First Coffee

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Loudon Wainwright III's great live album Career Moves:

Wow, it's, like, so unlike salesforce.com to announce good news, we're surprised here at First Coffee to see the normally media-shy, reticent founder, Marc Benioff, out in front blowing the company's horn announcing results for its fiscal second quarter ended July 31, 2006.

"As we soar past the half-million paying subscriber mark, we stand on the cusp of another remarkable achievement: a half-billion dollar annual run rate. These are historic milestones for salesforce.com and the industry that we are leading," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com in a rare public appearance. "Few software companies achieve this scale and momentum."

As the company heads towards one million subscribers and one billion dollars in revenue, Benioff, clearly uncomfortable in the spotlight, said he wants "to thank our 24,800 customers, partners, and our 1,625 employees for creating this amazing community of success on the Business Web."

Salesforce.com's announced results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2007include total revenue of $118 million, an increase of 64% on a year- over- year basis and an increase of 13% on a quarter-to-quarter basis. Subscription and support revenues were $106.7 million, an increase of 63% on a year-over-year basis and an increase of 13% on a quarter-to-quarter basis. 

Professional services and other revenues were doing well, $11.5 million, an increase of 82% on a year-over-year basis and an increase of 13% on a quarter-to-quarter basis.

The rub is in Earnings per Share: GAAP earnings per share were "approximately break- even," company officials said, noting that non-GAAP earnings per diluted share, excluding the effects of stock based compensation and amortization of purchased intangibles related to acquisitions, were $0.06. 

Net paying subscribers rose approximately 57,000 during Q2 to exit the quarter at approximately 501,000 total subscribers, an increase of 63% from Q2 of the prior year, and an increase of 13% from the prior quarter. 

Customers rose approximately 2,100 during the quarter and totaled approximately 24,800, an increase of 47% from Q2 of the prior year, and an increase of 9% from the prior quarter.

Based on information as of August 16, 2006, salesforce.com is initiating guidance for its third quarter fiscal 2007 ending October 31, 2006, and updating guidance for its full fiscal year 2007 ending January 31, 2007.

Q3 FY07: Revenue for the company's third fiscal quarter is projected to be in the range of approximately $126 million to approximately $128 million. Non-GAAP diluted EPS is expected to be in the range of approximately $0.04 to $0.05, and GAAP EPS is expected to be in the range of approximately break-even to a loss of $0.02 for the third quarter.

WebMethods, Inc., a business software vendor, has announced an OEM agreement between webMethods K.K., the company's wholly-owned Japanese subsidiary, and Canon Inc.

Under the agreement covering the Japanese market, Canon is embedding webMethods technology as a standard feature within its imageWARE Enterprise Gateway, which is the company's data transaction product for connecting Canon's input and output products with a variety of back-end systems.

Canon is using webMethods as an integration standard for linking its input and output product to a number of enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms.

Andy Wilkinson, senior vice president and General Manager, Asia/Pacific & Japan, webMethods, Inc., said partnering with Canon's imageWARE Enterprise Gateway "will allow organizations to more quickly and easily implement and automate document workflow."

As a result of the linkages, documents like invoices, purchase orders and payments can automatically entered into each system, and these systems can be linked directly to a variety of digital outputs

Revonet, Inc., a B2B Direct Marketing Company, has announced public availability of its Leads-On-Demand product, which uses market research and database segmentation to identify best prospects and "then makes thousands of phone calls to discover companies that are in the market for purchasing VoIP and telecommunications services."

These leads are then transferred in real time through the LOD product to a select group of vendors "capable of servicing the interested company. Each lead has specifically requested to be contacted by a sales representative and contains very specific information detailing the opportunity," Revonet officials claim.

Each sales lead includes the full customer profile including contact names, addresses, phone numbers, as well as contract size, expiration date and other helpful data. The records can be quickly and efficiently shared or fed into any number of existing CRM systems.

Starting today, Revonet is offering interested customers the ability to test 5 leads at no charge. Vendors can sign up for a subscription to Leads-On-Demand for as low as $75 per lead.

The Leads-On-Demand product is focused on prospects that spend between $500 and $5,000 in Monthly Recurring Charges for data and telephone services.

FYI: Some company calling itself "SalesGuru.com" has announced that their software is 91% less expensive than Salesforce.com.

"How does SalesGuru.com manage to offer prices significantly lower than all other CRM companies?" company officers ask rhetorically. Gee, glad you asked:

SalesGuru.com charges a fee per company as opposed to individual user. "Other CRM applications, including Salesforce.com, Sugarcrm.com, and Salesnet.com charge on a per person basis, which means that whenever a company increases the size of their sales team, their fee also increases," SalesGuru officials say.

Businesses "can be assured," however, that "regardless of how many sales representatives they have, they will only pay one flat-rate at SalesGuru.com."

And of course company officials express the hope that "we are also likely to see an increasing number of companies abandon on-demand services like Salesforce.com in favor of SalesGuru.com."

Sometimes one brilliant bit of clarity explains everything. The BBC reports:

"A survey for the newspaper La Croix found that seven French people out of ten supported the deployment of an international force. However only a small majority -- 53% -- were in favor of the French military getting involved."

Something needs to be done? Oui! Military action? Oui! Us French the ones to accept the responsibility and do something meaningful? Non!

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Dell tries to find how exploding batteries can help improve customer relationships:

Dell Inc.'s recall of 4.1 million laptop batteries is a major headache and a logistical nightmare. But it may help the Texas computer giant in the long run.

Dell has been trying to improve its image lately after acknowledging that its customer service wasn't making the grade. Its stock has dropped about 40 percent in a year, mostly because its sales growth has slowed and competitors have strengthened.

The recall, issued because the batteries could catch fire on rare occasions, was a great opportunity for Dell to show it's acting voluntarily to protect its customers. If customers find the recall process easy and fast, their opinions of the computer maker may improve.

"In many ways, long-term, this will help in terms of the goodwill Dell is trying to build with its customers and potential customers," said Sam Bhavnani, research director at Current Analysis.

What's more, Dell doesn't expect the recall to cost it very much -- not enough to make a material change in its financial results. Sony Corp., which made the faulty batteries, has said it's financially assisting Dell with the recall, though neither will say who's paying what.

AOL To Dig For Spammer's Gold from the Associated Press:

Dig this: AOL believes a renegade Internet spammer buried gold and platinum on his parents' property in Massachusetts and wants to bring in bulldozers to search for the treasure and satisfy a $12.8 million judgment it won in federal court.

The family says it knows nothing about any buried treasure and will fight AOL's gold-digging plans.

AOL said Tuesday it intends to search for bars of gold and platinum that the company believes are hidden near the home of Davis Wolfgang Hawke's parents on two acres in Medfield, Massachusetts…

At the height of Hawke's Internet activities, experts believe, Hawke and his partners earned more than $600,000 each month -- much of it cash -- by sending unwanted sales pitches over the Internet for loans, pornography, jewelry and prescription drugs.

"They were millionaires, if only briefly," said Brian McWilliams, a journalist who interviewed Hawke and wrote extensively about him in "Spam Kings," a 2004 book about e-mail spammers. McWilliams said Hawke lived a nomadic life as an adult, eschewed luxuries and described burying his valuables.

"Hawke lived like a pauper really," McWilliams said. "He drove a beater of a used car, an old cop car. He never owned a house or anything."

This just in from the Birmingham Post -- Customer service in Britain still stinks: 

Somehow my phone got lost in the taxi home… I rang up the air-time provider the next day to put a bar on the phone.

It took five failed calls over a 30-minute period to get the phone barred. I suffered the usual ridiculous messages like "your call is important to us and we pride ourselves on good customer service." Oh yes? Try staffing your call centre properly then and perhaps even training the staff and paying them well enough to stay and get some experience!

One very frustrating end to a call was a machine voice saying "we have had a technical difficulty -- ring back later." Of course the calls were being charged for at 0870 rates.

The point about this story is that the company cannot provide excellent customer service for the prices it charges me -- it feels like an unsustainable service.

There are many similar examples: credit provision in the UK is another. Just how long can the major banks go on generating the sort of returns they do when effective customer service has all but died? We have been trying to get one of our accounts hitched up to the bank's internet service for over three months. The only people we can get to speak (in a call center) simply do not have the power or training to do anything significant to resolve this service problem.

The Boston Globe: Running Of The Brides attracts advertising:

For the first time, Filene's Basement is allowing select companies to peddle their products at the Downtown Crossing "Running of the Brides" event, the twice-a-year spectacle when hundreds of brides line up for hours to hunt for deeply discounted gowns.

Filene's Basement said it had to turn away many other businesses, including hotels, Redken salons, and the consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, which wanted to give away Swiffer mops.

"The event has just gotten bigger and bigger. Everyone wants to be a part of it. Who would have thought I'd have to turn P&G down?" asked Basement spokeswoman Pat Boudrot. "But I just didn't feel right about giving women mops. And how were they going to carry them around with the gowns?"

The Basement's bridal sale, which began in 1947, will feature over 2,400 gowns, priced at $249, $499, and $699; the dresses normally cost $900 to $9,000 at bridal salons.

The event attracts newly engaged women and their entourages of shopping buddies from all over the country and from abroad. Boston hotels offer deals for the event; the Fairmont Copley Plaza's "Running of the Brides Package," starting at $559, includes accommodations, energy bars, bottled water, and a pair of running shoes.

The Dallas Morning News's Steve Davis finds the best customer value for sports in America:

It's Roller Derby, and it's not your father's Saturday night, tricked-up, made-for-late-night-TV version.

Three local teams form the centerpiece of Assassination City Roller Derby, where the skaters attack the flat track, maneuvering, bumping, falling and, yes, sometimes brawling their way to victory. (Just two teams at a time, of course.)

The bouts are roughly once a month, when a few hundred diverse fans, bonded by the kitschy subculture, fill the Pleasant Grove rink at 400 S. Buckner Blvd.

The skaters, some on the softer side, some with quite an edge, are as diverse as the fans. A few are quite athletic and nimble.

The bargain? Tickets are $10 in advance. Parking is free. And it's BYOB (No $6 beers!). Coolers are welcome.

...

Airlines allowing customers, oh, paperback novels back on board, UPI reports:

Air New Zealand, has relaxed some of the tough new restrictions on cabin baggage on flights to the United States.

Carry-on baggage was restricted to essential travel documents in a plastic bag. Air New Zealand now says normal cabin luggage and electronic devices will be allowed on its planes but passengers should expect to have them ready for inspection.

