lasso for real estate marketing, selling and inventory management projects. The new projects add to the company's "over 1,000 projects deployed globally across a spectrum of urban high rise, suburban condo, single and master planned communities, destination resorts and fractional ownership properties," Lasso officials say.

Some of the new clients taken on in the quarter include Capella Bahia Maroma in Riviera Maya, Mexico, FIG Global in Phoenix and Westbank Projects in Vancouver.

"Our prospective clients tell us they need better internal systems to capture, nurture and communicate with their prospect database and to pinpoint the best lead and media source," said Dave Clements, Lasso's CEO. "In these time builders demand a clear CRM technology value proposition, a vendor that understands their core business and their CRM software be deployed quickly with minimal financial risk."

Lasso's software manages potential home buyers online from interest list to occupancy including sales, inventory and contract management. It's a privately held company headquartered in Vancouver.
...

China's Kingsoft Corporation has announced plans to make its office software business "turn to SaaS within two years," according to Pak Kwan Kau, board chairman and chief executive officer.

Although Kingsoft is a software firm with a 20-year history, it's a relative newcomer to Saas -- as, frankly, are a lot of other software vendors. Currently, Kingdee International Software Group, UFIDA Software, Alisoft and Digital China Holdings are probably the main players in the Chinese SaaS market.

A couple months ago Kingsoft decided to spin off its online game, office software, and security software businesses as three independent companies. The firm also appointed top management teams for the three units. Ge Ke, senior vice president of Kingsoft, was named CEO of the office software and security software companies.
...

Not to freak you out or anything, but more electronic records were breached in 2008 than the previous four years combined, fueled by "a targeting of the financial services industry and a strong involvement of organized crime," according to the "2009 Verizon Business Data Breach Investigations Report."

This second annual study, based on data analyzed from Verizon Business' actual caseload comprising 285 million compromised records from 90 confirmed breaches, shows that corporations "fell victim to some of the largest cybercrimes ever during 2008." The financial sector accounted for 93 percent of all such incidents, and 90 percent of these records involved groups identified by law enforcement as engaged in organized crime.

 

As opposed to unorganized criminals, apparently not as much of a threat as the ones who keep schedules.

The report's authors classified nearly nine out of 10 breaches as "avoidable" if security basics had been followed. Most of the breaches investigated did not require particularly difficult or expensive preventive controls, as the report's findings support the conclusion that "mistakes and oversight failures hindered security efforts more than a lack of resources at the time of the breach."

In a finding similar to last year's, "highly sophisticated" attacks account for only 17 percent of breaches -- but 95 percent of the total records breached. This means that your motivated hacker pretty much knows where and what to target.

"The compromise of sensitive information increased dramatically in 2008, and its past time to be vigilant about enterprise security," says Dr. Peter Tippett, vice president of research and intelligence for Verizon Business Security Solutions. "This report should serve as another wake-up call that good security and a proactive approach are paramount to running a business in this day and age -- particularly since the economic crisis is likely to trigger a further increase in criminal activity."

...

Transverse, a vendor of business support products, has announced the availability of blee(p) Enterprise Edition, the commercially supported version of an open source BSS product for telecom service providers. 

 

Transverse's Business Logic Execution Environment and Platform, mercifully known as blee(p), is a telecom back-office product designed as a set of business management services for back-office systems. The Enterprise Edition is a production-ready distribution of blee(p) with such features as service-level agreements, on site or virtual training and continuing education services and production and developer support staffed 24x7.

 

Chris Couch, chief operations officer at Transverse, says the result is a carrier-grade BSS product "at a fraction of the price of competitive offerings." In addition to being open source, blee(p) is a Web-based and real-time, and constructed as a service-oriented architecture-based product, providing over 2,100 individual telecom-related business management services.

 

The product's capabilities include such standard features as multi-service billing and customer care, order and service management, real-time billing and inventory management.

 

"Until now, service providers have had to face CAPEX and OPEX costs in order to change their back-office architecture to support new business models," says Jim Messer, chief executive officer of Transverse, noting that now service providers have the options of "using open source and other technologies that help end vendor lock-in, as well as reduce the total cost of ownership of back-office systems."

Blee(p) Enterprise Edition is accessed by obtaining an Enterprise Edition subscription from Transverse. Pricing is based on the number of subscriber lines per number of installed systems it is used to manage.

Based in Austin, Texas, Transverse was founded in 2007 and is privately funded.

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Dexter Gordon's 1978 set Live At Carnegie Hall. Great music, but sad to hear his in-between talking to the audience, the man sounds so completely baked. Amazing that it doesn't affect his playing any, but then again Keith Richards used to go out on stage with the Stones strung out on heroin and not hit a wrong note:

 

NetSuite has announced a new version of NetSuite OneWorld for large SAP enterprise customers "at the divisional level," while retaining their current SAP on-premise systems at the corporate level. 

 

Officials of NetSuite say that with the new version, "large SAP legacy accounts can now use NetSuite's on-demand application to manage business operations," and roll up division-level transaction and summary data. Key to NetSuite OneWorld for SAP is a new integration offering called SuiteCloud Connect for SAP, which lets SAP users roll up data to their SAP system at the corporate level and any data that was captured and used in NetSuite OneWorld at the divisional level, such as general ledger, order and revenue information.

This new offering is a pretty clear indication that NetSuite sees a huge market opportunity -- namely, large enterprises seeking to control costs and gain greater efficiencies across processes who are tired of the high price tags on corporate implementations which don't deliver what the enterprise is expecting. NetSuite's betting that they'll be in the market for more malleable, customizable and flexible software systems than those provided by the corporate parent company.

Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite, admits as much when he says "NetSuite OneWorld for SAP enables large companies to keep their investment in legacy business applications, while deploying a Web-based business application suite that reduces costs."

Bruce Richardson, Chief Research Officer at AMR Research, notes that with this offering, NetSuite is looking to exploit one of the gaps in SAP's strategy -- the lack of a cost-effective product for smaller sites -- by providing a way to link the hub and spokes via the new SuiteCloud Connect for SAP: "This is a product and services offering that allows SAP customers to roll up transactional data generated by NetSuite applications, including invoices, purchase orders, shipments, inventory adjustments, invoicing, and order and payment integration with point-of-sale systems," he explains. "NetSuite is positioning its product as more functional than SAP Business One and less expensive and complex than SAP Business All-in-One and the SAP Business Suite."

...

 

Acteva, a vendor in the on-demand event registration, ticketing and payment management services space, and the Salesforce.com Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the CRM vendor, have announced Acteva's involvement in the Salesforce.com Foundation's "Power of Us" Partner Program. In addition to donating products and related services, Acteva's employees will continue to volunteer for nonprofit organizations, including activities organized by the foundation.

 

The foundation's objective, according to company officials, is to provide Salesforce.com partners with a vehicle for contributions to their communities "through a donation of time, equity, and products to nonprofits who need their expertise." Nonprofits such as the National Council on Aging are already using ActevaRSVP for Salesforce CRM. NCOA works with organizations across the country to help seniors find jobs and benefits, improve their health, live independently and remain active in their communities.

 

Acteva has developed two special nonprofit editions of ActevaRSVP to address event registration needs. The ActevaRSVP Nonprofit StarterPack Edition is $149.00 for a full year of service and includes one organizer user, one event per month and up to 5,000 e-mails per month. The ActevaRSVP Nonprofit Enterprise Edition, a discounted version of ActevaRSVP Enterprise, is $780.00 per year and includes up to five organizer users, an unlimited number of events per month, and up to 15,000 e-mails per month. 

 

Both editions include unlimited event registrations and unlimited phone and email support.

 

Ed Lemire, Acteva's Executive Vice President, noted that forty percent of the company's 14,000 customers are nonprofits and associations. 

 

The Salesforce.com Foundation mentors companies to successfully incorporate Salesforce.com's 1/1/1 integrated corporate philanthropy model -- 1 percent time, equity, or product -- under the rubric of trying to "do well, while doing good."

...

Ireland's biggest bookmaker, Paddy Power, has implemented nGen E-mail from nGenera Customer Interaction Management. The bookie has also introduced live chat assistance on the Web site, powered by nGen Chat, to offer customers rapid and highly personalised responses to any query.

Paddy Power officials say nGen Email lets its agents "significantly reduce e-mail response times and improve the accuracy of information provided through e-mail management features, including intelligent routing rules that direct e-mails to the most appropriate agents, spell check and pre-written suggested responses."

Using nGen Chat, a single agent can hold up to six live assistance sessions simultaneously in order to handle customer queries in real time on the site. "As a result," company officials say, "customers no longer have to contact Paddy Power by telephone to check last minute information, such as the odds for a horse race just before the start."

 

First Coffee has some experience with Paddy Power, having attended the big-deal horse derby in Dublin a couple years ago, and hopes they appreciated his modest charitable donations.

The comprehensive reporting system within the nGenera CIM Suite is also providing Paddy Power's management team with a real-time view of its e-mail and live chat customer service, enabling the company to accurately measure Service Level Agreements and agent performance for the first time.

Darren Lovern, Online Operations Manager for Paddy Power, says it's a "strategic decision"to move more customer service online, "recognising that e-mail and chat can be highly effective and cost efficient communication channels."

Paddy Power officials say they're planning to integrate nGen Knowledgebase into customer service operations in Q1 2009. This should let any customer service agent log in and access information through a flexible portal "to ensure accuracy and consistency of responses across all channels."

...

Argistics, a SaaS vendor of customer interaction products, has developed a Live Chat platform for company Web sites integrating video, audio (VoIP) and text chat along with content sharing, form sets, and on-the-fly video push. 

It allows multiple applications running from one platform, such as sales chat, help desk, and customer service, all running on the same sites. Each application is  customizable for either small or large businesses. 

Argistics officials say the platform's main advantage is that it lets users "expand and brand their chat applications for less, by moving live interactive chat to a cloud-powered environment." Waxing lyrical about the powers of the product, they claim the product lets users "break the chains of Windows-based servers and the limitations and costs that are associated with expanding business." Fellow workers... 

"The vision was not about developing a new chat application but about developing a platform that used chat for initial engagement, and then gave control to agents and reps to use the program to close sales faster by using their own materials and processes. That's what chat was designed to do," said Jeffrey Bennett, CEO and head developer at Argistics. "We are really excited about pushing chat to the next level." 

Saying the platform has been designed to complete sales transactions faster, and give customers "more information than can be provided by more traditional chat programs, Bennett said the platform is intended for a company "looking to sell more online with fewer resources." The company is based in Marietta, Georgia. 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a nice Sonny Rollins album for a cool, slightly overcast day, Saxophone Colossus. Some critics call this album a great jazz classic, that may be, First Coffee doesn't know jazz well enough to say, but if so it's one of a handful of jazz albums praised by critics which also happens to be enjoyable listening for the more casual jazz fan, as most critical darling jazz albums are unlistenable exercises in musical deconstruction:

Salesforce.com has announced that it's been positioned in the Leaders quadrant of Gartner's CRM Customer Service Contact Centers Magic Quadrant. According to Gartner, the magic quadrant "looks at contact center desktop software for customer service and support best suited for different economic situations, including a recessionary period." Noted vendors, the analyst firm said, "are showing how their products can lower costs while driving customer loyalty."

