First Coffee

First Coffee for August 17, 2005

August 17, 2005

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Crosby, Stills & Nash’s CSN. Clever album titles from those guys – Crosby, Stills & Nash and CSN:

Ever hear of Spotster? First CoffeeSM hadn’t either, but this sounds like a cool product. They have a search engine they’re introducing today, which they describe as “targeted at the specific needs of business professionals looking for information within their industry.”

The search service creates “a comprehensive vertical industry web” that delivers search results to industry professionals. It’s live in beta and is available at www.spotster.net.

Spotster has introduced the service for three targeted industry segments including Customer Relationship Management, Integration & Web Services and Radio Frequency Identification.

Industry-specific search and research has become more difficult on traditional search engines – Google, et al – which lack a focus on industry-specific sites. There’s also all the search engine spam to wade through, irrelevant – i.e.

First Coffee for August 16, 2005

August 16, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Other Stewart, Rod’s 1971 masterpiece Every Picture Tells A Story:

Today’s Reader Of The Day is Peter Moore who, when challenged by yesterday’s column to name Al Stewart albums other than Year Of the Cat and Time Passages, rattled off eleven more, including one, Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time, a rarities and B-sides collection which First CoffeeSM’s never heard. Well done.
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Sedona Corp., which sells their Intarsia CRM to small and mid-size financial institutions such as insurance companies, community and regional banks and credit unions, has announced Q2 revenues of $229,000 compared to $407,000 reported in the same period one year ago.

Revenue from license fees and royalties increased to $87,000 from $80,000 in 2004, a jump company officials attribute to additional sales from one of the company’s partners.

Service revenues decreased to $142,000 compared to $327,000 reported one year ago. The reduction was due to a $300,000 decrease in related party revenue recognized in 2004.

Total revenues for the first six months of 2005 were $386,000, compared to $694,000 reported in 2004.

Their net loss for the three months ended June 30, 2005 was $641,000, or ($0.01) per share, compared to $611,000, or ($0.01) per share reported in the second quarter of 2004. For the six months ended June 30, 2005, the net loss was $1,458,000, or ($0.02) per share, compared to $1,343,000, or ($.02) per share, reported for same period in 2004.
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Chalk up another milestone for Avaya: According to company officials, they’ve just shipped their seven millionth line, for ING Vysya Bank, a private Indian bank.

Avaya said its IP line shipments surpassed traditional line shipments this year, further demonstrating Avaya’s global momentum in a growing market.

The Basking Ridge, New Jersey-based IP telephony company claims to be the “worldwide leader in IP telephony line shipments for first quarter 2005 with a 21 percent share,” citing research from the Synergy Research Group.

Jeremy Duke, president and CEO, Synergy Research Group noted that “the adoption of IP telephony by enterprises is growing markedly, as demonstrated by a more than 70 percent year-over-year growth noted in the first quarter of this year,” opining that “the major part of the adoption curve still lies ahead.”

In 2004, IP telephony accounted for eight percent of the 423 million total enterprise telephony lines installed worldwide, but that number increases almost daily.

First Coffee for August 15, 2005

August 15, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is five Al Stewart CDs on the changer. Here’s betting you don’t have five – here’s betting you can’t name five Al Stewart CDs, and we’ll spot you The Year Of The Cat and Time Passages:

Pro-SAAP Solutions is announcing the launch of what they’re calling “a powerful new web based business management” product, Version 5.0,) for the newspaper and magazine publishing industry that will, the company claims, “support a dramatic technological advance for companies that adopt the strategy.”

It’s being pitched to “newspapers and publishing businesses” who have dreamed of “jumping directly from a 1980s era legacy application to 21st Century Web based information processing.” Sounds good, doesn’t it?

It was developed by a guy who never has to spell his name over the phone, Sibusiso Tshabalala, President & CEO Pro-SAAP, LLC, nicknamed who’s described in company materials as “an entrepreneur who managed the advertising and online systems infrastructure for… publishing firms, including the San Francisco Chronicle and Ziff-Davis.”

It’s designed, company officials say, to use the investment companies have made in existing mainframe systems. “In contrast,” they claim, publishing industry products “from application software vendors like PeopleSoft, SAP, etc. require ripping out the existing infrastructure and can cost several million dollars in software license fees and implementation services.”

The Pro-SAAP product, company officials claim, “can be implemented at a fraction of the cost.”

Tshabalala said Pro-SAAP’s product helps publishing companies migrate “from legacy technologies into a web-based environment at a fraction of the cost of implementing a new ERP class application.”

It works with the Admarc software used by a little over half of the newspaper and magazine publishing firms in North America. It “can be implemented in a matter of months, and “typical implementations are expected to cost between $250,000-500,000,” company officials say.
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This was announced over the weekend, but First CoffeeSM was hip-deep in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, hopefully you were too.

First Coffee for August 12, 2005

August 12, 2005

Ugandan Jewish coffee seller J.J. Keki, left, leader of Uganda's Abayudaya Jewish community, with his son and two colleagues. Photo by Laura Wetzler.