However aerosols, gels and liquids in carry-on baggage remain prohibited. They must be placed in checked-in baggage. Passengers also are not allowed to carry duty-free liquids in the cabin of aircraft on flights to Britain and the United States, to avoid possible confiscation on arrival, the airline said.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music, in honor of PR maven Ryan Zuk's getting a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young concert cancelled out from underneath him in Phoenix, is a Crosby, Stills and Nash threefer – Crosby, Stills and Nash, Déjà Vu and CSN – and Neil Young's Live Rust:

Kyliptix, which claims to be "the first company of its kind to adopt a utility-style, usage-based billing model that eliminates the upfront investment associated with software acquisition," although "of its kind" is left tantalizingly undefined, has announced the launch of Kips CRM.

The product's pitched at small businesses, and Kyliptix is marketing it as allowing SMB's to "gain a competitive advantage by employing the cost-effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality previously available only to larger organizations."

Fellow SMB workers, unite! Throw off the shackles of imperialist larger organization oppression!

KiBS CRM is a productivity tool that is described by company officials as delivering "a complete collection of customer facing processes, including Sales Force Automation, Marketing, Customer Service, and Support, to small businesses." Evidently it's designed to simplify processes for growing businesses, since as officials promise, "KiBS CRM can readily serve the needs of a few users, then scale to accommodate several hundred users at a time."

KiBS CRM works with the overall performance of a business concerned with the customer engagement processes -- and hey, who's not? -- including Web lead capture, Outlook integration, reporting, generation of quotes, sales orders, and invoices, sharing of accounts, contacts, leads and calendar events, and support of multiple languages.

Company officials say it's ideal for companies that have outgrown simple contact managers and need to improve their processes. The product has no upfront hardware or software purchase requirements.

William Gast, founder, president, and chief executive officer said the KiBS CRM is "the first in a full suite of offerings that we will be releasing in the coming months. As a provider of Web-enabled solutions, Kyliptix understands that ease of use and ease of deployment are critical in today's marketplace."

Grunge poet Charles Bukowski must have worked here at First Coffee at some point. Here's how he described his working day:

"Every day I'll wake up around noon. Then I'll go to the track and I'll play the horses. ... Then I'll come back and I'll swim and ... have dinner and I'll go upstairs and I'll sit at the computer and I'll crack me a bottle [of wine] and I'll listen to some Mahler or Sibelius and I'll write, with this rhythm, like always."

China-based vendor CDC Games, a wholly owned subsidiary of China.com Inc, a business unit of CDC Corporation which sells CRM software and products, has acquired the license to the Japanese online game, Stone Age 2 from DigiPark, a major game developer in Japan.

The animated game is set in the pre-historic era and players roam a world of volcanoes, deserts, and jungle populated by dinosaurs and spirits. The game encourages cooperation between players by rewarding teamwork. Players work together to build villages, capture and raise dinosaurs and look for treasure.

The new game will be free to play with players paying for virtual merchandise. This business model was pioneered by CDC Games in China with Yulgang, an online games in China with over 30 million registered users and 348,000 peak concurrent users.

Dr. Xiaowei Chen, Chief Financial Officer of China.com Inc. said the new game is "another demonstration of CDC Games' commitment to bring the best products from around the world to provide our users with the most unique and compelling gaming experience in China."

Here's what First Coffee would have liked for Dr. Chen to have said: "Stone Age 2 has many features we believe could be incorporated in our CRM products, see this cool button here that zaps the evil spirits? Watch what happens when we transfer the technology to our CRM product. Now, see this troublesome customer here, who calls in and complains about every cotton-pickin' thing? Ties up your customer service rep time and causes a lot of hassle. But simply set the button to 'vaporize,' and…" (puff of smoke appears over Des Moines, Iowa) "… poof! Gone!"

Database Solutions, Ltd., a customer relationship management (CRM) and technology company selling to the insurance industry, has announced that it plans to open a new database web development subsidiary.

Since 2002 Database Solution’s efforts have been focused on developing and launching its Agent Intelligence CRM product; however, company officials say the requests for customized database-driven sites have "dramatically increased."

There is a rising trend for companies to use database-driven web systems, CRM or otherwise, to manage their customer base and to run their businesses, according to the company's research. Database Solutions sees an opportunity to capitalize on a market and has decided to offer this web-hosted service.

The company has already begun sending out proposals to potential clients. Database Solution’s new subsidiary will only focus on larger scale projects that exceed a price of $25,000 and will not include web stores or standard company websites, except for Agent Intelligence clients.

Database Solutions' CEO Jason Wong, stated, "It is a good decision for any company to diversify -- especially if it has a proprietary technology. We have looked at the potential revenues Database Solutions would realize by offering our technology to other industries, and based on that evaluation, the decision is a no-brainer."

Best kinds of decisions out there. But First Coffee speaks from experience when he says that some decisions are better made using brains.

Kintera Inc. has announced that the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation has selected the Kintera Sphere technology platform to strengthen the organization's online presence and increase fundraising results.

The Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation provides financial assistance in the form of scholarships for higher education to deserving sons and daughters of Marines and children of former Marines. The organization recently embarked on a fundraising campaign to double its average scholarship award to $3,000 a year for children of current and former Marines, and endow its commitment to award $20,000 in scholarship assistance to every child of a Marine or Navy Corpsman serving with the Marines, whose parent is killed in the global war on terror.

MCSF is using a Kintera Sphere solution suite, which includes Kintera Content Management System, Kintera E-mail Communication, Kintera Friends Asking Friends and Kintera Special Commerce.

MCSF has created a new membership program, which helps members keep track of their donations and sign up for golf tournaments, galas and other MCSF events. In addition, MCSF is using Kintera Sphere to enable their donors to establish a scholarship in honor or memory of a loved one -- or use Kintera Friends Asking Friends to set up their own Web page and encourage friends and family to raise funds for MCSF or their named scholarship.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is a CD my brother-in-law sent me, a compilation of a band named Plain White Ts, not bad stuff:

Commit Business Solutions, a vendor of management software products for small to mid-sized computer service and support businesses, has announced the launch of its new QuickBooks Link in its CRM product.

Maayan Porat, CEO of Commit, said the new feature of Commit CRM will help their customers to more efficiently manage their day-to-day activities, "particularly their billing" procedures.

"Our customers can now easily and accurately bill their customers for every service or repair they've provided without worrying about duplicate data entry and wrong data, errors that are common to manual data entry," Porat said.

"Integrating with Intuit QuickBooks was an obvious decision on our part," he said, since "most of our customers already use QuickBooks, and Intuit has offered us a great integration platform. The Commit QuickBooks Link integrates with a wide range of QuickBooks versions and editions, including the US, Canadian and UK editions."

New Zealand-based industry observer Campbell Gardiner has reported that Wellington's Victoria University has "expanded its RightNow CRM functionality with the purchase of sales consoles for the system."

University officials say the consoles will be used for admissions management for international students.

Victoria has operated RightNow since 2004. Gardiner reports that "it is mainly used as an e-marketing tool to recruit prospective students from as far afield as China, Germany, USA and Malaysia."

E-marketing coordinator Charles Brooks says the consoles will help streamline its e-marketing, sales and admissions processes; important in a competitive international student market.

"One of the biggest issues for New Zealand universities is to maintain their international student numbers in a market that's going through a bit of a downturn. RightNow has helped us maintain our market share, and the enhancements put us in a good position to grow that," Brooks says.

Victoria's international website receives around 10,000 user sessions each month and RightNow provides "a timely response" to a range of student enquiries, Gardiner says: "It provides customized and automated responses, online self help and also captures and uses information for outbound marketing purposes."

As Brooks says, "there's no real alternative to e-marketing for us. We can't go and advertise on BBC or CNN and, given we're looking for a tiny result in a lot of different markets, doing local campaigns isn't an option either."

Gardiner reports that "there are 3,000 international students at Victoria University at any point in time; and to maintain an international focus the university aims to have 16 per cent of all students coming from overseas."

SplendidCRM Software, Inc. has announced the release of SplendidCRM 1.2 for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and SplendidCRM 1.1 for Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.

With these two new releases, SplendidCRM is offering what company officials call a "cross-platform CRM for companies that wish to tightly integrate a CRM with their back-office systems."

"Using the Mono platform, we are able to use the .NET tools from Microsoft, but still allow copy deployment… we can compile our application on Windows, copy it to a Linux installation that supports Mono, and run it," said Paul Rony, President of SplendidCRM Software.

"Not enough people realize that Mono can support copy deployment. Beyond allowing a single code base, copy deployment will allow them to ship a single set of binaries," stated Miguel de Icaza, Vice President in charge of Mono at Novell.

SplendidCRM has also announced the availability of a free Runtime License to hosting companies who license SplendidCRM Professional.

The company provides live demos of its software running on SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, and MySQL. A live demo of SplendidCRM running on Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 has been made available at http://mssqlmono.splendidcrm.com.

Avanade Inc., a technology integrator for Microsoft enterprise products, has announced the results of a benchmark study of enterprise-scale use of Microsoft CRM.

You're holding your breath to learn if the results are positive or negative for Microsoft, right? I know, the suspense is deadly.

The Avanade test… drum roll… envelope please… "demonstrated the capability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 to scale under a medium to heavy sales force load with response times averaging less than 0.5 seconds."

Mike Pazak, vice president of Enterprise Business Solutions at Avanade explained that the benchmarking exercise is part of Avanade's work "to help even the largest customers maximize the value of their CRM investment, and is a response to market demand for extending the success of Microsoft CRM implementations to support more users."

According to Brad Wilson, general manager for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, "We're seeing a strong demand in the enterprise space for CRM solutions that are fast, flexible and affordable."

During the benchmark tests conducted at Avanade's Seattle development center, data load was carefully simulated to represent records that would be generated by about a year's worth of heavy sales activity.

Peak-hour benchmark performance highlights with a 3,000 concurrent user test parameter included 22,260 CRM business transactions per hour (you know, like you do in your business on a daily basis), 355-millisecond average response time, zero authentication errors and "66.77 percent database server utilization."

Avanade completed the study using the same methodology as Microsoft-based performance tests that were conducted in the early part of 2006. Avanade set up the benchmarking study to measure the software's performance with minimal customization using a default installation of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 configured for Web clients only, deployed on three dedicated Web servers.

Tuning was performed to optimize application performance, and Avanade Connected Architecture Infrastructure for .NET was used for optimal configuration of the application infrastructure, including network design, identity and access management, and platform design and deployment.

Hardware components were selected for their enterprise-class characteristics, including a Sun Microsystems V40z Windows database server with four dual-core 64-bit AMD Opteron processors, 16 GB of RAM and Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition for 64-bit computing; and two 2-GB Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) adapters connected to a fully meshed SAN fabric with eight paths to an EMC(R) Symmetrix 8430 storage array.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is one of my favorite recent musical discoveries -- Aimee Mann's Live At St. Ann's Warehouse. That voice, the female equivalent of Lou Reed; had Mann been on The Velvet Underground/Nico instead of Nico that album would have frozen water particles at fifty feet. It's a testament to Jim White's confidence that he let her sing backup on "Static On the Radio" and carjack the song at 65 miles an hour:

As part of the "Applications Unlimited" program, Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 9.

