May 2009 Archives

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Tom Waits's across-the-years collection Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards. If you're going to leave studio tape lying around on shelves to be pulled out and anthologized one day, make sure it's as quality material as these tracks, most of which are the equal of anything Waits was putting out as official product at the time:

SugarCRM has announced the beta release of its new Web services framework, platform improvements, and enhanced mobile features for SugarCRM. The release, company officials say, lets users and developers "create and manage customized CRM experiences." The new capabilities are on Sugar Open Cloud, and available to the SugarCRM community to test in beta today. General availability is expected this summer. 

CRM is "most valuable when customized for each business and integrated with other mission-critical systems,ews for modules designated for mobile use. Users can then select which modules to view in the wireless client and tailor the layouts and fields for the wireless client from within Sugar Studio.

The new mobile studio is supposed to allow developers and Sugar users to design purpose-built mobile views into the SugarCRM system. A streamlined view of the customer support case module, for example, could help field support agents and manage customer case information to provide troubleshooting for customers.

 

SugarCRM is also introducing capabilities to let users add multiple individuals or teams to a CRM record to "enhance collaboration on complex projects," company officials say, adding that "for example, a user could assign an executive sponsor, professional services team and customer advocate to a given account, rather than simply assigning the account to an individual sales representative or sales team.

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SharePoint Solutions, a vendor of Microsoft SharePoint products and consulting, has announced the creation of a product that integrates Microsoft SharePoint and Salesforce.com.

The product is available as extensions to the SharePoint Data Zoom Web Part, a free tool that allows SharePoint users to build content on any page. "Armed with the SharePoint Data Zoom Web Part and the extensions for Salesforce.com sales objects," company officials say, "users will be able to pull into SharePoint all Salesforce.com data from leads, opportunities, contacts, accounts and users." The SharePoint Data Zoom extensions for Salesforce.com cost $4,995 per Web front-end server

"SharePoint and Salesforce.com are the two biggest business software successes of the past five years," says Jeff Cate, president of SharePoint Solutions, adding that Microsoft represents the traditional software company in which users purchase licenses for software that is installed on computers, whereas Salesforce.com represents "the new breed of software companies that provides software via the Internet on a subscription basis. From the customer's perspective, Microsoft's SharePoint is the best portal and team collaboration software available, and Salesforce.com makes the best Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation software."

Users can also design reporting and inquiry tools to increase CRM data visibility to those who can access an enterprise's portal, but don't have a Salesforce.com account.

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Cablevision Systems officials say the company is offering business customers across its service area the option to select up to 24 lines of Optimum Voice phone service, "enabling Optimum Business to serve businesses with up to 100 employees." 

Each Optimum Voice line features low flat-rate pricing, unlimited local and long-distance calling within the U.S., Puerto Rico and Canada with -- they promise -- "no hidden fees or taxes," and 14 business calling features "at no additional charge, such as Enhanced Voice Mail, Find Me, Rollover Hunting and Three-Way Calling."

Joseph Varello, Cablevision's vice president of voice and small and medium business services, said with the offer, Optimum Business is "addressing a segment of the market that has historically been underserved by legacy phone companies -- mid-sized businesses with up to 100 employees." It's his opinion that along with the recent introduction of Optimum Online Ultra, the value and benefits of Optimum Business "extend beyond small business and apply to a much larger segment of the commercial market."

Designed for commercial and small or home-based offices that require high-speed Internet and voice communications, Optimum Business provides predictable flat rate pricing, unlimited calling and voice and data services. Optimum Online Ultra, according to company officials, delivers downstream speeds of up to 101 megabits-per-second for residential, small and medium businesses customers.

The Optimum Business offering includes Optimum Online and Optimum Voice, each for $29.95 per month for one year. For customers with four to 24 lines, each additional Optimum Voice line is available for $29.95 per line. Optimum Online Boost with Static IP is available for an additional $24.95 per month, and Optimum Online Ultra is available for $99.95 per month.
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OnState Communications, a vendor of on-demand virtual PBX and virtual call center business communications systems, has announced new product features for its business presence monitoring system. 

In addition to a number of dashboard and performance enhancements, company officials say, features in this release include the addition of OnState Mobile, real-time account tracking on a centralized dashboard and SIP phone support.

The addition of OnState Mobile extends OnState's virtual PBX and virtual call center capabilities to iPhone and BlackBerrys. Or should that be "BlackBerries?" Somehow "BlackBerrys" just doesn't look right. Okay, let's say "to BlackBerry devices and iPhones." There. A bit clunky but grammatically non-nebulous.

OnState Mobile is designed to track the business presence of your remote or traveling employees, who can now use an iPhone or BlackBerry -- singular or plural -- to participate as part of your call center operation. In other words, with this new feature, employees can directly receive incoming customer calls on a mobile phone, transfer the call to another employee in the company, or act as a secondary support resource to your core sales and customer support teams.

Call center managers can now view account information on a centralized dashboard. Available information that includes the total number of user licenses purchased and configured is displayed along with existing account credit balance, which is required to make or receive public switched telephone network calls. OnState customers handle the majority of calls using a soft phone based on Skype, SIP, or Google Apps, but the new release of OnState's software supports a range of SIP desktop phones.

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The Frost & Sullivan 2009 North American Outbound Dialing Systems report, according to Aspect officials, has found that the unified communications vendor is "the leading outbound contact center vendor in market share." 

Frost highlighted Aspect's predictive outbound modes and the company's enterprise market across a wide range of industries in the report.

"The outbound market grew about three percent in 2008," says Joe Outlaw, principal analyst, Frost & Sullivan. "The features work with other Aspect product platforms and third-party products, making them an option for companies in the contact center," as well as companies that require outbound tools such as financial services, outsourcers, and telecommunications industries.

Aspect's outbound capabilities are components of several UC applications for the contact center, including Blended Interaction and Streamlined Collections. Aspect's UC applications help companies target operational objectives with specific capabilities.

Serge Hyppolite, director of interaction product management, Aspect, says that by taking "a unified approach to implementing outbound functionality," combined with other capabilities such as inbound routing, voice portal, and campaign management, "companies can lower costs by up to 20 percent and improve sales by up to 10 percent."

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Uncle Tupelo's No Depression. One of those albums that kick-started a musical trendette, the so-called "No Depression" school, combining alt-country and rock in some supposedly great new way, as far as I can understand.

 

It's an OK album if you're into country artists slipping into The Byrds' studio after hours and playing with the instruments - "Lookit me, I'm Gene Clark!" - but hardly the earth-shattering landmark it's sometimes made out to be. Besides, if you want this kind of stuff Buck Owens and Creedence Clearwater Revival both did it better earlier:

Come to a company with a better way to comply with SLAs and you'll find a new customer. Amdocs, a vendor of what they call customer experience systems, has announced that SmartTrust, a Swedish vendor of SIM and device management software for mobile operators, has upgraded its service assurance solution to Amdocs CES - CRM 7.5 software.

Ana Marquez, Technical Support Manager at SmartTrust, said Amdocs "identified how we could enhance the existing system to better support our business needs, such as ensuring cases are managed and resolved in compliance with customer service level agreements, as well as improving agent efficiency by centralizing information management."

The Amdocs service assurance product lets SmartTrust offer support "regardless of the communication channel -- e-mail, phone or Web -- and geographical location," company officials say: "With integrated business processes and improved workflow management, SmartTrust can now respond more efficiently to SLA issues."

Amdocs reported revenue of $3.16 billion in fiscal 2008, and counts over 17,000 employees.

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"Some of the riskiest searches on the Internet today are associated either with finding items for free, such as music or screen savers, or looking for work that can be done from home," according to officials of Internet security company McAfee.  

 

Search categories like these "are used to lure unsuspecting consumers to their Web sites," company officials say, adding that hackers and cybercriminals "are often able to persuade searchers to download files carrying malicious software that can cause consumers to expose their personal and financial data."

McAfee's report, "The Web's Most Dangerous Search Terms," describes how cybercriminals seek the largest pool of possible victims with popular search terms about current events, gadgets and celebrities. During the recession, according to the report, there has been a growing number of malicious search results targeting people who want to save money or "earn extra income working at home."

