By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion.” Sometimes straight coffee just doesn’t do it in
the morning, folks:
All the legal wrangling over and done, Research In Motion is jumping
right back in it, announcing the
immediate availability of BlackBerry Enterprise Server v4.1 and BlackBerry
Enterprise Server - Small Business Edition v4.1 for Microsoft Exchange and IBM
Lotus Domino.
“Incorporating feedback from thousands of enterprise
customers across the globe,” RIM officials say, BlackBerry Enterprise Server
v4.1 includes new functionality that makes it “easier than ever to expand
populations of BlackBerry users and manage larger scale deployments.”
The new release provides tighter integration with leading
platforms for enterprise instant messaging, including Microsoft Windows
Messenger, Live Communications Server 2005 and IBM Lotus Sametime. BlackBerry
Enterprise Server v4.1 also incorporates support for the new BlackBerry Mobile
Data System v4.1 application development and deployment environment, which includes
BlackBerry MDS Studio, a new visual development tool for creating BlackBerry
wireless applications from Web Services.
RIM is also
announcing acquisition of Ascendent Systems, a vendor of products that
simplify voice mobility implementations in the enterprise.
Ascendent, a member of the BlackBerry ISV Alliance Program,
makes the Ascendent Voice Mobility Suite, a standards-based software product
that augments existing PBX and IP-PBX systems and supports heterogeneous
telephony environments to “push” voice calls and extend corporate desk phone
functionality to mobile users on their wireless handset or any wireline phone.
Ascendent will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of RIM.
Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
…
Salesboom.com, a vendor of on demand CRM
and ERP, has released parts of legal documents exchanged between it and Salesforce.com,
according to Salesboom officials.
In the documents – this is all according to Salesboom, mind
you – Salesforce.com senior Vice President and former General Counsel David
Schellhase “openly accuses Salesboom, on more than one occasion, of attempting
to ‘trade off the goodwill created by salesforce.com,’ citing the similarities
of the two companies’ names.”
That, and the similarity of Salesboom’s terminology to
Salesforce.com’s – “Zero Software Promise,” e.g. Frankly the thought that the
smaller Salesboom.com is trying to bask in a
little reflected glory has crossed more than one CRM mind. And frankly I’m not
sure what to make of this “news” from Salesboom, I’m not sure I understand either
what they’re saying or why they’re saying it.
Let’s see what the press release says… Salesboom President
Rami Hamodah “responded,” denouncing the Salesforce.com accusation as an “absurd
statement” and stating that SFDC appears to be engaging in “intimidation
practices.”
Whatever. Let’s leave ‘em to it and move
on, folks.
…
Here’s for everyone who thinks pushy sports parents are a
uniquely American problem:
MONT-DE-MARSAN, France
- A father who drugged his children’s tennis opponents, leading to one player’s
death, was sentenced to eight years in prison after being convicted Thursday.
Christophe Fauviau had
confessed to the crime. Before jurors began their two hours of deliberation,
the retired soldier told the court that he was responsible for Alexandre
Lagardere’s death and that “I’ll always carry that with me.”
“Not for one second
did I think of hurting people. I realize now that I did,” the 46-year-old
former military pilot said…
Fauviau was accused of
spiking the water bottles of his children’s opponents 27 times in tournaments
across France from 2000 to 2003, using the anti-anxiety drug Temesta, which can
cause drowsiness…
…
Australian and New
Zealand organizations’ IT budgets which are set to rise by an optimistic 5
percent, according to industry observer Dahna
McConnachie.
Forrester’s IT budget forecast released earlier
this week shows “33 percent of companies anticipate an IT budget increase of an
average 5 percent in 2006, with only 18 percent of respondents expecting a
reduction in budget,” McConnachie says.
Interesting, of all companies surveyed worldwide, Australian
and New Zealand companies “show the strongest alignment of IT with business in
supporting organizational goals such as improving productivity and reducing
cost.”
Forrester analyst Sam Higgins said that Oracle’s strategy
and Fusion roadmap may have caused a small amount of end user dissatisfaction
in this market, but that is not the main influential factor, McConnachie
writes:
“Oracle’s acquisition strategy would be a small blip in an
otherwise healthy outlook for it. I think the main reason is that everyone has
already done their spending. There is only so much ERM and CRM people can do,”
he said.
…
Don’t look now, but the folks as South By Southwest are gettin’ optimistic again.
A good local article in the Dallas
Morning News says as the quirky, beer-drenched alt-tech festival gets
underway, there are still the ghosts of massive craters such as drkoop.com, garden.com
and others haunting SXSW Interactive, but fewer and fewer folks are scared off.
“The pendulum always swings from fear to greed, and just in the past year or
so, it has swung back over to the greed side,” Chris Pacitti, general partner
in Austin Ventures, told the Morning News.
The fever of 1999 will hopefully remain “a big anomaly… but
that’s not to say shades of it won’t come up,” Pacitti said. In the last year, “some
people started making some money, liquidity events started happening, and that
sort of feeds on itself.”
In other words, venture capital’s starting to flow again,
all wounds have been licked and all lessons learned and everyone’s rarin’ to
go. Grab your checkbooks, it’s fun again.
…
Infineon Technologies, a vendor of
Communication ICs, has announced that T-Com,
the Fixed Network business unit of Deutsche Telekom AG will base the rollout of its new hyper-speed VDSL2 network entirely on
broadband access systems powered by Infineon’s VINAX chip-set.
With this investment, Infineon officials say, T-Com will be
the first carrier in the world to have a fully standard compliant VDSL2 network
in operation. Infineon will provide its VINAX components for both the DSLAMs as
well as the customer premises side.
Deutsche Telekom is currently connecting the first 10 cities
in Germany to its new VDSL2 network. The new network allows for example the
delivery of around 100 free and pay-TV channels, on-demand video and advanced High
Definition Television content running with up to 50 Mbit/s downstream and 10
Mbit/s upstream (profile 17a and 8b respectively of the VDSL2 standard).
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