Highlights of this release, according to Oracle officials, include "new enhancements designed specifically for the financial services and communications industries, usability enhancements designed to help increase productivity and increased use of Oracle Fusion Middleware."

Yes, Oracle considers increased use of Fusion Middleware a "highlight."

Happy Customer Testimonial: DePaul University CRM Craft Team Leader Audrey Bledsoe said "we are looking for ways to decrease maintenance time. This release should help."

PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9 mostly has enhancements for business processes and functional enhancements specifically for the communications and financial services industries, while bearing in mind the fact that the move to Internet Protocol services and 3G data networks requires communications service providers to have flexible customer and order management processes.

But of course it reinforces the notion that PeopleSoft is going to be around for a while. See, PeopleSoft has had a problem that other P.S., Penn State, has had in attracting top high school football recruits (stay with me here): You weren't sure if legendary coach Joe Paterno, who went to kindergarten with Teddy Roosevelt, would be around beyond your freshman year. And Penn State without Coach Paterno is kind of like Microsoft without Bill Gates.

After Oracle absorbed PeopleSoft in a takeover giving new dimensions to the term "hostile," everyone wondered if PeopleSoft disappearing down Oracle's maw was the last we'd see of the company. This release goes a long way to assuaging those concerns.

William Band, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. tells industry observer Marc Songini that, in Songini's words, "the launch of PeopleSoft 9.0 should reassure current customers that the software will be further developed and supported and could reduce any interest in alternative software… Companies are generally interested in getting the most from their past investment in CRM solutions, and the new release addresses that need."

Industry observer Sarah Lacy notes that Oracle took over the top market share slot in the Human Capital Management sector "for the first time, thanks to its PeopleSoft acquisition," citing a study recently performed by tech analyst firm AMR. "By the end of 2005, it had 25% of the market, while SAP had 23% -- though the lead will narrow in 2006, when SAP's share will rise to 24% as Oracle’s holds steady, AMR says," Lacy writes.

As she points out PeopleSoft "had been the gold standard for HCM, so the gain isn't entirely surprising." But Lacy finds that "the jump was larger than if PeopleSoft and Oracle's pre-merger revenues were lumped together. In 2004, Oracle sold $324 million of HCM software, and PeopleSoft sold $864 million. But in 2005, the combined company sold nearly $1.4 billion in HCM software."

With PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9, Oracle is claiming to deliver "communications-specific care and ordering capabilities to streamline the deployment and maintenance of next generation services." There you go, got almost all the appropriate industry terminology in there. Take a deep breath, guys, you did well.

The product does focus on CRM capabilities for the financial services market. Building on Oracle's core CRM suite and the financial services capabilities of previous releases, enhancements for PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9 include such goodies as sample processes for Financial Account Creation, Lead and Referral Management, as well as Web Services for Remote Portlets allowing for PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9 content currently available within the PeopleSoft portal technology to be visible within diverse third party portal technologies.

It includes an actionable 360-degree view of customers with a work list and auto-save of recent searches, an auto- population of commonly typed text using hotkeys, and a bulk service management for order capture, calendaring enhancements, lead import performance improvements, mobile sales support for Intellisync Mobile Suite architecture.

John Webb, vice president of enterprise application strategy at Oracle, said the application is "largely targeted at the existing PeopleSoft CRM installed base rather than potential new users." Currently, Webb said, Oracle is treating its recently acquired Siebel Systems Inc. software as its default CRM suite for prospects.

And hey, Oracle officials say the product "delivers 19 new web service enabled transactions with more than 70 service operations, enabling PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM applications to more easily integrate with third party applications and plug into standards-based business processes."

But wait, there's more! "Oracle XML Publisher has been integrated specifically with PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9 to help manage correspondence by delivering improved performance for generating documents, improved scalability; improved ability to create correspondence letter templates and real-time merge capabilities and preview of correspondence management."

And if you act before midnight tonight, it "tightly integrates Oracle BPEL Process Manager delivering a standards based business process management tool for organizations to quickly and cost effectively deploy new solutions and business processes across heterogeneous systems."

It's all part of Larry Ellison's Master Plan. As Lacy notes, "analysts give Oracle props for overcoming early customer fears that the company would kill PeopleSoft's superior applications. Instead, Oracle has offered lifetime support for the software customers had already bought."

Oracle and SAP are in a fight for "the few remaining up-for-grabs industries, such as retail, banking, and telecommunications," and Lacy's probably correct when she says "strong footholds in human resources and customer care will be a big bonus. To service businesses, that software is more important than manufacturing-friendly software that manages things like when to ship how many widgets to which customers."

So the challenge for Oracle, as it is for any voraciously hungry company, will be "maintaining the momentum, beyond integrating acquisitions."

Not everybody's happy: Technology Solutions Company's Carl F. Dill, Jr., chairman and acting CEO, in announcing results for Q2 2006, said part of the reason for the "mixed" results (net loss of about a million bucks on revenues of $11.5 million) was that "our eopleSoft offering suffered significantly from Oracle's decision to support older releases of PeopleSoft software indefinitely, removing much of the incentive for clients to upgrade to newer versions."

That being the case, Dill said, "we do not see a compelling market for our PeopleSoft offering going forward. Therefore, subsequent to the end of the second quarter, we decided to exit this offering and concentrate our Enterprise Solutions business on SAP. We remain encouraged by the on-going strength of our SAP offering."

Hence, Dill said "our focus going forward will be on our three primary service offerings -- Charter (including CRM), Digital Healthcare, and SAP in Enterprise Solutions."

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning (second, but who's counting?), and the music is Mingus Ah Um by Charles Mingus:

Boy, you just find CRM everywhere, don't you? AutoSurvey, an e-mail and call center survey system that provides customer feedback in real time, has announced the launch of its latest version built entirely on Microsoft.NET technology.

Company officials say it enables the instant capture of customer feedback and resolution of any service issues before they escalate out of control.

"AutoSurvey really is a complete CRM system for the customer satisfaction end of things. The key is that as soon as there is a service issue the system alerts all parties that should be involved. By the time of our weekly meeting, not only do we no longer spend time compiling reports, but we further save time as employees have already been alerted about most issues."

The AutoSurvey system has a system of checks and balances built in which "helps us ensure that customer issues are priority," according to Stephen Neu, Director of Business Development at Reedman Toll Auto World, one of the largest volume dealerships in the U.S.

It's not simply cosmetic, either: According to recent industry studies, customer satisfaction with dealership service affects the bottom line for dealers. A CSI score gain of 10 points can add as much as $300 per customer annually.

Using Microsoft.NET as a platform, AutoSurvey's product is supposed to "monitor all aspects of dealership client satisfaction through its front end applications, back end service module, and issue management system," according to company officials. AutoSurvey is based on an Application Service Provider model, and integrates with over 45 Dealer Management Systems.

"The million dollar question for the dealer is; 'how much did I not make because of some dealership issue or customer upset that went unhandled,'" said Jason Tryfon, AutoSurvey President. "In many dealerships the dealer never sees vital information on customer service issues as it gets trapped at the service or sales level."

The ability to follow-up and resolve customer concerns is considered a strong selling point for the AutoSurvey product. With AutoSurvey, dealers can e-mail or call the customer back to let them know their feedback has been received, assign the issue to staff within the dealership, track staff and customer comments and measure the resolution cost when issues are closed.

The system "captures the small sparks of customer defection the minute they ignite," according to the more metaphorical company officials at AutoSurvey.

Stephen Neu says high manufacturer CSI scores and surveys can be difficult to obtain for high volume dealerships and "unless they find a better way to interact with customers," it can cost dearly: "While overall we have a greater number of satisfied customers, the low percentage we don't satisfy can hurt us many times more than the average size dealership, not just in customer defection but in manufacturer incentives and straight on financial rewards."

Riffa Views, which bills itself as "the first master-planned property development in Bahrain," is geared up to offer "competitive service quality" through the implementation of Sage Accpac's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

Company officials hope the Sage product will "streamline the company's sales and marketing operation through efficient processing of its customer and prospect information and requests."

Riffa Views is a project of Arcapita, a Bahrain based bank with real estate investments totaling $ 2.5 billion including Bahrain Bay, a waterfront development, and Victory Heights in Dubai Sports City.

It is "a major development project which will occupy an area of 23 million square feet with 900 luxury villas, an international school, commercial and recreational facilities," said Yasser Abdulla, Managing Director, Riffa Views. "Our vision is to bring new concepts in residential living and commercial investments to the region."

Always good to have a vision. In order to achieve aforesaid vision, "we need to focus on delivering the best service levels, and implement global best practice methodologies in our sales and marketing. This meant choosing a CRM product, first of all from an established global vendor, second with strong local support from an experienced partner, and of course with enough customizability and scalability to grow with our business," said Abdulla.

Through the Sage Accpac CRM system, all property account managers at Riffa Views have project information available to them on-screen. This includes information of the various phases of the development, area sizes, prices and design styles. In addition, "the history of communication with a prospect or customer is stored in the system for review, and financial transactions integrated to Sage Accpac ERP. It's seamless," he explains.

Using Sales Force Automation, Abdulla says, Riffa Views has built "greater efficiency" within its sales force by offering easy access to information. The company is also planning to use Sage Accpac CRM campaign management feature to run targeted marketing campaigns and measure return on marketing investment. In the future, Riffa Views plans to extend Sage Accpac CRM to online information of property availability for customers and within the company's different departments.

Astea International Inc., a vendor of service lifecycle management products, has released financial results for the second quarter of 2006.

For the second quarter ended June 30, 2006, Astea reported revenues of $4.5 million compared to revenues of $5.4 million for the same period in 2005. Net loss for the second quarter was $1.9 million or $(.54) per share, compared to a net profit of $431,000 or $.15 per share for the same period in 2005.

License revenues were $1.0 million compared to $2.1 million in 2005. Total service and maintenance revenue increased 7% to $3.5 million compared to $3.3 million for the same period in 2005. Zack Bergreen, CEO of Astea said the vendor is continuing to "invest heavily" in such projects as the integration of FieldCentrix, "our center of excellence for mobility."

"We have also deepened our relationship with Microsoft by forming a strategic alliance to provide integrated Service Lifecycle Management solutions with Microsoft Dynamics GP and Microsoft Dynamics AX," which will "provide an additional revenue-generating opportunity for Astea," Bergreen said.

The Astea Alliance suite "supports the complete service lifecycle, from lead generation and project quotation to service and billing through asset retirement," according to company officials. It integrates business processes for Contact Center, Field Service, Depot Repair, Logistics, Professional Services, and Sales & Marketing.

It's back-to-college time soon, here are some fun facts to ponder:

The average student bears credit card debt of $3,200, with one out of 10 students carrying a balance exceeding $7,800.

