October 2009 Archives

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Rod Stewart's Every Picture Tells A Story. Before he was a socialite, a disco act or a crooner, in the early '70s Stewart was one of the greatest bluesy-folk rock performers in the game. Here he is at his absolute "Maggie May" and "Reason To Believe" best on one of the very, very few truly indispensable rock albums:

"Customer experience systems" vendor Amdocs has announced the acquisition of jNetX, a privately-held service delivery platform provider, for $50 million net of debt and cash, subject to post closing adjustments.

 

Amdocs officials say the acquisition "accelerates" their position in the SDP market, since it combines jNetX's offering with Amdocs' CE products and service delivery.

The SDP market is estimated to grow at a 14 percent to $6 billion by 2013, according to industry analyst firm Analysys Mason in a study concluded a couple months ago. It's seen as a way of "enabling faster time-to-market and the monetization of services."

 

Amdocs and jNetX share a number of customers, including Vodafone Group, British Telecom and Mobilkom.

 

In explaining the market opportunity they see, Amdocs officials contend that "today," service providers "are seeking to move their businesses from predominantly subscription-based access services to include rich content, applications, and other offerings." Therefore, the combination of Amdocs and jNetX products will, in their view, "allow service providers to expose both Telecom and IP components in the network to offer convergent network, IT and Web-based services."

 

Amdocs is evidently hoping to distance themselves from other SDP vendors supporting services solely on IP-based networks: Jim Liang, senior vice president strategy and corporate development for Amdocs, underlined the "technological combination" of the acquisition.

 

The combination is also an excuse for punching up Amdocs CES Portfolio. The vendor has enhanced their convergent charging offering by providing service control and service brokering capabilities, and are touting "closer integration with the Amdocs App Store to expose network services to developers."

Amdocs does not expect a material impact from the acquisition of jNetX on fiscal year 2010 non-GAAP earnings per share, which excludes acquisition related costs and equity-based compensation expense, net of related tax effects. The impact on GAAP results will be finalized after Amdocs completes the purchase price accounting for the acquisition.

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IT Structures has the idea that trying out enterprise IT can -- darn it, should -- be as simple as browsing iTunes.

 

To that end, company officials say they've created a platform that lets companies share "fully functional" IT environments in the cloud with their "Try I.T. Now" button.

 

The button allows any software or appliance vendor let their sales teams, prospective customers or partners "take the product for an instant test drive, in a monitored and controlled way," company officials say: "Companies can post the button on their Web site," and users are spared "having to install or download anything."

This approach "goes beyond basic Webinar or virtual lab offerings by letting customers create production-grade replicas of their existing IT," IT Structures officials contend.

Taking note of what they see as "the rising popularity of on demand and SaaS software applications" leading to "an increase in cloud-based business tools," IT Structures officials say there is increased pressure to provide sales prospects with a true user experience without ever leaving the office.

"When we say 'try it now' we mean that literally," says Zvi Guterman, CEO of IT Structures, adding that since "we're living in a 'try & buy' world" anyway, the concept isn't foreign.

 

The vendor's also offering the option to customize the button to reflect corporate branding.

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Indianapolis-based consulting firm Walker Information is offering an iPhone application to provide its users "fast and easy access to customer feedback," company officials say.

Walker Link for iPhone was created to complement Walker Link -- an online application linking account managers to feedback provided by customers. With the new iPhone app, account managers can access that customer information.

Mike Grindstaff, Walker's IT product portfolio manager, said Walker Link for iPhone "provides access to the most recent feedback from customers."

So from an iPhone, an account manager can get the feedback from a company or individual contact, see which contacts have responded to a survey, and send survey reminders: "Walker Link for iPhone allows people to have a meaningful dialogue with their customers," Walker's Chief Information Officer Brian Kovacs says. 

Walker is a privately held consulting firm.
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Emobus, a vendor of "mobility management" services and software, has formed an advisory board to serve as "a representative sounding board to provide strategic insight" to the company. Advisors include Aris Kekedjian, Philip Dodds, and Sean Murphy.

 

Company officials say the board will help Emobus with customer development and product development efforts so their products and vision "remain closely aligned with customers' business objectives."

Kekedjian is Managing Director & CEO, GE Strategic Development & GE Capital, Middle East/Africa. He's expected to provide Emobus with insight into selling to large corporations and financial strategies.

 

Dodds, chosen to provide Emobus with database and business intelligence insight, has worked in a variety of roles in the last 15 years: CTO of DevZuz, Co-Founder of Unity Systems, and consultant to various global banks and multimedia companies.

Murphy will provide Emobus with "strategic insight into marketing and scaling a new technology," company officials say. Murphy has worked in a variety of roles in the last 25 years -- software engineering, engineering management, business development, and product marketing at companies such as Cisco, AMD, MMC Networks, 3COM and VLSI Technology.

Emobus officials claim their products help clients "slash direct carrier billing costs," via not only selling them software but letting them "offload their enterprise cellular challenges."

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Salesforce.com has announced that 20/20 Companies is running its growing business on custom applications built on the Force.com cloud computing platform.

 

The vendor works in the marketing and sales contracting industry. It used Force.com for custom application development to manage orders, invoicing and payroll, as well as employee time-tracking.

The need for custom applications arose when 20/20 officials got tired of their sales reps manually entering order data into one system, and then manually reconciling with their client's systems, as well as internal company financial, payroll and reporting applications. You can guess the result, of course: Time-consuming busywork, just the sort of thing sales reps thrive on, with errors and inconsistent information.

Fort Worth, Texas-based 20/20 Companies officials figured they could develop custom applications on Force.com at 25 percent of the time and cost required to build the same apps on-premise with .NET, according to company officials.

The firm now has an application to manage the order-to-invoice-to-payroll process, described by company officials as "a central point for the sales team to track orders," and one where information is "shared across 20/20's business applications and with clients." They also have a time-tracking system for staff to log in and out "with the assurance that their hours will be paid accordingly, whether regular, overtime or holiday rates."

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Warp 9, which sells e-commerce platforms and services, has announced that customer ShapeFX, a Spiegel Brand, was featured on the The Today Show with Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira.

Hey we know. Not everything here at First Coffee is hard news. Gotta relax and have fun every now and then. We like a little showbiz glitz as much as the next guy.

Warp 9 officials are proud of the fact that they've had customers featured on national television programs like NBC's The Today Show and Oprah before. And for good reason -- "The surges in traffic and sales that accompany these appearances are quite amazing. These are great opportunities for clients to boost brand and product awareness, sell a lot of product, and acquire a large amount of new customers."

As well as maybe get a chance to meet Tom Cruise! After the caffeine buzz has worn off!

"Because of the benefits of these opportunities, it is important that these experiences go extremely smoothly for our customers. These large spike factors are figured into the capacity and resource planning we do," notes Harinder Dhillon, Warp 9's CEO.

The ShapeFX.com site runs Warp 9's ICS Enterprise E-Commerce Platform. Enterprise ICS sites are served by, on average, 15-20 enterprise-grade servers. A typical Warp 9 Enterprise ICS site, company officials say, is capable of 1200+ orders per hour.

 

One wonders how many an Oprah appearance generates.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Leo Kottke's One Guitar, No Vocals. It's a fine album for someone who doesn't like jazz (First Coffee does, but we're just saying) and who wants good music at work that's not soporific wallpaper:

ILinc, which sells Web and video conferencing software and services, has announced that iLinc for Salesforce had been named the "App of the Week" by Salesforce.com.

 

This is a designation given to a Software-as-a-Service application that integrates with the Salesforce CRM platform. You can get it from the Force.com AppExchange.

 

The software vendor noted that iLinc for Salesforce app integrate Webinar data with existing Salesforce CRM data, with the ability to launch virtual meetings directly from Salesforce Lead and Contact records was also a key feature.

James M. Powers, Jr., President and Chief Executive Officer of iLinc, described the product as combining a Web conferencing platform with real-time data management, letting companies deliver "high-impact Webinars, sales demos and product training sessions while keeping the sales and customer support teams informed."

The idea behind this, company officials say, is that by moving Webinars and online training sessions to the iLinc platform, customers get to integrate two business systems as well as "the visibility into online event intelligence that they need."

Built using the Force.com platform, as well as the native Apex and Visual Force languages, iLinc for Salesforce is available for test drive and deployment on the AppExchange.

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Here's a rhetorical question if First Coffee's ever heard it: "Many of us get frustrated when dealing with contact centers - but do you ever find yourself swearing at the agent, or simply hanging up?"

 

We'd like to see the honest hand of anyone except our dear saint of a mother (mutterings after hanging up pleasantly don't count) who can truthfully -- truthfully -- answer "no." Now we find that's maybe because First Coffee's mother isn't Scottish. Or Welsh.

New research by Corizon reveals that among Brits, "Scots are the most likely to use 'inappropriate language' when talking to a contact center agent (15 percent), while the Welsh are the most prone to hanging up in frustration (49 percent)." 

Corizon describes its business as "bringing together elements of other software applications in 'enterprise mashups'" for contact centers.

Conducted during August 2009, the study of 90 contact center managers and 2,100 consumers found that Scots are the most likely to use inappropriate language (15 percent), followed by Londoners (12 percent), and that 18-30 year-olds are the most likely age group to use inappropriate language. First Coffee supposes that a "London-dwelling 23-year old Scot!" is a term of particularly scathing opprobrium among call center agents.

 

Welsh people are most likely to hang up on an agent (51 percent), followed by Easterners (49 percent), while Midlanders and Southerners are most likely to hang up before speaking to an agent (61 percent each).

First Coffee would have guessed the Irish for most likely to use inappropriate language -- and they very well may be. Based on First Coffee's recent trip to the Emerald Isle he would have no problem believing that the only reason the Irish don't rank first is because nobody can tell what the heck they're saying when they're riled up.

Men are more likely than women to use inappropriate language (12 percent compared with 7 percent) -- shock shock there -- but in a genuine surprise, women are more likely than men to hang up before speaking to an agent, although not by much -- 60 percent compared with 57 percent.