Michael Maoz, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, says in the report that as more applications are built in a cloud-based model, "by 2011,SaaS will evolve from an interesting alternative delivery model into a critical selection factor at all levels of the customer service contact center," an opinion which is no doubt music to Marc Benioff's ears.

The Service Cloud, according to Gartner officials, "transforms customer service through the power of cloud computing," bringing together cloud computing platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter with traditional contact center channels like phone, e-mail and chat. By capturing these conversations, they explain, "the Service Cloud helps companies deliver the expertise of the community to customers, agents and partners regardless of location or device." 

 

As far as Gartner's concerned, this is the future, too - they predict that "by 2013, at least 75 percent of customer service centers will use some SaaS application as a part of the contact center solution." The heart of the Service Cloud, what it does that really makes it tick, is capturing and funneling information from inside the enterprise and in the cloud into a company's knowledge base.

The Magic Quadrant is described by Gartner officials as "a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period," depicting "Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace," and is "intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action."

...

DataSphere, a Software as a Service Web technology company, has announced the availability of the DataSphere Web Suite, which lets companies create and run Web sites based on catalogs, media or other data on a scalable, multi-tenant SaaS platform.

 

The suite is comprised of a number of different services, each designed for the specific requirements of individual customers.

DataSphere CEO Satbir Khanuja says he sees quite a market in "affordable consumer experience for Web sites." To that end, he explains, the Web Suite is designed to let Web sites with extensive product, media or other data catalogs operate smoothly, "increase revenues and reduce expenses within weeks."

The DataSphere Web Suite is a basically a site creation, hosting and management product giving Web site owners access to capabilities for attracting traffic from across the Web and providing the in-site consumer experience. Company officials claim that their team has "decades of driving traffic and user experience at Amazon.com and MSN.com," among others.

...

Loyalty Lab, a vendor of on-demand loyalty and CRM for consumer brands, has announced the launch of a free trial "try before you buy" option on any of Loyalty Lab's products to qualified companies for up to 90 days. 

 

Company officials say the offer lets marketers use their own data in any system, including e-mail, segmentation, loyalty programs, ad hoc reporting, OLAP analysis, and data visualization. Matt Howland, President of Loyalty Lab, said the firm "wanted to give companies a chance to learn more and evaluate our capabilities before making a financial commitment."

 

Prospective clients can use their own data on a full subscription of Loyalty Lab products including a sample microsite, complete access to APIs, documentation and best practices, and support from account management team, company officials say, adding that the trial "can be used to experiment with different relationship marketing tactics, to run parallel to an existing program, to try ad hoc reporting and OLAP, or just to get familiar with Loyalty Lab's features and applications."

Loyalty Lab's four products for retailers, manufacturers, and other consumer brands are available for trial, including a customer retention tool, a loyalty marketing product, a "lightweight" tool for in-store clienteling and a reporting and analysis product providing ad hoc reporting, OLAP analysis and data visualization tools.

...

 

LiveOps's On-Demand Contact Center Platform has received a 2009 CRM Excellence Award from Technology Marketing Corporation's Customer Interaction Solutions magazine.

The platform offers contact center technology designed to let users improve the cost and operational efficiencies of their contact centers. These capabilities include call routing, interactive voice response, agent management, workforce productivity, and real-time monitoring and reporting. Using Web architecture and distributed grid computing, company officials say, the platform was designed "from the ground up" with "multi-layered security features."

"We are honored to be recognized by Customer Interaction Solutions for providing a technology that helps enterprises achieve greater cost and operational efficiency in their contact centers, especially in these challenging economic times," says Wes Hayden, president of LiveOps, adding that his company's "experience operating a virtual call center of 20,000 independent home agents" helps them "capitalize on the growing trend of deploying remote agents."

The CRM Excellence Award relies on "facts and numbers that demonstrate the improvements the winner's product has made in a client's business," say TMC officials: "The Tenth Annual CRM Excellence Award winners have been chosen on the basis of their product or service's ability to help extend and expand the customer relationship to be all encompassing, covering the entire enterprise and the entire lifetime of the customer."

The 2009 CRM Excellence Award winners can be found in the May and June 2009 issues of Customer Interaction Solutions magazine.

Using the LiveOps on-demand platform, "rather than investing in overcapacity for the spikes in operations, companies can pay-per-use for technology and services that instantly scale up or down to meet demand," company officials say.

The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is Neil Young's "Live Rust." It's hard to think of any major rock artist who's been around as long as Neil and who's been as good as Neil -- "After The Goldrush" and "Rust Never Sleeps" are in anybody's Top 100 -- who's released as much dreck. Maybe The Beach Boys, but they expired as creative artists years ago and are now simply a human jukebox. When Young's good he's among the very best, yes, but it's difficult to think of any artist taken seriously today who's put out an equal tonnage of forgettable music as ol' Shakey.  