According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, college drinking contributes to an estimated 1,400 student deaths (mostly automobile related), 500,000 injuries, and 70,000 cases of sexual assault each year.

Education Week has reported that 54% of students admit to plagiarizing; 74% admit to "serious" cheating at least once during the past school year; and 47% believe their teachers sometimes choose to ignore cheating.

Caffeine can take up to 12 hours to fully dissipate from the body.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is… lessee, we don't have any music playing right now, let's fix that… turn on iTunes, go to Purchased, punch Shuffle, Play… the first song to come up is… "Can't You See" by The Marshall Tucker Band.

Microsoft has announced that Spy Optic Inc., a Carlsbad, California-based designer and manufacturer of eyewear and accessories, has selected Microsoft Dynamics GP for its new, overall enterprise resource planning and Microsoft Dynamics CRM to manage its customer and vendor relations.

The company, which has 125 employees, will use the technology to "streamline interactions with its European headquarters in Lombardo, Italy," according to Spy officials. Spy Optic distributes to more than 5,000 retail locations in the U.S., with plans to expand to markets in Australia and Europe.

The combination of a recent public offering and the welcoming of a new chief information officer evidently convinced Spy Optic that it was a good time to rejig their production, inventory, sales and customer data management, all of which were distributed throughout various nonintegrated IT systems.

"We expect the adoption… to be a day-and-night change for this company," said Erik Quade, CIO for Spy Optic. "Our goal is growth. From increasing the effectiveness of our sales and customer relations efforts to drastically improving order fulfillment and business analytics on the back end."

The company will use Microsoft Dynamics GP to move to a paperless model, which it projects may reduce order processing and SKU setup time by up to 50 percent. In addition, the company anticipates that new credit card automation functionality may potentially save up to 30 labor hours per month by reducing data entry of cash receipts by approximately 30 percent.

Spy Optic will also leverage the new product in its warehouse facility, where integration with handheld scanning technology may increase inventory management and distribution time proficiency as much as 90 percent.

Spy Optic chose Microsoft Dynamics CRM for its customer and vendor relationship management functionality, Microsoft officials say, as well as the way in which it feels for employees already familiar with Microsoft Office Outlook and other programs.

Wanna see the worst music video ever made?

Current random play: "What I Really Mean" by Robert Earl Keen, Jr.

Aspect Software, Inc., which likes to call itself "the world's largest company solely focused on the contact center," has announced that the Aspect Customer Self Service 7.2 voice portal, which will be generally available Aug. 28, about the same time the new Bob Dylan album Modern Times will be released, has been awarded VoiceXML-Forum certification.

Wonder if Bob knows that Al Stewart released an album named Modern Times in 1975? Oh well, at least he's not ripping off the memoirs of Japanese gangsters with this one.

The new standards-based VoiceXML 2.1-enabled, software-only SIP or TDM product provides all the benefits of traditional IVR and state-of-the-art voice portals and integrates easily with contact center products from Aspect and other vendors. It offers what company officials claim to be "full CTI support for both TDM and IP environments and an optional VoiceXML Studio module that can dramatically shorten the design and coding time needed to create VoiceXML-based speech and touchtone applications."

These enhancements are supposed to be able to reduce development and voice-over-IP implementation costs while "increasing scalability and customer satisfaction with voice self-service automation."

There's a critical need for a customer-friendly product in the automated voice self-service arena, which has become increasingly stigmatized by negative public perception. A maze of complicated menus and the inability to transfer to an agent easily can frustrate customers.

Well-designed voice user interfaces can reduce call time as much as 30 percent, significantly cut opt-out rates and enable a smooth call transfer to an agent that doesn't require the customer to repeat information that he's already provided to an automated system.

Aspect Customer Self Service 7.2 is described by company officials as "a fully functional voice self-service portal" using non-proprietary off-the-shelf, industry-standard hardware and supporting VoiceXML 2.0 and 2.1. Companies using the system can eliminate the need for telephony cards and give their customers access to assisted service as needed.

Current random play: "The Low Spark Of High-Heeled Boys" by Traffic.

CRM vendor Ubics, Inc. has announced that Girish G. Godbole has submitted his resignation as the company's President - Global Services, effective October 31, 2006. So, it's not exactly like he's being bum-rushed out the door or anything.

Godbole has also resigned from the company's board of directors. He continue in his position as President - Global Services until the end of July 2006, and thereafter has been providing the company with transition services as needed through October 31, 2006, according to Ubics officials.

Sunil Patil, the company's President - Global Solutions, will take over as President - Global Services.

Founded in 1993, Ubics is an affiliate of the UB Company, a $2 billion multinational group of companies headquartered in India. Ubics, with business operations in the United States, United Kingdom and India. The company is headquartered in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania.

Current random play: "Stray Cat Blues" by The Rolling Stones.

Inter-Tel Inc. has announced that a Special Committee of its Board of Directors, has rejected as inadequate an unsolicited acquisition proposal from Steven G. Mihaylo and Vector Capital (the "Mihaylo Group") to purchase all shares of Inter-Tel, other than those held by Mihaylo, for cash at a price of $22.50 per share.

The Special Committee concluded that the Mihaylo Group's proposal does not reflect the intrinsic value of Inter-Tel and its advanced technology and consequently fails to provide appropriate value to all Inter-Tel shareholders, company officials said.

Among reasons cited for rejecting Mihaylo's bid were the recent enhancement of Inter-Tel's call center applications to include multi-media contact center functionality, and enhancements to the company's presence management and multi-media collaboration applications.

The Special Committee believes that "the continued execution of management's current long-term strategy," including the rollout of the Inter-Tel 5600 and version 2.0 software for the Inter-Tel 5000 family, the forthcoming introduction of the 7000 communications systems, and enhancements to Inter-Tel's portfolio of advanced software applications represents "a superior alternative for enhancing shareholder value."

The company's also seen "early indications of success" with the new Lake products designed for the small office / home office market.

The Special Committee has authorized UBS Investment Bank, the Company's financial advisor, to review and explore various strategic options for the company. In other words, it still might very well be sold to someone.

Current random play: "Play In the Sunshine" by Prince.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

Welcome to another broadcast of Radio KCRM 98.6, All Allman Brothers All The Time, and today we have some special guests, kicking off with Ned Lamont, the winner of the Connecticut Democratic Primary over three-term incumbent Joe Lieberman. Ned, thanks for appearing on the First Coffee blog.

"Blogs? Don't know anything about them, never heard of them."

Uh, Ned, you shot TV ads featuring you playing kissy-face with leftist bloggers, you had bloggers traveling with your entourage, you raised mucho dinero through leftist blog donations, yours was the first American political candidacy to be almost wholly a creation of the left-wing blogs, do you really think we're so stupid as to believe you when you claim you don't know anything about blogs?

"Blog, um, sorry, name doesn't ring a bell, no. My victory was due to the fact that my experience as city councilman in Greenwich was what the voters were looking for, that and my inherited fortune and my membership in an all-white, all-male country club that doesn't have too many Liebermans, if you catch my drift."

Ned, you make Dan Quayle look like Winston Churchill. Congratulations on winning the Miss Liberal Connecticut Beauty Contest, we look forward to seeing you get your butt whipped in the election that really counts in November, but hey, thanks for costing the Democrats a safe seat the Republicans couldn't have pried open with a crowbar.

Let's play a song while we get our next guest in here on Radio KCRM 98.6, All East Village Opera Company All The Time… SpikeSource, a vendor of business-ready open source products, has announced the addition of Open-Xchange Server to the company's applications lineup, targeted to both small and medium size enterprises and larger companies through authorized channel partners.

Open-Xchange Server Spike Certified, according to company officials, integrates open and reliable messaging and collaboration tools into a single product, and is seen as a " complement" to the company's current application offerings, which include open source customer relationship management (CRM) and content management applications.

"E-mail, calendaring and collaboration applications are in high demand by the SME market," observed Joaquin Ruiz, vice president of marketing for SpikeSource.

Open-Xchange Server Spike Certified provides features and functionality of asynchronous collaboration software: e-mail, calendar, address book/contacts, portal, project/task tracking, document sharing/version control, and bulletin board/threaded discussion/forum. End-customers can use this functionality anywhere and with any device, company officials say: "Extensions, 'Oxtenders,' enhance customer flexibility to integrate to existing IT infrastructures, or even extend capabilities such as Fax, Backup, Archiving, Mobile Communication, or CRM."

"Open-Xchange is built with ease of use, installation and management in mind," said Dan Kusnetzky, EVP Marketing for Open-Xchange.

Okay, we got our next guest in here… yes, folks, please welcome Reuters Global Picture Editor Tom Szlukovenyi. Tom, thanks for dropping by First Coffee, I can't imagine you're very fond of blogs either at this point.

"Why, I don't know what you're talking about. I love Daily Kos, that guy's so balanced and fair-minded."

Well, the whole, um, scandal, you know, where Reuters has been running such obviously faked Photoshopped fauxtographs from Lebanon that they've been ridiculously easy to spot. The Little Green Footballs blog was the one to point it out.

"Oh, that, yeah, I remember hearing something about that. One of our stringers from Lebanon was cleaning the dust from a print and inadvertently altered one image in a minor way, I think."

Actually, Tom, Reuters had to withdraw over 900 photographs. Don't you think that's quite a lot? Like this one here, it's surprising a photograph this obviously faked made it in print -- isn't that your job, Tom? To watch out for things like this?

"Well, this photo isn't… I mean, it's entirely possible that the 35-foot high Godzilla shown in the photograph rampaging through Beirut could have actually been there, neither you nor I are on the ground there, we can't see the story developing in real time, that's why we rely on stringers, see."

Hoookay, public service announcement time here at Radio KCRM 98.6, All Charles Mingus All The Time: Tech analyst firm Frost & Sullivan is holding its 2006 Quarterly Analyst Briefing Presentation Tuesday, August 15, 2006 at 3:00 pm EDT.

Enterprises large and small have begun to treat their contact centers as the strategic corporate asset that they really are, Frost & Sullivan believes -- "critical to corporate brand image, customer retention and growth," according to company officials.

Finding a way to optimize agent staffing and stop the bleeding from soaring attrition rates has become a major concern for contact centers today, while at the same time there is continued pressure to reduce overhead, cut real estate costs and trim operational expenses. Stop me if you've heard any of this at your contact center.

Highlights of the F&S briefing, company officials say, include an understanding of the benefits as well as the challenges inherent in deploying work-at-home agents.

To participate, please e-mail Mireya Castilla at mireya.castilla@frost.com with your full name, company name, title, telephone number, e-mail address, city, state and country. Upon receipt of the above information, a registration link will be e-mailed to you.

"There are both push and pull factors accelerating this movement to home- based agent staffing in contact centers," notes Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst Michael DeSalles. "The power of the model lies in agent quality, flexibility and lower attrition -- happier employees who stay with a company longer. Clients recognize that high-quality interactions add significant value to the customer experience."

