First Coffee

First Coffee for August 3, 2005

August 3, 2005

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and we have a good ol’ classic rockfest on the CD changer, the Stones’ Exile On Main Street, Neil Young’s Live Rust, The Allman Brothers’ Eat A Peach… about as good as rock got before it died in the ‘90s:

Living here on the Mediterranean has its advantages, one of which is, well, the Mediterranean Sea itself.

First CoffeeSM usually preps for the day by doing laps in the pool, but today went along with a good friend to some rocks overlooking the sea, jumped in – scariest part of the whole day – and did some serious swimming, watching fish – a school of flying fish took off right in front of First CoffeeSM and his friend, trying to get the watches snagged on rocks in the shallows and swallowing salt water.

First CoffeeSM swam in college, so chlorine’s a daily nutrient as far as he’s concerned, but if there’s any more of this ocean swimming in the future his freestyle breathing motion needs to be adjusted so not quite as much salt water’s ingested.

It is great not to have to stop to flip turn at the pool wall, just swim as long as you can. Disorienting at first not to have the blue stripe at the bottom of the pool to follow, to have to reckon by the coast line, but a great morning.
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First CoffeeSM will be in San Francisco in September for salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event – yep, get the beer cold, Andrew – but wishes he could be there, flowers in his hair, for the “madhouse” that is TMC’s VoIP Developer Conference.

“TMC’s VoIP Developer Conference is a madhouse. It truly is,” says Rich Tehrani, TMC’s president. “The conferences started about 20 minutes ago and we have been scrambling to get more chairs to put into the sessions to keep up with all the people.

First Coffee for August 2, 2005

August 2, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Jim White’s 1997 CD Wrong-Eyed Jesus:

Always nice to run into a new product or company in the course of work, that’s one thing that keeps this job more interesting than washing windows or some other jobs First CoffeeSM’s had, and today there’s Creative Manager, Inc., which makes Creative Project Manager and Creative Manager Pro, and has evidently released version 7.95 of its flagship product, “with improvements to the integrated calendar for both Mac OS and Windows users,” company officials promise.

So what is this product? According to company officials, it’s “the only ad agency software and project management software for the creative design industry, created exclusively for design firms, ad agencies, in-house creative/mar-com departments, and creative service firms.”

It’s web-based integrated project management and job tracking solution which “streamlines the entire firm, from developing new business, to staffing, managing, and executing projects through to accounting and financial reporting.”

Works for business journalists too, at least for those who can’t tackle the above chores with a cheap notebook, whiteboard and paper bag for receipts. Those of us who run high-tech operations have a different manila folder for each month’s receipts.

Creative Manager Pro supports CRM, document management, shared calendaring, accounting and other functionalities.

First Coffee for August 1, 2005

August 1, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is three Frank Sinatra and two swing CDs on the changer. It’s going to be a good morning:

As part of First CoffeeSM’s occasional series of interviews with important types in the CRM and contact center space, we have an interview with CobbleSoft Chairman, CEO and minority owner Richard Stevenson.

A Brit living in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of New York state – if First CoffeeSM moves back to America that’s one place under heavy consideration, that and the Shenandoah Valley – Stevenson’s just overseen CobbleSoft’s release of Version 3 of its flagship product, COIGN, web-based help desk and service management software.

Excerpts are printed here, the complete interview appears as an article by First CoffeeSM’s mild-mannered reporter alter ego on the TMC site:

Richard, thanks for your time. What do you find are the best CDs to play at work?

A pleasure, David. Recently, I discovered Aria 3, Metamorphosis by Brit Paul Schwartz. It is incredibly powerful music, inspired by his love of rock and opera – you should play it for First Coffee… you never know when you walk into my office if you’ll hear The Who, South American salsa or classical.

To the uninitiated, in as plain English as possible, can you explain what it is that COIGN brings to the market that isn’t being, uh, brought anywhere else?

COIGN was one of the first truly web-based helpdesk products, and certainly the first to use Apache/Oracle for the middle tier, as opposed to Microsoft’s IIS. Developed exclusively for the Oracle Database… where COIGN adds value over and above other products is the sense of collaborative ownership it generates, whereby support does not have to be limited to IT or the helpdesk. CobbleSoft believes there are vast amounts of knowledge spread throughout any organization, and COIGN enables you to tap into that knowledge, resulting in faster and more accurate service and resolution.

In the past you’ve mentioned other products, that CobbleSoft is being asked to come in to deployments and do better.