 

And we're not just talking a misfire here and there, everybody has those, we're talking entire eras of Young's career can be safely ignored-- anything he did for poor David Geffen in the 1980s, for starters. Indeed, after 1990's Ragged Glory, where's a truly great Neil Young album? Silver And Gold? You have to admire the man's work ethic, he's industrious about putting out product when he doesn't really need to, but quality, Neil, quality:

Network Automation has announced a series of enhancements to AutoMate BPA Server, the client/server multi-machine edition of its business process automation platform. The upgrade adds support for Web Services, Microsoft Exchange, the grouping of agent machines for workflow assembly, and other new features and actions.

Company officials say users of AutoMate BPA Server can invoke Web Services in automation routines without scripting, making it possible -- for example -- to extract data on customers fitting a specific profile from Salesforce.com and put it into the company's marketing automation program, since "the product's native support for Web Services enables tasks to interact with SOAP-based Web resources without custom APIs or hard-coded interfaces."

 

It also lets users create, modify or delete Microsoft Outlook objects such as calendar and contact entries based on defined event triggers, and build automation workflows for groups of agent machines, company officials say, "eliminating the need to list each machine individually in AutoMate BPA Server's visual task-building window."

 

There's support for PGP encryption/decryption of any file for secure data transfer and the ability to send and receive e-mail using SSL authentication for SMTP, POP3 and IMAP, as well as what Network Automation officials say is "a variety of enhancements that strengthen the ability to build complex automation sequences without the time and expense of coding."

Introduced in 2008, AutoMate BPA Server is an extension of the AutoMate platform for single-machine process automation. It's available immediately for purchase at $3,995 for new customers and $3,495 for existing clients seeking to upgrade.

...

The CEO of Connotate , Bruce Molloy, recently gave an interview to Ron Powell and the BeyeNETWORK, discussing among other topics Connotate's approach to the problem of how to monitor and gather business intelligence from the Web. Molloy talked about using intelligent software agents to combine data from Web and enterprise sources.

 

"Companies seeking competitive advantage in the current economic environment need to employ tools that create efficiencies in the workplace so that they can quickly adjust to the market," Molloy told Powell. "While businesses have invested massive amounts of workplace resources and money to keep abreast of changing sentiment and market conditions, they often fall short on delivering something that can combine the intelligence mined from Web sources with intelligence buried in enterprise systems."

 

Molloy says his company's Agent Community GEN2 was built with "the needs of the non-technical business user in mind" for such issues. Powell, Co-founder and Editorial Director of the BeyeNETWORK, said without the need for programming, such agents "carry out the tedious data-collection and aggregation tasks."

Connotate officials say the firm's machine-intelligent agents "can do anything a human can do to monitor, mine, analyze, mash-up and deliver content." The agents operate 24 x 7, and content is delivered "over any number of media, including XML, RSS, e-mail, text messaging, file systems and direct feeds to SQL databases and Excel.

...

 

Here's a press-stopper: "Cash-strapped consumers and an economy in recession and are bad news for sales of most products." But -- you knew there was a "but" coming soon -- that may not apply to netbooks, according to ABI Research principal analyst Philip Solis.  

 

Solis says several characteristics of the diminutive Web-oriented computers may actually work to their advantage in a depressed market: "Netbook sales may not be adversely affected - in fact may actually be helped - by the recessionary pressures." There are three reasons for this, Solis says: "First, netbooks are a fairly new class of device, and widespread adoption has only recently begun. Second, they are relatively inexpensive, and some consumers may see them as a viable alternative to that pricey laptop they originally intended to buy. Finally, they can run inexpensive operating systems that don't require powerful hardware."

 

Take First Coffee's word for it -- this column is produced for your entertainment on an Acer Aspire 1 netbook. Well, with an exterior keyboard, mouse and large flat screen. The day somebody comes up with a netbook one can touch-type on with a decent mouse pad is the day we're all waiting for.

 

Three out of every four netbooks shipped last year ran Windows XP as their operating system, but ABI officials find that even that's changing: "While much recent media attention has been focused on the trend to beef up netbooks and make them more laptop-like (and more expensive), the more important change has been at the lower end of this market. To create a lower-cost device designers are turning to Linux, and, for netbooks with ARM processors, to any of several mobile device operating systems such as Android."

The Achilles' heel of XP as an OS for netbooks is that mobile OSs such as Android, Windows Mobile, and Maemo can still provide the core functionality required of a netbook, but at lower cost and with smaller storage and memory requirements. It's Solis's opinion that 2012 "will see the tipping-point at which netbooks running Linux-based and mobile operating systems outnumber those running Windows XP."

...

 

Lafayette, Colorado-based APconnections has announced the release of its newest NetEqualizer model, which company officials say is developed specifically with WISPs and small business users in mind.

How so? Well, this NetEqualizer release is designed for 10 megabits of traffic and 100 users, with potential room for expansion. "Furthermore," company officials say, "in addition to offering all standard NetEqualizer features, this smaller model will be Power over Ethernet."

Company officials say they developed the model specifically "to meet a growing demand both for an affordable traffic shaping device to help small businesses run VoIP concurrent with data traffic over their Internet link as well as a need for a shaping unit with PoE for the WISP market." Since in a large wireless network congestion often occurs at tower locations, APconnections officials think they have a winner with a lower-cost PoE version of the NetEqualizer giving wireless providers "advanced bandwidth control at or near their access distribution points."

Joe D'Esopo, vice president of business development at APconnections, noted that about half of wireless network slowness comes from p2p (Bit Torrent) and video users overloading the access points: "We have had great success with our NE2000 series, but the price point of $2,500 was a bit too high to duplicate all over the network." Pricing for the new model will be $1,200 for existing NetEqualizer users and $1,499 for non-customers purchasing their first unit.