Calling cybercrooks "smart," Jeff Green, senior vice president of McAfee Product Development & Avert Labs, said hackers create related Web sites "laden with adware and malware whenever a particular topic increases in popularity." One can only guess, of course, at the total tonnage of Barack Obama-themed sites. Unsuspecting consumers "are then tricked into downloading malicious software that leads them to blindly hand over their personal assets to cybercriminals," Green explains.  

 

McAfee's research found the riskiest set of keyword variations was "screen savers," with a maximum risk of 59.1 percent -- meaning nearly six out of the top 10 search results for "screen savers" contain malware.  

 

One of the single riskiest search terms in the world is "lyrics," with a maximum risk factor of one in two. Surprisingly, the report found that searches using the word Viagra, a popular keyword that is also common in spam e-mail messages, yielded the fewest risky sites. Searches with the safest risk profile included health-related terms and searches about the current economic crisis.

Oh, and clicking on results that contain the word "free" have a 21.3 percent chance of infection from spyware, spam, phishing, adware, viruses and other malware, while "work from home" searches can be as much as four times riskier than the average risk for all popular terms.

 

So maybe you don't want to click that "Work from home posting free lyrics screen savers!" link after all

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Amazon.com gift card reseller Perks.com has announced the introduction of PerksXpress, which company officials describe as "a real-time electronic gift card distribution application," featuring Amazon.com Gift Cards available for customers of Salesforce.com's CRM application.

It lets Salesforce CRM users purchase Amazon.com Gift Cards directly from PerksXpress for people on their user group list. "The gift cards are created individually in virtually any denomination and the claim code is instantly issued through branded e-mails with customized messages," Perks officials say, adding that in their opinion, "the service offers a quick and secure way to deliver gift cards to targeted recipients, allowing the recipient to start shopping immediately on Amazon.com."

After accessing the free application users are able to enter a payment method to purchase the gift cards, create a customized e-mail campaign, upload single or multiple e-mail addresses, select the Amazon.com Gift Cards amount and presto! Begin sending Amazon.com Gift Cards in customized branded e-mails. Be sure to include david at firstcoffee dot biz.

"This is great for companies who seek simple, immediate ways to recognize and reward customer loyalty, employee initiative and sales force performance," says Steve Timmerman, vice president of business development with Perks.com, adding that driving enhanced adoption of Salesforce CRM is one side benefit of this service "as users find new productive ways to use their contact lists."

Marcell King, senior manager of corporate gift cards with ACI Gift Cards, said the company "designed Amazon Gift Codes On Demand specifically with services like PerksXpress in mind."

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From their Southern California development offices RedHorse Systems have announced the release of Version 2.0 of their CRM offering.  

 

"Following the initial release of the product in December 2008," according to founder and Chief Development Officer Connie Koch, the company believes that this is "a critical release," as all of the Standard Business Modules are now integrated in the standard CRM product.

RedHorse officials feel there's genuine opportunity in the SMB CRM space, as "many of the traditional players have abandoned the 5-50 user market." Accordingly, they're marketing a CRM product in the $595 per user category, including "enterprise-class CRM functionality bundled with Business Modules for Quoting, Marketing Campaign Management, Service Ticket Tracking, Billing, Project Management and of course Outlook and QuickBooks Integration."

VP of Sales & Marketing, Chris Staller says that Koch has spent the last 15 years developing software for the CRM market, and it was her objective to provide "a cost-effective, yet complete package that a company could use for all aspects of their business. And with the 2.0 release RedHorse CRM has achieved this goal."  

 

There's a school of thought cited by RedHorse officials saying that in this economy, small businesses looking to retool and reinvent will come out on top. The company seem to be marketing to this mindset, judging from comments from company officials, and overall this reporter thinks that's a pretty good bet.

 

Their CRM 2.0 includes such features as the ability to create custom toolbars to provide access to functions inside and out of CRM, quoting and Service Ticket Templates that are user configurable for their business needs, an integrated knowledge base and Outlook and QuickBooks integration.

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Sonoma Partners, a vendor of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, has announced a partnership with BigMachines to provide on-demand product configuration and proposal generation for users of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

BigMachines offers a platform of Web-based software and services. They see the integration to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, a cross-functional customer relationship management application providing sales, marketing, and customer support modules, as allowing customers to "sell more and sell faster," as if such results would be attractive in this day and age.

"We have worked with to extend functionality of the CRM platform and provide additional value," says Mike Snyder, Founder and Managing Partner of Sonoma Partners, adding that extending the application to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform "creates new growth opportunities for both BigMachines and Sonoma Partners. The BigMachines software integrates with Microsoft Dynamics CRM."

Chicago-based Sonoma Partners sells, customizes and implements Microsoft Dynamics CRM for enterprise and mid-size companies throughout the United States. Founded in 2001, it has worked exclusively with the product since the Beta release of version 1.0. In addition, Sonoma Partners has written multiple books about Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Microsoft Press.

BigMachines sells on-demand sales configuration, quoting and proposal software.

The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is The Grateful Dead song "Brown-Eyed Woman" - in nine versions from various live shows, and including a fine cover from The U-liners. No, First Coffee isn't a Deadhead, this is the only Dead song I have more than one version of:

Avaya, a vendor of business communications systems, software and services, has announced a new program to attract Nortel resellers to the Avaya Business Partner program.  

 

New Nortel partners joining Avaya, company officials say, will be fast-tracked with programs and incentives to help them deliver Avaya's unified communications and contact center products to new small, medium and large businesses. "For Nortel channel companies, it's an opportunity to add the Avaya product line, including the Avaya Aura platform," says Todd Abbott, senior vice president and president, Field Operations.

Avaya recently announced Avaya Aura, an architecture designed, company officials say, to simplify communications networks. The company has also announced it's stepping up implementation of a High-Touch Channel-Centric strategy to try to grow its business through indirect sales.

Avaya invites Nortel channel partners to participate in this new era of communications by joining the Avaya Business Partner program. Nortel channel partners will be fast-tracked with training, sales, marketing and services support to help enable them to quickly succeed in the market, and will receive bonus incentives for every new Avaya customer and product order.

The communications vendor claims over 120 former Nortel and Siemens channel partners have joined the Avaya Business Partner program since the beginning of the year.

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The latest study by The Radicati Group, titled "Hosted Unified Communications Market, 2009-2013," provides analysis of the field, including installed base and revenue market share by vendor, four-year forecasts, and breakouts by region and business size.

 

Radicati analysts found that the Hosted UC market is "showing strong growth," with revenues expected to reach $2.3 billion in 2009, and growing to nearly $5 billion by 2013.

The Hosted Unified Communications market basically comprises services that offer integrated voice, messaging, collaboration, and presence capabilities accessed and managed through a single interface. This study looks at the Hosted UC Providers, and Telecom UC Providers segments of the market.

The study looks at a range of Hosted UC Providers, including Apptix, AT&T, CallTower, Cypress Communications, Hutchinson 3G, Intelliverse, Intermedia, LightEdge Solutions, Microsoft, NTT DoCoMo, Onebox, Orange SA, Skype Technologies, Sprint Nextel Corporation, Telus, USA.NET, Verizon Communications, Vodafone and others.
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Salesforce.com has announced that RehabCare Group is using the Force.com platform to build a custom health care application to run on its staff's Apple iPhones.  

 

Built in just four days, the application is said by Radicati officials to be designed to enable RehabCare staff to shorten the time needed to process patient pre-screens, "from as many as 18 hours to less than sixty minutes."


 

RehabCare is one of the 59,300 companies counted as part of the Salesforce.com customer base as of April 30.

"We have a multiple-step screening process that helps ensure we match our services to our patients' needs. Unfortunately this process was taking too much time and was impacting our ability to admit patients quickly," says Dick Escue, chief information officer at RehabCare, adding that using Force.com, they designed and built something to fit their needs "in just a matter of days." If we had tried this with .Net, we would have faced at least three months of development time."

RehabCare's patient screening process involved completing an evaluation form that was filled out manually by employees in the field. The evaluations were then passed to a program director for review and, finally, to a medical director for approval. With the Force.com platform, RehabCare automated the system to run on employees' iPhones, while ensuring "protection of patient health information" and addressing concerns around unauthorized access to the information, RehabCare officials say.

 

The Force.com platform, which powers the Salesforce CRM applications, is used by over 800 ISV partner applications. Applications built on the Force.com platform can be distributed to the cloud computing community through the Force.com AppExchange marketplace.