First Coffee for July 29, 2005

July 29, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Best of 1968-1973 by The Steve Miller Band. I’m a joker…

Datamonitor is predicting that North America's $458 million hosted and managed speech services market “is tipped to exhibit an aggressive 15% year-over-year growth rate through the next four years.”

Their report, “Voice as a Service,” says growth is being spurred by a saturated hosted/managed DTMF market forcing hosted IVR providers in North America to sharpen their focus on speech services to arrest the precipitous slide of their revenues and create new revenue streams.

“In tandem with this,” they say, “smaller providers that specialize in hosted speech services are gaining greater momentum and credibility among enterprises and service providers.”
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NCO Group, Inc., which sells business process outsourcing services, announced today that during the second quarter of 2005, it reported net income of $14.1 million, or $0.42 per diluted share, as compared to net income of $14.4 million, or $0.43 per diluted share, in the second quarter of 2004.

Their revenue declined – in the second quarter of 2005 they got $247.2 million, a decrease of 3.2%, or $8.1 million, from Q2 2004’s revenue of $255.3 million.

NCO’s operations are organized into four market specific divisions that include: Accounts Receivable Management North America, Customer Relationship Management, Portfolio Management and Accounts Receivable Management International. For the second quarter of 2005, these divisions accounted for $192.5 million, $43.8 million, $27.8 million, and $3.3 million of revenue, respectively.

For the second quarter of 2004, the ARM North America, CRM, Portfolio Management and ARM International divisions accounted for $185.0 million, $59.4 million, $24.1 million and $3.5 million of the revenue, respectively.

The decrease in revenue is being pinned on the loss of a telecommunications client within the company’s CRM division. “While the implementation of newly committed client contracts is progressing on schedule, the revenue from such opportunities has not yet had a meaningful impact on the company,” officials say.

Michael J. Barrist, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer said “During the quarter our CRM division continued both the planned exit of a large telecom client and the implementation of several new client opportunities.”

NCO also announced that it continues to expect earnings per share to be approximately $1.70 to $1.80 per diluted share for 2005.
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This came out late yesterday afternoon, so if you, like, knocked off early or something you missed it.

First Coffee for July 28, 2005

July 28, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the Miles Davis reissue The Complete Birth Of the Cool:

Always nice to hear about a company – although First CoffeeSM, a leading CRM columnist, wishes that every single company who has a product in a space would kindly stop referring to themselves as “a leader” in that space.

We haven’t covered Relationals before, evidently they sell hosted CRM, targeting the publishing and media industry – “completely focused on the unique requirements of the newspaper and media industries advertising and agency relationships,” according to company officials.

They’ve announced thatLee Enterprise’s Columbus Telegram has selected the Relationals CRM suite to “automate and simplify sales processes and improve advertiser relationship management.”

“It’s been a phenomenal tool. I wish we had put this into place 6 months or a year ago! We can track every call, every mailing, every sales visit. A year from now we will be able to go back and look at that same activity to make sure we don’t miss out on any opportunities,” says Shannon Brinker, Advertising Manager at the Columbus Telegram.

“The sales reps enjoy being able to track their own revenue on a daily basis and having a tool that helps me track activity for multiple teams has been invaluable.

First Coffee for July 27, 2005

July 27, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Uncle Kracker’s 2002 No Stranger To Shame:

First, a correction from yesterday. First CoffeeSM received the following e-mail concerning an article his mild-mannered reporter alter ego wrote:

I work in NetSuite Public Relations and noticed your article titled “SAP’s Hosted CRM: Ten Things You Need To Know” has a misleading statement that reads “…..Oracle baby NetSuite….”

Oracle and NetSuite have no affiliation. Larry Ellison has personally funded NetSuite and is a majority stockholder and sits on the Board but that is the extent of his relationship.

At one point we had a co-branding agreement with Oracle for our Oracle Small Business Suite but that has long since passed.

First Coffee for July 26, 2005

July 26, 2005

Hendriz Inogacia Santos, the UAE’s number one barista.

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Kinks’ 1975 album Schoolboys In Disgrace:

Interesting news about SAP’s decision to offer hosted CRM after saying no, we have no plans to do so.

At the US Sapphire user conference in Boston a couple months ago SAP talked a lot about its CRM version 5.0, which you’ll see in the third quarter of this year, but quashed talk of a hosted product offering.

First CoffeeSM doesn’t see it as a coincidence that the announcement came after SAP announced their second quarter results, which showed that the CRM division was the only one where revenues stayed flat.

But as he had to, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann “denied a link between the CRM application’s below-par performance and the tactical volte-face,” according to Pete Swabey at Infoconomy. The service is scheduled to launch later this year.