 

When the network is congested, company officials explain, NetEqualizer's "behavior shaping" technology gives priority to latency sensitive applications, such as VoIP and e-mail, and "controls network flow for the best WAN optimization.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the greatest hits album from MFO, Turkey's only decent rock band -- the only decent one First Coffee heard after living there a total of nine years between 1993 and 2008. They sing exclusively in Turkish, but you don't need to know a word of Turkish to appreciate their masterpiece song, "Bodrum:"

Bozeman, Montana-based RightNow Technologies has unveiled new "defense-ready hosting capabilities" designed to support both the Department of Defense and other civilian government and intelligence agencies, according to company officials, who add that "two commands within the DoD have made the decision to move ahead" with this new offering.

"Our new secure hosting capabilities will help our DoD clients to tap into the cloud... The DoD requires a more intense level of security than most civilian agencies," says Greg Gianforte, CEO and founder, RightNow

RightNow has been working government contracts for over ten years, and today counts clients in over 155 public sector clients, including nearly every US cabinet-level agency as well as the Army, Marines, Air Force, members of the Intelligence Community and DoD.

RightNow officials say they expect their DoD contracts to furnish the same benefits of SaaS, "such as lower cost of ownership, fast deployments and exceptional scalability" as civilian users find: "Because the DoD requires an unparalleled level of security, RightNow's new hosting capabilities use DITSCAP/DIACAP to ensure compliance with DoD Instruction 8500.2, meet US Federal security standard FISMA (NIST 800-53) and include a 24x7 dedicated security and information assurance team," company officials say, adding that civilian contracts with extraordinary security needs can have "a second secure hosting environment" to meet their needs.

"In the last year, our North America public sector sales grew 66 percent, showing the demand for cloud based CRM is growing among government agencies," says Kevin Paschuck, vice president, public sector, RightNow.

...

 

So you think everything's moving into online social community? Not so fast there. Research into the attitudes of youth towards technology "has exploded some of the myths about the technology consumption and media choices of young people today," according to officials of the British organization A Beta Life - Youth.

 

The organization "examined how technology affects all aspects of young people's relationships," officials say, concluding that "the offline world is still the primary influence and driver of young people in how they conduct their lives, including interactions with friends, family, entertainment media, communication technologies, advertising and brands." The research was conducted in the UK, US, Germany, India and Japan between September and December 2008 among 8,000 "technology-embracing" 12 - 24 year olds.

The research, conducted by OTX in association with Nokia, MTV Networks, 20th Century Fox, Fox Mobile Group, and Channel 4, shows that digital technology "plays two main functions in young people's lives -- as a means of improving their enjoyment of and access to traditional offline behaviors, but more significantly in the creation of commutainment -- a hybrid of communication and entertainment where the act of communicating itself becomes a form of entertainment."

With up to eight digital gadgets in their bedroom -- yes, your teens are normal -- and access to four more in their household, the popular perception is that young people are immersed in gadgets and technology for their own sake. However, A Beta Life's research finds that young people's immersion in these devices, and the time spent on them, "is not due to an obsession with the technology per se, but largely due to the gadgets' ability to facilitate communication and to enhance young people's enjoyment of traditional pursuits."

 

For most, in fact, it's a pretty sensible approach: "The focus of their passion is not so much the device itself, but more about how it can help them connect, relax or have fun. The technology itself is invisible to the young consumer -- despite the millions of widgets they download from Facebook, young people are not even comfortable using widespread technology terminology such as 'widgets'." 

 

Graham Saxton, Managing Director, Media and Entertainment Insights, OTX, scoffs at the notion that young people's obsession with digital technology is due to a fascination with the technology and gadgets. "In fact," he says, "they are only interested in technology as a means to an end. The traditional world remains the go-to destination for meeting their friends and entertainment and real, offline destinations and pastimes still rate higher than the online space."

 

Think about it, of course he's right -- do you consider yourself in love with your cell phone, or its ability to bring you contact with people? It's the same for your kids.

Fifteen years ago, most teenagers would have had access to just one communications device -- their household phone. Today, despite being involved in what the study finds are an astonishing 48 digital communications every day, the average young person "remains most engaged by traditional behaviors -- of their overall top ten favorite activities seven are still offline." Traditional activities such as hanging out with friends, listening to music, and seeing boy/girlfriends dominate the top three favorite pastimes of young people, while digital behaviors such as creating user generated content have a much lower penetration than commonly perceived  -- quick, how many young people have written a blog?  How many have filmed and uploaded a clip to a site like YouTube? The answers are 16 and 21 percent respectively. Surprised?

 

Even when engaged in digital communications, young people prefer activities with a social context -- "texting friends" and "sharing video content with friends" both score much higher than watching video alone on their handheld device.

The study also found distinct differences in attitudes to digital technology on a gender level: "Female early teens are much more active communicators compared to males," something which has been true since, oh, the Garden of Eden, technology notwithstanding. This then reverses in late teens, as anybody with teenage daughters knows -- "How was school?" "Mmph."

And if you think texting is ubiquitous, you're right -- the study found that 34 percent even text the group of friends that they are physically with. Okay, that's kinda weird.

...

Optimus Technology, a Middle East technology provider, and on-demand CRM and ERP vendor Aplicor have completed an international business partner agreement whereby Optimus will market, distribute, implement and support Aplicor's CRM and ERP hosted application through its channel network across the Middle East, Asia and Northern Africa.

According to Managing Director at Optimus Technology, Meera Kaul Sawhney, "we look forward to working with Aplicor to increase visibility and market share in this region."