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Excelior Chief Executive John Watkinson happily accepted a $300,000 grant by Australia's Government of Victoria to support the education and retraining of employees at the company's Bendigo contact center, saying the funding was vital to keeping jobs in the region and facilitating expansion.

At the same time, Watkinson announced a $500,000 investment in new IT technology at Bendigo.

"While we have had some significant success in attracting additional contact center work to Bendigo, dramatically slowing the phased ramp-down of jobs that we had feared after our major client AAPT withdrew, we needed this State Government assistance to maintain our viability," Watkinson says.

Watkinson said the funding "enables us to provide a blended contact center, providing businesses and governments" with the opportunity to access the services available to the corporate sector. He added that he is "optimistic of expanding our services at Bendigo to include assisting other government departments to manage their contact center responsibilities." Recent new client wins at the center have included a Federal Government department, Close-The-Loop, PMP and Carrier Air Conditioners.

Mr Watkinson said that as far as possible, Excelior would be using local Bendigo firms and trades people to carry out the company's technology expansion program to keep work within the local community.

Excelior is an Australian customer contact center operator with specialist capabilities in contact center management, recruitment and training. Established in 1999, it employs more than 2,000 people across 60 sites in Australia and New Zealand.

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Ace Hardware Corporation, which probably actually is, as the company boilerplate publicity claims, the largest retailer-owned cooperative in the home improvement industry with over 4,600 stores, has partnered with TargusInfo to improve the new member sign-in process in its customer loyalty program.

With consumer information from TargusInfo, the feature allows Ace Rewards retailers at over 700 locations to create new memberships in real-time at the point of sale. Customers who join the Ace Rewards loyalty program receive an Ace Rewards Card at the point of sale and immediately begin accumulating points. Ace locations enroll new Ace Rewards members with phone number and On-Demand Identification services from TargusInfo.

It "significantly reduces" the customer's time to complete an application, and increases the accuracy of the customer's contact information, Ace officials say. Brian Wiborg, director of consumer marketing for Ace Hardware, said the move has "decreased the turnaround time for the sign up process" and "increased the accuracy of the customer's contact information."

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is one of the best non-jazz, non-muzak albums for a creative work environment - Traffic's live album "Welcome To The Canteen":

According to ex-TMCer Al Bredenberg's fine, interesting blog Quriosity, the Times-Reporter of New Philadelphia, Ohio has reported that "police searching for a potential suicide victim were thwarted by a Verizon Wireless operator who refused to turn on the customer's cell phone so the police could use a nearby cell tower to locate the victim."

The man was behind on his bill, Bredenberg explains, and the rep informed police that they would have to make a payment on the bill or the signal would not be connected.

"This kind of intransigence makes me think that Verizon Wireless has been unsuccessful at implementing a key practice in good customer relations: Empower your people to do the right thing for the customer," Bredenberg says. He's right, of course. Assuming the facts as reported in the article are correct, there's probably another good word for Verizon here, but as this is a family publication First Coffee can't use it.

According to the Times-Reporter article as Bredenberg recounts it, "Sheriff Dale Williams attempted to use the man's cell phone signal to locate him, but the man was behind on his phone bill and the Verizon operator refused to connect the signal unless the sheriff's department agreed to pay the overdue bill. After some disagreement, Williams agreed to pay $20 on the phone bill in order to find the man. Deputies discovered the man just as Williams was preparing to make arrangements for the payment."

"I was more concerned for the person's life," Williams told the newspaper. "It would have been nice if Verizon would have turned on his phone for five or 10 minutes, just long enough to try and find the guy. But they would only turn it on if we agreed to pay $20 of the unpaid bill. Ridiculous."

 

Amen.

 

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NetSuite has announced NetSuite Financials, a new edition of its on-demand accounting and enterprise resource planning software. Evidently it gives businesses access to NetSuite's financial and accounting functionality in a modularized format to save money.  

 

Here's a way to save even more cash: For a limited time, NetSuite Financials is available at a 30 percent discount from the list price for any company switching to NetSuite from Microsoft Great Plains or any Sage ERP product.

NetSuite officials say Financials is designed for companies looking to dump legacy, on-premise accounting systems and dip a toe in cloud computing. The product lets companies migrate financial and ERP processes right off the bat, allowing them to add customer relationship management (CRM), Ecommerce or deeper ERP functionality later, company officials say, as easily as "flipping a switch." They say.

Mini Peiris, Vice President of Product Marketing at NetSuite, said the suite approach they favor "eliminates the high costs and complexity associated with integrating applications from multiple vendors. Even in the cloud, integration complexity is an issue that customers will have to address if their core applications were not initially designed to work together."

The suite offers tools that allow a business to control all its financial data and processes, including: general ledger / accounts receivable / accounts payable, budget management and financial reporting. There's also an order management functionality, as well as a set of inventory management, manufacturing and procure-to-pay process management features. It also has SuiteAnalytics for business intelligence -- "no data warehouse or data analysts are needed, thanks to embedded role-based dashboards with pre-built key performance indicators, trend graphs, scorecards, graphical report snapshots and more."
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Research In Motion has announced an enhanced BlackBerry Technical Support Services offering with new levels of support and support service options for small to medium sized businesses and large enterprise customers.

"We have developed a more comprehensive, flexible, scalable BlackBerry Technical Support Services program that can help small-to-mid-sized businesses and large enterprises keep pace with their evolving mobility needs," says Alan Panezic, vice president, platform product management at RIM, saying the new program includes "new levels of support" and a range of add-on services.

 

The product has three support levels, including Basic, Enhanced and Advantage Support for small-medium businesses; and Standard, Premium and Elite Support for enterprise customers. Programs are offered with access to support professionals for planning, management and preventative maintenance, as well as Web-based training, instructor-led Webinars, certification, online newsletter, and access to the BlackBerry Expert Support Center for informational resources, self-service tools, and account monitoring and management.

There's also direct access to advanced support with select service levels or purchased as add-on services, and preventative maintenance services including Health Check Services and Change Management Planning Services, as well as optional Performance and Load Testing Tools.

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Customer Connect Associates has announced that its next "Success Accelerators" Webinar will show students how to use Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and Microsoft SharePoint.  

 

Titled "Better Together: Microsoft CRM and SharePoint," the Webinar will be held June 18 at 10:15 a.m.

"We're going to show people how CRM and SharePoint deliver a flexible platform that can be used to significantly reduce costs involved in developing and maintaining custom applications," explains Customer Connect CEO Geoff Ables. "In addition, they will learn how SharePoint can combine with Microsoft Dynamics CRM to enhance employee, vendor, distributor, partner and supplier relationships."

Attendants must have Windows 2000 or later, or - for Mac users - Mac OS  X 10.4 (Tiger) or later to be compatible with the presentation.

Founded in 2000, Customer Connect Associates counts Travelocity, SAS, LandAmerica, Cardinal Health and Realty One among its clients.

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Clarizen, a vendor of on-demand, online project management software, has announced Clarizen 3.0, its Software-as-a-Service collaboration and project execution offering.  

 

Company officials say Clarizen 3.0 is designed to help teams manage project details, "regardless of where each team member is located."  It has issue and expense management, and improved budget management and Gantt chart features.  

 

With data showing that SaaS usage doubled in 2008 and is rapidly becoming a mainstream business model in 2009, Clarizen officials say, they feel that this release's enhancements "continue to position it as a comprehensive collaboration tool."

 

The product's features include separate capacity for customers to manage business issues with clients, partners and employees by using technical support to automate the lifecycle of a clearly defined issue, and expense reports through time tracking, letting users view hours and associated costs to improve the process of economically reallocating resources, costs and time.

Pricing begins at $29.95 a month.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is John Cage's "Daughters of the Lonesome Isle." No "4.33" here, just wistful, sometimes challenging but never grating piano music ably performed by Margaret Leng Tan. This is John Cage when his experiments work:

 

SAP AG and Research In Motion have announced the availability of a product designed to give customers "anytime, anywhere access" to the SAP Customer Relationship Management application on BlackBerry smart phones.  

 

The new BlackBerry Sales Client for SAP CRM is now available from RIM. It's billed as giving sales reps the same kind of access to customer information in SAP CRM "they have come to expect from BlackBerry smart phones."