 

The survey, a joint project of Corizon and YouGov, found that there is, to use the technical term, "plenty" of frustration with contact center technology, at both ends of the telephone line -- nearly 75 percent of contact center managers said their agents use an average of five different software applications in a typical working day, with one claiming to use as many as eighteen. That's right -- 18.

 

Corizon is headquartered in London. They presumably avoid hiring 18-30 year old Scots who live locally to man the phones.
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Staying on the Salesforce and British themes today, Admiral Technology officials say they're focusing the company's attention on the Small and Medium Sized Business (SMB) market by providing enterprise class consulting to the Salesforce.com community "without attracting the traditional software consultancy price tag."

 

First Coffee saw where the New England Patriots poleaxed the Tampa Bay Buccaneers 35-7 at London's Wembley Stadium yesterday, evidently in an effort to show Brits that we Americans can offer sporting events as dull as 1-1 soccer ties as well, maybe that's where all this Anglophilia comes from.

Is First Coffee the only one who thinks it rather droll that the NFL sends a team named "New England" to Ye Olde England, and one named the "Patriots," defined as "the guys who kicked you out of America?"

In announcing "RapidForce," which Admiral describes as "a range of fixed fee, fixed scope implementation and support packages to bridge the gap between the desires of companies to improve their customer relationship management (CRM) strategy," company officials say it comes in "a number of formats, starting with a One Day Quick Win option."

Nigel Fisher, Director at Admiral Technology, says their Bronze, Silver and Gold packages "reflect the different editions of Salesforce.com," touting their "predictable outcome and cost."

 

With more than 16 years in the European JD Edwards community, Nigel Fisher launched Admiral Technology to "concentrate on Software-as-a Service," he says: "It is clear that management have a desire and a need for alternatives to traditional on-premise software solutions to run their businesses. The current economic climate means that everyone wants to generate and hold on to as much cash as they can."

Subscription-based products, he says, fit this bill since they "do not require capital intensive investments in architecture and support personnel."

And of course the fact that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' owners, the Glazer family, also own Manchester United is purely a coincidence.

As Fisher observes correctly, SMB's face a lot of the same problems and issues bigger companies do with CRM-related issues, and Fisher thinks they may even have an advantage: "They can make the decisions and take the actions to get things done. They are often more flexible and less bureaucratic and this in itself makes them more responsive."

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Net-Results, a company with no discernible overt connections to Salesforce.com or Britain, in the business of selling sales and marketing software products, has released the 2.4 version of its proprietary marketing automation platform.

 

Company officials say it uses social media applications to help convert prospects and leads into customers.

The product's tracking capability and incorporation of social networking tools "allows users to understand the interests and focus of prospects at an individualized level while maintaining the service's trademark usability," company officials say, referring to the fact that its Visitor Center and Contact Profiles now include integration with such apps as Twitter, LinkedIn and Jigsaw.

"The Net-Results platform is all about listening to prospects and customers, understanding, and responding intelligently," says Net-Results Founder and CEO Michael Ward. 

As described by company officials, the product "listens" as prospects and customers interact with Web sites and marketing campaigns i"n real time, providing actionable information at the individual level."

 

One of the benefits of the 2.4 release, they point out, is that users can hit a given prospect's LinkedIn profile and recent Twitter updates, thereby finding out all about how funny their cat is, what they're watching on TV, having for dinner and how many times they laugh out loud in any given 20 minutes.

Founded in 2003, Net-Results' product starts at $99 per month.

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Oh here we go, back to Old Blighty: From London comes the news that CRM vendor StayinFront has announced that Euphony Communications, a telecom vendor, has deployed the latest version of its flagship product, StayinFront CRM 11, across their European offices.

Euphony initially launched StayinFront CRM 11 in its Benelux operations. Evidently things went well enough there -- hey if it flies in Belgium it'll fly anywhere -- to where Euphony has adopted StayinFront CRM 11 as the platform for sales and customer service management throughout their operations.

Euphony's core business is the resale of land line (CPS) telephony, Internet access (dial-up and ADSL), pre- and post-paid mobile, and energy services, such as gas and electricity. The company likes to focus on residential consumers and the small business sector in Ireland, U.K., Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Portugal and the Czech Republic.

The StayinFront CRM system has also been integrated with Euphony's back-office systems that manage provisioning, billing and finance, according to company officials.

Nigel Huxtable, vice president, Sales EMEA of StayinFront -- "Nigel" does appear to be a fairly beloved name over there, doesn't it? -- says Euphony benefits from the fact that StayinFront CRM 11 combines CRM and analytics into one system making business intelligence data readily accessible, "without the monetary investment and time requirements of configuration."

Headquartered in Fairfield, New Jersey, StayinFront has offices in Illinois, the United Kingdom, Ireland, India, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand.

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It's a well-established policy here at First Coffee that if you're a tech firm doing something good to "give back to the community," as the saying goes, we'll give you a bit of a shout-out here. To that end, then, a tip of the coffee pot to Tahitian Noni International, whose sales and service operators have been raising money to help Community Action Services of Provo, Utah, which offers local food bank services for Utah, Wasatch, and Summit counties. 

Many groups do special projects to help people in need around Christmas, so in October they tend to stock up, "leaving donations in October far short of what food banks need," according to Tahitian Noni officials.

What is "noni," you ask? First Coffee didn't know either, but according to What Is Noni? it's a natural white fruit about the size as a potato which "has a bitter taste and doesn't smell good."

 

But it's useful as a dietary supplement, evidently, and TNI was founded to "introduce the benefits of noni to the world outside Tahiti," according to company officials. The company itself was founded by two food research scientists in 1995. Headquartered in Provo, it has manufacturing facilities in the United States, Germany, Tahiti, Japan, and China and sales offices in more than 30 countries worldwide.

So the sales and service agents at Tahitian Noni International have been holding special activities for the last three months to benefit the local charity. August was their "money war" spare change challenge, company officials say, "where they gathered over a thousand dollars in mostly quarters, nickels, dimes and pennies."

In September, they raised an additional one thousand dollars by holding seven separate fundraising lunches at Tahitian Noni International Corporate Headquarters. October was "toilet paper" month, where they had over 1,000 rolls of toilet paper donated to the cause.

 

And it worked, we're happy to say. The money raised purchased 120 jars of peanut butter, 1,752 cans of food (vegetables, fruits, soups, tuna, beans and the like), 90 gallons of powdered milk, 90 quarts of juice, 117 boxes of cereal and 152 boxes of mac and cheese.

 

Hey toss in a few cases of beer and ramen noodles and you have a college student's yearly diet.

As well as the 1,037 rolls of toilet paper.

All of the articles were delivered to Community Action Services in Provo, but they're not done yet: "Sales and service agents are now looking at how they can help during the upcoming holiday season as well."

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the absolutely unique Miles Davis work A Tribute To Jack Johnson. Part jazz, part acid rock, part jagged glass fragments slicing through silk, it's like nothing else First Coffee's heard:

LeadMaster, a vendor of cloud computing products for sales lead tracking, lead management and online CRM, has announced a certification program for lead generation and lead providers designed to let users have sales leads flow in real-time into LeadMaster's Web-based, SaaS system.

 

They're inviting all lead generation companies to join the Lead Provider Integration Program for free.

To participate in the certification program, a lead provider will register and receive access to the LeadMaster system as well as instructions on integrating and sending leads, company officials say: "The lead provider will test the integration to complete the certification process."

 

The instructions are described by company officials as "straightforward, and most companies are certified in less than an hour." Heck, this Web app is so simple even your technophobe sales reps can learn to use it in about an hour, they say.

LeadMaster officials say the product can accept data from "every industry. In addition to the demographic fields lead providers have an unlimited number of user-defined fields available through the LeadMaster custom form technology."

 

With leads in the LeadMaster system, users get reminders to follow up. This is designed, obviously, to cut down on lost leads. As Andy Brownell, LeadMaster CMO notes, "you can't compete if you're still getting leads in a spreadsheet or via e-mail. You need a process whereby your sales leads drop into your lead management CRM system automatically."

Brownell says this will "turbo-charge" lead generation campaigns and "make it easier for companies of all sizes" to turn prospects into customers: "We've invested 12 years of development work into the LeadMaster lead management."

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Kana Software has enhanced the social CRM capabilities of Kana 10, the company's service experience management platform.

 

Specifically, Kana 10's "collective intelligence capabilities" can be used to assist agents in navigating processes, optimize cross-selling and up-selling offers, enhance search results ranking based on common search patterns and build communities of customers with similar interests and orientations, Kana officials say.

 

As part of this enhancement, Kana officials say they've entered into an OEM agreement with Baynote to integrate Baynote's Collective Intelligence Platform with Kana 10, to "provide companies with predictive analytics based on the implicit patterns of customers visiting their Web sites."

 

Launched in June, Kana 10 is built upon IBM's service-oriented architecture frameworks.

Social CRM is based on the idea that it's possible to employ the "wisdom of crowds" to improve service delivery. The way Kana officials explain their approach, "as customers search, shop, browse and work in forums, that information found to be most pertinent can be used to drive success for those that follow."

To that end, then, there's the integration of Baynote CIP and Kana 10, which "allows Kana's clients to capture and analyze customer experiences, and then to use that information to enhance the service experience" depending in part on "the collective input and insight of the crowd."

Baynote CEO Jack Jia said there is "a natural synergy" between the Baynote CIP and Kana 10: "The Baynote CIP allows businesses to deploy personalized on-site recommendations and social search."

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IBM and Canonical are introducing what officials of both firms call a personal computing software package for netbooks and other thin client devices "to help businesses in Africa bridge the digital divide by leapfrogging traditional PCs and proprietary software."

 

This is the first cloud- and premise-based Linux netbook software package offered by IBM and Canonical.

Part of IBM's Smart Work Initiative, the package targets what the partners see as "the rising popularity of low-cost netbooks to make IBM's industrial-strength software affordable to new, mass audiences in Africa."