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Everybody’s Bach:

ELoyalty Corporation, an enterprise CRM consulting company, has posted a net loss of $2.9 million for the period ended July 2, 2005.

For the second quarter of 2005, eLoyalty reported total revenue of $19.6 million, an increase of 8 percent over the comparable period last year, but a net loss of $2.9 million, “which is unfavorable by $2.5 million,” according to company officials’ rather elegant phrasing, “when compared to the second quarter of 2004.”

The net loss available to common shareholders was $0.52 a share, compared to a net loss of $0.13 a share in the second quarter of 2004. ELoyalty realized non-GAAP “Adjusted Earnings” measure loss of $0.2 million for the second quarter of 2005.

In addition, the company recorded a restructuring charge of $0.5 million in the second quarter of 2005.

First Coffee for August 11, 2005

August 11, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a song so good you wonder if James Taylor really wrote it, “Mexico:”

A couple columns ago First CoffeeSM ranted about how companies wishing to “do CRM” run out and buy a lot of shiny new technology from a big name vendor, unpack it, plug it in and pat themselves on the back for having gotten that taken care of, just wait for the improved customer satisfaction scores to roll in, what’s next week, ERP?

There’s no excuse for that – First CoffeeSM and former colleague Bob Thompson of CRMGuru told you that wasn’t the way to do it in 2000. We can’t understand why there still seems to be a problem – didn’t we tell you the right way to do it?

The impetus for that particular splenetic columnar rant – it doesn’t take much, folks, it really doesn’t – was a report Forrester did on the dissatisfaction with CRM vendors from such companies. First CoffeeSM has less than zero sympathy for such companies, since 99.7 percent of the time they screwed up the process themselves, and blame the technology for the resultant mess the way some clod who spills coffee on her hand will blame McDonald’s.

Got a note from William Band about the column:

David- I wrote the Forrester report on CRM enterprise suite vendors. I fully agree with the points in your article.

First Coffee for August 10, 2005

August 10, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a Beach Boys-Frank Sinatra mix. It actually makes a lot of sense:

RightNow Technologies is announcing a couple new products as well as a flagship product upgrade this morning.

First there’s RightNow Telesales, what the folks out there in beautiful Bozeman, Montana are calling “the on-demand CRM market’s first comprehensive solution for inbound and outbound telephone sales automation.” It’s designed to automate workflow processes and streamline management tasks.

“Historically we’ve built stuff to handle inbound calls,” RightNow founder Greg Gianforte told First CoffeeSM. They found, however, that their customers “want help with outbound calls. We studied it, realized that the way people do this today is a manager gets numbers,” and ends up mucking around with spreadsheets.

RightNow saw a needs for help with workload and management metrics, “so we built a solution for agent and manager to create campaigns tailored about specific selection criteria, and which then automatically distributes workload to the telesales unit.”

The product, RightNow Telesales, provides an intuitive, graphical campaign workflow designer that allows managers to “easily create call lists based on any number of segmentation filters, assign calls to sales representatives based on territory assignments or other criteria, and to distribute call scripts that optimize articulation of the sales message,” according to a RightNow spokesman. Related sales tasks-such as follow-up calls, letters, and emails-can also be automated as part of these campaigns.

RightNow Telesales can generate personalized call lists showing salespeople the calls they need to make for each campaign, as well as those that need to be followed up from previous campaigns.

They’re also releasing SmartGuide today. That’s a new CRM product designed to guide customers and service agents through “intuitive decision-tree” logic. This gives users a series of diagnostic questions to guide them to their answer.

Using RightNow’s patented AI technology, SmartGuide automatically improves its own effectiveness over time by learning from each user’s interactions. As more users interact with the system, it “learns” how to get them to answer faster.

“It’s basically a decision tree template on top of an existent database,” Gianforte said.

First Coffee for August 9, 2005

August 9, 2005

First CoffeeSM’s very first ad…

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132:

Kintera Inc. specializes in fund-raising and customer management tools for nonprofits, which right now is a good description of the company itself. Late yesterday afternoon the Associated Press reported that Kintera “will restate first-quarter earnings to reclassify the way it accounts for development costs, a move that is seen increasing its losses during the period.”

Kintera won’t release their Q2 results until the restatement comes out. It won’t be good news for the software maker, whose shares fell 16 cents to $3.83 in electronic trading after the announcement. It’s not like their originally-stated results, a loss of $7 million on revenues of $9.5 million were that great to begin with.
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Had a good talk with RightNow president and founder Greg Gianforte yesterday.

First Coffee for August 8 2005

August 8, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is one of the great rock songs ever, Ike and Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary” from their Greatest Hits. People forget how good she was before she went pop – “Sweet Rhode Island Red,” “Nutbush City Limits,” “Sexy Ida,” great rock’n’roll. Now, well, can her Tin Pan Alley tribute album be far off?

ECI Telecom is announcing that SDN Communications, South Dakota’s largest communications network, has selected ECI’s ST200 multi-service edge routers to deliver enhanced IP services.