As enterprise mobility using smart phones becomes more and more just something you gotta have because the next guy does, SAP and RIM felt the need to put a product out there for business users allowing access to SAP CRM. The product is billed as using "the inherent security, management capabilities and efficiency of the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution," while introducing such mobile CRM functions as "in just one or two clicks" giving users access to client information from a BlackBerry smartphone, including contacts, sales leads and logged activities.  

 

The product can also deliver, or "push," customer data updates in the SAP CRM system to the user, as well as pushing sales leads to the sales representative's BlackBerry smartphone inbox with one-click access. A local cache system allows access to certain information even if the user is outside of network coverage.  

 

The service also promises "end-to-end encryption to help protect confidential customer information whether stored on a BlackBerry smartphone, in transit, or in the SAP CRM application," company officials say, explaining that IT administrators can "securely" deploy the BlackBerry Sales Client for SAP CRM to users over the air.

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The latest Vendor Matrix released by ABI Research, ranked Sybase at the top, according to Sybase officials.

 

Digby and JiGrahak Mobility Solutions claimed the second and third spots in the company's new worldwide evaluation of mobile commerce vendors using technologies other than Near Field Communications.

"Enterprising solutions providers are working with MNOs and merchants in Austria, India and Germany to provide mobile commerce options," says senior analyst Mark Beccue, noting Sybase's acquisition of mobile commerce pioneer Paybox "combined with Sybase's MNO relationships" in explaining why the company snagged the top ranking.

Second-place Digby, which creates mobile commerce Web sites and downloadable mobile commerce applications for merchants, was described as "well-positioned to help merchants in the mobile Internet shopping boom," and JiGrahak, which operates the NGpay program in India, has was noted for its mobile marketplace which lets consumers shop e-commerce merchants "from nearly any mobile phone."

The Vendor Matrix is an analytical tool developed by ABI Research to provide what the research firm's officials say is "a clear understanding of vendors' positions in specific markets," with vendors assessed on the parameters of "innovation and implementation across several criteria unique to each vendor matrix." For this particular matrix, under "innovation," ABI officials say they examined the functionality of the vendors' SMS, mobile Internet and downloadable application offerings, and their "NFC-readiness."

Under "implementation," ABI Research scrutinized the vendors' financial services companies, MNO and physical merchant relationships, and the breadth of their offerings -- for example, do they include SMS, mobile Internet and downloadable applications? Also evaluated: any complementary products such as loyalty and gift cards, e-commerce and mobile banking as well as "the vendors' general financial and organizational health."

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Vendavo has announced the availability of Vendavo Enterprise Pricing Suite for Salesforce.com's Force.com AppExchange. Company officials say it was developed "to confront the pricing challenges facing today's global business-to-business companies." The product integrates with customers' existing Salesforce CRM systems.  

 

Built using the Force.com platform, Vendavo Enterprise Pricing Suite is available for a test drive on the Force.com AppExchange.

The product can be used to access sales cycle information on Salesforce.com such as pricing, guidance and deal scores, if you think such things would help with consistent and profitable negotiations. Vendavo sells products aimed at the pricing challenges facing today's global B2B companies.

"Salesforce CRM has become an instrumental part of the way businesses operate and serve customers today," says Jamie Rapperport, co-founder and executive vice-president of marketing and business development at Vendavo, adding that the product announced would allow joint Salesforce.com-Vendavo customers "access to the right pricing information at the right time."

In an economy where "every dollar counts," bringing together Vendavo's Enterprise Pricing Suite with Salesforce CRM "helps users use pricing and negotiation guidance," explains Kendall Collins, Chief Marketing Officer, Salesforce.com.

AppExchange Force.com is an enterprise platform for building and running business applications in the cloud. Salesforce.com officials say it has over 800 ISV partner applications like those from CODA and Fujitsu, and more than 100,000 custom applications.
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Aria Systems, a vendor of on-demand billing and customer life cycle management products, has announced the addition of new customer relationship management (CRM) functionality to its A+ Billing Platform. Company officials say the move is "designed to let Aria customers address billing-related customer requests."  

 

Aria's Active CRM component is marketed as a product for billing-related interactions, allowing customer service representatives to handle most billing inquiries such as refund requests, monetary disputes and changes to service plans "in a matter of minutes."

 

The product is specifically designed to solve billing-related requests, company officials say: "Changes requested by customers or implemented by service representatives are automatically reflected in the billing system. CRM or accounting-based systems require additional steps to implement changes in the billing system."

 

John Miller, Managing Principal and Director from Clario Analytics, says the billing platform is useful for letting companies direct "revenue-generating resources" that would have otherwise been allocated for managing customer management related issues."

In March Aria announced version 5.0 of its A+ Billing platform, which included an increased ease-of-use, self-service and implementation capabilities suited to small, medium and enterprise-sized companies. Tying billing related customer service functions directly into a company's on-demand product "extends required billing-specific secure procedures," company officials explain, "assuring customer financial information remains protected."

The company is backed by investments from Hummer Winblad Partners, Venrock, and Dave Labuda, former CEO of Portal Software (acquired by Oracle), and headquartered in Media, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia.

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Intalio, which styles itself "The Enterprise Cloud Company," has announced the acquisition of CodeGlide, a software company based in Buenos Aires, and ProcessSquare, a software company based in Munich.  

 

CodeGlide developed a platform for Customer Relationship Management, including Sales Force Automation, Marketing Automation, Customer Helpdesk, Analytics, Enterprise Mashups, and Office Productivity, while ProcessSquare has a Web-based Business Process Management application used by customers such as ABB, Allianz, and Henkel. Both product lines are integrated within Intalio's product stack.

Company officials say Intalio's cloud computing platform, Intalio|Cloud, uses hardware and software to deliver "multi-tenancy, dynamic provisioning, elastic scalability, and deployment both on-demand and on-premise." Charging that alternative offerings "focus on the infrastructure as a service layer," Intalio officials say their product "goes all the way up to the application layer."

Given the plethora of professional sports playoffs on at the moment, it's perhaps unavoidable that we'd hear the "take it to the next level" meme bandied about in business promotion as well: "These two acquisitions and the massive product development efforts that followed are taking Intalio to a whole new level," says Ismael Chang Ghalimi, Founder and CEO of Intalio, saying Intalio|CRM is "at feature parity with Salesforce.com, costs 60 percent less, and is available both on-demand and on-premise, while providing a much better user interface, similar to Microsoft Dynamics CRM's."

What's more surprising -- and frankly refreshing -- is hearing business software described in Derridavian, Foucaultian terms: "Post-modern application architecture demands a deconstructed meta-platform, in which cooperation and composition outweigh cohesion," says Richard Watson, Analyst for Burton Group.  

In order to facilitate the deployment of Intalio|Cloud within large organizations, the vendor offers the Intalio|Cloud Appliance, which puts in a single rack all the hardware and software required for the platform. The hardware is made of HP BladeSystem blade servers and enclosures, Solid State Drives for all database storage, and the InfiniBand interconnect technology.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is an old favorite here at the Manhattan penthouse suite of offices for First Coffee: David Bowie's Station to Station. Never has cool, detached decadence sounded so good, so... emotionally appealing, especially if you substitute the live version of the title track from Stage for the studio cut:

NetSuite, no doubt timing the announcement for the middle of the Sapphire SAPfest, has announced some of "the latest" companies to select NetSuite over software provided by SAP. 

 

Distribution Video & Audio, GestureTek and Schaeffer Oil are now using NetSuite's enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and e-commerce offerings "in a single on-demand application... at a fraction of the cost and administrative overhead of SAP," company officials say.

 

Guess their invitations to Sapphire got lost in the mail.

The NetSuite officials gleefully cite "new research from Macro 4, a UK-based global software company," claiming to find "a high degree of risk and complexity involved in most major SAP upgrades," including "the bulk of historical data clogging up their systems... the time that upgrades consume, the complexity involved and the staffing resources involved." They also fail to pass up the opportunity to remind you of the July 2008 report by Forrester Research finding the tipping point toward SaaS adoption is "the upgrade and application management requirements of on-premise" products, such as... oh, to pick a random example... SAP.

NetSuite claims that by providing ERP, CRM, and e-commerce in a single product, companies get a feature set "offered by legacy software developers, including multi-language, multi-currency international operations, full controls and compliance enforcement, and a 360-degree view of customers and prospects."

