First Coffee

At the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC's Erik Linask had a chance to interview Diskeeper's Colleen Toumayan, Director of Public Relations.

The company's been around for 25 years or so, you might remember their product, the first automatic defragmenter for Windows. This reporter sure does.

Toumayan said that the company's helped Microsoft develop the API hooks that even allow defragmentation to take place at all. She said that Diskeeper "actually, really revolutionized the market. We've been the first to market with many new technologies in the defrag space, and now we have a new technology called IntelliWrite, which can actually prevent up to 85 percent of fragmentation from happening." Read more here. ... At the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani had a chance to interview Voltaire's Vice President of Marketing, Asaf Somekh.

What? Whazzat? You say something? Sorry, I can't hear you, all I hear is this infernal buzzing of 10,000 bees in here. Evidently there's a big market in producing "anthems" for World Cup teams.

From snail-mail correspondence, to the telephone, to self-service knowledge bases, to social communities, customer service continues to evolve and expand its footprint across a range of delivery channels, according to Parature officials. Parature, a leading provider of Web-based customer support software, has a white paper giving a good overview of channel choice in customer service today. They find it is best determined by a company's business model, but that "most successful businesses today offer a multi-channel approach that gives their customers options in seeking service." In other words, companies don't need to offer every possible channel to their user base - just the ones they find to be most effective, based on their constituency. Determining which ones will be most effective is, of course, the fun. Read more here. ... How'd you like to be able to give your CRM software vendor this recommendation: "NetSuite has simplified our company's operations, given us great efficiency, power, and flexibility, helped us do business on the Web, and has helped unify our customer touchpoints by linking CRM with ERP and Ecommerce.  In IT, NetSuite changed our role.  We're not traditional IT anymore -- we now spend our time adding value rather than answering requests." That's from Advantage Sign Supply, talking about their recent NetSuite CRM software installation. They're a large supplier of sign-making materials and components, and they wanted to attract more franchise customers, improve profitability. Hey who wouldn't? They have to deal with over 15,000 SKUs and frequent price changes by materials suppliers, and were trying to keep a handle on it all with fragmented IT systems, forcing company to set prices manually, SKU by SKU. Read more here. ... Recently call center management software provider Knowlagent published a useful white paper dealing with the question of how to evaluate whether or not an at-home agent workforce is right for your business. "First, you have to determine if a work-at-home program is even feasible for your organization," said Krystal Sautter, CEO of Moving Beyond the Bricks, a consulting firm specializing in home-based workforce implementations, who designed and implemented the at-home program at ConAgra Foods. Then, she recommended, "consider all of the potential costs from office furnishings to supplies, technology, a customer satisfaction and workforce management tool, training, tech support, and any other elements needed to sustain an at-home program." Other recommendations highlighted: Read more here. ... Recently at the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani had a chance to both break the house at baccarat and sit down and talk with Geoffrey Anderson, the senior product manager at Open Text, a vendor focusing on content management and enterprise fax over IP products. Anderson works in the fax group, he said, adding that they have three product lines in their group right now, with two fax-based products, one of them being Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition, formerly known as RightFax, which is their mainline fax server product sold to medium to large enterprises. They also offer Fax appliance products, smaller-scale appliances for SMBs, which are also well-enabled with capabilities. "We also have a document management" product, Anderson said, the Open Text Document Server, Alchemy edition, which he described as a "capture and management" product, "strongly tied to our fax products and provides a great archiving application." Read more here. ... Recently at the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMCnet's CEO Rich Tehrani had the chance to interview Force10's Senior Director of Product Marketing Kevin Wade. Wade said they've had an active couple of months leading up to the show.

"Ever wonder why overhearing a cellphone conversation is so annoying? American researchers think they have found the answer," goes the Reuters teaser. Frankly, my friend, we wonder about that as often as we wonder why we find Julia Roberts beautiful or why we like banana splits, or why we find cold toilet seats and Justin Bieber annoying. Evidently it's because only half of the conversation is overheard, the researchers say. See, this "drains more attention and concentration than when overhearing two people talking," according to scientists at Cornell University, Reuters reports. "We have less control to move away our attention from half a conversation (or halfalogue) than when listening to a dialogue," said Lauren Emberson, a co-author of the study that will be published in the journal Psychological Science. "Since halfalogues" - ten points for the somewhat cool coinage - are really more distracting and you can't tune them out, this could explain why people are irritated," she theorized, according to Reuters. Read more here. ... The National Foundation for Educational Research, Britain's largest independent provider of research, assessment and information services for education, training and children's services, has selected UPS Systems to "avert disaster with its remote monitoring tool REMO, and reduce the organization's costs," according to NFER officials. The foundation's mission is to aid British government departments and agencies on both a local and national basis by informing and improving policy and practice. As you might imagine, then, its IT systems are essential to its day-to-day operations, and power failures are not acceptable.

UPS Systems is helping NFER with its remote monitoring tool REMO, NFER officials say.

Recently TMC's Group Editorial Director, Erik Linask, had a chance to visit Las Vegas, win his mortgage payments for the upcoming year and talk with Infoblox's Greg Ness, VP of Marketing.

The company automates network infrastructures, Ness said. "Generally when people think of infrastructure, they think of switches and routers, which every three to five years goes to a refresh. What we automate is the core network services of that infrastructure."