“We are in preparation [for hosted CRM],” Kagermann said, according to Swabey. “You’ll see something soon.

First Coffee for July 25, 2005

July 25, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is a bootleg of Bob Dylan’s historic electric set at the Newport Folk Festival, forty years ago today, which ripped both folk and rock music wide open:

First CoffeeSM isn’t a conspiracy theorist – he’s one of two or three people alive who believes the Warren Commission’s report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which found that Lee Harvey Oswald was a disturbed wingnut who acted alone. But he does note this morning that his beloved Mozilla Firefox browser can’t access Web sites which the clunky old Internet Explorer can access with no problem – well, no more than all the usual problems which led First CoffeeSM to ditch it in favor of Firefox in the first place.

Any other Firefox users out there having unexplained trouble? Again, we’re not proposing any nefarious conspiracy, just noting that it’s curious there’s all of a sudden this accessibility problem with one of the most serious threats to Microsoft’s ham-fisted browser hegemony?
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Somewhere Malcolm Gladwell smiles. “Wireless messaging and corporate application access have finally reached the ‘tipping point,’” said Terry Austin, President Worldwide Marketing and Sales, Good Technology.

Gladwell, of course, is the author of 2002’s The Tipping Point, a “facile piece of pop sociology,” according to one reviewer, contending that trends – such as wireless messaging – spread like viruses.

First Coffee for July 22, 2005

July 22, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Steve Taylor’s six-song EP, I Want To Be A Clone:

A couple days ago First CoffeeSM’s mild-mannered reporter alter ego wrote about VTiger, the Indian company selling an Open Source CRM product using SugarCRM as the base. It’s raised interesting questions about the nature of Open Source.

They had announced a subscription model for customer support, with pricing starting at $149 for a single user pack, $699 for a five-user pack, $1,299 for a ten-user pack, $2,999 for a 25-user pack, $4,995 for a 50-user pack, and $8,995 for a 100-user pack. Customers also have an option of a one-time remote installation fee of $250.

“The software itself is available for free to download and install, with no complex licensing schemes,” says Mani, co-founder of vTiger.

VTiger describes its “mission” as being to “create affordable enterprise IT solutions in CRM, Groupware and other areas.”

Others thought they were pulling a fast one.

VTiger’s wholesale rebranding of SugarCRM as their own product has created “serious dissention within the Open Source ranks,” according to the Casey Software blog. “It appears -- I have NOT done a code audit myself to confirm this -- that they have taken the entire source to SugarCRM and simply rebanded it with their own logos, stylesheet, copyright notices and call it ‘vtiger CRM,’“ the blogger writes.

However, Christiaan Erasmus at LinuxToday writes “Recently vTiger took SugarCRM’s source code, stripped the logos, added an installer and released it as vTiger CRM.

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First Coffee for July 21, 2005

July 21, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Al Stewart’s A Beach Full of Shells, his new album and first in a few years:

It’s quarterly reporting season, and CRM vendor Amdocs Limited weighs in with a good one.

The St. Louis-based vendor, which is hitting the Chinese market hard, reported that for the third quarter ended June 30, 2005, revenue was $507.4 million, representing sequential growth of 3.9 percent and an increase of 12.7 percent from last year’s third quarter.

Excluding acquisition-related costs net of related tax effects of $1.7 million, net income was $78.8 million, or $0.37 per diluted share, an increase of $15.3 million, or 24.1 percent of Q3 2004.

The company’s net income was $77.1 million, or $0.36 per diluted share, over net income of $59.9 million in Q3 2004.
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SAP didn’t do too badly either in their Q2 2005, slightly exceeding estimates. They’re reporting software revenues of 576 million euros… sigh, break out the calculator… okay, at 1.21 euros to the dollar, that’s… $701 million, up from $605 million last second quarter. That’s a 16 percent increase in any currency.

American license sales were up strongly, but the Walldorf, Germany-based giant is a little concerned over declining German license revenue.

Total revenues for second quarter of 2005 were euro 2.02 billion, or $2.46 billion, over 2004’s $2.19 billion, a 13 percent increase.

Software revenues in the U.S. – or, as SAP puts it, “money that didn’t go into Larry Ellison’s pocket” – increased 24 percent to euro 174 million, or $211 million for the second quarter of 2005, a tidy enough sum.

Software revenues in the EMEA region grew 9 percent to $351 million for the second quarter of 2005, an eight percent increase from 2004.

“Licenses looked good with 16 percent growth.

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