By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Al Stewart’s Modern Times:
Agilent Technologies Inc. had themselves
nice Sunday yesterday, announcing a $14.5
million order with Indian communications service providers Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd. and Tata Teleservices Ltd.
The companies will use the Agilent OSS products to form
their centralized network management system located in Mumbai – Bombay, to the cartographical nomenclaturally recalcitrant.
The CNMS will manage the service providers’ international
and nationwide telecommunications services, in hopes of improving service and
customer satisfaction and streamlining network operations.
The $14.5 million deal includes Agilent OSS QoS Manager and NETeXPERT-based
network management software products, services and support. Coupled with
partner products, CNMS will cover fault, performance, configuration, security,
inventory, trouble ticketing and work flow management.
Agilent OSS in Asia-Pacific, with headquarters in Singapore, has offices in
Australia, China, India, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan.
Agilent’s just full of good news, as they’re also
announcing, in tandem with Mentor
Graphics Corp., an integrated product enabling high-volume diagnosis for logical and physical failure analysis in
the semiconductor manufacturing test flow. The integration between Agilent’s
93000 Pin Scale test system and the Mentor Graphics YieldAssist diagnostics
software enables fast online data collection in high-volume manufacturing.
Using this product, Agilent claims, manufacturers working at
90nm and below will now have integrated online diagnostic capabilities to
shorten the time to production yield, with enhanced initial design debug,
ongoing yield improvement, process control and quality assurance throughout the
manufacturing process.
…
Don’t kick dirt on Siebel’s grave just yet (Marc, put the shovel down). The newest
addition to Larry Ellison’s silicon menagerie is announcing that Hillert and Co., an integrated
marketing communications agency, has
selected Siebel CRM OnDemand as its hosted CRM supplier.
Hillert specializes in creating and delivering integrated
communications campaigns for its customers. As a full-service marketing firm,
Hillert is composed of three divisions –advertising, interactive marketing, and
mobile marketing. Founded in 1999, Hillert has offices in Munich and Frankfurt,
Germany.
…
Mobile operator CSL and Nokia are announcing the
commercial launch of what they say is “Asia’s
first video sharing service” in Hong Kong, enabled by Nokia IP Multimedia
Subsystem and systems integration services.
At a press conference CSL and Nokia demonstrated video
sharing service using the Nokia N70, the 3G Series 60 smartphone with 2
megapixel camera and a full set of Nokia Nseries features.
Hong Kong’s got a fiercely competitive telecommunication
market, and this should be a nice leg up for CSL until everybody else starts
offering it. Video sharing is a multimedia service that allows users to view
live or prerecorded video during a normal voice call on their mobile phones.
Both the caller and the receiver can watch the same video and discuss it, and
then end the video sharing without ending the voice call.
Video sharing is based on standardized 3GPP IMS and IETF
technologies, and its specifications are available at Forum Nokia.
“Video sharing is a natural expansion of voice calls and an
advancement of normal video calls,” said Hubert Ng, Chief Executive Officer of
CSL. “The introduction of video sharing service during a voice call is a key
evolutionary step for 3G video services,” he stated, adding that CSL believes 3G
video sharing “will become one of the most popular services among consumers.”
…
Second-tier on-demand CRM vendor Parature has sent around a
press release trumpeting the fact that
CenterStone Technologies has replaced RightNow Technologies Customer Service
Software with Parature’s
Customer Support product.
“After implementing RightNow’s products a year ago,
CenterStone, a provider of applications helping retail dealers and salespeople
work more effectively, began to realize that the workflow and user interfaces
were complicated both on the customer support representative and end user
customer sides,” the press release claims.
“RightNow’s basic functionalities are really difficult,”
Terry Gates, Sr. Vice President of Technology at CenterStone Technologies is
quoted as saying. “Their complex user interfaces made navigating
confusing and their workflow concepts were too complicated. Parature’s workflow
and user interfaces are much cleaner and more straightforward which better
meets our needs.”
Neither Parature nor Gates addressed comparative cost issues
involved between the two products.
One remembers that RightNow, one of the top three on-demand
CRM vendors today, has recorded an upwards of 31 straight quarters of growth, so
the claim that RightNow’s basic functionalities are “really difficult” is hard
to swallow, frankly, as First CoffeeSM knows a little bit about
RightNow and their products, and is nothing but impressed.
There’s “complicated,” and there’s “powerful,” and a quick
check of RightNow’s and Parature’s client lists shows that maybe not everybody’s
ready for RightNow’s level of functionality, and maybe for those companies
Parature’s the right choice for now.
First CoffeeSM is not much of a fan of this “we
replaced those guys” style of marketing, honed to a fine art by salesforce.com-Oracle-Siebel-NetSuite,
what RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte correctly called “this dysfunctional family
from Oracle,” and is rather disappointed to see Parature, a fine young company
with bright leadership, resorting to it.
…
First CoffeeSM wrote last week that, due to
having from 3:45 to 4:30 a.m. free most mornings, he’s decided to sign up for National Novel Writing Month to kill all
that extra time weighing on his hands. The purpose of NaNoWriMo is to give would-be
John Grishams the one thing they usually lack to get a novel written – well,
talent, but the other thing: A deadline.
It’s a great idea. You simply promise to write a 50,000 word
novel during the month of November, 1,667 words a day, with midnight 30
November as the drop-dead, drop the pencil, turn off the computer deadline.
This does wonderfully focus the mind for those of us who’d love to have a novel
written, but who need an accountable deadline to get anything written. This
turns the “one day novelist,” as in “One day I’d like to write a novel” into
the actual have-written-it novelist.
The novel doesn’t have to be great, doesn’t even have to be
good, that’s for rewrite, which can cover a multitude of sins. The point is
simply to shut up about writing a novel long enough to put 50,000 words down on
paper – as one gruff old newspaper editor snarled, “Don’t get it right. Just
get it written.”
Thanks to NaNoWriMo, First CoffeeSM is actually
getting some serious novelizing done, and would like to report a first week
word count of 18,273 words. The plot concerns a devilishly handsome, irresistible
to women business writer specializing in CRM and VoIP issues who’s frequently
mistaken for James Bond and Clark Gable…
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.
Re Parature - they did get you to write about them, didn't they?