First Coffee

First Coffee for June 21, 2005

June 21, 2005

A man jumps in the air from the top of one of the stones as the sun rises over Stonehenge.
Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 1272 in E flat, performed by the Quartetto Italiano for a 1968 Philips recording:

In good news, slimebucket John Rigas and his reptilian son Timothy Rigas were sentenced to 15 and 20-year prison terms for stealing at least $100 million, looting Adelphia Communications Corp., hiding $2.3 billion in debt, bank fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy, bankrupting a billion-dollar company, destroying the retirement security of investors who trusted them and generally being repulsive water rats with the ethics of corrupt third-world kleptocrats.

First CoffeeSM has absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for contemptuously dishonest businessmen, and the Rigases are among the worst. The Associated Press reports that Judge Leonard Sand asked Rigas’s lawyer “Do you see what he did? What he did to Coudersport, what he did with assets and by means which were not appropriately his?

First Coffee for June 20, 2005

June 20, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Beach Boys’ 1966 album Pet Sounds, the finest American pure pop music of the rock era:

Late Friday – First CoffeeSM missed it, maybe you did too – Renee Ferguson wrote that SAP is expected to announce early this week that they’ve hired away several executives from Oracle, PeopleSoft and Siebel.

She quotes Joshua Greenbaum, principal of Enterprise Applications Consulting in Berkeley as saying they’re “senior-level people.” Matt Hines writes that Bill Wohl, SAP’s communications chief, said late Thursday that SAP’s new hires are “on the same level” as George Paolini, the company’s senior vice president for platform ecosystem development who was one of the guys in on the creation of Sun’s Java.

The new hires, which Ferguson says “in some cases have been on board at SAP since the company’s annual Sapphire user conference in May,” are said to “have experience in technology and application development” SAP needs to “morph from an applications provider to an infrastructure provider.”
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Announcing Salesboom.com’s new CRM and SFA add-ons, Aziz Samarai ,VP of Sales lashed out at salesforce.com, saying they don’t listen to their customers.

The Nova Scotia-based provider of on-demand CRM and SFA is announcing the release of its CRM Outlook Integration Software add-ons, some of which, Samarai says, were inspired by comments from “disgruntled” salesforce.com customers.

“Our competitors tout Outlook based CRM integration functionality, but did they listen to their customers when they designed it,” Samarai asks rhetorically. “Evidently not, because the functionality behind Salesboom’s Microsoft Outlook CRM software was inspired by requests from former Salesforce.com customers who weren’t pleased with Salesforce’s Outlook CRM offering.”

That’s right, jump in the ring, plenty of mud to go around, grab a fistful and throw.
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ShoreGroup, Inc. of New York City is announcing Release 3.0 of its CaseSentry Systems Management product, a product “that ensures the availability and integrity of the vital systems and processes that business depends on,” according to officials.

ShoreGroup and TiVerity Consulting of Atlanta, two old Cisco Intelligent Contact Management and Customer Voice Portal installation hands, have also announced they will join forces to offer a complete suite of contact center products for enterprise, service provider and government sectors.

TiVerity Consulting is a consulting, engineering and implementation provider of large distributed contact centers focused on the Federal marketplace. Pete Schamberger, CEO and President of TiVerity Consulting said the partnership would “give us entrée into the commercial contact centers areas.”
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Telefonica Moviles Espana, the wireless operator of Telefonica Moviles Group in Spain with over 19 million customers chose Nortel as the main supplier for expansion of the core multiservice network that will support its third generation service offering under a multi-year contract.

The network will enable TME to support increased voice and data traffic on its 3G Universal Mobile Telecommunications System network, while reducing operational expenses through consolidation.

First Coffee for June 17, 2005

June 17, 2005

(Photo by Aimee K. Wiles)

Coffee shops are the finest institutions in the United States of America, and those which sell just doughnuts and coffee are the best of the best. So it is with a heavy heart First CoffeeSM salutes Donuts Delite of Rochester, New York which for the past 47 years has sold just doughnuts and coffee, and which in another sign of the decline of Western civilization is closing June 30th. Frater, ave atque vale.

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First Coffee for June 16, 2005

June 16, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Daughters Of the Lonesome Isle, the 1994 John Cage collection of piano compositions played by longtime Cage pianist Margaret Leng Tan:

Pegasus Wireless Corporation is announcing today the signing of an agreement to supply its complete line of 802.11 WiFi broadband wireless networking products to Ukrainian company Walrus Ltd. Walrus Ltd has agreed to carry Pegasus Wireless’s 802.11 WiFi line exclusively for a period of two years.