 

For those companies "already deeply reliant on SAP products" looking to switch to SaaS," NetSuite OneWorld for SAP offers integration for subsidiaries and corporate divisions which need their own capabilities "while maintaining transparency with the central system of record."

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NetSuite has also announced plans to hold an online NetSuite Career Fair for former Sage UK employees and Sage UK employees who were recently offered voluntary redundancy by Sage management. According to reporting in The Times cited by NetSuite officials, Sage would cut a further 600 positions this year, on top of cutting 400 staff last year. 

 

About a fifth of the 1,000 jobs lost in 2008 and 2009, from Sage's 14,500-strong global workforce, will be made in Britain as part of a drive to reduce annual costs by an estimated £50 million.

NetSuite's European headquarters is in the UK. The vendor says it plans "continued expansion" of its workforce in the UK and across Europe. For information about the Career Fair, visit http://www.netsuite.com/careerfair .

NetSuite attributed the voluntary redundancy to "the declining demand for on-premise software," as well as "the company's poor rate of organic growth." According to IDC's 2009 software forecast cited by NetSuite officials, Software as a Service will experience over 40 percent growth while on-premise ERP will have less than one percent growth in 2009. NetSuite officials tout the fact that they have only "a single code base to maintain."

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Salesforce.com has announced Summer '09 , the company's 29th generation release. 

 

This release has new features across the Service Cloud, the Sales Cloud and the Force.com platform, company officials say, adding that the real time cloud infrastructure lets Salesforce.com "deliver approximately three major releases a year." One of the major new features touted in the release is the ability for customer service agents to collaborate in real-time with third party service partners on a single version of every case, giving everyone access to the same information. 

 

The advantage of this is that "it lets customers run their business, not their software," according to media-shy Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO at Salesforce.com. Taking a leaf from NetSuite's SaaS-style hit-em-where-it-hurts line of promotion, Benioff says that Salesforce.com can provide "the latest innovations to all of our customers, without the hassles of upgrades and maintenance." He characterized Summer '09 as a "major product breakthrough at no additional cost."

Sheryl Kingstone of the Yankee Group, current holder of the Most Quoted CRM Analyst Alive title, calls Summer '09 a "revolution to the Service Cloud," since "now, in just a few clicks, companies can share case information in real-time with their partners, maintaining the validity of their own business processes while ensuring that customers receive the best service, regardless of which company they contact first."

The Service Cloud, Salesforce.com officials say, brings together cloud computing platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter "with traditional contact center channels like phone, e-mail and chat to capture every conversation and use every community expert in the cloud." 

 

Some features introduced for the Service Cloud with Summer '09 include the ability for customer service agents to trigger an e-mail alert to the appropriate person based on a change in the comments section of a case for them to respond to customer requests and issues. It also gives sales reps and managers "more powerful analytic tools," including new displays, colors and two entirely new chart types. And colleagues that sales reps bring in to assist in closing a deal will now have access to the deal information in the opportunities tab with Summer '09. 

 

Salesforce.com's Summer '09 release is currently scheduled to be available to all 55,400 Salesforce.com customers in June 2009. Customers who purchase Salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Please visit  for more information.

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Miller Heiman has announced the newest version of its sales planning and communication software, Sales Access Manager, for Salesforce.com subscribers, saying it has "improved visibility" to data for organizations operating with a Salesforce.com customer relationship management system using Miller Heiman's tools.

The update to Miller Heiman's Sales Access Manager sales process enablement tools, company officials say, provides quicker access to best practices from past worksheets and the ability to include any data into Salesforce.com reporting and dashboard systems, according to company officials: "Managers will notice a new feedback section and an additional field for review comments." The software populates both the CRM and the planning tools.

The enhanced software includes direct access to Miller Heiman's concept reinforcement modules, designed to provide reminders and best practices for program concepts to help support understanding and promote proper application. "For our clients who are using Salesforce.com, Sales Access Manager offers a way to increase their organization's adoption of both the sales process and CRM," says Aliena Martinez, senior director of products for Miller Heiman.

 

Headquartered in Reno, Nevada, Miller Heiman has additional corporate offices in the United Kingdom and Australia and offers programs worldwide in 15 languages.

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SprinxCRM has announced the launch of SprinxCRM Mobile for Windows Mobile.

"With a vast array of smartphones currently in use, we understand the need to make our mobile CRM as accessible as possible by achieving compatibility with as many instruments as possible," says Radko Jelinek, Sprinx' Director of Sales. 

 

SprinxCRM Mobile officials say "marketing managers, sales representatives, technical consultants. . . indeed, anyone with designated clearance can now access information on their smartphone equipped with Windows Mobile." The product is an on-line, real-time Web-based tool."

Company officials say they will feature demos and free versions of SprinxCRM Mobile for Windows Mobile, SprinxCRM Mobile for BlackBerry Smartphones, Sprinx in Sync with Microsoft Office Outlook and "other products comprising their suite of CRM" at Interop Las Vegas.

Sprinx Systems was founded in 1996 in the Czech Republic, and is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

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SAP AG and Research In Motion have announced the availability of a product that provides customers with access to the SAP Customer Relationship Management on BlackBerry smartphones. 

 

The new BlackBerry Sales Client for SAP CRM is now available from RIM, giving sales reps access to customer information in SAP CRM with basically the experience they get from BlackBerry smartphones. Officials of both firms say the product uses the security, management capabilities and efficiency of the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution, as well as "a number of innovations for mobile CRM."

Instant Access to Up-to-Date Information - In just one or two clicks, users can gain access to up-to-date client information from a BlackBerry smartphone, including contacts, sales leads and logged activities. This seamless and intuitive CRM experience is made possible through deep integration between the SAP CRM application, the BlackBerry Sales Client for SAP CRM and core BlackBerry smartphone applications.

It can push customer data updates in the SAP CRM system to the user, as well as push sales leads to the sales representative's BlackBerry smartphone inbox with one-click access. Needless to say it enables people's CrackBerry habits by providing contacts and account information continuously on them as well, and a local cache system allows access to certain information even if the user is outside of network coverage. Securitywise, it has end-to-end encryption for customer information, whether stored on a BlackBerry smartphone, in transit or in the SAP CRM application. IT administrators can also deploy the BlackBerry Sales Client for SAP CRM to users over the air.

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is... goodness, been such a crazy morning we forgot to put on the music... hang on... there we go, some Sunny Border Blue from alternative chanteuse Kristin Hersh, formerly of Throwing Muses:

Tired of your field service techs being behind on changing information that affects what they're doing? Syclo and SAP may have something for you. At Sapphire 2009 and the 2009 ASUG Annual Conference, Syclo, a vendor of mobile enterprise platforms and applications, has announced a mobile product, the SMART Service Manager, which company officials say results from its relationship with SAP AG. 

 

With a mobile product for the market, "we'll be expanding our relationship for SAP's customers in CRM," says Rich Padula, president and CEO of Syclo. "As a recognized leader with proven mobile solutions for field service and asset management, Syclo's solutions offer integration with SAP Business Suite software and are in use by SAP customers today."

 

The product is intended to extend the SAP Customer Relationship Management application to field service technicians using Syclo's SMART Mobile Suite, a family of applications certified as powered by the SAP NetWeaver technology platform. SMART runs on a broad range of devices regardless of connectivity. It's billed by Syclo officials as letting field service technicians use "intuitive action-driven workflow," and get "up-to-the-minute customer history and service information."

Jujhar Singh, senior vice president, Solution Management for CRM, SAP AG, said the Syclo product does aid service for SAP CRM.

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Tweet away for SalesQuest now. SalesQuest has announced that it has expanded its corporate communications strategy to include Twitter.com as another platform to communicate directly with customers and prospects. 

 

Company officials say SalesQuest will be using Twitter in combination with the SalesQuest blog to communicate about relevant sales and marketing related topics on the Fortune 1000 and Global 500. Tim Davenport, SalesQuest's social media guru, said by following them on Twitter, "our customers will know what CRUSH reports are being updated, when new CRUSH reports are built and added to the platform and we'll notify them of important sales trigger events happening in the Fortune 1000 and Global 500."

 

SalesQuest's CRUSH Report analysts will be using Twitter.com to "communicate with customers, prospects, build brand awareness" and "establish SalesQuest in the Fortune 1000 sales intelligence marketplace," company officials say. The company says SalesQuest's followers onTwitter.com/salesquest will "gain insight" to what CRUSH Report analysts are doing every day.