 

The idea, IBM officials say, is that businesses which probably couldn't afford traditional PCs for all employees "can now use any type of device and low-cost software" regardless of the level of communications infrastructure.

 

According to AIB Research, netbook computer sales are expected to quadruple from 35 million in 2009 to 139 million by 2013. AIB Research predicts that Linux will outgrow Windows on netbooks by 2012. More than 30 percent of netbooks are sold with Linux, which reduces their cost substantially below the typical retail cost of personal computers running Windows XP.

 

IBM estimates that it costs about half per seat than a Microsoft-based desktop. A network of local service providers such as Inkululeko and ZSL is expected to extend the IBM Client locally throughout Africa.

The IBM Client for Smart Work is now available across Africa and is being piloted for other emerging and growth markets worldwide. It includes open standards-based e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, unified communication, social networking and other software. It runs on Canonical's Ubuntu Linux operating system, and provides the option to deliver collaboration through the Web in a cloud service model.

 

For those who want, this software bundle can be extended to virtualized work spaces using VERDE from Virtual Bridges, available locally through business partners and voice-based collaboration pilots through IBM Research.

The IBM smart client package is also being billed as a product to "help African governments deliver open standards using Open Document Format... The reduction of personal computing costs may enable governments to transfer information technology expenditures to fund mission-critical initiatives such as crisis management, education and health care."

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Betting on mobile, especially text messaging, to reign as the communications method of choice, Premiere Global Services has integrated Clickatell's SMS-as-a-Service platform to provide customers with the option of "adding mobile text message alerts into all aspects of existing business communications," such as e-mail, voice, online, and physical mail communications.

Atlanta-based Premiere Global Services has "a presence" in 24 countries, PGS officials say.

The company say the idea behind the integration is to give customers the ability to use Clickatell's gateway to send SMS notifications to customers through an interface in Premiere Global Service's software, which also lets customers add and customize SMS distribution based on user preferences and opt-ins.

The partnership with Clickatell allows Premier Global Service's customers to offer such services as text-based flight status notifications, delivery reminders, trade confirmations, transaction alerts, appointment reminders, automated notifications to streamline accounts receivable, pretty much whatever clever, imaginative customers can think of.

Pieter de Villiers, Clickatell CEO, noted that, available on 4 billion-plus handsets worldwide, "SMS remains the most used mobile application -- over instant messaging, media rich MMS, mobile e-mail, and even voice in many regions. People simply prefer to be notified via SMS on their mobile phone."

The man's most likely correct: In Australia alone, according to proprietary research commissioned by Premiere, Frost & Sullivan reports that enterprise SMS message volumes will grow to 290.4 million messages per day by 2015 from 175 million messages per day in 2008.

David Adams, Premiere Global Services' Products Director, APAC, when asked why, replied "Because there is money in it. Our customers are trying to satisfy, retain and attract new customers while reducing operational costs. SMS delivery information directly to cell phones and it is exactly what people want -- text messaging remains the most common mobile denominator in terms of acceptance."

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As a certified sucker for any headline including the word "infotainment," First Coffee was interested to read that Amsterdam-based TomTom GO I-90 a) wasn't a product based on the interstate highway, and b) doesn't stop at navigation - "it's a double DIN navigation and radio solution, integrating world-class navigation and in-car infotainment for all types of cars."

 

The device will be available to buy through '12V' specialist retailers throughout Europe from December 2009. The device will cost Є599 excluding installation.

Integrated navigation systems usually come pre-fitted in new cars, or so they tell us -- First Coffee prefers to stick with adopting Volkswagen Beetles and buses since he can operate a map and remember directions. Evidently this product is for those with an more, ah, vintage car who want integrated navigation.

It can be fitted into any car, company officials say, adding that it provides "full radio integration with the car speakers for high quality audio when using spoken instructions, or making hands-free phone calls."

 

Yes it's integrated, but the navigation device is portable so it can be used in other cars.

Giles Shrimpton, TomTom's Managing Director AUTO, noted that features such as TomTom Map Share -- allowing users to make instant changes to the map and share these with others through TomTom HOME and Safety Alerts -- let drivers "save on speeding tickets" and drive safer.

The device, which comes with maps of Western Europe pre-installed and offers hands-free calling, so drivers can make calls while driving.

It also comes with iPod capability, coming with a USB connection for an MP3 or iPod connection.

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According to Yankee Group's research, the current $7.2 billion in stimulus funds earmarked for extending broadband service across the U.S. is "woefully inadequate," reaching "less than a third of the investment necessary to connect every U.S. household."

 

The group's report, titled "Ubiquitous U.S. Broadband Will Cost At Least Triple the Current Stimulus Package," analyze several scenarios and finds that "even the most bare-bones approach to extending broadband across the country will require funding -- and vendor cooperation -- far beyond what we see today."

Currently, about 12 percent of U.S. households, including those in some major metropolitan areas, have no access to broadband service, landing the U.S. 15th in broadband penetration worldwide.

 

The report examines four possible approaches to addressing the problem: an ultra-cost-conscious "Discount" option, a use-what's-in-place "Duct Tape" method, a "Pragmatic" middle-of-the-road approach and an all-fiber-to-the-home "Gold-Plated" scenario.

 

According to Yankee officials, all reach the Anywhere goal of at least one broadband connection per home, but "at a minimum, they all require unprecedented vendor cooperation and regulatory foresight."

Achieving ubiquitous broadband in the U.S. "will hasten economic recovery and put the nation back where it belongs in terms of technology leadership, but it will take a concerted effort on the part of all stakeholders," claims Vince Vittore, principal analyst at Yankee Group and author of the report.

 

Vittore said the research shows that "a minimum of $24 billion is required, and that's only if networks are deployed in the most efficient manner and much of the middle-mile infrastructure already is in place. While the stimulus is a good start, it's just that: a start."

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Bob Geldof's rather overlooked 1995 Vegetarians of Love. Not a great album, not even as good, maybe, as his unfortunately forgotten Boomtown Rats material, but a sturdy album, pleasant melodies and fun lyrics, a nice change of pace for a work morning:

"Hanging out" for teens today isn't what you and First Coffee remembered it as, where you actually, you know, saw people. Live people. Where you, like, talked and punched each other's shoulders. Today Facebook, instant messaging and texting qualifies as "hanging out."

 

Hey it's not all bad -- you don't have to wonder if they're out smashing up your car.

 

But they do tend to share personal information that makes them vulnerable for identity theft. "Scam artists are relying on teens to be impulsive and naive," say officials of National Protect Your Identity Week, who evidently have teens of their own.

 

To that end officials of N.P.Y.I.W. -- October 17-24 -- offers some safety tips for teenagers when online, to "protect their identity and their financial future when it's time to apply for that first credit card or buy that first car."

 

And to keep you from having to co-sign the loan:

First, don't give out your numbers. Social security number, driver's license number, debit card, phone card, insurance card, library card, medical ID card, or credit card, none. There's no good reason a friend needs to have this information transmitted online.

Don't post your personal information online. "Nearly 50 percent of Facebook users put enough personal information--including full name, full date of birth, address, phone number, or school--to enable thieves to fill out credit card applications," Week officials say.

Don't participate in e-mail or social networking quizzes. "These seemingly fun personality quizzes can access your personal profile information -- your religion, political affiliation, wall posts--that could be used against you," they warn. So just for the record, so you don't have to take them, you were Robespierre in a previous life, your ideal pet is a Golden Retriever, you're "Beat It" and if you were a cast member on Seinfeld you'd have been Kramer.

Don't be specific about where you are or where you are going. "Naming your school, sports team, clubs, or where you work could leave a trail for an identity thief," Week officials say.


 

Other Facebook tips: "Set your profile to 'private.' Be in control of who can view your content. Only add people you know to your Friends list. A friend of a friend might not be someone you know."

Week officials also recommend using a different, isolated e-mail just for social networking instead of the "trusted" e-mail you use to communicate directly with people you know you can trust.

They also recommend against accessing social networking sites or e-mail from public Internet connections or public computers.

 

And in a particularly wise piece of advice, they urge teens to "be selective about what pictures you text or post on your page. Is it a photo you would want your parents to see? Treat your Internet activity like a digital tattoo. Once you post something, it cannot be taken back. Even if you erase the posting, there are cached versions and backups on servers across the country."

 

Just imagine your Senate confirmation hearings. Would you want that picture to come up there?

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CRM and ERP vendor Consona Corporation has announced the general availability of Consona Knowledge Management Version 7.3, described by company officials as "a KCS Verified v4 product featuring analytics powered by QlikView business intelligence software."

Most knowledge management tools are sold as modules, Consona officials note, saying "we built our product around that concept that knowledge shouldn't happen in isolation, or be an afterthought."

 
"In the past, Web transaction logs, especially from busy self-service sites, have made it virtually impossible to look at knowledge trends," Consona officials say, adding that knowledge management initiatives are "long-term programs -- you may achieve a fast return on investment, but they also grow, evolve, and even decline relatively slowly."

 

Tim Hines, vice president of product management for Consona's CRM products, says QlikView was developed "to make long-term analytics practical reality, even for the highest-volume customer support sites."

 

The result, Hines says, is "simplicity itself: visibility into data that gives program managers the ability to see the long-term trends with the ability to change their view in real time."

The tool can also analyze support cases and knowledge together, Consona officials say, explaining that v7.3 "combines customer self-service behavioral data, traditional knowledge management, and uses case tracking to answer questions.

QlikTech is a business intelligence vendor offering a BI offering that can be deployed on premise, in the cloud, or on a laptop or mobile device.


 

Consona is jointly owned by Battery Ventures VI and Thoma Bravo.

...

 

United Marketing Group has opened a new Customer Service Operations Center in Itasca, Illinois described by group officials as a "secure, 63,000 square foot, 200 seat facility housing a secure PCI Level 1 Gateway" for payment card processing.