This briefing is aimed at contact center managers, HR professionals, outsource solution providers, CRM and workforce optimization vendors as well as prospective work-at-home agents interested in understanding how this agent model is evolving in the market.

Our next guest… what's that? Where… London? No cell phone… Folks, the engineer in the control booth's saying our next guest, a Mr. Khan from England, says he got held up at the airport…

Okay, not to panic, we've got Maurice Clarett on the schedule for the sports segment to talk about his indoor football team, the Mahong Valley Hitmen's upcoming season in the … what? Arrested and on $5 million bail? Oh for… here's a statement from Hitmen owner and coach Jim Terry saying Clarett's recent violent arrest will "not affect his status with the team," according to Youngstown's NewsNet5: "They plan to stand behind him."

Why would they "stand behind" someone who was arrested with a loaded arsenal in his car, wearing a bulletproof vest, close to the home of someone scheduled to testify against him in another court case? Coach Terry says his team's season ticket and memorabilia sales "have skyrocketed since Clarett signed on with the team." Oh, right. Of course. Silly me. What else did I expect from a team calling themselves the Hitmen? Who's the team mascot, Sirhan Sirhan? O.J. Simpson? Terry must be drooling over himself with joy.

Any public service announcements to run… let's go to Astea International Inc., a vendor of service lifecycle management, and Fuji Xerox New Zealand, who are commemorating ten years of "a strong and fruitful relationship."

"In our initial search, we evaluated many service management products, and Astea was the only product on the market that fit our needs and could help us achieve our business goals," said Martyn Smith, Information Systems Manager of Fuji Xerox New Zealand, who said the Astea product "makes it fast and easy for our field service team to access all of the information they need" for customer service.

Yeah I know, but you try finding instant air. So this is Radio KCRM 98.6, All Adam Carroll All The Time, signing off.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Kinks' Misfits:

EmailLabs, a vendor of e-mail marketing solutions and a subsidiary of J.L. Halsey Corporation, has introduced EmailLabs 4.8.

The new features help marketers "minimize undeliverable or improperly formatted e-mails, create more effective messages based on contextually relevant best practices, offer RSS delivery to their subscribers, and uncover statistically significant variations in campaign performance based on subscriber demographics and attributes," according to company officials.

Jim Herbold, general manager at EmailLabs said his company offers "best practices that… minimize the risk of having e-mail messages render poorly or get improperly filtered. We enable marketers to offer RSS to their most discerning subscribers, and we help demonstrate ROI to C-level executives by indicating how messages resonated with specific segments."

Officials say the product is provided as an ASP service, and is integrated with a company's Web site, sales force automation and CRM technologies through EmailLabs' application programming interface.

What company officials call "significant" features include EmailAdvisor, an e-mail auditing tool from sister company Lyris Technologies, whose five interrelated auditing components let marketers preview how messages will appear in the 35 most popular e-mail clients,

Betcha didn't know there were 35 e-mail clients, did you? "Lessee, Outlook, Eudora, MacMail… um…"

The product also checks messages against common spam filters and blacklists, determines the best time to send based on which ISP providers are experiencing delays, and get real-time, post-launch analysis of how 40 major ISPs are delivering, blocking or filtering messages.

Oh hey, and it helps you "comply" with CAN-SPAM and enhance deliverability, wink wink.

Australian IT is reporting that "Telstra says its billion-dollar data centre and IT management contract with IBM will save $250 million over six years."

The services deal includes the day-to-day management of Telstra systems. It's put IBM in charge of an extra 1,500 servers.

Telstra told Australian IT it had saved $500 million in capital expenses "through tough negotiation with vendors and discontinuing projects that did not advance the transformation strategy"."

Other measures announced in November included a $100 million core network upgrade contracted to Cisco, the new 850Mhz 3G mobile network being constructed by Ericsson, and upgrades to billing and CRM systems and operational support systems, the paper said.

Autobytel Inc., an Internet automotive marketing services company, has announced it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission its Form 10-Q Quarterly Report for the second quarter ended June 30, 2006.

Revenue for the second quarter of 2006 was $29.4 million, of which $17.8 million was related to Lead Fees, $4.3 million was related to Advertising, $6.3 million was related to CRM services, and $1.0 million was related to Data, Applications and Other.

Total revenue declined $2.0 million, or 6% from revenue of $31.4 million in the second quarter of 2005.

Operating expenses were $37.7 million in the second quarter of 2006, an increase of $2.9 million from operating expenses of $34.9 million in the second quarter of 2005.

Net loss for the second quarter of 2006 was $7.9 million, or a loss of $0.19 per fully diluted share.

CRM vendor Kintera Inc., which sells software as a service to the nonprofit and government sectors, has also declared a quarterly loss, announcing financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2006.

Total net revenue for the second quarter 2006 was $12.8 million, an increase of 20 percent compared to $10.7 million in the first quarter 2006, and an increase of 23 percent compared to $10.4 million in the second quarter 2005.

Net revenue for the second quarter 2006 exceeded the guidance of $11-$12 million provided by Kintera management.

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization and stock-based compensation was a loss of $4.5 million, or $0.13 per share, in the second quarter of 2006, which was within the company's guidance range.

This is a decrease of 34 percent compared to a loss of $6.9 million, or $0.19 per share, in the first quarter 2006, and a decrease of 43 percent compared to a loss of $8.0 million, or $0.26 per share, in the second quarter 2005.

Kintera's net loss for the second quarter of 2006 was $7.0 million, or $0.20 per share, which was at the favorable end of the company's guidance range. This is a decrease of 25 percent compared to a net loss of $9.3 million, or $0.26 per share, in the first quarter of 2006, and a decrease of 31 percent compared to a net loss of $10.1 million, or $0.33 per share, in the second quarter 2005.

Operating expenses for the second quarter 2006 totaled $16.5 million, a decrease of $0.7 million from the first quarter 2006 and a decrease of $1.9 million from the second quarter 2005.

Another net loss, dang it all anyway: Selectica, Inc., a vendor of sales execution and contract management products, has announced financial results for the first fiscal quarter ended June 30, 2006.

Revenue for the first quarter of fiscal 2007 was $5.2 million, which compares to revenue of $7.1 million for the same period in the previous year. Net loss for the quarter was $2.6 million, or ($0.08) per share, which compares with a net loss of $2.7 million, or ($0.08) per share, in the first quarter of fiscal 2006. Bookings in the first quarter of fiscal 2007 increased over the prior quarter.

Selectica has also just announced that the board of directors has named Stephen Bennion as the company's new Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.

Bennion has served as Chief Financial Officer of Selectica since September 1999. He replaces Vince Ostrosky, who has stepped down from the CEO position following "a mutual decision reached with the board of directors that the company would be better served by a more streamlined management structure," according to company officials.

Let's see if you can translate that quote accurately. Here, we'll spot you the "Ostrosky got ____ in the ____ and ____ out the ____." There you go, MadLibs for Businessmen™.

Ostrosky will continue to serve on Selectica's board of directors, and Jamie Arnold, chairman of the nominating and audit committees of Selectica's board of directors said all the usual nice things about him.

For some knee-slapping fauxtography see the invaluable LGF exposé. Amazing that there are people out there who, First Coffee's told, actually trust Reuters, The New York Times and the rest of the MSM. For a good look at the whole fauxtography issue from a liberal publication here's an LA Weekly article.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and we’re still on our jazz kick here at the sprawling office complex headquarters of First Coffee, having Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um piped to all the far-flung office buildings, garages, stables, indoor golf courses…

Microsoft partner Workopia, Inc. wants you to know that it now offers national assistance to small businesses that want to evaluate and implement Customer Relations Management software at an affordable price.

Unlike most Microsoft enterprise partners, and certainly most unlike Microsoft itself, Workopia believes it "talks the language of the small/medium company" when discussing enterprise level software. Workopia trains their clients on necessary operations to any extent desired, but will do hands-on set up for the client to save time and money if that is desired.

According to Frank Lee, president of Workopia, many smaller firms want to manage their customers better, "but don't have the staff and resources to learn about CRM systems." Lee thinks Microsoft CRM 3.0 can be adapted to smaller companies, "so we act as temporary staff to get clients up and running."

The success of Workopia earned Frank Lee an MVP designation (I don't know, "Microsoft Valued Partner," maybe?), one of the few MVPs in the country devoted to the small/medium enterprise. Workopia is a Certified Microsoft Business Solutions Partner and helped launch two of Microsoft's 18 showcase customers for their CRM 3.0 system.

Microsoft was pleased enough with their efforts to encourage Workopia to expand their services nationally to get other small and medium size companies using CRM 3.0. Aztec Software in Springfield, N.J. was one of the first clients outside of the San Francisco Bay to retain Workopia.

…

Thank you, thank you, thank you MoveOn.org and Daily Kos, for accomplishing what no Republican could ever have done this year -- taken away a safe Democrat Senate seat in Connecticut. The patented Daily Kos Kiss of Death at work.

The wonderful thing about political morons is they have a self-destruct button (Republicans still send Ralph Nader a Christmas card every year for single-handedly costing Al Gore the 2000 election) and by taking away a valuable safe seat -- Joe Lieberman will run as an Independent in Connecticut and will win, the loony militants are the ones who actually bother to vote in primaries -- from the Democrats the nutroots rapidly taking over the once-proud Democratic Party are doing their part to ensure Republicans maintain control of Congress.

No candidate backed by Daily Kos has ever won any office, they're something like 0-22 now.  Were First Coffee a conspiracy theorist he'd suspect Karl Rove was bankrolling Daily Kos, as valuable allies as they've proven to be in destroying the Democratic Party as a party of serious national governance.

A few Democrats in Georgia's Fourth Congressional District grew some brain cells and threw out certified embarrassment Cynthia McKinney, who no doubt was also the favorite of the Code Pink-Mama Moonbat Sheehan crowd. Honestly, for all the liberal conspiracy wackos attracted like moths to MoveOn.org, Daily Kos, Code Pink and Mama Moonbat you'd think somebody'd notice "Hey, Karl Rove couldn't be picking off liberals with any more deadly accuracy than our supposed 'leaders'…"

…

Neocase, a vendor of collaborative customer service CRM products, has announced that Tamera Scholz has joined as vice president of professional services, a new position at the company.

Scholz will oversee the pre-sales, professional services and customer service organizations as the company expands its U.S. presence following the recent launch of its CRM solutions for the U.S. market.

At Neocase, she will be responsible for the deployment of Neocase customer service and CRM applications, and the execution of software integration projects and customer support across Neocase's channel partners, customers and internal teams.

Scholz said she thinks Neocase has the "ideal" product for mid-sized companies looking to improve their customer operations processes. Additionally, Neocase's flexible delivery model -- via on demand or on premise -- "is designed to meet the specific needs of our customers and let them focus on providing the best possible customer care."