 

SalesQuest's CRUSH Report analysts are tweeting about such events as organizational changes, security breaches, active technology projects, new data center openings, mergers and acquisitions, decision maker changes within the Fortune 1000 and Global 500 companies, the weather in San Antonio, to ask if anybody knows a good sushi place in St. Louis...

In addition, company officials say, SalesQuest's customers will have a direct line of communication to CRUSH analysts in order to ask questions about CRUSH Reports and CRUSH Alerts, provide feedback on the searchable CRUSH Update Online platform, and make direct requests for new products and services.

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Middleware vendor GoAhead Software has announced SAFfire 3.0, which allows for implementation of the Service Availability Forum's open specifications "with a spotlight on support of the Platform Management Service," company officials say. 

 

Along with SAFfire 3.0, the company has announced the GoAhead SA Forum Ecosystem Program and the GoAhead SA Forum Architectural Design Service. This is described as a service which combines technology, expertise and partner ecosystem for "a low-risk approach" for ensuring the availability of systems. It'll be generally available in July.

Simon Stanley, who has the job title First Coffee, as well as many others, no doubt, would love -- "analyst at large" for Heavy Reading, said when implementing such a product, success criteria include "dedicated engineering focus, assured flexibility and a proven track record."

SAFfire features functionality to monitor and manage redundant hardware and software system resources to ensure 99.999 percent or better availability ("or better?" What's the functional difference between 99.999 and 99.9991?), as well as millisecond, stateful failover and checkpointing to preserve application data and uninterrupted service. This is combined with support of the SA Forum Application Interface Specification, GoAhead officials say.

 

In addition to the capabilities offered in SAFfire 3.0, GoAhead rounds out the offering with the GoAhead SA Forum Architectural Design Service and the GoAhead SA Forum Ecosystem program.

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Customer Connect Associates officials say they're delivering "advanced, sophisticated Web site upgrades" -- for themselves.

 

The aim of the Web site, evidently, is to be as easy for clients and prospects to find the information they want and the help that they need as possible, according to company officials. Prominent among the advantages of these new connections to the user is the fact that they are completely free of charge. Which should broaden the appeal in this economy. Heck, it should broaden the appeal in an up economy as well.

"We see the new additions to Customer-Connect.com as a significant improvement over the old version of our primary Web site," says CEO Geoff Ables, adding that the company has included additional information "linked to news feeds from our related sites" and improved their ability to deliver archived and library content to visitors. 

Some sites linked to the Customer Connect home page are www.successaccelerators.com, which explains the seminars and Webinars the company offers, as well as www.askcrm.com and www.gotsalesforce.com, their blogs relating to issues dealing with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and Salesforce.com, respectively. An additional blog on the topic of Web 2.0, www.askdnn.com, is also offered.  

 

Each blog contains tips, how-to instructions, and specific expertise and tools exclusive to Customer Connect Associates.

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3i Consulting, a developer of mobile products for the SAP platform, has announced the availability of an Employee Self Service portal designed for the SAP ERP and BlackBerry platforms. And if you wonder why there's so much SAP news here today, when major vendors hold their yearly bashes they do tend to generate press releases.

 

The product, powered by 3i's Mobile Workplace platform, provides access to common ESS functionality such as SAP Workflow tasks, creation and updating of employee banking, address and benefits information as well as time sheet entry and creation of leave requests. The functionality available on Employee Self Service portal is configurable, company officials say, and the portal can be enhanced with any federal, country and state specific functionality.

"2009 is shaping up to be an exciting year for SAP mobility as there is an increasing focus on cost reduction and the ability to streamline non income-producing activities, such as HR functionality, is pushed further into the spotlight," said David Sherman, Director of Sales at 3i Consulting Inc., who added that when a company considers how much time is wasted by employees chasing approvals or leave requests, they "quickly see the inherent value" of such processes.

The company, 3i Consulting, has been developing complementary SAP products since 2001 and focuses on stuff that address bottlenecks in business processes. 3i offers a QuickStart trial of Mobile Workplace through its Web site.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is an overlooked gem - The Steve Miller Band's Brave New World. I'm a spaaaace cowboy... bet you weren't ready for that:

NetSuite has announced that Suntech America, a unit of Suntech Power Holdings, manufacturers of photovoltaic modules, has gone live on NetSuite. 

 

Suntech officials say they now have a platform to manage their network of solar power dealer-installers, and have simplified the chart of accounts preparation "from a week-long administrative chore to a single-click report." Suntech America uses NetSuite primarily for the ERP and customer relationship management functions.

Suntech officials are hopeful that solar energy is "on the verge of rapid growth in the U.S., since the firm is banking heavily on their recent initiatives to expand within the U.S. solar market in hopes of tripling sales to the U.S. in 2009 through, among other things, expansion of its dealer network. Suntech America officials say they believe they can "finally make solar power an everyday reality in American homes and workplaces."

The system Suntech got from NetSuite is designed so as potential customers and dealers identify themselves on the company's site, leads are automatically entered into the NetSuite CRM system and sorted to a contact for follow-up. Dealers will have their own NetSuite log-ins, allowing them to get leads and book business directly with Suntech America.

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Self-service sales compensation vendor Makana Solutions has launched a Web portal designed to provide sales performance management to Salesforce.com users. 

 

The new portal, the Makana Sales Portal for Salesforce.com, is Force.com AppExchange-certified. Company officials say it provides sales and sales management with access to information on incentive pay detail and individual and team sales performance right from a tab within Salesforce.com. Basically the portal tightens integration between Salesforce.com and Makana Motivator Pro, a self-service sales compensation management product for planning and payment targeted to small and mid-sized businesses. 

 

The portal is available now and free to Pro users.

Makana Motivator Pro is pitched as an alternative to SMBs that use spreadsheets to create sales compensation plans, calculate payments and track sales performance -- "The use of spreadsheets for the generation of commission statements and sales performance reporting is an error-prone and time-consuming manual process," Makana officials note correctly, adding that spreadsheets "make it difficult to provide salespeople with accurate and timely information on their performance and answers to questions on their incentive pay.

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Speaking of what it calls a "joint vision of one-stop shopping," Openet, a vendor of transactional intelligence tools for network service providers, has announced that through an OEM deal, Cisco has signed its first contract with a Tier 1, U.S. wireline and wireless service provider. 

 

The provider will deploy the Cisco-branded Openet FusionWorks Policy Manager product along with Cisco's Mobility Solutions. Openet officials say the combined deployment of Openet's policy and Cisco's deep packet inspection products will let the operator "automate control over its wireless and wireline networks."

This idea behind the deal is for the service provider to get a suite of tools that can control access to, and allocation of, network resources, in the hopes of bumping up revenue a bit and improving the customer experience. 

The one-stop shopping, so the thinking goes for Openet officials, is for a convergent policy architecture "that can adapt to the innovation in the marketplace." The product provides controls across all services and networks, letting operators apply business logic within their mobile, landline, cable and WiMax networks.

The customer selected these products because they wanted to manage policy across many different networks, ensuring revenue can be derived from any customer base, Openet officials say, adding that the provider wants to "monetize current and future services and applications at the network's edge." 

 

Although Cisco's Mobility Solutions have processing of IP flows through content examination, subscriber service access control and subscriber account balance enforcement, integrating Openet's TI capabilities make it a more comprehensive suite for operators, letting them control access to, and allocation of, network resources.

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ClickFox , a vendor of Customer Experience Analytics software, has announced three new business products -- CEA for Operational Efficiency, CEA for Customer Satisfaction and CEA for Customer Retention. ClickFox officials say they developed them to address the customer experience management market.

With the ability to aggregate data from all touch points and other analytics sources, ClickFox offers speech analytics, Web analytics, quality monitoring and others as cross-channel offerings. "Specifically," company officials say, the products consist of "software and services that provide customer experience mapping and analysis, business process re-engineering, reporting and portals." The purpose here is to allow business case reporting along with monitoring and measuring the impact of cross-channel customer experience analytics using the ClickFox CEA Enterprise 2.0. 

 

The ClickFox CEA for Operational Efficiency is designed to carve out operational costs from a business' service delivery system, while improving the overall customer experience by using segmentation analytics to categorize customer interactions by channel type, frequency and other attributes.