Jasper Knabb, President of Pegasus Wireless, calls Ukraine a “a virgin market.” He said upon his first visit toUkraine “it was clear that they have the entire technology infrastructure, except for 802.11 WiFi products. There are no wireless products on their shelves at all.”

First CoffeeSM has friends who’ve tried to make money in Ukraine, one of whom, safely back home drinking a decent beer, implied that its business ethics diverge slightly from America’s. First CoffeeSM wishes Pegasus all the luck in the world.

Yet Alex Tsao, CEO of Pegasus is correct when he says “Eastern Europe has been overlooked as a market in general.

First Coffee for June 15, 2005

June 15, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition, Ravel orchestration, recorded in Berlin in 1990 by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under the direction of Carlo Maria Giulini:

Today at CommunicAsia IP Unity and Telekom Malaysia are announcing deployment of Home Prepaid Services. While not yet an enterprise application, this new service rollout is a major VoIP and IP messaging effort, and according to Telekom officials, “just the beginning of Telekom Malaysia’s enhanced services expansion.”

This morning Telekom Malaysia is also “denying reports that it had made a solo bid to buy a 48 per cent stake in Idea Cellular,” according to PTINews. A joint $390 million bid by Telecom and Singapore Technologies Telemedia for 47.7 per cent of Idea Cellular fell through after they failed to get the required approvals in India.
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SST Communications, a developer of RF integrated circuits for wireless and multimedia applications, and a subsidiary of Silicon Storage Technology, Inc. are announcing a Bluetooth power amplifier that increases transmission range with lower power consumption than is currently available, according to company officials.

Targeting Bluetooth Class 1 applications like wireless USB dongle and long-range pico-nets, the SST12LP00 increases transmission range by 40 percent with less than 100mA in current consumption. “Dongle,” “pico-nets,” such colorful language.
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Is “doing CRM” the same thing as being “customer centric?” Financial services doesn’t think so.

According to the results of a recent BusinessEdge study, the financial industry thinks doing a good, efficient, clean job is being “customer-centric,” skip the frills and froo-froo. The top three reasons for financial services firms pursuing customer centricity include operations efficiency at 44 percent, compliance at 24 percent and customer up sell or cross sell at 14 percent.

Across other sectors those priorities are inverted, as customer up or cross-sell is the top reason for 52 percent of respondents, sales force productivity for 28 percent and operational efficiency for 15 percent.

It reminds First CoffeeSM of when he was working with Bob Thompson of CRMGuru.com and went out to see him in San Francisco, and Bob asked him where he thought CRM was heading, and after an answer involving technology Bob said something like “See?

First Coffee for June 14, 2005

June 14, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is an iTunes mix, current selection 1980’s “Romeo’s Tune” by Steve Forbert:

Thank God Michael Jackson was found innocent of all charges. First CoffeeSM can end his fast and start concentrating on work again.
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This came in late yesterday, but First CoffeeSM is sure you were as distracted by waiting for the Michael Jackson verdict as he was so no doubt it slipped by you. Nuasis, which bills itself “the IP contact center company” announced that it has opened an east coast customer support, professional services and software development center in Montreal, which is close to Canada.

Company officials say its “growing east coast customer base” dictated the move. The new location is also an extension of the company’s California-based software development department: “Having a customer support center in the east coast time zone gives us greater availability to our growing east coast customer base,” explained Senya Rahmil, vice president of customer services and quality assurance, Nuasis.

Montreal is recognized as a global center for voice telecommunications expertise as it counts among its largest employers some of the industry’s giants such as Nortel Networks and Excel Communications.
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Interesting ongoing thread at Pocket PC Thoughts on the availability of a pocket PC CRM application.

Jason Dunn posted “A friend asked me about a CRM application for the Pocket PC, and I drew a blank because that’s something I don’t know much about.

First Coffee for June 13, 2005

June 13, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Neil Young’s essential 1979 album Live Rust:

The Siebel Watch, Day 1

First CoffeeSM is initiating close updated coverage of Siebel today. Once the flagship company for Customer Relationship Management, today it’s a tottering giant, subjected to takeover rumors and tossing irate shareholders a bone in the form of a two and a half-cent stock quarterly dividend, the first dividend payout in the company’s history.

In late 2000 Siebel stock hit $119 a share. Today it’s $8.74, sales are falling for their fourth consecutive year and stockholders are clamoring for either a stock buyback or for the company simply to sell itself, put it out of its misery.

Tom Siebel stepped down as company head in 2004, naming Michael Lawrie as his replacement. In April Lawrie was sacked after first quarter numbers were even grimmer than expected, and George Shaheen, last seen at the wheel as Webvan ran into the ditch, named to take over.