"It is important to our company and our global client base to expand our presence in Asia and the Middle East," says Chuck Schaeffer, CEO at Aplicor. "We reviewed the Middle East market for a partner with a strong channel network and demonstrated market expertise."

Headquartered in the Jebel Ali Freezone in Dubai, Optimus provides sales, marketing, channel acquisition, channel management, implementation services and support services bundled with its core operation of supply chain and inventory management of technology and telecommunication products in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia Regions.

                                                                                                               

Aplicor officials claim to be "the only CRM and ERP hosting provider with a 100 percent system uptime history."

...

The Go2Group , which sells Software Production Line Automation, has announced the availability of the Go2Group Free CRM Plugin, a free version of its CRM Plugin providing integration between Atlassian JIRA and SugarCRM or Salesforce. 

 

The Go2Group Free CRM Plugin is a basic version of the Go2Group CRM Plugin -- both products allow sales, support, and development teams to remain in sync without the need to consolidate individual different systems.

Basically it lets users connect a project in Atlassian JIRA to a SugarCRM bug or a Salesforce case, keeping customer information in sync. This providing a syncing mechanism between different teams is seen by Go2Group officials as a benefit helping "keep customer management processes flowing by providing these users with information."

Brett Taylor, CEO of Go2Group, said the introduction of a basic version of the Go2Group CRM Plugin is for customers "interested in strengthening the collaboration between teams using different systems for different needs... while basic, the Go2Group Free CRM Plugin provides the power for a Salesforce user to coordinate customer activities with their JIRA counterparts."

The Go2Group Free CRM Plugin is compatible with Atlassian JIRA, Professional and Enterprise Editions: v3.12 and later, SugarCRM v5.0 and later and Salesforce, Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited Editions.

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Duke Ellington's Blues In Orbit:

Varicent Software , which sells incentive compensation and sales performance management products, has announced what company officials are calling "an integrated product" with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. 

 

The move is characterized by Varicent officials as producing a tool to help sales managers and sales users get a complete view of sales performance, compensation results and key performance indicators and better visibility into inquiries, compensation and plan approvals from a single application. It's also touted as helping users "manage other incentives, including Management by Objectives," and to "facilitate the development and management of quota plans."

Varicent officials see "business value" in the product arising from users' Microsoft Dynamics CRM being extended to sales performance, and "providing a single product that addresses the needs of various departments across the organization." Working with marketing, finance, sales and human resources, the product provides "alignment between field activities, and corporate strategy."

 

Brian Hartlen, Vice President Marketing at Varicent, argues that having an integrated CRM and SPM tool will "increase CRM's relevance to sales, motivating increased adoption rates. The sales audience will gain visibility into actual and potential commissions through enhanced sales reporting, analysis, modeling and forecasting available within this unique integrated offering."
...

Pitney Bowes Business Insight, a vendor of location and communication intelligence offerings, has announced that the Data Quality Connector 5.5 for its Customer Data Quality Platform software is  now validated for integration with Oracle's Siebel CRM 8. 

The Pitney Bowes Business Insight Data Quality Connector software "integrates the company's CDQ Platform software with Siebel CRM" so the data going into the CRM engine is "clean and complete," according to Pitney Bowes officials, by verifying, updating and correcting addresses.

"Validation through Oracle PartnerNetwork Application Integration Architecture for Partners gives customers' confidence that the integration between Data Quality Connector 5.5 software and Siebel CRM 8 has been validated and the products work together as designed," said Mary Arbelaez, senior director, ISV Programs at Oracle, adding that validation through this initiative applies a technical process to review the integrations.

Siebel CRM customers can use the CDQ Platform software's data solutions to "improve marketing practices with more accurate data," Siebel officials say, explaining that the Pitney Bowes software provides "name standardization, geocoding, data cleansing and data matching services in batch and real-time modes within accounts, contacts and prospect records."

 

Navin Sharma, director of product management for Global Data Quality for Pitney Bowes Business Insight, said the matching algorithm of the Siebel CRM integration provides CDQ Platform software users with more advanced duplicate detection and the flexibility to use corporate data. 

 

The Data Quality Connector software is a server-based product that supports both real-time and batch operations. It uses out-of-the-box data quality integration with Siebel CRM and provides a graphical interface that features data quality functions inside the actual Siebel CRM application.

...

CDC Software, a wholly-owned subsidiary of China's CDC Corporation, has announced that AAA Western and Central New York has selected Pivotal CRM 6.0 for its membership relationship management system that is expected to be used by more than 650 associates at 17 locations throughout upstate New York.

AAA Western and Central New York wants to use the Pivotal product to market the association's products and services to its membership base, "meet its vision of standardizing core business processes across all business units and provide enterprise-wide access of member data to enhance customer service."

When fully implemented, AAA officials say, the product is expected to provide the platform and service-oriented architecture to support AAA Western and Central New York's relationship management, leads and opportunity management, complaint management, marketing campaign management, corporate knowledge management and enterprise reporting.

Tom Chestnut, president/CEO of AAA Western and Central New York, said the organization was looking for a system that offered "advanced integration capabilities with our other systems and significant flexibility to conform to our business processes, and no other system we evaluated did that except Pivotal CRM 6.0." He said they were "impressed" that Pivotal CRM was based on Microsoft.NET technology for integration with Microsoft Office, Visual Studio and SharePoint. 

 

Bruce Cameron, president of CDC Software, said service organizations are "looking for membership relationship management products to help them differentiate their services and build customer loyalty in increasingly competitive markets."