 

ClickFox CEA for Customer Satisfaction Solution, company officials say, lets users understand the "total customer experience" and the direct relationships leading to both negative and positive CSAT scores by mapping end scores to the specific interactions/experiences that directly influence daily CSAT results.

ClickFox CEA for Customer Retention Solution uses the ClickFox CEA Enterprise 2.0 analytic platform to understand the specific customer behaviors and events that result in churn by comparing the baseline experience of "non-churn" customers. This lets companies identify the negative customer experiences that drive churn and respond to tie off leakages in customer retention.

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Ever want to take your own alcohol breath test so you know what you'd blow if -- just theoretically, of course -- you were pulled over by the cops? Popular with Hollywood types -- Lindsay Lohan has three -- is a product called iBreath, a nifty little doohickey that connects directly to an iPhone or iPod and lets you know your blood-alcohol level. 

 

About the size of a large key ring, you simply fold out the blow wand and exhale into it for at least five seconds. Two seconds later, the iBreath Breathalyzer will display the user's current alcohol levels and whether they-- not you, of course, the guy borrowing it from you -- are over the legal limit to drive. Another handy feature is a built-in timer that can be set from one minute up to eight hours in order to remind users when it's time for the next test. It's currently being offered with a $30.00 discount.

The National Center for Injury and Preventions Control reports that "alcohol-related motor vehicle accidents kill someone every 31 minutes, and injure someone every two minutes in the United States alone." The manufacturers of iBreath Alcohol Breathalyzer, after factoring in the fines, lost driver's licenses and jail time for drunk driving offenders, smelled a lucrative market and offered this gizmo at $89.00. Well, today it's yours for $59.00. Now, how much would you pay? But wait -- the ginsu knives are still free.

The iBreath was labeled the "Best iPod Accessory Ever!" by Gizmodo.com, and comes with a personal endorsement from Cleveland Browns wide receiver Donte Stallworth. It basically gives you a pretty good idea what your alcohol breath level is, but of course David Steele Enterprises, the manufacturer, is exquisitely lawyered up and "makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the ability of this device to determine whether a user is intoxicated or able to operate machinery or a motor vehicle in a safe manner."

 

Oh yeah -- First Coffee does not recommend drinking and driving. Spilled too much prime Maker's Mark that way.

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CRM vendor Maximizer Software has announced that it is now a member of the Sprint Smartphone Certification Program.

 

Cheers, let's celebrate drinks all around. Don't forget your iBreath.

 

Maximizer Mobile CRM has been certified through the Sprint Smartphone Certification Program to work on Sprint networks. The Smartphone Certification Program, a component of Sprint's Application Developer Program, lets independent developers market, as Sprint Compatible, applications that Sprint customers can access through the open Internet to do more with their phones, whenever and wherever they go.

Yes, for you CrackBerry heads, there's one for you: Maximizer Mobile CRM for BlackBerry gives you access to information in the field, including customers' history, leads, sales opportunities, dashboards, customer service cases, documents, and schedules. You don't have to put your baby down.

 

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Miles Davis's 1971 album A Tribute to Jack Johnson, an album I learned about on Facebook this morning. Can't believe I've never heard of this before, it's one of the most exciting jazz discoveries I've made:

Oracle has announced the general availability of their Communications Unified Inventory Management 7.1, which company officials say is designed for the introduction "in a discrete fashion" into an existing inventory environment through a modular, service-oriented architecture-based framework for unifying disparate data across multiple systems. 

 

Company officials say this approach lets service providers deploy "only the specific inventory capabilities required in their environments." They point to Etihad Atheeb Telecom "GO," Cellular South, Com Hem AB and Tikona Digital Networks as early adopters using it to "support enterprise and consumer services across fixed, cable and mobile networks."

 

The 7.1 release has new capabilities, Oracle officials say, with "improved usability and integration," and including technology packs giving out-of-the-box functionality for accelerated rollout of the most common IP multi-play and higher layer services, including voice over IP, multi-protocol label switching layer 3 virtual private network and Metro Ethernet/virtual local area network services.

It's also touted as providing out-of-the-box integration with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, which can be used to create tailored reports that draw upon real-time and historical inventory data, as well as Oracle Spatial, which supports geographical mapping and geocoding across the application. There's also a graphical design time modeling tool, Design Studio, offering best practices modeling of customer services and resources.

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Software vendor eglue has announced it has been positioned by Gartner in the Niche Players quadrant of the "Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Centers" report.

Eglue officials say that the current economic situation is "affecting the decisions of business leaders," who are "focusing on the central role of customer service to simultaneously lower costs and build customer loyalty," maintaining that this is "changing the evaluation criteria of the Magic Quadrant" in light of "budget realities."

The report assesses the market for customer service and support applications, saying selection of an application must take into consideration how the application addresses the requirements of the service center. Hard to argue with that, of course. It rates requirements in increasing order of complexity in what it calls "the four major areas" -- information access, service process optimization, end-to-end industry process experts and intelligent dialogue/real-time decisioning. 

 

That last one, deemed the most complex requirement, is where the eglue product is aimed, as it pulls data from the ongoing interaction and internal or external data sources, translating it into "actionable user guidance" by presenting recommendations in the form of call-outs.

Dror Pockard, CEO of eglue, cites the Gartner CIO survey list as putting "cost-cutting, customer experience and customer service as the business factors that will drive decisions in the next 24 months." He says niche players offer important products as components or offerings for vertical segments, as opposed to other vendors who "offer complete portfolios but demonstrate weaknesses in one or more important areas... they usually are focused on support of the large enterprise, rather than small and mid-size businesses."

Founded in 2001, eglue is headquartered in Hoboken, New Jersey. It's a privately-held company backed by venture capitalists and private investors such as Giza, Cedar, Evergreen and Plenus Venture Lending.

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Speech recognition provider LumenVox and open-source MRCP project UniMRCP have announced what officials from both firms are calling "the successful conclusion of interoperability testing between their products."

LumenVox CTO Jim Blake said the integration means that anyone who uses UniMRCP libraries for their MRCP stack will also be able to use the LumenVox Speech Engine. Arsen Chaloyan, the author and maintainer of UniMRCP, says UniMRCP provides "a free method of adding MRCP support to any voice platform, gateways, or media server," and that anyone wishing to add support for LumenVox speech recognition "can do so easily and affordably."

MRCP, the media resource control protocol, is a standard method for different pieces of software to communicate. It is most commonly used for telephony systems such as voice platforms to control automatic speech recognition and text to speech applications. Most all modern ASR and TTS support some form of MRCP, as do many voice platforms. UniMRCP is an open source cross-platform project providing libraries for an MRCP client or server. Its typical users would be programmers who are working on a voice platform and wish to add support for MRCP.

The LumenVox Speech Engine is a speech recognition product including support for both MRCPv1 and MRCPv2. The two versions of the protocol are similar, except version one uses RTSP as its signaling protocol while version two uses SIP. LumenVox and UniMRCP support both versions, and both were tested as part of the interoperability certification.

UniMRCP encapsulates SIP/MRCPv2, RTSP, SDP and RTP stacks and provides an MRCP version independent user level interface, meaning platform providers can integrate the UniMRCP stack into their software and support both MRCPv1 and MRCPv2.

While UniMRCP is mainly a programming library to be used by developers adding MRCP support into an existing product, and not a standalone application, a simple standalone MRCP client is available as part of the downloads at the UniMRCP Web page. Both UniMRCP and LumenVox support Windows and Linux.

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Convergys, a vendor of relationship management products, has announced the availability of a platform-independent On-Demand Voice Authentication product, which Convergys clients and non-Convergys clients can implement by enrolling the voice signatures of their customers and employees. 

 

Included in this product is voice biometric security from the Voice Signature Service provided through Convergys' partnership with TradeHarbor.

 

The idea is that upon enrollment, companies can authenticate agent-assisted and consumer transactions more securely than with a traditional ID + PIN authentication. Convergys officials describe it as a "no-capital expense deployment," touting its pay-as-you-go model.

Nancy Jamison, president and principal analyst, Jamison Consulting, has noted that government regulations requiring authentication, "coupled with the growth of identity fraud," are increasing demand for security products with features like voice authentication. According to Convergys officials, a person's voice signature is as unique as a fingerprint and can be used in legally binding documents and contracts if allowed by applicable law.