Prior to joining Neocase, Scholz served as director of implementation services and director of worldwide training services at NetSuite, where she was responsible for creating and delivering CRM product training to worldwide end-users and partners.

Scholz has implemented educational programs and led training teams at Corrigo, Flexi International Software and Industrial Indemnity.

…

Advent Software, Inc., a vendor of CRM software and services to the investment management industry, has announced that Bill Few Financial Group, a Pittsburgh-based investment and wealth advisor and broker-dealer group, has migrated to Advent Portfolio Exchange for client relationship management functionalities.

Bill Few Financial Group, which has $1.2 billion in assets under management, participated in the client validation development process of Advent Portfolio Exchange last year. The company upgraded from Axys to Advent Portfolio Exchange, Advent's next-generation portfolio management platform that integrates front-office marketing and CRM functionality with back-office portfolio accounting and reporting operations.

Bill Few officials said moving to Advent Portfolio Exchange was done to improve the firm's client services, improve compliance and security, and help integrate front-office functions with back-office operations.

"A key benefit of Advent Portfolio Exchange right out of the box was the security functionality. We can set up user IDs and limit user access to specific accounts, which enables us to allow portfolio access to select affiliates," said John Jones, Chief Operating Officer of Bill Few Financial Group, adding that "the built-in CRM capabilities show us all the client's data in one integrated view."

Advent Portfolio Exchange is built on industry standard tools, including Microsoft's SQL server for data security and simple IT functionality.

…

CRM vendor Knova Software today announced the financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2006, losing $500,000.

Revenue for the second quarter of 2006 was $7.5 million, a two percent increase over second quarter 2005 revenue of $7.3 million. Revenue for the quarter was comprised of $3.2 million of software license revenue and $4.3 million of services and maintenance revenue compared to $2.8 million of software license revenue and $4.5 million of services and maintenance revenue for the second quarter of 2005.

The GAAP net loss for the second quarter of 2006 was $0.5 million or $0.05 per share. This compares to a net income of $0.06 million or $0.01 per share for the second quarter of 2005. GAAP net loss in the second quarter of 2006 includes stock based compensation charges of approximately $0.5 million reflecting the company's adoption of Statement of Financial Standards No. 123R ("SFAS 123R") on January 1, 2006.

On an adjusted non-GAAP basis, net income for the second quarter of 2006 was $0.2 million or $0.03 per share.

Based on the company's first half 2006 results, Knova is raising its annual revenue guidance. Revenue for 2006 is expected to be in the range of $26 million to $29 million.

If  read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Adam Carroll's album released a couple months ago, Lookin' Out The Screen Door:

Intelliworks, Inc., a vendor of CRM for higher education, has announced that Southern Methodist University, The Brookings Institution and University of Washington have all gone live on the Intelliworks CRM platform.

Frank R. Lloyd, Associate Dean, Executive Education SMU Cox School of Business, said they selected the system because "it was purpose-built for executive education programs, and it is being used by other top business school programs."

"It works and everybody else is doin' it." First Coffee's heard better reasons for choosing a software system, but believe me, I've heard a lot worse too.

In a single system, "we can communicate with people as they progress from prospect to registrant to participant and past-participant," says Lloyd. And in this case, "past-participant" means "alumni who will be supplicated for donations for the rest of his natural life."

Using Intelliworks CRM, the SMU team hopes to be able to offer better integrated customer service, marketing, and sales, university officials say. Some things they'd like to do -- or do better -- are to accept online payments securely, finely segment customers by various attributes and deliver targeted messaging, build sites for each program to provide greater interaction with customers and staff through discussion boards, faculty material postings, and online faculty-student interactions and manage sales leads and client relationships -- both inside and outside sales activities.

The left-wing "think tank" Brookings Institution's Adina Lord, Enrollments and Operations Manager said they're "delighted to implement iRM (Intelliworks Relationship Manager) at the Brookings Center for Executive Education."

IRM will "enhance our relationships with our current clients through its unified customer relationship management system, and will allow us to better track and manage new customer relationships."

Brookings selected Intelliworks because "their product is designed to meet the needs of executive education programs," specifically, iRM will "give us the chance to identify our best customers, manage our growing relationships with executives and deliver the right marketing to the right people. The enhanced reporting capabilities of the system will allow all of our staff to have easy access to data about our clients."

Burst Media has announced that Tacoda, Inc. has renewed its agreement to use a customized version of AdConductor, the company's complete ad management product, for its Tacoda Audience Networks, which bills itself as "the nation's largest behaviorally-driven online advertising network of quality Web sites for brand advertisers."

(Okay, sorry, I'm going to have to take this Adam Carroll CD off the player, spending way too much time listening and laughing than doing any actual work. This is why I can't have Bob Dylan or John Prine on while working either. Need something more work-friendly… Frank Sinatra or something jazzy like that… Sinatra's Come Fly With Me album, there we go. Let's get together after work, Adam.)

The agreement will enable Tacoda to "take advantage of numerous new features and upgrades in AdConductor such as integration with Tacoda's existing CRM and billing systems, as well as a unified order entry system that links directly to its customer resource management tools," according to Burst Media officials.

A private-label portal will serve as a dashboard that allows Tacoda publisher partners to control their overall online advertising business.

"For all our customers we try and serve as much as business consultants as we do technology providers, using our ten years of Internet advertising network experience. Our goal is to help them reengineer their processes with proven technology," says Harry Klein, Burst's COO.

Tacoda calls itself "the world's largest and most advanced behavioral targeting advertising network." Frankly I can't think of a larger or more advanced behavioral targeting advertising network, so we'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one.

Communications service providers: Want to get consumers to go for your bundled offerings of fixed and wireless phone, DSL broadband, and video services? Better pay attention to your CRM databases, among other things.

A new report by consulting firm Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, Inc. recommends that service providers who want to develop and deliver integrated products and services need to adhere to industry standards, cooperate with large developer and vendor communities, and form strategic partnerships with experts in core technologies such as seamless mobility.

They also need to "build a convergence customer data repository, with information from multiple CRM databases and network switches, to provide a single view of customer profitability and usage across different products," Diamond analysts found, adding that "service providers will also need a common Internet Protocol core network."

It's quite a challenge. Cable operators like Comcast and the Regional Bell Operating Companies see the convergence of these various services as an important source of growth, noted Hamilton Sekino, a partner in Diamond's telecom practice.

Sekino calculates that approximately $18 to $23 billion in enterprise value is in play as RBOCs and cable providers bundle services to compete for increased market share in the U.S.

"Profitably delivering bundled services -- the so-called triple and quadruple plays of various voice, data and video offerings -- will require that providers build significant new capabilities," Sekino contends. "It will take targeted marketing, customer-centric offerings, new organizational models, and technology innovation to be successful."

"A key question these companies must answer is, 'will customers go for it?'" Sekino said. "There isn't a monolithic market. Different consumer segments have far different attitudes about what they're willing to buy, from whom, and at what price. The answers will drive billions of dollars in investments."

And those are exactly the sort of answers well-done CRM, which is based on the premise that one size does not fit all, can provide, as the firm notes.

And from the Another Story First Coffee Would Love To Be Reporting On Location department, Ryder Systems, a European provider of bill management for fixed and mobile operators, has been awarded a contract by Ireland's eircom, to supply its Bill presentation and Analysis product to their Small Business & Consumer customer base.

With over 1.2 million customers, eircom will use Ryder's product to get comprehensive billing information via an intuitive online portal, with an eye to reducing billing queries. The online bill pay feature will be available to eircom's small business and residential fixed line customers.

Martin Gillick, Head of CRM Project Release Management in eircom retail, said the Irish communications giant wanted a product "which could be rolled out to our Small Business and Consumer customer base."

Through an easy to use web portal, users will be able to access a copy of the bill and view usage trends and summaries through charts, with additional functionality to create personalized reports to monitor usage patterns month on month, set specific watch points and drill down into the bill to extract specific information.

Eircom, the leading communications provider in Ireland, provides a full range of services from fixed wire and mobile telecommunications to broadband Internet.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is an album the higher I.Q. stoners in high school, the guys who listened to a lot of Yes and Beatles and read Robert Heinlein and Dune over and over liked but one which I never cared for until recently, but it's actually pretty good -- Return To Forever's Romantic Warrior:

Bluespring Software, which sells Business Process Management software, has announced the general availability of BPM Suite 4.4. The new release, according to company officials, "expands the number of things a business person can do with little to no involvement from IT."

The product lets users "create, retrieve, update, publish and delete files" from any standards-based (WebDAV) document management product, such as Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server, FileNet, Documentum and others. Processes can be triggered by document library events and site management can be automated.

It also works with Microsoft's CRM 3.0, as its processes "can be triggered by events or actions within CRM," officials say, and can pass business rules and process data between InRule's BRE and BPM Suite, "facilitating the management of rules separate from process management."

"Business processes should be owned by business people and a business's people should be able to participate in a process using common desktop tools like e-mail and Office," said Karl Treier, Bluespring's Chief Technology Officer.

In what Dubai officials describe as "a move to enhance customer satisfaction," Dubai Customs has a new customer relations strategy that involves the opening of a direct communication channel with customers to "facilitate closer mutual interaction."

As part of aforesaid new strategy, Dubai Customs will "strengthen its customer service mechanism and hold monthly meetings with customers to deliberate at length all aspects related to the services provided by it."

Long on generalities and frustratingly short on specifics, officials said "at the first monthly meeting held recently, senior executives from the Customer Relations Department of Dubai Customs briefed customers on the various services being offered by Dubai Customs to streamline processes and expedite clearance of goods. "

This involved customers being given "a comprehensive presentation" on Dubai Customs innovative e-Clearance, which was developed and integrated into Dubai Customs business processes "to streamline trade facilitation and digitize customs procedures in order to promote enhanced compliance and administrative efficiency."

It's all to the good whenever organizations take steps to improve customer communication and efficiency, First Coffee raises his second iced coffee of the morning to them, what we'd like to hear about are the specifics of how it'll be done:

The e-Clearance tool, built on a robust web platform, evidently allows accredited customers to "complete all documents related to their cargo manifest online," facilitating the faster clearance of goods. A total of 426,330 e-Clearance transactions were carried out in the first half of 2006, Dubai Customs officials report, "compared to 163,698 in the same period last year."

Vodafone's massive trans-Tasman (Australia-New Zealand) infrastructure project is "running late, with a potential large cost overrun," according to Wellington, New Zealand-based industry observer Randal Jackson:

"In December 2003, IBM was selected as the integrator for Vodafone's new CRM, billing and provisioning systems in New Zealand, Australia and Fiji. The CRM component was to be based on Siebel, which is used in several Vodafone country subsidiaries."