 

Pivotal CRM 6.0 is based on Microsoft.NET technology with task-based navigation, embedded Microsoft SharePoint and Office applications.

...

VisualCube, which sells products and services designed to enhance Infor's CRM, has launched a community Web site for Epiphany users and developers.

"We launched this open and free forum to connect users' wants and needs with developer products, and to give Infor intel," says VisualCube Managing Partner Jason Balliet. "The aim is to augment, not supplant, Infor's existing strategies with the Epiphany product. Since my partner and I helped develop Epiphany from its inception, we've remained interested and involved through its evolution."

Ourepiphany.com offers several areas designed to influence and expedite Epiphany improvements, including a blog set up to give Epiphany CRM users, the implementation community and other stakeholders of any size a forum to share information, advance ideas, and brainstorm possibilities. Members can comment and vote on someone else's ideas, advocate their own for others to evaluate, ask for input and assistance, or suggest ways to improve Epiphany -- either from developer or user perspectives.

 

The aim is to offer constructive advice and criticism, "versus just complaining or denigrating," site officials say: "Salient information will be made available to Infor Product Management for further consideration and discussion as they deem appropriate."

Due to launch second quarter is a feature called The Store, which will have plug-ins that customers can add to Epiphany with a free plug-in architecture interface, as well as an application cloud designed to enhance Epiphany during initial deployment, and provide post-deployment upgrades and consulting options. There will also be a jobs marketplace to post salient Epiphany-related openings.

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a nice recording of Thelonious Monk's "Brilliant Corners." Yeah I know music is just math with sound, and this is supposed to be one of the greatest jazz compositions ever, or something like that, but Monk's composing has never really grabbed me the way other jazz composers' work has, mainly because it strikes me as overly mathematically precise. Of course I'm almost a complete illiterate when it comes to jazz, I just knows what I likes, but that's how it looks to me:

Youcalc, which sells on-demand analytics apps for online marketing and on-demand CRM, has announced a series of analytics apps which it says are designed to reduce the time it takes analysts and administrators to "analyze sales force and call center activities."

"The term 'analytics' is used so loosely in the cloud communities that their popular definition can be confused with simple reporting," notes Rasmus Madsen, CEO of youcalc correctly.

The real difference between reporting and analytics, Madsen says, since you were wondering, is that while reporting is basically views of data already in the system -- "total sales by region," et al -- analytics lets you play around with the reportage, crunching the data and generating calculated metrics -- "lead conversion ratios," "funnel conversion ratios," et al. What the Salesforce.com analytics apps from youcalc are supposed to do are let you perform custom analysis on the data in your Salesforce.com database, and in the words of company officials, "generate new insight in a fraction of the time it would take to use traditional reporting tools."

It also comes with funky animated 3D Flash chart graphics.

Youcalc currently has more than 25 Salesforce.com analytics apps and promises more are on the way.

...

Acteva, a vendor working the online event registration, ticketing and payment management side of the street, has announced its participation in the Salesforce.com Foundation's "Power of Us" Partner Program. 

 

The objective of this corporate philanthropy program is to provide Salesforce.com partners with a model to make contributions to their communities through a donation of time, equity, and products to nonprofits who need their expertise.

Acteva's participation will include donating its RSVP tracking for Salesforce CRM. This functionality lets Salesforce.com's nonprofit customers take registrations and track RSVPs for all types of free events, including meetings, workshops, trainings, seminars, retreats, volunteer programs, parties and what have you.

Some nonprofits, such as the National Council on Aging, are already using ActevaRSVP and Salesforce CRM to create and send event invitations to their database, capture event registrations online and update Salesforce campaigns. "NCOA works with thousands of organizations across the country to help seniors find jobs and benefits, improve their health, live independently and remain active in their communities. Our knowledge base of individuals' interests and event attendance grows automatically with each event and is accessible for future campaigns," said Stuart Spector, Senior Vice President, NCOA.

Acteva has developed two special nonprofit editions of ActevaRSVP to address the event registration needs of the Salesforce.com nonprofit community. The ActevaRSVP Nonprofit StarterPack Edition costs $149.00 for a full year of service and includes one organizer user, one event per month and up to 5,000 e-mails per month. The ActevaRSVP Nonprofit Enterprise Edition, a deeply discounted version of ActevaRSVP Enterprise, is $780.00 per year and includes up to five organizer users, an unlimited number of events per month, and up to 15,000 e-mails per month. 

 

Both editions include unlimited event registrations and unlimited phone and e-mail support, according to Acteva officials.

Ed Lemire, Acteva's Executive Vice President, said "forty percent of our 14,000 customers are nonprofits and associations. We look forward to continuing this tradition of service alongside the Salesforce.com Foundation."

Salesforce.com Foundation's "Power of Us" Program partner program is designed to increase the number of companies committed to a similar model of corporate social responsibility. The Salesforce.com Foundation mentors companies to successfully incorporate Salesforce.com's 1/1/1 integrated corporate philanthropy model -- 1 percent time, equity, or product -- so that they too can "do well, while doing good."

...

ManageEngine, makers of a suite of network, systems, applications and security management software products, has announced beta availability of ManageEngine IT360, an integrated business service management product, aligning infrastructure management with business operations.

IT managers are generally in favor of the goal of BSM (mapping infrastructure components to the business services they support), but the expensive software, implementations and staff trainings -- left many feeling BSM was out of reach. ManageEngine IT360 is "designed to offer the benefits of BSM," company officials say, "starting with the business-centric views illustrating the way in which business services are affected when IT resources are underperforming or unavailable," but "without the cost or the headaches."