 

"Today voice authentication is a competitive differentiator because it is new. However, with the increase in online transaction activity and increase in mobile device use, voice authentication will quickly go from being a nice-to-have to being a must-have for companies that want to retain their customers," says Bill Livingston, vice president of services architecture and deployment, TradeHarbor. 

Convergys, a member of the S&P 500, has about 75,000 employees in 84 customer contact centers and other facilities in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. 
... 

 

A recent survey from AEP Networks shows that 92 percent of organizations questioned allow their employees to work remotely or on the move. 

 

Okay, you say. So? "This is," the report says, "despite the fact that network threats are on the increase and 44 percent of respondents believe that their networks are no more than 'quite' secure," and "no one" thought that unauthorized data access would have a minimal impact on their business, while 29 percent believe this would cause major, long-term damage. 

 

The rest ranged between these two poles, with 61 percent taking the middle ground or tipping the balance towards "more significant" harm.

 

When asked about the likely impact of data loss on their organization, only three percent believed that jobs would be lost and the same number would expect no real impact at all. However, 53 percent thought that data loss would result in a negative impact on their business reputation. Customer relationships would be damaged for 22 percent and 19 percent felt that the impact would be felt directly in the bottom line.

Pat Donnellan, CEO of AEP Networks, said the survey found that 83 percent of remote workers carry corporate data on their laptops and mobile devices "despite the perceived impact of data loss and unauthorized data access on the business as a whole." He noted that the majority are relying on VPN security (61 percent) to provide adequate protection for their remote access needs.

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is... total iTunes shuffle... hit play, no idea what the first song's going to be, you'll know it as soon as I do... it is... Van Morrison's "Gloria," from his live "It's Too Late To Stop Now" album:

"For all of its promise, the cloud computing movement is in danger of becoming yet another mousetrap to lock-in customers to proprietary vendors," charges John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM. If he has anything to do about it that won't happen, and Sugar's recent partnership with Smart Selling seems to be a step in that direction.

 

SugarCRM, having just introduced Sugar Express with Smart Selling, has now released Australian market pricing for the new product. Smart Selling CEO Mark Parker characterized the offering as "full featured, open source CRM for under $10 per month." This announcement coincides with updated and simplified packaging of both Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise.

Sugar Express is engineered to provide sales, marketing and support features, and has Sugar Plug-Ins for Microsoft Office as well as access to SugarCRM Customer Support. Platform functionality includes 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.

Sugar Express is "a direct result of feedback from the commercial market place," says Parker, adding that in his estimation a "large part of the market was asking for an entry-level, on-demand product that is not about vendor lock-in and offers deep features and support."

Supported by Smart Selling and SugarCRM, Sugar Express includes the features of Sugar Community Edition plus access to Sugar Plug-Ins for Microsoft Office along with three customer support cases. Australian pricing is $690 (excluding GST) for one to five users per year, and $995 (also excluding GST) for up to 10 users.

Founded as an open source project in 2004, SugarCRM applications have been downloaded over five million times, according to company officials.
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Kalido officials have announced that the latest release of the Kalido Information Engine with better data matching capabilities to support governance programs, as well as functionality for best practices for the design, development and deployment of the Kalido Information Engine.  

This release also gives users better native data governance capabilities than their last release, along with automated data matching capabilities designed to "help ease a manual and administrative burden for data stewards," according to company officials.

It's no secret that organizations are having to spend much more time and resources on keeping up with all the regulatory compliance requirements, and many have identified bad data as a significant barrier to their efforts. In response, company officials say, some have been deploying formal processes in the form of data governance programs to "ensure a business acceptable level of information quality."

Included in the new functionality is matching intelligence to improve rules management, candidate management, confidence calculation, process matching and survivorship management within Kalido, company officials say: "Specifically, Kalido's new integrated matching technology will let customers de-dupe and match records from different sources to help build gold-copy master data, as well as create and maintain those mapping relationships between source and gold-copy master data."

 

The product also lets companies use hierarchy relationships as part of a match and support complex match definitions across fields, and to use any master data element or nickname as a thesaurus and use those elements as part of a matching criterion. This release of the Kalido Information Engine is certified to run on Netezza appliances.  

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Infor has announced an enhanced version of their Infor ERP SyteLine product, an enterprise resource planning tool for discrete manufacturers. New features in this the 8.01 release include support for Infor MyDay, a Web 2.0 user interface for Infor applications that provides central access to information, enhanced customer relationship management functionality and improved event management.

Infor MyDay takes the business data captured and stored by ERP SyteLine, as well as other business applications, and presents it in a single view to employees based on their roles within the organization. Company officials say it "sets relevant data free," and will be provided at no additional charge to companies running ERP SyteLine 8.01 and higher with active maintenance plans.

New to ERP SyteLine's core functionality is additional CRM capability to help manufacturers with marketing, sales and service. This functionality, built directly into the product, lets companies update information stored in the system to manage prospects and sales contacts. The idea behind this, of course, according to Infor officials, is that with greater visibility and access to customer information, users of ERP SyteLine are able to expand their marketing and lead generation opportunities and create new revenue for the company.

ERP SyteLine 8.01 has also improved the product's event management for manufacturers, letting them respond to events as they occur -- "or fail to occur," as company officials put it presciently -- so that action can be taken. For example, an alert could notify an inventory manager when inventory of a particular item falls below a predetermined quantity. Event management in ERP SyteLine can also give users alerts as steps are completed in various processes, letting multiple departments work together without missing cues or stepping on each others' toes.

ERP SyteLine is anchored on Infor Open SOA, an event-driven service-oriented architecture using an industry standard business language to distribute data between Infor and other systems.

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NGenera Corporation, vendors of Collaborative Enterprise Management products, have announced $10 million in a new Series C financing round. Participants in the initial close of the round include Foundation Capital and Oak Investment Partners.  

 

Company officials say the funding will be used to help the company increase its product development and expand sales.

According to Forrester Research's Collaboration and Web 2.0 Technology Adoption, Q4 2008, more than 60 percent of firms surveyed are implementing or upgrading existing implementations of collaboration software in next 12 months, so nGenera sees this as a rich vein to tap. NGenera officials also point to research finding that "seven of every ten firms surveyed are planning to invest in enterprise collaboration in 2009."

"The additional funds will enable nGenera to accelerate the development our Collaborative Enterprise Management, as well as to strengthen and expand our sales infrastructure," says Steve Papermaster, Chairman and CEO of nGenera.

NGenera officials are trying to hype Collaborative Enterprise Management as "the next big leap in management process," saying the last leap was Enterprise Resource Planning, with the adoption of ERP processes and technologies "triggering a major wave of business innovation, productivity, and growth, by improving the repetitive, accounting and transactional information flow in organizations and their supply chains." According to this line of thinking, with the "leap to CEM," management decisions must allow for non-repetitive processes that require the collective experience from a group of people, drawing from the data that exists inside and outside of the company's ERP and other transactional systems.

Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics and Grown Up Digital, says what nGenera has done is "combine the collaboration platform and applications with expertise and education."

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SugarCRM has also announced the GetSocial Twitter Module has been named the "Project-of-the-Month" for SugarForge.org.  

 

The module lets companies integrate social marketing to Twitter from within SugarCRM, giving users tools to improve customer service, expand marketing programs, maintain management oversight and try to decipher more or less random assemblages of letters and punctuation marks.

Each month, SugarCRM highlights a Project-of-the-Month winner on SugarForge.org, the company's community website. Projects-of-the-Month are selected on the quality of a project's code, its overall activity and its general usefulness as an extension to SugarCRM, company officials say.

The GetSocial Twitter module is intended to help companies using the SugarCRM customer relationship platform by providing Twitter features for every department. Internal employees can now use Twitter through an authorized channel and client that provides an audit trail and reporting for managers.

This reporter is aware that he is, of course, a Luddite, but he simply doesn't get Twitter. There must be a reason why 60 percent of all Twitter users drop out after the first month, this reporter sure did. Maybe it's because this tends to be the day-in, day-out reality of Twitter?

"The explosion of Twitter has left many companies searching for answers on how to adapt to the new service in order to provide better customer support, enhanced marketing efforts and maintain management oversight," says Josh Sweeney, managing partner of ALT-Invest. "In building GetSocial Twitter, we are providing an open source enhancement for marketing and sales teams."