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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.