The call center was a joint investment by UMG and its sister company, Teleformix. It was designed from inception to be flexible and expandable, UMG officials say, adding that the facility was formerly occupied by GE Money, a retail finance program provider. 

The Customer Service Operations Center operates 24x7 and includes customer support, operations and network or physical security personnel. A call center application built by Teleformix records both the agent's voice and computer screen to capture the transaction for validation, evaluation, quality assurance and compliance: "Advanced call tracking provides agents with access to a complete customer transaction history" as well.

"Giving our customer service representatives this kind of information is the first and the best opportunity to make a good impression," says Alan Portelli, CEO & President of United Marketing Group.

A 2009 study by CFI found quick issue resolution is "paramount" to the success of the contact center. "Strong processes and highly skilled agents lead to resolved issues -- which makes for happier, more loyal customers," say UMG officials commenting on the study. 

"Many of our CSRs have been with the company for more than five years. All our customer service representatives are KPI managed using technologies that eliminate opinion and bias to maintain customer service," says Portelli.

...

Teradata has introduced a business product called Teradata Contact Center Intelligence for Telecommunications based on Microsoft's business intelligence technologies.

 

It's designed to bring together "the Microsoft family of business intelligence products" with direct connectivity to the Teradata enterprise data warehouse system, Teradata officials say, to provide "access to customer experience information and query response."

 

This new product lets contact center managers and business analysts examine company data from all service channels, outside vendors and other enterprise data sources to "understand both current operations and trends over time," according to company officials, who say it's designed to run on the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse, Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance, Teradata Extreme Data Appliance or the Teradata Data Mart Appliance.

"As customers continue to use more communications channels, carriers need help in integrating service information across those channels in order improve the customer experience. Of course, they have to reduce contact center costs at the same time," notes Sheryl Kingstone, senior analyst, Yankee Group. 

The cost of operating a telecommunications contact center environment can be significant, ranging from $100,000 to a more than a billion dollars annually. This being the case, company officials say, "even small performance improvements can have a multi-million dollar impact, resulting in a rapid payback on a carrier's investment."

"Contact center reporting has traditionally been provided by the operational systems in the call center. However, traditional methods of analysis are becoming obsolete as customers may try three or more channels before reaching an agent," says David Grant, vice president of industry solutions for communications, media, entertainment and utilities, Teradata Corporation.

...

Every once in a while along comes a company news headline that demands to be included in First Coffee. Today we saw another one: "Humans Replacing Computers."

Steve Levenson, founder of Global Telecom Testing, says that the idea for the company came when he heard that a global teleconferencing company was losing clients because the international numbers assigned to its customers were flawed.

 

He contends that most telecom companies rely on the local telephone companies in cities abroad to confirm numbers are operational, which is, he says, a bad idea: "More often than not, even though the overseas' local telephone company confirms a number is operational, the number doesn't work."

"GTT was founded specifically to address the lack of worldwide live in-country telephone number testing on behalf of telecom companies, before they release international numbers to their clients," Levenson said. "Only humans -- not computers -- can perform these tests by placing live, in-country,outbound originating calls to and from the exact numbers that the telco's clients will be calling."

The company's employees, located in 80 countries, test numbers before they are released to clients "to ensure they are operational," Levenson says, adding that they also "listen to the message participants will hear, note if instructions are in the appropriate language, and test the access codes and the quality of the audio."

 

What usually happens, Levenson says, is that if a telecom client needs international numbers in Singapore, a computer at a U.S. telecom company office tests the numbers from a switch in the U.S. to a switch somewhere close to Singapore. Then "if the switch-to-switch trial works, the numbers are released to the client. However, this rudimentary testing is inaccurate and not indicative of working numbers in Singapore."

The only way to 100 percent verify that international telephone numbers are functioning in any city is to perform live, in-country tests in those cities and locations, Levenson says.

Prospective customers get a free trial with live testing in two or three countries. "We're so confident in our services that we offer potential clients a two-day trial test to demonstrate the effectiveness of our comprehensive process."

...

Sorrento Networks, a vendor of metro optical access products, is releasing an 8Gbit/second Fibre Channel card for its GigaMux 1600/3200, an optical transport system supporting a variety of wavelength division multiplexing architectures.

 

The new card enables high-bandwidth connectivity of storage area networks between data centers and meets new bandwidth demands driven by cloud computing applications like storage virtualization.

"We're seeing an insatiable demand for I/O availability between data centers that only 8 Gigabit Fibre Channel and 10 Gigabit Ethernet can satisfy," said Jim Nevelle, CEO of Sorrento Networks, adding that the product is a way for their customers to "double their SAN connectivity horsepower without a major overhaul to their data centers."

By deploying 8Gbit/s Fibre Channel, IT managers can free up server interfaces that would otherwise be allocated for multiple 4Gbit/s or 2Gbit/s connections, Sorrento officials say, thereby "collapsing the number of servers needed to deliver the same processing power and connectivity. Fewer servers mean reductions in data center operations costs such as rental space and utilities."

The product also offers complete wavelength availability for XFP-based version, client-side interfaces based on SFP+ form factor for maximum SAN switch compatibility, full reshaping, regeneration and retiming capability for reliable transport of services. The card is fully supported in all GigaMux 3234, 3217, and 1608 chassis.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a nice discovery, Angela Easterling's Earning Her Wings album. Solid traditional country songwriting, a beguiling vocal and obvious passion in the performances. What more could a Friday morning need?

Thanks to Glympse, IPhone users can now "visually share their location with anyone around the globe" for free. Evidently the newest version of the app uses maps included in the 3.0 OS and a new Twitter feed sharing option.

Bryan Trussel, co-founder and CEO of Glympse, said that while other location sharing apps "require users to create another social network, which is unappealing to most people because the reality is there are very few people in our lives who we want to know where we are, all the time." The man has a point; supply your own hellish scenario here.

 

So with Glympse, users to define a limited time period of up to four hours during which their location will be shared, making Glympse appropriate not only for family and friends but also coworkers, existing social networks and even mere acquaintances."

And yes, Twitter junkies, you can post your location to your account. Relax.

All that is needed to receive a Glympse is a Web-enabled phone or computer. 

"The possibilities are endless," company officials say, suggesting that now when you let others know you're stuck in traffic and running late you can actually prove you're not lying. You can also "allow your teenager to check in on Friday night without feeling as if they are being followed," giving them another reason to "forget" their phone when they go out.

 

Glympse can be downloaded for free on the iPhone and iPod touch from Apple's App Store. Caveat: On devices without GPS, like the iPod touch and non 3G iPhones, the Glympse experience "can be less than optima," company officials say, "since it uses WiFi triangulation to identify location, which is typically less accurate than GPS and not always available."

First Coffee can vouch for that: We tried it on our iPod Touch here in New Zealand and it couldn't even locate us. No doubt it'll work better on a GPS -enabled device.

...

Jefferson County CYF, the division of Children, Youth and Families, a 24/7 investigator of child abuse and neglect allegations, estimates it will save more than $100,000 annually using TeleNav Track, a cell phone-based GPS navigation and tracking service.

In 2008, the organization responded to more than 6,000 calls of concern. Its social workers travel throughout Colorado, and appreciate the TeleNav Track's turn-by-turn GPS directions -- and being able to save the location for future visits.

Since implementing TeleNav Track and accessing the information directly on their mobile phones, Jefferson County CYF estimates that each caseworker is saving an average of one hour per week.

Prior to implementing TeleNav Track, Jefferson County's caseworkers would depend on calling local police within their jurisdiction to come to a location when a situation escalated. However, employees would often call for police support too late. The organization determined it needed a safety system put into place that would be appropriate and effective for situations a caseworker might face.

Jefferson County CYF officials say the system lets supervisors track the location of caseworkers, how long they were on each site, and their last location should the caseworker lose contact for an extended period of time. Caseworkers can easily report a problem by pressing designated "hot keys," generating emails that are issued to a pre-determined group alerting management that the employee is in trouble or in an uncomfortable situation.

...

SAP AG has reported an uptake of utility companies adopting SAP AMI Integration for Utilities software in 2009. The offering, introduced in May 2009, is billed as a tool to help utility companies integrate their metering processes with their back-end systems, "providing end-to-end clarity into energy usage patterns."

 

"The push toward smart grids by the utilities industry calls for new technology and IT infrastructure," SAP officials say, adding that the deployment of smart meters "will impact utility processes and require flexible business operations and IT systems that can adapt to changes."

The modernization of networks through deployment of smart meters "comes hand-in-hand with operational challenges," according to SAP officials: "SAP is addressing these challenges by linking metering, back-end operations, customer service and billing processes."

Using the system, smart meters provide real-time information about energy consumption and enable communication between a utility company and its customers. As for finding a way to make efficient use of the large amounts of data collected by the meters, the product lets utility companies integrate the collected data with business processes such as those included in SAP Business Suite.

...

Boise, Idaho-based CradlePoint Technology, which sells 3G and 4G networking products, has announced the launch of a new product line, the All Connected Business Series, aimed at the small to medium office market.

 

The debut product in the series is a new business-class router, the MBR1200 Failsafe Gigabit N Router, evidently named by a latent Guns N Roses fan, to provide availability to users of both traditional wired networks and wireless networks using 3G and/or 4G services.

As the name might suggest, the MBR1200 has a built-in failsafe feature that senses when the wired Internet connection has been disrupted and fails over to either a 3G or 4G service. Once the wired Internet service has been restored, the MBR1200 will then fail back to the wired Internet service.

The MBR1200 Failsafe Gigabit N Router is available now with an MSRP of $299.99.

...

Chicago-based Intelestream, an open source CRM consultancy and developers of intelecrm, has released a fully functional 30 day free trial of intelecrm.

Intelecrm is an on demand CRM product for small and medium sized businesses with a pricing structure which charges subscribers according to the quantity of records and data storage used, rather than the number of users accessing the system.