Jackson explains the new systems were to cover 1,100 "heavy" users and 1,400 "light" users in the sales channel. He reports that the project, which is billing-related, "was originally costed at $200 million and was due to be delivered by IBM at the end of 2005. Two sources say the cost is likely to blow out to at least $300 million. One was told by IBM, when the contract was signed, that the deal was worth $200 million."

IBM is the systems integrator working in both countries.

AppStrategy, Inc., a vendor of Rapid Application Development tools for Microsoft CRM, has announced the opening of its new EMEA office in Paris.

(Just so you're aware of the value First Coffee adds, the news advisory had written "… its new EMEA office in Paris, France," supposing that you're the kind of person who'd think appStrategy's new EMEA office had opened in Paris, Texas. We defend you from numerous insults to your intelligence, this is but one example.

(Here's another sentence we thought best to deflect: "AppStrategy EMEA will handle sales and support of the company's software products in the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions." In case you thought the EMEA office would handle sales and supports of the company's software products in, I don't know, Paraguay or Newfoundland. Watching out for you 24/7, that's First Coffee.

(You should see the piles of weeded-out adjectives around here by Friday, if we could find a way to turn "leading," "user-friendly," "seamless" or "powerful," the wooden pallets of the business news world, into fuel we'd never have to buy a barrel of oil from the Middle East again.)

AppStrategy offers ISVs, consultants and corporate developers its appRadius development framework for Microsoft CRM. AppRadius integrates with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Visual Studio, external databases including Oracle, DB2, Oracle, MySQL and legacy sources.

"The release of appRadius 3.0 has sparked interest in our framework," believes Greg Ozuzu, Founder & CEO of appStrategy, who says "our EMEA go-to-market strategy is to partner with MBS ISVs in the region to deliver CRM for customers."

AppRadius for Microsoft Dynamics CRM is currently available in several languages including English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. The system includes Small Business and Enterprise Servers and a Developer Suite.

Ever notice that jazz-rock "fusion" is a lot more jazz than rock? Rarely is it ever real rock'n'roll "incorporating" jazz, since that's like Levi's 501 jeans "incorporating" lace, it's almost always straight-up jazz but with a (audible) rhythm section playing in 4/4 time.

I love Russia. You gotta love Russia. No, not in the sense that you get thrown in the gulag any more if you don't, but in the sense that you get stuff like this: "New Web Site Offers Information on Customer Relationship Management. http://www.crm-pro.com is a new site that has information about plumbing and plumbing resources."

The site promo goes on to show that it knows what CRM is -- "CRM (customer relationship management) is term used of software that is normally used and for Internet capabilities that help companies' customer relationships in an organized way. For example, a company may build a database with all their customers that has not only the normal information like their name address etc, but also individualize situations, like what the customer purchased and when and if they called in for help what was said during the phone call and what was the problem and how the problem was resolved etc."

A few paragraphs of general CRM theory like this, concluding with "This new site [http://www.crm-pro.com] is designed to help people find good information on plumbing and plumbing materials and prices."

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, the music is Cross Canadian Ragweed's version of "Whiskey River," and that Rob McGrath has exactly one week to get me my deposit in Tanner & Haley back or… or else:

Selectica, a vendor of configuration, sales execution and contract management applications, has announced the release of a study titled "Contract Management in the Mid-Market" by Aberdeen Group.

The report was developed, company officials say, to help mid-market companies (in their eyes, if you're doing between $50 million and $1 billion you're mid-market) gain insight into "effective and efficient contract management methodology for both the buy and sell-side agreements."

Selectica sells technology that automates business processes in the areas of sales execution and contract lifecycle management. Available on-demand or installed, the company's products link between CRM and ERP.

"Contract Management in the Mid-Market" is based on survey results of 140 respondents. Findings include the disturbing fact that more than 80 percent of companies on both the buy- and sell-side of contract management use entirely manual or only partially-automated processes and systems. Friends, this is intolerable in this great land of ours.

According to Cassandra here mid-market companies face "significant challenges with contract management. In many cases, companies cannot even locate contracts that may be stored away in archaic filing systems. Mayhem ensues.

On the buy-side, contract management is seen as part of overall supply management, while on the sell-side, companies are looking to contract management to "improve customer relationships as well as to better assess and mitigate risks," according to the report's findings.

"The major goal for contract management within any company is to ensure that its commitments and obligations to customers and suppliers are clearly visible to the right people in the organization and that these commitments are promptly executed upon," said Vishal Patel, Aberdeen research analyst and author of the report.

Generally Contract Performance Management software does stuff like ensure compliance by automating and streamlining the creation, storage, management, and analysis of contracts -- from initial contract request and negotiation to on-going compliance and performance management.

Automating many of the manual, disparate processes traditionally associated with contracts helps by giving users visibility and control of their commitments, eliminating expired, redundant and poorly structured agreements, tracking key milestones, deliverables and renewal events, ensuring accurate financial reconciliation and compliance, managing collaboration and approvals across entire contract lifecycle; and enforcing use of standard processes and terms.

I love it when spammers get creative, an ersatz poetry is achieved. Today I got a spam for all my "faarmacy" needs, with the subject heading "Reminder for your actuality." Isn't that great?

It's the time of the season for reporting how well -- or not-so-well -- you've been doing, so FP Technology, Inc., doing business as Firepond, is announcing that its multi-tenant on demand product, Firepond CPQ OnDemand, has seen significant user growth over the past year.

To date, the amount of subscribers has increased by 62% and the amount of proposals generated has grown over 185%. Not… bad, as we say.

This quarter, Firepond added two more major companies to its customer list. The first company, a worldwide financing and asset management solutions provider, wanted to improve their lead-to-quote process. They chose Firepond CPQ OnDemand because of its "tight integration to salesforce.com, ease of use and the strong capability of the Firepond Product Data Manager configuration engine," according to Firepond officials.

The second company is a major security software provider that will deploy Firepond to its thousands of worldwide salespeople to "improve the accuracy of quotes, control margin and centrally manage pricing and configuration."

Bill Santo, Firepond CEO said through "a single sign-on to salesforce.com," their customers can develop accurate quotations that they can present to their customer in minutes.

Firepond is a certified AppExchange partner, and Firepond OnDemand is one of more than 250 applications created by salesforce.com, its customers and partners that are now available on the salesforce.com AppExchange.

Advice to Mel Gibson: Join Hezbollah or, better yet, get elected the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Then you can say that Jews are the source of the entire world's problems and should be wiped off the map and everybody will simply shrug, yawn and turn the page as they do when Hezbollah and the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran say things like that. You can even be sober.

You may have seen this news the past week, First Coffee missed it so there's a chance you did too:

The United Kingdom's Direct Marketing Association has formed the new Mobile Marketing Council, following the creation of a strategy group earlier this year. Chaired by Nick Fuller, the council's primary objectives are to "promote a greater understanding and use of the medium to both members and the wider industry."

Mobile is becoming an established direct marketing medium for applications as varied as direct response fulfillment, CRM and advertising. So DMA members and the broader industry, the thinking goes, should know more about the Council's support in areas such as legislative compliance (particularly around consumer permission), technology understanding and best practices.

The Council has already compiled a Code of Practice for membership consultation which is now available via its microsite at www.dma.org.uk and is running several events where case studies from experienced practitioners are combined with hands-on demonstrations.

Nick Fuller, Chair, Mobile Marketing Council, says within digital, mobile marketing is "probably the newest area but its staggering growth and potential continues to grab marketers' attention."

According to the DMA's Future Trends Survey 2005, interactive media is the fastest growing area of Direct Marketing. This, Fuller says, is why the DMA has established a council -- "to offer members support and advice as well as to promote the benefits of mobile marketing."

Sand Technology Inc., a vendor of enterprise information management products, has announced that it is working with TopEnd Technology, Inc. to implement the Sand/DNA Analytics product at NHN Corporation in Korea as "the core component of a data warehouse system supporting analysis of Internet portal usage."

Sand/DNA products include SAP-certified information management, CRM analytics, and specialized applications.

NHN Corporation, which according to Sand officials was described recently in BusinessWeek magazine as one of the "hottest Internet search companies on earth," is one of Korea's premier Internet companies, operating the Naver search portal and Hangame game portal.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.

A second cup of coffee for today, and the music is ABC's "Date Stamp," witty 80's disco-metal-glam pop for English majors who can't dance:

The news in the Wall Street Journal yesterday got me thinking: Starbucks Corp. said "unexpectedly heavy demand for new juice and banana frappuccinos during the morning rush hurt its sales growth in July." Chief Executive James Donald admitted "we are losing some espresso business due to longer-than-normal wait times" at stores.

Thinking specifically about a) how nice a banana frappuccino'd be about now, and b) the fact that too long wait lines is a problem lots of businesses would like to have. As I wrote yesterday, "the problem at Starbucks isn't that customer service is poor, but that it's too good. For one thing it's the new standard in coffee shops, and for another it's highly impersonal." That column dealt with Starbucks setting the standard for coffee shop quality, today's deals with Starbucks' highly impersonal, competent, absolutely wonderful style of customer service that you don't notice.

"As an avid Starbucks fan (every morning, sometimes afternoon), I can tell you that in terms of the store I frequent, you nailed it: They are practically overstaffed, which makes for excellent customer service," a reader wrote in response to yesterday's column. Great. Now switch to minor key, here comes the villain: "The staff is also greeting customers by name, when possible, and I think that is how they are being trained."

As Miss Manners correctly notes, "No respectable job requires you to simulate human emotions." It's morally wrong to make a customer feel she needs to engage in conversation to avoid being rude to the staff when all she wants is a coffee, a table and some quiet time. Some people in your life you don't want to have to pretend to be chums with, you have to do enough of that at work.

The whole principle behind CRM is the company offering the service the customer wants. As I noted yesterday, this has come to equate "remembering the customer." Hotels like recording what kind of drink someone ordered to have it ready for that guest when she comes back next year. Amazon.com, of course, is famous for their "Hi Marv, we have recommendations for you" whenever Marv logs in. Is this "good" customer service?

Coffee shops are almost perfect laboratories for CRM. They sell a relatively fungible, commonly-available product, so service is important -- if you're the only coke dealer in town it's not like you sweat the customer service. They're easy to tinker with, and results of improvements -- or problems -- show up quickly.

It's received wisdom that SMBs can provide the more personal, customized customer service customers like, it's their great advantage over the huge impersonal conglomerates. In coffee shops this means you know the name of the guy who runs Andy's Kaffee Haus on the corner -- well, so does anybody who can read -- and he probably knows yours, knows what kind of coffee you like and how you like it. Some people like this.

And of course you get to know the regulars, and have to say hi to everyone, and the staff know your preferences and expectations so you're inhibited from ordering something new because it's a problem, and you have to chat with everyone and the help so pretty soon you have to find a new coffee shop where you can get work done.

