By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the
current iTunes song is “Six Months In a Leaky Boat” by the late, lamented,
underrated New Zealand popsters Split Enz:
First CoffeeSM doesn’t know about you, but he
feels a whole lot safer this morning, reading that North Korea’s “promised” to give
up their nuclear program. Hey, they promised, this isn’t the same
empty-promises-for-fuel scam President Clinton fell for. Come on, they promised, cross their hearts hope to
die.
But seriously folks, kudos
to Kabul and the rest of Afghanistan for holding meaningful, free elections for the
first time in many a crescent moon. President Bush still hasn’t gotten the
credit he deserves for that.
…
Etalk, a division of Autonomy, is
announcing the latest release of Qfiniti
Enterprise, a unified call recording, agent evaluation, and advanced speech
analytics product for the contact center market.
It delivers a scalable and centrally-managed enterprise
platform that allows international, multi-site customer service operations to,
in company officials’ words, “monitor, measure, improve and understand relevant
customer interactions.”
Scott Shute, president of etalk, notes some of the new
features and functionality of Qfiniti, such as what the company’s claiming is “the
first fully integrated recording, evaluation, and speech analytics offering for
quality monitoring, logging, and VoIP-based call acquisition that does not use
third-party analytics technology.”
The new interface is an operational and visual improvement
over what went before, and supports language localization, which company
officials hope will open up more international opportunities.
The theory behind a lot of what Qfiniti’s engineered to do
is that a lot of the information that circulates in a contact center – the audio
recordings, documents, web pages, e-mails, what have you – is unstructured, in
that it resides outside of a normal structured database. Lots of valuable info
there, but it’s tough to manage efficiently.
Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer (known by its
acronym “Billy”) technology is designed to make sense of this disparate
information so companies can use it all, not just the information that fits neatly
into fixed database boxes. Qfiniti Enterprise has embedded the IDOL engine into
the Qfiniti platform, with the result that every recorded voice transaction and
its elements are searchable.
…
If First CoffeeSM’s ever acquired by a rival
columnist he wants Siebel’s Bruce Cleveland, Senior Vice President,
Products in his corner. Perhaps you’ve seen Cleveland’s feisty open letter to “Friends and Colleagues” in the
wake of salesforce.com’s gloating over Siebel’s being acquired by Oracle.
No need to fisk the
whole thing, but some points stood out:
In keeping with his
company’s Dreamforce theme, Marc seems to be dreaming big, hoping that the
fabricated tales he spins become facts. Sadly, for him, they’re simply not
true. Let me illustrate.
Marc Benioff, California dreamin’? Perish the notion. But as
Cleveland says:
Siebel Systems has
added more than 500,000 ‘live’ users of its CRM applications since the
beginning of 2005, while salesforce.com has added approximately 100,000
subscribers. And our win rate in OnDemand software versus salesforce.com was
approximately 58 percent in our most recent financial quarter.
Of course the differentiation between hosted customers and
on-premises customers is the point of contention here, if Siebel signed up
exactly one on-premises customer they’d beat salesforce.com in that category.
But Cleveland notes that the customers salesforce.com’s been poaching from
Siebel are largely SFA deals, “not Business Analytics deals, or self-service
deals, or customer order management deals, or customer data integration deals.”
One thing First CoffeeSM found amusing at
Dreamforce this past week was the ubiquity of the word “SOFTWARE” under the red
circle and slash. “The end of software” was repeated frequently in
presentations, as Cleveland says, but First CoffeeSM noted that not
many Dreamforce expo hall reps from companies who make their living selling
software were wearing that particular lapel button.
And it is worth noting, for however seriously one reads
takeover announcements, that while Benioff says Oracle will “kill” Siebel CRM
OnDemand, during the acquisition announcement September 12th Larry
Ellison did say “we think OnDemand is
going to be increasingly important. We think the Siebel OnDemand products have –
are improving at a very, very rapid rate and we intend to invest in them
heavily.”
Again, take that as
you will. It might be instructive to look back at what Ellison said when Oracle
acquired J.D. Edwards and PeopleSoft, which are currently being dismembered and
digested into the still-amorphous Fusion.
And Cleveland can’t help pointing out that last Monday, “NetSuite
put out a press release announcing that more than 100 companies have switched
from salesforce.com to its products.” Didn’t hear much about that at Dreamforce.
…
An entity new to First CoffeeSM called bNet
Software, which describes itself as “a web-based eCommerce” vendor,
is announcing “the completion and launch
to the public of Tablet Authority's eCommerce website.”
Evidently bNet was asked to build a site for Tablet
Authority to resell Motion Computing Tablet PCs. “In less than a month,” bNet
claims. “Tablet Authority had the site they needed: a complete sales, service
and marketing solution that included everything,” including scalable backend
eCommerce software, site launch services, design and site setup. The site was
built to eliminate paperwork from the fulfillment process, put complete
customer histories online and launch integrated opt-in e-mail.
Um, good job guys.
…
Contact
Center World has something from Xceed touting, of all places, Egypt as a hot (literally) new call center
outsourcing option.
This is news to First CoffeeSM, and probably is
to you as well. Nevertheless they point to a recent Datamonitor report
predicting that “demand for Egyptian outsourced offshore call centers” will
grow by 50 percent by 2009 – no indication what the hard numbers now are – due
to the country’s “competitive advantages” such as; “lower-value cost of labor, multilingual
skills, neutral accents, advanced state of commercial development, government
incentives, friendly investment environment.”
“Neutral accents?” Egypt?
…
Read in the Baltimore
Business Journal that Microsoft’s looking to open an office in that
fair city. What, they’re allergic to blue crabs? Is it startling to anyone
else that a $40 billion company has never
opened an office in the country’s 18th-largest city?
Or is it more startling that from 1990 to 2004 Baltimore
lost approximately 12 percent of its population, easily the biggest loss among
the top 50 cities, falling from 12th to 18th below non-NFL,
non-MLB cities Memphis and Columbus, Ohio?
And they can’t blame Washington, D.C. for that, as former
D.C. resident First CoffeeSM knows Baltimoreans are fond of doing,
since the District itself lost 5.7 percent.
Maybe they can both blame Phoenix, which grew 34 percent and
jumped from 10th to 6th. And the fact that San Jose, the
largest city in America without a major pro sports franchise, ranks ahead of
San Francisco in population is a great bar bet for the impoverished yet thirsty.
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