 

Intelestream has also used a "pay-for-what-you-need" approach, where customers are billed for only the features and add-ons they require. Obviously this is tailored for small businesses on a budget. Basic edition pricing for the product with unlimited users starts at $20 per month.

 

"Intelecrm is our response to what small and medium sized companies have told us was missing from the CRM market," said VP of Consulting Services for Intelestream, Ray Stoeckicht, a guy who has never heard "can you spell that, please?"

 
Intelestream was founded in 2006 by former employees of SugarCRM as a professional services firm concentrating on open source CRM implementations and customizations. 

"The application is designed as an affordable, turn-key CRM product that can be customized according to individual requirement," Stoeckicht said, adding that an Internet connection and Web browser are "all that is needed to use the application."

...

Peterborough, New Hampshire-based Kennedy Consulting Research & Advisory has released research detailing the failure of traditional Customer Relationship Management technologies to act as the proverbial silver bullet for improving customer interactions, and how that has led to the rise of Customer Strategy and Interaction consulting.

The report, "Customer Strategy and Interaction Consulting Marketplace 2009-2012: Key Trends, Profiles and Forecasts," defines the "burgeoning" CSI practice area as "the definition of customer-centric strategic goals and execution of operations processes that leverage information technology to capitalize on customer insight."

 

That and the desire to get a cool TV show named after it. "CSI - Peterborough!"

 

This services evolution is evidenced by consulting practices centered on the concept of the "customer," which include market strategy, customer insight, experience, and strategy and pricing and customer segmentation.

Clients pursuing these services, in particular, should check out capabilities before committing to a provider, company officials say: Erick Burchfield, Associate Director, Kennedy Consulting Research & Advisory and lead analyst, said as an emerging market, "CSI consulting comprises a relatively small portion of the global consulting market, yet demand is expected to grow approximately three times faster than the overall market over the 2008-2012 forecast period."

 

Kennedy's research found that the CSI consulting market is highly fragmented -- "one in which both large, multinational firms and niche firms have a stake. Larger firms tend to focus on customer-facing technology."

 

Research analysts say that there is "significant opportunity" for niche firms to capture market share from large, global practices, "particularly when it comes to the soft side of CSI, such as customer experience management."

Firms horning in on the CSI market include the usual suspects -- Accenture, A.T. Kearney, Bain, Deloitte, Fujitsu America, IBM, McKinsey & Company, The Boston Consulting Group, Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, et al.

The research also details the competitive landscape, including top-five ratings by practice type -- global, niche, customer strategy, pricing, customer interaction management, marketing sales and service management, customer-based IT enablement, and customer intelligence (data) services.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Sinatra's Swingin' Session!!!, the hardest-swinging record he made. You know that lost, weird feeling you get when you haven't listened to Sinatra for a few days? Me neither:

Convergys Corporation has announced that three global companies in the services and technology industries have renewed contracts for Convergys HR Solutions.

These "human resources outsourcing" contract renewals, Convergys officials say, range from one to five years in length, and during that period are expected to generate total revenue of more than $25 million.

According to the terms of the most involved deal, Convergys will continue to provide workforce management and HR administration services, including recruitment, on boarding, absence management, and leave administration for over 60,000 North American employees of "a business services company," company officials say,

Another deal covers benefits administration and support for a company with 70,000 employees, and the third is a one-year renewal for payroll technology and systems supporting 18,000 US-based employees of a global technology company.

 

John Gibson, Convergys President, Human Resources Management, described the contract renewals as "testament to the hard work and dedication of both our clients and Convergys employees."

Convergys has clients in over 70 countries and 35 languages and 70,000 employees of their own in 82 customer contact centers and other facilities in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, as well as global headquarters in Cincinnati.

...

 

Rocket Technology Labs, developer of the Rocketvox unified communications platform, has announced the release of Rocketvox Beta, available by request.

Company officials bill the product as "one place to view and manage all of your communications streams with channels for any POP or IMAP e-mail, VoIP, voicemail, visual voicemail, voicemail-to-text, Twitter, and Facebook accounts."

In other words, your one-stop shop for all your "social media." What a boon for ADD Web surfers out there, sharply reducing mousewear. There's also a cross channel address book for "the Internet and mobile devices."

Rocketvox Beta's user interface is being released as an Adobe AIR application that runs on Mac OS, Windows, or Linux. To deliver voice apps the company has partnered with VoIP and voicemail providers Ribbit and PhoneTag for their platforms. Rocketvox Beta comes with encryption, back up, and non-repudiation into Rocketvox Beta.

...

Boomi and Model Metrics, a vendor of cloud computing services, have announced that they have helped Global Forex centralize its customer data from disparate systems.

Global Forex, a financial services company, used Boomi AtomSphere, an integration Platform-as-a-Service, to -- wait for it -- integrate customer data from its customer-facing Web services to Salesforce CRM.

 

Global Forex chose Boomi because of its "ease-of-use, speed of implementation, cost effectiveness and the advantage of being connected to the AtomSphere network," according to Boomi officials.

Tom Fox, Salesforce Operations Manager, Global Forex, cited the advantages of Boomi's "single dashboard of customer data... with AtomSphere, we were able to eliminate 95 percent of our previous ongoing integration costs, and we now have a transparent platform that lets us analyze customer data in real-time."

Model Metrics implemented the project between Boomi and Global Forex, connecting the Boomi AtomSphere to migrate data from Global Forex's Web services and on-premise applications to Salesforce CRM. This involved thousands of transactions managed by Excel spreadsheets and transferred manually between systems -- "a process that drained resources and prohibited in-depth analysis and planning," Model Metrics officials said.

...

Elizabethtown Gas in New Jersey has dedicated its new Customer Care Call Center with a ribbon cutting ceremony and tour of the facility. The Center, located on Green Lane, in Union, N.J., brings more than 50 jobs to the area.

Jodi Gidley, president, Elizabethtown Gas, said the center "reinforces our commitment to the community by adding jobs to the local economy."

 

Yeah First Coffee realizes this flies dangerously close to P.R. fluff, but anybody creating 50 jobs in today's economy, with unemployment flirting with ten percent, gets a shout-out. You go, Elizabethtown Gas. Anybody else who creates 50 American jobs in this sector who wants a tip of the coffee pot please, feel free to let us know. We like to Do Our Part.

The new Customer Care Center will serve the utility's more than 273,000 residential, commercial and industrial natural gas customers.

In addition to the new Customer Care Call Center, Elizabethtown Gas announced the donation of $120,000 to energy assistance programs. The money will be available through various social service agencies to help qualified customers pay their winter heating bills.

Elizabethtown Gas, in operation since 1855, is a wholly owned subsidiary of AGL Resources and sells a natural gas delivery service to approximately 273,000 residential, business and industrial natural gas customers in New Jersey. Atlanta-based energy services company AGL Resources serves approximately 2.3 million customers in six states.

...

Infusionsoft, which positions itself as a vendor of automatic follow-up software for small businesses, has announced that its all-in-one marketing automation tool will be part of the "Start, Run & Grow Your Business" package from Palo Alto Software.

The package itself is billed as a way to enable entrepreneurs to build and grow their businesses "from the ground up."

Basically the product lets users put their marketing and customer follow-up on "autopilot," company officials say, for those who think that's a good thing, so that they can "focus their energies on growing their business."

 

The tool does this by combining sales and marketing technologies into one automated system geared to small businesses with 25 employees or fewer, including e-commerce, CRM and e-mail marketing: "Entrepreneurs with new businesses will be able to set up a streamlined, efficient system for automated marketing, interacting with prospects and eliciting customer feedback about their products or services," company officials say.

Dave Lee, vice president of business development at Infusionsoft, said the company offers marketing suite "for the true small business, and we have over 400 customers."

Sabrina Parsons, CEO of Palo Alto Software, said they'll include Infusionsoft with their "packaged array of best-of-breed products."

Other programs in SRG include software for bookkeeping, timesheet management, project management, storing passwords, creating press releases, doing payroll and taxes.

"Start, Run & Grow Your Business" is available now in Target stores nationwide. It will be available at Amazon, Fry's, Costco.com, J&R, Apple and other retail outlets soon.

Infusionsoft is a privately held company based in Gilbert, Arizona and funded by Mohr Davidow Ventures and vSpring Capital.

Marketing and small business insight from the Infusionsoft team can be found on the Infusionsoft blog at and the Infusionsoft Twitter feed at www.twitter.com/infusionsoft.

...

Advebs, Inc. -- wonder what my spell checker's going to say about that one -- which sells cloud platform applications for sales and marketing applications, has announced the launch of Flowlett, described by company officials as a cloud-based Proposal Management System.

It's designed to bring together features of various systems -- document management, workflow management, project management, electronic signatures and Facebook-style commenting into a single system needing "little to no training requirements."

Company officials say the product can route proposals to recipients for reviews, comments, online approvals and electronic signatures: "The routing can be in any order -- one person after the other, many simultaneously or any combination thereof. This routing can also be changed while the proposal is en route to recipients."

It can keep track of deadlines and do follow-ups automatically. All proposals are stored in a secure vault and access to them is logged in an audit trail log.

"It's vitally important now more than ever, to continually stay on top of proposals that are in the pipeline, and to reduce any logistical friction that may exist for customers to accept proposals," says Ramesh Pai, founder & CEO, Advebs.

Flowlett is a stand-alone product, but it can "complement and extend the functionality of traditional CRM systems like Salesforce.com, Oracle's Siebel and Microsoft CRM," company officials say, with its REST-based APIs. Plays well with SharePoint too.

Pricing starts at $15 per user per month. There are no contracts with the Standard Plan and all new Accounts get a free 30 day trial.

Fonded in late 2008, Advebs is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. and has a presence in London. It's currently seed (angel) funded.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is an iTunes play list arising from a Facebook discussion as to what the most listenable songs in our collections were -- the ones you can listen to over and over and over until your wife slams your office door shut. First Coffee came up with twelve. Current song: Bob Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again." Last song: Brook Benton's "Rainy Night In Georgia." Next song: The Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset," quite possibly the most beautiful song written in the rock era. On deck: Mundy's "Galway Girl:"

Calgary-based Cognera, which sells billing and customer management tools, says more companies in the utilities industry should consider the Software as a Service model.