First Coffee for June 10, 2005

June 10, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Stephen Stills’s 1972 album Manassas, one of the few Crosby, Stills or Nash projects as good as Neil Young’s work:

Okay, we’re off Supercomm ‘05 Chicago now, so what’s flown by in the meantime?

Got an e-mail from Ashlee Vance yesterday re First CoffeeSM’s assessment, based on his coverage of Chairman Martin’s appearance at Supercomm, that although his reporting lacked both humor and insight, “Vance is hep and linguistically frisky, he’ll do well on the Paris Hilton beat somewhere.”

Vance sent an e-mail titled “Paris Hilton beat,” asking “where do I sign up for that?” First CoffeeSM wrote back saying sorry, can’t help, been trying to get on it for years myself.

Nice to see Vance has more of a sense of humor than his writing would suggest. In all fairness he did do a good piece on the iPod DJ scene in a Chicago bar, “Bars hold iPod nights for iDrunk DJs,” more suited to his smug-Brit-among-the-wogs style.
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One thing that slipped by was BenchmarkPortal’s latest eGain-sponsored study finding that SMB e-mail customer service still stinks – worse than that of the large enterprises.

You’d think that the one thing small and medium-sized businesses would have going for them would be that they can focus on customer service more than the big boys. Wasn’t that supposed to be the big competitive advantage – “Hey look, you’re just a number to them, to us you’re a real person, we care?”

You’d be wrong. In what’s being billed as the first eService benchmark study “focused exclusively on small and medium-sized businesses,” BenchmarkPortal found that online customer service provided by SMBs is “even worse than the service level offered by large enterprises,” according to company officials.

This is the second study in the State-of-eService Benchmarking Series sponsored by eGain. The first study, released in August 2004, focused on 300 enterprises in the US and Canada with more than $250 million in annual sales.

The goal of the second study was to assess the state of eService in SMBs with annual revenues between $10 million and $250 million (drat, First CoffeeSM just misses the cut).

First Coffee for June 9, 2005

June 9, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Miles Davis’s 1959 album Kind Of Blue, one of the best, er, evening activities CDs my wife and I have found:

As has been noted First CoffeeSM is not actually in attendance at Supercomm, but it’s pretty easy to follow things from the Mediterranean coast. Heck, with today’s technology it’d be easy to get married to someone in Chicago from here.

Paul Kapustka kicks off his coverage of FCC Chairman Martin’s speech Tuesday afternoon by saying “[c]alling broadband deployment his agency’s ‘top priority’ is about as exciting and contentious as it got…” Elsewhere he writes “[w]e don’t know, especially after a boring appearance here at Supercomm… what he intends to do as chairman of the FCC.”

Kapustka’s a good journalist, but was it really that boring and opaque of an appearance? By some standards, probably. By D.C.

First Coffee for June 8, 2005

June 8, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is an old favorite, 2004’s The Platinum Collection, Frank Sinatra during his Capitol Records years of 1953 – 1961:

More happening at Supercomm ‘05 Chicago, the town that Billy Sunday couldn’t shut down. As noted in yesterday’s column the Officially-Approved Show BuzzTM is Internet Protocol television, but triple play is getting some noise as well.

Alcatel hits a buzz twofer as company officials claim the company has “leadership in the area of providing triple play solutions, including Internet Protocol Television capabilities, to its customers.” If First CoffeeSM had a quarter for every “leading” he deletes from company statements this’d be First ChampagneSM instead, and sure enough Alcatel thinks they’re “the leading triple play solutions provider.”

Granted they have done over 25 IPTV deployments around the world, and at Supercomm they’re unveiling the Alcatel 7342 Intelligent Services Access Manager FTTU Gigabit Passive Optical Network, which they announced a week ago. They’re also introducing the 5750 Subscriber Services Controller, what company officials call “a comprehensive policy management solution” for service providers to use to centrally manage their customers and services.

In Alcatel’s view, this “unlocks the full revenue potential of triple play by offering an unprecedented user-driven environment.” They’re also announcing a collaboration with global chip maker Freescale Semiconductor to create GPON-standards compliant silicon to further advance the adoption of triple play services (voice, video and data) delivered via standard fiber to the home.
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ZyXEL Communications, a provider of secure broadband networking and Internet connectivity and routing products, is stepping up to the triple-play plate to… hmmm, not a good metaphor there, sorry, ZyXEL. Anyway, the company’s demonstrating its triple play bona fides at Supercomm ‘05 Chicago, that toddlin’ town, showing off its suite of VoIP, ADSL and VDSL products to deliver quality voice, video and data integration to address what company officials describe as “the growing demand for triple play applications by telecommunications providers.”

Specifically, ZyXEL will showcase its Prestige 2000W v2 VoIP Wi-Fi phone, one of its most promising new technologies.

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