ECI acquired the ST200 product line when the picked up Pittsburgh-based Laurel Networks this June. SDN is hoping for a smooth migration to an advanced IP/MPLS network.

Already operational, the new network lets SDN offer Virtual Private Networks and other services to its customers. “Equipment installation was completed in early June and we’re already seeing incremental revenue opportunities,” said Mark Shlanta, Chief Executive Officer of SDN Communications.

SDN Communications, a regional telecommunications provider, consists of 27 independent telephone companies covering 75 percent of South Dakota’s geography, transmitting voice, video, and data over 5,000 miles of fiber.
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In a story that TMC would gain great advantage sending First CoffeeSM to cover personally, LogiSense Corporation, an IP Billing/OSS and network software vendor to service providers and enterprises, along with Gemtek Systems are announcing that their integrated product has been selected by Caribbean Systems Inc. to deliver Wi-Fi services to hotels, timeshare/apartment blocks, Internet cafés, restaurants, colleges, and libraries on St. Martin.
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Ran across an interesting bit of news from Croatia this morning, it catches one’s attention when a news advisory starts “Ever since the first voice conferences were introduced many years ago, if participants were unfamiliar with each other’s voices or the line conditions were poor, there was the same question hanging in the air: ‘Who’s talking right now?’”

Evidently the company, Uniqall from Zagreb thinks “getting voice activity data at times from multiple active talkers, in a continuous manner, and the presentation of this data to the conference participants, were typical problems that always induced headaches for developers of conferencing and collaboration software.”

That’s right, we’re not dealing with a slick, native-English speaking press release writer here, which is fine by First CoffeeSM.

Uniqall is releasing today, “for free evaluation and download,” the first beta of its upcoming Gridborg HMP Server 1.1 software, which it promises “will be the building block that is going to make life easier for developers of advanced voice conferencing, collaboration and contact center applications.”

In the Gridborg HMP “world,” Uniqall says, “there are no physical analog ports on voice cards or their digital TDM equivalents that are restricted by the processing capabilities of a particular DSP behind them.

First Coffee for August 5, 2005

August 5, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is 1993’s Cracker:

First CoffeeSM’s been hearing about that Forrester Research report earlier this week discovering that the market’s “rife with dissatisfied customers… betting millions of dollars on products and services that do not fully satisfy their needs,” says one report.

Well, duh, if you’re just “betting” you deserve to lose. If you’re “intelligently investing,” that’s something else. First CoffeeSM can almost hear his old friend and colleague Bob Thompson, founder of CRMGuru.com shouting “It’s not about the technology! CRM’s an attitude, an approach, not buying a bunch of stuff!” Amen, Bob, you were right then and you’re still right now. All those jeremiads we wrote…

It’s curious that the Forrester report would only evaluate and rank four CRM players, Amdocs, Oracle, SAP and Siebel, and no hosted products.

First Coffee for August 4, 2005

August 4, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is – still – Exile On Main Street, which just never seemed to get taken out of the CD player from yesterday. Might even see it again tomorrow:

Yesterday afternoon SSA Global Technologies, Inc., a vendor of extended enterprise solutions and services announced they’re buying CRM vendor Epiphany in a deal worth $329 million, or $4.20 per share for the shareholders of Epiphany.

Epiphany’s product suite includes sales, service, marketing, and customer analytics applications, based on a similar services-oriented architecture and built using the same Java 2 Enterprise Edition technology, as the recently released SSA Technology Architecture.

Mike Greenough, chairman, president and CEO of SSA Global said “with Epiphany, we expect to enhance SSA CRM.”

Epiphany, which styled itself E.piphany until about 2001 when everything “dot-com” became verboten, overextended themselves a few years ago and never really recovered through their strategy of concentrating on verticals. Still they had a nice client roster, including Nestle, the Gap, Citibank, and Microsoft.

Josh Greenbaum, chief industry analyst for Enterprise Applications Consulting tells industry observer Ephraim Schwartz that with moves like this, picking up distressed companies, SSA is, in Schwartz’s words, “setting itself up to be one of the three or four major contenders” in the mid-market space.

“It will quickly become SSA versus Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP,” Greenbaum said, noting that SSA wants to be the one with the biggest customer base and the most competitive applications: “They already have a worldwide distribution channel,” Greenbaum tells Schwartz.

Focusing mainly on manufacturing, distribution, and retail, SSA offers ERP, BPM, product lifecycle management and supplier-relationship management, Schwartz says.
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A new report by independent market analyst Datamonitor finds that analytical customer relationship management technology, considered the logical evolution of the CRM lifecycle, is being adopted by enterprises on a broader global scale.

The report, cleverly titled “Analytical CRM,” forecasts global enterprise investment in aCRM will grow from an estimated $2.3 billion today to over $3 billion in 2009, “spelling good news for those technology vendors that operate in this space.”

That doesn’t sound exactly like an industry blowing wide open to First CoffeeSM, but hey, were you to promise this columnist a 30 percent raise between now and 2009 he wouldn’t sneeze at it.

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