 

More widely accepted in industries outside utilities, particularly prevalent in industries like telecom and financial services, the SaaS model is good if you want an IT that can both quickly adapt to tech upgrades and demands without large scale infrastructure investments.

"Many utilities are cautiously awaiting direction and regulation from Washington regarding technology upgrades, particularly in the area of helping consumers understand behavioral best practices for cleaner energy consumption," says Frank Hoogendoorn, Executive Vice President of Business Solutions for Cognera. "We are offering a solution to small to medium sized utilities who are not dealing with large capital upgrade budgets, but are equally concerned with meeting technology requirements."

 

In other words, nobody has any idea what new regulations are going to come sailing down the pike, so a tech model where there's not a whole lot that'll need to be ripped out and replaced should a senator decide to vote this way or that might be a good bet.

According to tech research firm Gartner, quoted by industry tech analysts the way fantasy baseball geeks quote Bill James, SaaS offerings are emerging as important security tools, "especially for cost-sensitive and highly distributed business and computing environments." That's from their "Cool Vendors in Software-as-a-Service Security, 2009" report, by Ray Wagner, et al, March 17, 2009.

 

SaaS products do give a company reliable cost forecasting, immediate access to the latest 'n' greatest upgrades, bells and whistles, but they're mostly making money because many companies simply don't want the hassle of maintaining an in-house IT department. It's one of those "if you don't have to, don't bother" decisions.

...

InContact, which sells on-demand contact center software and agent optimization tools, has announced that a provider of performance products for the casualty claims industry will be using inContact's product "with Salesforce.com for its multiple call centers."

"More and more companies are seeing the benefits of layering the inContact product over their existing phone system and using the inContact integration with on-demand CRMs like Salesforce.com," says Paul Jarman, inContact CEO. With the performance and enhancements these two products and companies bring to one another, we expect to see more and more customers utilize the integration."

The integration of the two products is supposed to let agents and managers work through a single user interface to resolve customer calls and run reports. And because both applications are cloud-based technologies, InContact officials maintain, companies using inContact and Salesforce.com "see a minimal cash outlay, a quantifiable return on investment, a reduced maintenance burden and a pay-as-you-go model."

...

Quantivo, a vendor on-demand Behavioral Analytics, has announced that the company's SaaS application is powering Behavioral Analytics across 7.6 billion transaction records for a single customer.

 

The odds that yours are in there somewhere: High.

 

Evidently that's some sort of milestone marking Quantivo's "ability to deliver answers for unrestrained ad-hoc analysis," according to company officials.

"We are proud to see a customer analyzing this vast amount of data," says Paul O'Leary, CTO at Quantivo, noting that his company's approach to analytics is used by their customers who are "analyzing anywhere from 10 million to more than seven billion records."

With more business data being generated every day, especially from Web sites, social networks, and online marketing activities, it is becoming even more difficult for companies to pick out the important trends amidst the mountains of data, to separate the wheat from the chaff and put the beer and diapers together.

 

Companies' data analysis appetites can no longer be satisfied with costly, decades-old relational database technologies," declared O'Leary.

 

Quantivo officials say they use the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure, which is used by retailers, media companies and B2B corporations to try to get answers to customer behavior questions. "

...

SafeHarbor Technology has said that SmartSupport, its managed Web Self Service contact center product, will come with a Return on Investment Guarantee.

 

"There are so many priorities in business, and so few guarantees that a product will perform," correctly notes Dianne West, Vice President Sales.

 

Through December 31, 2009, SafeHarbor Technology officials say, they will guarantee "a complete return on investment within 12 months of deployment" or they will refund the difference.

 

In order to qualify for SafeHarbor's guaranteed ROI program, customers must meet minimum contact center volumes and mutually agreed upon key performance indicators.

"SmartSupport is one of the best products on the market. Over our ten year history we have consistently delivered a positive ROI to our customers in the first year. None of our competitors, such as RightNow or InQuira, are able to offer such a guarantee," says Greg Clark, President of SafeHarbor Technology, talking smack and naming names.
 
SafeHarbor Technology Corporation, founded in 1998, is a Washington-based corporation with clients such as American Airlines, IBM, State of Washington, SunTrust Banks, Sprint, TiVo and T-Mobile.

...

That WiMAX has struggled to establish a foothold in the mature broadband markets of Europe, North America and Asia is probably too well-known to need a rehash here, and a recent study explores the question of whether there might even be a chance for WiMAX in the emerging markets.

In Ovum's recent report "WiMAX in emerging markets: the opportunity assessed," Ovum finds that "the confluence of several factors including technology cost, coverage, vendor support and service provider choices will limit WiMAX to only a niche technology in the emerging markets."

 

Seeing so many reports whose sunny outlooks aren't always equally merited by the actual research, it's refreshing for First Coffee to see a report examine an issue and say you know, this might not work out the way you want. Adds a bit of credibility, you know?

 

Basically Ovum sees WiMAX's meal ticket as being part of established fixed and mobile operators' broader broadband access portfolios, never the main course.

Angel Dobardziev, Ovum's Practice Leader, stresses that there will be lots of WiMAX networks, however low the uptake: "Two thirds of the 300+ WiMAX networks globally are in the emerging markets of Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Latin America," she points out.

 

Dobardziev says WiMAX will remain a niche broadband technology in emerging markets -- "we forecast that WiMAX will account for less than five percent of the 1.5 billion fixed and mobile broadband access connections in emerging markets by 2014."

 

The stubborn fact remains that emerging market WiMAX operators still count their subscribers in thousands, or tens of thousands, rather than the hundreds of thousands they planned to have at this stage. Scartel in Russia is the first WiMAX operator in the emerging markets to even hit 100,000 subscribers, and second place, Packet One in Malaysia, has but 80,000.

 

Why is this? Dobardziev suggests that WiMAX is not competitive against fixed or mobile broadband alternatives in most urban areas of emerging markets -- where virtually all existing WiMAX rollouts are -- on either coverage or price.

 

It's certainly not a mass market-affordable technology either: "On a non-subsidised basis, it is currently priced and positioned as a broadband option only for businesses or wealthy consumers," Dobardziev says, citing the cost of customer equipment "where both DSL and HSPA outperform WiMAX with significantly greater economies of scale."

Ovum expects the growth, funding and margins pressures to lead to large-scale consolidation among WiMAX service providers in the next two to three years as well.

...

TargusInfo, a caller name provider, has announced that Onvoy Voice Services, a Zayo Group company, has renewed a multi-year agreement to provide caller name services.

 

The agreement provides Onvoy with both CNAM services and storage, company officials say, adding that the idea is to make CNAM listings more accessible to nationwide providers.

"Offering caller identification services with the widest coverage and accuracy is a necessity for providers of all types and sizes," says Fritz Hendricks, president, Onvoy Voice Services. 

"For many providers, attempting to keep up with the rapid changes in CNAM data in 2009 is like trying to take a sip from a fire hydrant through a straw," said George Moore, CEO and chairman, TargusInfo, adding that their CNAM repository of more than 410 million CNAM records sourced by telecommunications companies allows such benefits as standardized display, flexible pricing model and multiple connectivity options.

TargusInfo is a privately held company headquartered in Vienna, Virginia. Onvoy Voice Services is headquartered in Minnesota.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Miles Davis's mind-blowing Tribute to Jack Johnson. Music biz rumor is that Davis wanted Jimi Hendrix as guitarist for these 1970 sessions, but it's hard to imagine he could've done much better than John McLaughlin did. The producer grabbed Herbie Hancock, who just happened to be walking through the building on other business that day, to play keyboards, and the first track that appears on the album is the one where Davis himself showed up at the studio after the other musicians had started playing:

Cherwell Software, a vendor of ITIL and Pink Elephant Verified IT Service Management software, has announced what company officials are calling a "unique and innovative guarantee and licensing structure."

 

And there you thought you'd seen all the guarantee and licensing structures there were.

The vendor's offering both the SaaS on-demand and the on-premise options, both allow multiple users to access the licenses. In addition, the software has the ability to reserve licenses for specific individuals for continual access.

"We've found our customers have a hard time determining the number of concurrent licenses they may need because the industry has long had a restrictive and costly 'named license' approach," says Vance Brown, Cherwell CEO, adding that his company's approach of "concurrent licensing combined with our 60-day guarantee, allows an organization to find the optimal ROI balance of needed licenses in the first 60-days of deployment." 

Headquartered in Colorado Springs, Cherwell Software was founded and is run by the former CEO of FrontRange Solutions, the former Chief Architect of FrontRange's HEAT and ITSM product lines, and the original founder and past CEO of the Help Desk Institute.

...

Good news or bad news, depending on your point of view: A study recently released by the Partnership for Public Service finds there will soon be "a considerable increase" in new government jobs.

 

The study attributes the coming increase to a variety of factors including stimulus spending, turnover and "increased demand in expanding areas such as homeland security."

 

The study thinks there'll be 273,000 new hires in positions deemed "mission critical" by the fall of 2012.

Evidently government "medical jobs" are going to lead the way, as the study's calling for 54,000 over the next three years. Overall, however, there will be taxpayer-funded sinecures for paralegals and biological science experts, border patrol agents and engineers, IT experts and accountants.

Taxpayers are also going to be on the hook for loan repayment of up to $10,000 per year (totaling $60,000 in exchange for a minimum of three years of service) for the expansion of the government payroll, recruitment bonuses, and relocation incentives. 

The Partnership for Public Service is a Washington, D.C.- based -- surprised? -- group founded in 2001 by Samuel J. Heyman "in an effort to restore prestige to government service."

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Telecom New Zealand has recently gone live with a product from Opengear letting them access and manage network and telecom equipment in their Network Integration Lab in the national capital, Wellington.

 

It includes a couple console management appliances, Opengear KCS6000 and IM4200, deployed as two distributed clusters, supporting access from up to 1000 external specialist engineers and administrators.

Telecom officials say Prophecy Networks and Opengear worked with them to "fine-tune" the product, "something that was not forthcoming from the vendor" of the previous management product."

"Although the Opengear did not initially fulfill our needs out-of-the-box, their engineers were dedicated to modifying the operational software" for Telecom's requirements," said Dave Shaw from the Network Integration Lab, "at a reduced cost when compared to the existing vendor."

Telecom's Network Integration Lab in Wellington is used for the creation and testing of new products such as routers, switches, DSL concentrators or VoIP gateways, as well as voice, data, and video services prior to release onto live networks. It's also used by its vendors to undertake proof of concept testing against models of Telecom's networks.

The Telecom NIL is used by our vendors to undertake proof of concept testing against the model of the network, allowing for rigorous testing of concepts before releasing them live on a network. The sales teams can also use The NIL as a demonstration and sales support center.

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NewBay has announced LifeCache Smart Address Book 2.0, what company officials are billing as a "converged social address book offering for carriers."

 

It's basically a white-label address book that syncs, merges and updates contacts and dynamic content from multiple sources, storing it in the cloud. It "creates a single unified view of everyone you know -- including all phone contacts, e-mail addresses, instant messaging buddies and social networking friends," according to New Bay officials.

 

"Interacting with contacts becomes an engaging experience for the user, resulting in increased voice and messaging traffic for carriers," said Nagappan Arunachalam, CMO at NewBay Software.

 

First Coffee isn't sure how it normally is for others, but would classify interaction with contacts as engaging enough with the current technology. Ah, maybe we just don't know what we're missing.

 

"We believe carriers are positioned to provide the social address book service... and a range of communication options and ensure that users on any connected device are only a click away from their digital lifestyle cloud services," New Bay officials say. The product imports contacts from multiple sources including Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, LinkedIn, and consolidate contacts into a single view.

LifeCache SAB 2.0 also has a Web-interface and "handset client experience."

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G2iX has unveiled the Morph CloudServer, described by company officials as an appliance using open standards to create custom Platform as a Service environments -- for "developing and deploying software on a massive scale."

The idea, company officials say, was to give businesses a way to "pilot new ideas, facilitate global expansion, and decrease time to market." The market opportunity they see here is the one Gartner Research VP Phil Dawson talked about when he said "for now, private cloud computing will not just be a viable term, it will be a significant strategic investment for most large organizations" recently.

 

"Cloud computing for the enterprise is about efficiency," says Winston Damarillo, founder and CEO of G2iX.

 

According to Dawson, through 2012, "more than 75 percent of organizations' use of cloud computing will be devoted to very large data queries, short-term massively parallel workloads, or IT use by startups with little to no IT infrastructure."

The Morph CloudServer is a customizable private PaaS that can be tailored to match and support different development languages and frameworks. Company officials say it's designed with "a philosophy of fault tolerance, not fault avoidance."

 

"Cloud computing technology, such as the Filipino co-developed Morph CloudServer, provides emerging countries with affordable access to world-class ICT infrastructure," said Secretary Ray Anthony Roxas-Chua, secretary of the Philippines' Commission on Information and Communications Technology.

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OpSource is crediting the "enterprise demand for cloud efficiency" for "accelerating momentum for OpSource Cloud." The product was in private Beta until early October.

 

Emphasizing security, company officials say OpSource Cloud provides every user with a Virtual Private Cloud within the public Cloud, "allowing them to determine their own degree of Internet connectivity." 

 

"Virtual private clouds for the first time allow enterprises to put computing in the cloud and expose as little or as much of their virtual cloud domain as is appropriate to their needs," said Phil Wainewright, CEO, Procullux Ventures.

"The opportunity that exists for elastic cloud computing offerings to redefine the manner that users purchase and consume IT resources is huge," said Ted Chamberlin, research director, Gartner. "Enterprises have long realized that paying full price for an underused asset does not make financial sense and does not match the scale needs of many applications."

 

The idea behind infrastructure utility and cloud based offerings, Chamberlin explained, is to provide user control and flexibility to "change the enterprise mindset away from deploying capital to buying infrastructure services."

OpSource Cloud is designed to "allow IT departments to manage their security as they would within their internal IT infrastructure," company officials say, explaining that upon sign-up, each customer receives a Virtual Private Network and sets the degree of public Internet connectivity they wish to grant, from totally private to fully available.

 

Addressing security, Antonio Piraino, Research Director, Tier1 Research claims "there has been little evidence to date of cloud providers that are able to show that they can offer adequate levels of control and performance while at the same time offering the same or better levels of security than their current operating environment."

"Unlike the alternatives, OpSource Cloud enables enterprises to not only have cloud computing on their own terms, but have it in the cloud too."

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is that great old reliable standby, Creedence Clearwater Revival:

Nearly two in five employed U.S. online adults work from home at least one day a month, according to new research in the "The Telework and the Technologies Enabling Work Outside Corporate Walls" from the Consumer Electronics Association. 

 

First Coffee's a perfect one-for-one on that score.

 

The same study also found that "most teleworkers plan to spend at least $925 over the next year on technology products to help them work from home."

 

If that includes coffee and Diet Coke, then okay, we're jake there, too.

 

More than 38 million employed U.S. online adults, or 37 percent of the total U.S. workforce, work from home at least once a month, the study found, adding that "focusing on tasks without disruptions" and "running a business from home" are the top reasons given by employees for teleworking. 

 

The top benefits include flexible hours, reduced travel time and costs, fewer disruptions, greater productivity and "nobody checking up to see how long I play Minesweeper or goof off on Facebook." 

 

Ninety-eight percent of teleworkers use computer/IT technology such as PCs or printers. Ninety percent use communication technologies like cell phones and fax machines, and 75 percent use CE accessorie including surge protectors or laptop docking stations.

 

Only 98 percent? First Coffee would like to see a telework job that doesn't require a computer.

Working from home, according to Steve Koenig, CEA's director of industry analysis, means "employees believe their performance is enhanced and their quality of life improves."

According to the CEA study, teleworkers are often purchasing their own technology equipment required to work from home: "Only a third, 34 percent, have access to an employer-provided computer or other IT technology at home, and less than a third, 31 percent, have access to an employer-provided communication device, such as a phone or fax machine."

The "Telework and the Technologies Enabling Work Outside Corporate Walls" study just published was fielded in July 2009, and is free to CEA member companies. Non-members may purchase the study for $699.

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Voice CRM has added and certified Google Voice to work with the namesake CRM software system at www.VoiceCRM.com. 

 

"Now," company officials say, "Google Voice users will be able to use the CRM system fully integrated with their virtual Google Voice number, automating calls, and adding features such as scheduling calling and group or conference calling via the Voice CRM system."

 

Voice CRM officials argue that the use of VOIP, CRM and Google Voice all in one system "is a time save and can save money over traditional business phone systems or VOIP alone." Paired with the power of a fully functional CRM system with Google Voice automates sales, marketing and customer service.

The new voice integration was made through their technology partner, Telesocial, using the BitMouth application gateway and API, company officials say: "By adding the BitMouth gateway services from Telesocial, FreeCRM.com is able to use advanced voice and mobile technologies and extend these features to our existing CRM user base."

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Ignify, a CRM and ERP consulting firm and Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle Partner has announced an enhanced Contact Center platform for Microsoft's CRM Call Center Agent Desktop.

The new platform allows "customer service agents using Microsoft CRM to prioritize incidents and escalate those incidents for resolution with just one mouse click," company officials said, adding that "this capability greatly enhances first contact resolution while reducing cost per incident and most importantly improving overall customer satisfaction.

The contact center extension offers an approach to increase sales and handle greater client workloads without the need for additional personnel, company officials contend, by providing customer self-service capabilities and "an integrated agent desktop that ties together different applications and voice, chat and CRM information."

The extension integrates into existing Microsoft CRM deployments, with one touch management to the platform's core features, including "automatic classification of accounts to multiple tiers based on past sales volume, visualizing a sales funnel through probability and accurately forecasting future sales and assigning contacts and customers to various marketing lists among many others," according to Ignify officials.

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Ribbit, a BT company into communication services, has announced its Ribbit for Oracle CRM On Demand is now available via a public beta. 

 

In 2008, Ribbit was selected as a participant in the Oracle Inner Circle Program. Ribbit for Oracle connects mobile phone, Oracle CRM On Demand and e-mail with voice to text conversion. 

 

Officials at Ribbit feel, most likely correctly, that customers who use CRM to manage their business are "becoming even more dependent on" -- read: addicted to -- "mobile devices," so in their view it's "imperative that these sales and service organizations are empowered with technology to sell more and type less."

 

"Sell More, Type Less" -- First Coffee doesn't know a single sales pro who can't get behind that slogan.

With the Ribbit for Oracle product, calls, voicemail and voice memos flow into Oracle CRM On Demand along with text transcriptions. Users call in notes rather than type them. Inbound voice messages are organized into a user's CRM application so they can be managed like e-mail, "without wasting time dialing in to listen or worrying about messages being deleted."

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Microsoft has announced that several global enterprises have selected Microsoft Dynamics CRM for their relationship management, including Barclays Bank, Booz Allen Hamilton, the City of London, Hard Rock International, Maccabi Healthcare Services, Polaris Industries and Vodafone Iceland.

"In these challenging economic times, businesses need customer management that are fast, flexible and affordable, and that help them build stronger and deeper relationships with their customers," said Brad Wilson, general manager, Microsoft Dynamics CRM in a quote he could have lopped the first five words off. My friend, at all times those are pretty much the customer management products we need.

Barclays Bank, a consumer banking division in the United Arab Emirates, has seen a 15 percent improvement in customer satisfaction and has attributed Microsoft Dynamics CRM for a 22 percent drop in service costs per customer incident.

Booz Allen Hamilton, a strategy and technology consulting firm that licensed the 1 millionth Microsoft Dynamics CRM seat, is standardizing Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a platform to deliver relational line-of-business applications across the organization.

The City of London in the U.K. uses the power and flexibility of Microsoft Dynamics CRM as an xRM development platform for services such as event planning and voter management it provides to citizens, businesses and visitors.

Hard Rock International, home of the only decent burger this reporter was able to find on his last trip to Munich, uses Microsoft Dynamics CRM to reduce its customer inquiry response times from four days to just a few hours. Wonder what music they play when they put you on hold.

Maccabi Healthcare Services, a health care organization located in Israel, has implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Microsoft Office SharePoint as the center service application to provide response and information to its members.

Polaris Industries, a manufacturer of all-terrain vehicles, deployed a dealer self-service portal and realized efficiency gains up to 35 percent compared with previous processes.


 

And Vodafone Iceland exceeded its own first-time call resolution rates expectations of 95 percent while also increasing sales by 20 percent since implementing Microsoft Dynamics CRM for its sales and service teams.

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Cabinet NG, which sells document management and workflow software, has announced a partnership with Tigerpaw Software, a developer of IT business management software, to provide small and midsized companies with a way to manage business processes. 

 

Implementing Tigerpaw's CRM+ software and CNG's Shared Access Filing Environment offers a filing approach that provides "a comprehensive paperless office that scales with business growth," according to company officials.

Tigerpaw's CRM+ lets companies "across a wide spectrum of industries" track customers, streamline sales, improve marketing, optimize service, better control inventory, and more, company officials say: "This integration moves documents between CRM+ and CNG-SAFE without the need to keep and connect manual paper-based processes."

 

It's billed as a way to "transform disjointed documentation into efficient electronic workflows for any project."

 

As part of the process CNG Synchronizer adds and updates folders to an existing cabinet in CNG-SAFE by monitoring the Tigerpaw database for additions or changes to an account. When a new account is added in CRM+, a corresponding folder is automatically created in CNG-SAFE. 

 

Thereby folder index data is also updated in the event a change is made in Tigerpaw. "For example," company officials say, "if a customer gets a new phone number in CRM+, Synchronizer updates the corresponding CNG-SAFE folder index."

CNG Retriever monitors the "Account View" panel in CRM+ and allows the user to access documents filed in CNG-SAFE directly from the Tigerpaw application. 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is U2's Achtung Baby, in honor of the fact that First Coffee is evidently the only person on all of Facebook who doesn't get to see U2 on their current tour... okay, you can block Farmville and Mafia Wars and Easter Eggs and all the other annoying Facebook app notifications from your wall, can you block Insufferably Happy People Going To See U2 When You're Not notifications as well?

 

Anyway, catching up on some news you may have missed recently:

Here's what we in the business call a "catchy" lede -- that's how we in the biz misspell "lead," too -- in a press release from HulloMail:

 

"The story of billionaire Warren Buffet's failure to receive a timely voice mail message from Barclays Capital chairman Bob Diamond pleading for help with the Lehman Brothers bailout has been fodder for the international news and blogger community this past week."

 

Guess First Coffee's gone off his fodder, didn't hear much about that. "If only the Oracle of Omaha had received the message from Diamond back in Fall 2008 instead of nearly ten months later ... would the course of international financial history have been changed?" company officials ask.

 

Who knows, but are you saying Warren Buffet doesn't check his voice mails for ten months? Wow.

 

HulloMail has evidently developed a voice e-mail technology converting standard voice mails into digital MP3 files (a.k.a. voice-emails) to be "permanently saved, e-mailed, and shared."

 

It works with a user's existing phone number and entails "no switching fees or messy contractual paperwork," company officials say. In the U.K., anyway, you can get HulloMail service for any phone. In the U.S. it's available on the Android platform for mobile users with T-Mobile handsets.

 

The service is free, company officials say, and is intended to "essentially replace traditional archaic voicemail."

"If Mr. Buffet would have been using HulloMail, he would have been able to easily pick up that critical voice message through his standard email account, and he wouldn't have had to rely on his daughter then or at any time to help him access his voice mail," said Andy Munarriz, the founder and CEO of HulloMail.

 

In addition to offering simplified message pick-up, HulloMail officials say, voice-email "can literally be saved forever." If that's your idea of a good thing.

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TravelTrac is announcing the first in its line of Multimedia Travel Sharing Apps designed for the iPhone. As company officials say, "Drop off the grid, but stay on the map."

 

TravelTrac provides a "touch simple" process for creating and sharing your trips and travel adventures as dynamic multimedia Web presentations. Yep, and your parents thought slide shows of their neighbors' trip to the Grand Canyon made for soporific entertainment: "Here we are driving through Kansas..."

 

Described by company officials as "more robust than any travel blog," TravelTrac Apps let users "share and pinpoint your locations, travel journals, photos, and videos integrating custom Google maps and geotagging technologies as interactive travelogues even from remote global locations."

 

TravelTrac will begin supporting Google Android and Blackberry OS devices shortly.

You can post and share your adventures using TravelTrac's multimedia travel sharing domains based on what sort of adventures you have to share -- there's MotoTrac for vehicular car, truck, motorcycle, RV and off-road trips, TrekTrac for land based exploration, tours, trips, and travel sharing and SailTrac for on the water sailing, boating, racing voyages and on-board adventures.

 

What, no SpaceTrac? Or the one First Coffee could have used -- HitchhikeTrac.

Playing up its ability to integrate offline mode technologies, company officials say TravelTrac gives the traveler "the ability to stay connected even when phone or wireless services are unavailable."

 

Once a user re-establishes a connection, "they simply re-launch the app and all content automatically updates and formats their expedition style travelogues with chronological accuracy. 

But, honestly, friends, lay off the driving though Kansas pictures. We've all seen wheat.
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First Coffee is aware that some distributors using a customer relationship management product in unison with an ERP system maintain two databases and do a lot of toggling back and forth between programs.

 

For you, then, there is help: Prophet 21, part of the Activant Distribution Suite, which includes a CRM tool.

The product is designed to let users coordinate sales and marketing efforts

Activant "takes a three-prong approach to CRM," company officials say, to wit: The first is sales force automation giving a distributor's sales reps lead generation tools, the second is contact management which "goes beyond maintaining customer addresses and phone numbers to tracking customers' buying habits," and thirdly is marketing capabilities -- "tools that allow users to fax and e-mail from the product, generate lead generation call lists and manage call center activity."

Kevin Roach, executive vice president and general manager of Activant, said in the dark ages of the past, "many distributors relied on the knowledge their sales force had of the customers and prospects they served," but "visibility into this and other efforts were not there for the executive team of a company."

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Bozeman, Montana-based RightNow was named a Leader by Gartner in the "Magic Quadrant for E-Service Suites" report, authored by Johan Jacobs and Michael Maoz.

 

Evaluation criteria included "customer experience, product, overall viability, and innovation," according to Gartner officials.

Gartner defines Magic Quadrant leaders as companies that "demonstrate market-defining vision and the ability to execute against that vision through products, services, demonstrable sales figures and solid new references for multiple geographies and vertical industries."

 

Typically "leaders" have at least five of the six e-service components supported by OEMs, and are "suitable for all sizes and complexities of enterprise, and have broad industry coverage."

 

Hit RightNow's site for a complimentary copy of "Gartner's 2009 Magic Quadrant for E-Service Suites."

In related news, RightNow officials say five of its customers -- Motorola, Black & Decker, iRobot, Minnesota Online and eHarmony -- won Gartner & 1to1 Customer Awards.

 

These awards, given by Gartner and 1to1 Media, a division of Peppers & Rogers Group, recognize companies "making a big impact through their customer relationship strategy" and achieving "excellence in delivering the customer experience."

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Denton, Texas-based eInstruction, a vendor of learning technology, has announced details of its third annual Classroom Makeover Video Contest.

 

The competition, open to primary and secondary students and teachers in the United States and Canada, invites entrants to submit "short, creative music videos demonstrating how they would use advanced technology to enhance their learning experience in the classroom."

 

The 2008 video contest drew nearly 300 entries from around the world and more than one million people logged on to review submissions and vote for their favorite videos, company officials say.

Entries may be submitted via the official contest site until noon Eastern time, November 10. Videos will be judged based on "effective use of technology, portrayal of teachers and students working together and overall creativity and spirit," company officials say.

 

On November 17, five finalists in each grade category -- kindergarten through fifth grade, sixth grade through eighth grade, and ninth grade through 12th grade -- will be selected and users will be welcomed to vote for the best submissions through noon Eastern time on December 4. One grand prize winner will be announced for each grade category on or around December 18.

Each winner will receive a "complete interactive classroom makeover with advanced interactive technology," including InterwriteMobi, described by company officials as a mobile version of an interactive whiteboard allowing two people or teams to work at the board simultaneously using two interactive pens.

The complete eInstruction Classroom Makeover is valued at approximately $30,000. In addition to the classroom technology, winners will receive a $1,000 cash prize and a celebratory party for the entire school.

EInstruction has a rather odd assortment of offices -- in addition to Denton there's Columbia, Maryland, Scottsdale, Arizona, Cincinnati and Paris.

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Kalido, a vendor of information management software for enterprise data governance, has announced the completion of its annual Kalido Connect conference.

 

The vendor unveiled a product it called its "vision of shared responsibility for information management," the latest version of the Kalido Information Engine, described as a platform to "engage business users in data governance" by providing access to and input in master data.

 

It's being billed as a way to "decentralize" data governance, and "change from conventional IT-centric thinking about data stewardship." The tool is delivered in a virtual format. 

If you want to test it out Kalido Connect sessions are available on-demand for 90 days. 

Bill Hewitt, president and CEO of Kalido, said today, "it's fair to say that enterprise data governance will quickly eclipse the importance of ERP systems... the ERP players continue to attempt to convince customers that a bottom-up, tools-driven approach will deliver long-term customer value."