Maybe it's just me, but the finest customer service is that which you're unaware of. I prefer the anonymity of big cities over the enforced acquaintance of small towns, too, so maybe I'm just a sullen misanthropic wretch. But I do have friends, I don't need the coffee shop guy to be my friend, I need him to sell me coffee. If I want to talk with friends at a coffee shop I'll bring them, I don't expect the shop to provide them.

Having a coffee shop "anticipate" my order irks me, I’m not a robot, I don't order the same thing every time I go into a coffee shop, and I don't want someone punch-drunk on CRM theory assuming I do. Start "anticipating" my coffee order and I'll start "patronizing" other coffee shops. Let me order, for heaven's sake, it's not too much strain.

As guru Bob Thompson said years ago, one of the problems with CRM is that customers don't want to be managed. I'd go one word further: A lot of customers don't really want a relationship either. At least not part and parcel with their business interactions. And as pleasant and casual as getting coffee in a coffee shop is, it's a business transaction and should be treated as such -- politely, professionally and competently.

At Starbucks the guy working the counter doesn't come over and talk to you, he lets you read or just sit and think. But if you're in Andy's Kaffee Haus, and you know Andy and he knows you, well, you have to make polite conversation which usually ends up with Andy saying "Hey, lemme put my band's new demo on the sound system, we're into atonal thrash metal now, tell me what you think of these first nine songs."

An article-length critique of yesterday's column appeared at a fine coffee-oriented blog, TheShot. The author writes "I'll agree with [First Coffee] that the world is littered with independent coffeehouse deadwood that could use a good, controlled burn. But I'll argue that customer service is just gravy in the larger scheme of things."

As TheShot notes, "I've had some of the worst customer service in the world (at least at first) at Sant'Eustachio il caffè in Rome, and yet it's one of my favorite cafés. Instead, I'd argue that the quality of the coffee and the welcoming nature of the location itself are the biggest drivers for making people pass over their local mom & pops."

Fair enough, point well taken. While I -- and I presume TheShot -- wouldn't advocate Soup Nazi-style service, a lot of people, myself included, prefer anonymous, cool, professional service, where you could order a venti caramel macchiato sixteen days in a row from the same clerk, and on the seventeenth day she says the same thing she said the first time she ever saw you: "Hello, what can I get for you?" Because, you know, everybody has their venti caramel macchiato limit, and yours might be sixteen.

Of course it might simply be that for people such as TheShot, who have the taste bud capacity where subtle grades of differentiation in the cup itself matter, customer service isn't such a big deal. If fine distinctions in coffee quality really affect your day, hey follow your nose and put up with surly employees, sixth-hand college dorm furniture and TIME magazines with President Hoover on the cover.

But the majority of people can't tell the difference between Kenyan AA and Sumatran and go to coffee shops for the overall experience, to them the service, the atmosphere, heck even the music is as important, if not more, than the actual java. And those are the people who like chatty employees. Me, I'll take an average cup of coffee and pleasant but cool help over Blue Mountain coffee with Chatty Cathy working the counter.

(And non-wobbly tables. Is it really so impossible, in a culture that can put a man on the moon, to produce tables that you don't have to spend five minutes balancing with napkins, sugar packets and pages ripped out of your notebook?)

Because when it comes to customer service, less is more. Most of the time simply smile, hand over the goods and shut up. If you get the order right I'm happy, I don't need five minutes of strained chit-chat, that's not good customer service.

My wife and I ran a coffee shop in Antalya, on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, for a couple years before moving up here to Istanbul in January. We quickly learned that by far most patrons wanted a pleasant interaction when ordering, prompt service and then to be left alone. When someone initiated conversation that was fine, but we didn't presume.

This is what Starbucks is great at -- cool, competent, professional service. It's why I go there. I enjoy Turkish coffee shops here in Istanbul, but there's always a friend of the owner's daughter who wants to take twenty minutes practicing her English with me, or bored counter help who strike up conversations about soccer, weather or Bush's foreign policy with the single customers, no matter how intently aforesaid customer's trying to read or work on a laptop. Good thing the Turkish coffee's so delicious.

In George Orwell's book Down And Out In Paris And London he writes of his time living the life of a street bum, and says when men lined up for charity meal tickets at churches, they hated clergymen who felt compelled to chat and shake hands while handing out tickets. There was one curate greatly favored among the men who would simply walk along the line, head down, and wordlessly hand out tickets. Orwell says the men paid him the highest compliment they could imagine: "He'll never be a bishop, that one."

That, my friend, is great customer service: Just what the customer wants.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content, from Starbucks or anyone else.

I didn't ponder the question too long
I was hungry and went out for a bite,
Ran into a chum with a bottle of rum
And we wound up drinkin' all night.

Time to rise and shine, friends, up and at 'em, sun never shines on a sleeping dog's butt, and worms taste good, lookit all those early birds suckin' 'em down out there eating your lunch, hey nobody ever delivers the early worm as takeaway, and here to help you get the lead out and switch on the ol' treadmill is Radio KCRM 98.6, All Jimmy Buffett All The Time…

… Bolder Minds Inc., a cutely-named Boulder, Colorado-based firm that provides business support products and services, has announced the signing of a technology reseller agreement with Toronto-based Book4Time Inc.

Book4Time sells web-based appointment scheduling and CRM tools for businesses that need to schedule client appointments -- gee, there's a niche market -- and manage internal resources used in delivering a service. Wow, like, hope those guys broaden out into services a broad strata of companies might actually need, they're really zeroing in on rather esoteric business processes there.

Unlike "traditional scheduling systems," Book4Time’s web-based portal supports alternative lifestyles and is accessible from anywhere, anytime without having to download and install software. In other words, "on-demand."

The product targets companies such as "spas, salons, or health service organizations that want to enhance their customer experience by making it easier to schedule appointments while increasing the productivity of their own employees," according to company officials, evidently anxious to differentiate their marketing focus from those spas, salons, or health service organizations which don’t want to enhance their customer experience, enjoy making it more difficult to schedule appointments and don't care about the productivity of their own employees (as opposed to someone else's employees?)

The agreement allows Bolder Minds to market and sell the Book4Time product in the United States. Bolder Minds will act as a sales agent for Book4Time and provide on-going account management services for the client base in the United States. The sales and marketing activities will take place from Bolder Minds headquarters at 1526 Spruce Street in Boulder, Colorado.

You're going to think we're being snide, snarky, snotty or otherwise in fine fettle here at Radio KCRM 98.6, All Chris Wall All The Time, but we're not, we're sensitively exposing our soul when we say that we really enjoy translated press releases from overseas.

Take the one from syskoplan we got today, telling us that the German vendor "has announced the results of the first six months of financial year 2006 today," and that "the first 6 months of the financial year have gone pleasantly. With the successful start of macrosInnovation and a continuing good order situation the prospects remain good for the 2nd half of the year." Whew.

The software integrator for Customer Relationship Management "achieved sales" of EUR 22.5 million for group, 12% more than in the previous year with EUR 20.1 million. Earnings before taxes came to EUR 3.3 million compared to the prior-year figure of EUR 1.8 million:

"Special effects of balanced EUR +0.8 million are contained in this which were allotted to the sale of CareGain and the give-up of the independent American business in the 1st quarter. Altogether, syskoplan after tax and minority shares obtained a net income of EUR 1.4 million till now (previous year: EUR 0.8 million), which means earnings per share of 33 cents (previous year: 19 cents)."

Almost achieves poetry, doesn't it? One euro equals $1.27, do the math yourself, we don't get paid by the hour here.

"In the 2nd quarter 2006 the sales of the syskoplan group came to EUR 12.1 million, or 16% higher than sales in the 1st quarter. Compared to the 2nd quarter 2005 the sales have increased by 13%. The EBIT was EUR 1.05 million following EUR 0.9 million in the 1st quarter 2006 and EUR 1.1 million during the same period the previous year."

The strategic partnership with SAP was "given some important new features in the second quarter. As one of only 6 companies worldwide" -- bet you thought there were more companies than that in the world, didn't you? Pays to listen to Radio KCRM 98.6, All Slobberbone All The Time, you learn things like this the Trilateral Commission and Bildenbergers don't want you to know -- "the syskoplan became Special Expertise Partner for Master Data Management."

And you'll be pleased to know that "the existing partnerships e.g. in the areas of CRM, BI and APO have also been confirmed for the next year."

It's time to take leave of our German friends, but they'd like you to know that "besides further developing our profile as regards content under safeguarding of the profitability we work to enlarge the network of companies in Germany and to intensify the cooperation within the Reply group. First common projects e.g. in the logistics area are already under way."

Good night, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu as we flit across the Channel to the British Isles, where "estate agents are so busy that they are probably missing out on major additional new business opportunities due to a lack of accurate tracking of customer leads, properties and status," if Colm Mulcahy, chief executive of Enterprise CRM knows his stuff.

His company's a software development and consulting partner for salesforce.com at the launch of a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) product designed specifically for the estate agency market. And the new product, "Property CRM" requires no investment in hardware, software, or maintenance, as it is a hosted service provided on the Salesforce.com AppExchange platform.

The fact that it can be accessed remotely from any location really comes in handy when you're up on the moors showing a customer alternative properties on a laptop, and Heathcliff comes running, axe in hand, straight towards your Rover. Okay, maybe that doesn't happen to you too often, but take my word for it, one really appreciates British automotive craftsmanship at such a time.

Wrapping the broadcast up at Radio KCRM 98.6, All Dwight Yoakam All The Time, let's note that on-demand CRM vendor NetSuite, Inc., has announced that North Carolina State University’s College of Management has incorporated NetSuite Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) into its Master of Accounting (MAC) and MBA curricula. 

The college’s Enterprise Resource Planning course is equipping MBA and MAC students with the knowledge and skills needed to manage the entire business process, and "working with NetSuite’s one integrated system, students learn the entire end-to-end cycle of a business, such as purchase to pay or order to cash — not only the financials," according to NetSuite officials.

“I have been teaching ERP classes at the graduate level for five years using various software packages including the traditional ERP systems, but they were not user-friendly; I spent most of my time managing the software versus teaching my students,” said Marianne Bradford, Associate Professor of Accounting. 

Yeah yeah, nice and all that, but let's get to the important point: When is NetSuite going to do something about N.C. State's incredibly stupid decision to fire Herb Sendek as the basketball coach? That program was in the flusher when Sendek came, he did a better job than anybody expected and remained a gentleman, ran a clean program and made the Big Dance. Okay, he couldn't beat Carolina or Duke every time out, but who does?

As a University of Virginia fan, Radio KCRM 98.6, All Brook Benton All The Time is overjoyed at the Wolfpack's stupidity, as we're tired of losing to State and are pleased they shot themselves in the foot, knee and gut like this, but wants Coach Sendek to remember, now that Frankencoach Gillen's gone about three years too late, the next time you're looking for a job, Charlottesville's a nice place to live.

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