The ManageEngine IT360's Web-based console is supposed to let IT administrators prioritize problem resolution for network, systems and applications based on the affected business operation. For example, with an understanding of a network segment's support for customer-facing applications, that segment might be assigned greater bandwidth. Or, a problem with an application could be automatically flagged to the service desk with a higher priority. Or it could help application administrators meet their Service Level Agreements.

The product includes an integrated ITIL-ready Service Desk, which has automated trouble ticketing, complete with incident management, problem management, change management, a knowledge base, and more. The idea behind this is simply reducing the complexity of workflows in production, making it easier for IT administrators to run effective operations.

"The reality on the ground today is that most IT teams have their hands full managing the technology side of the business," says Girish Mathrubootham, vice president, ManageEngine, adding that "most competing systems have only business level dashboards, and try to integrate into other monitoring systems using connectors and interfaces, making the whole thing complex and expensive."

...

ProClip USA has announced the launch of new device holders designed to mount an encased iPhone or iPod Touch to car, truck and SUV dashboards and consoles.

These holders, designed and manufactured by Brodit AB in Sweden, attach to vehicle-specific ProClip dashboard mounts. Once this two-part deal  -- device holder plus vehicle mount -- is attached to the vehicle dashboard, you're supposed to get "better viewing and easier access." The holders may also be attached to other manufacturers' vehicle mounts or any other flat surface, company officials say.

"Securely and conveniently mounting handheld devices, like the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch, without damaging a vehicle's interior is what we do best," says Bjorn Spilling, president of ProClip USA, and folks, lemme tell you it's pretty refreshing to run into someone who knows what he does best and is doing it.

The Adjustable Holder with Tilt Swivel and Pass-Through Connector is used for docking and undocking. Designed to accommodate your encased iPhone or iPod Touch, this holder will adjust from a width of 2.3" (60mm) to 3.2" (82mm). It allows you to connect your stereo cable, charging cable or other dock connector cable to the base of the holder to create a docking station for your device. See, this way you no longer need to plug and unplug the cable each time. There sits your iPhone on the dash, within easy reach, sliding in and out of the holder with one hand.

The mount clips into the dashboard seams, with an average installation time of two minutes. No dismantling of the dashboard is required and there is no damage to the vehicle's interior.

...

LongJump, which sells Platform-as-a-Service software, has unveiled its LongJump Business Applications Platform. The platform can be licensed for use within an enterprise's data center or licensed by independent software vendors to build and host their own multi-tenant Software as a Service applications.

The platform is designed, its makers say, to enterprises that want the capabilities of a PaaS for custom application development but require more control of the data, such as those dealing with government and civil agencies, financial and compliance processes or health and patient related information. The other is Independent Software Vendors and Service Providers that want to launch new, branded SaaS offerings but realize that developing a comprehensive, multi-tenant platform can be cost prohibitive.

Corporate IT loves quick ways to visually assemble information management applications for their divisional users. This is partly because of the recession forcing companies to slash budgets -- and corporate bean counters define "IT budget" as "place to economize." LongJump officials say their app platform approach lets users build a "private cloud" that provides a common foundation for building custom applications which run behind their own firewall. The platform also provides a unified interface, integrates with business data and systems, creates dynamic transactional applications, and can handle the relational information architectures.

According to David Cearley, VP and Gartner fellow in Gartner's Web and Cloud Computing service, "Just as in the early days of the Internet, the cloud definition is best-suited to include a public cloud -- external, like the Internet -- and private clouds, internal, like intranets." Private clouds, Cearley says, will be used by companies who don't want  their IT-related services available to external customers, but who like the delivery and acquisition model the cloud enables.

The product seems aimed at the many ISVs who feel that assigning their customer to a third-party PaaS provider presents too much risk, especially when they become subject to the PaaS providers' delivery services. They need to control the service delivery -- where they host the platform, manage the service levels they deliver, and enforce their own operational policies for their customers. They also want to have more control over how they price their service offering -- as high or as low as their business deems appropriate.

Based in Sunnyvale, LongJump is a service of Relationals, a privately-held vendor of on-demand CRM and SFA business applications.

...

HTC has debuted its newest QWERTY smartphone, the HTC Snap, which company officials say is designed with "everything customers need without overwhelming them with things they don't."

A recent study conducted by Harris Interactive and commissioned by HTC found that 44 percent of U.S. adults are "often overwhelmed" by the amount of e-mail they receive, and over half -- 55 percent -- of U.S. adults prioritize five or fewer people with whom they communicate via e-mail. 

 

Frankly First Coffee doesn't know what it means to be "overwhelmed" with e-mail. It's not like the stuff piles up on your office floor. Ever heard of a "Delete" key, folks? Handy invention, get somebody to show you where it is on your keyboard. 

 

But for the overwhelmed, HTC's Inner Circle feature lets HTC Snap users press a dekey to bring e-mails from a selected group of people to the top of their Inbox.

The HTC Snap measures less than a half-inch thick, and can give you about eight hours of talk time with the standard 1500mAh battery. The full QWERTY keyboard has "extra-large domed keys" and "responsive tactile feedback," with, presumably, a "Delete" key as well.  It also  has high-speed 3G HSPA connectivity.

The HTC Snap is expected to be available in select channels during the second quarter of 2009, rolling out in markets around the world throughout the second half of the year. An unlocked version supporting HSDPA at 850/1900MHz for the U.S. market will be made available under the name HTC S522 during the summer. The company is listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange.