By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is The Best of MFO, the band MFO
being not only the best Turkish rock band ever, but for my money the best
non-Anglophone rock band I’ve ever heard. Think The Kinks with stronger vocals for an approximate comparison, a
good pop/rock sound with a few elements of traditional Turkish music
used as part of the overall sound, not tossed in gratuitously to say “ethnic.”
Their haunting ballad “Bodrum” is one of the best songs I’ve ever heard
anywhere.
Trillium Software,
a division of Harte-Hanks and a vendor of Total Data Quality products, has
announced that it is to provide its TS
Quality enterprise data quality software to global telecommunications provider
BT on an enterprise-wide license basis.
The software is support for BT’s customer relationship
management installation by Siebel, one of the most sizeable CRM implementations
anywhere in the world.
The agreement extends an existing license based on user numbers, to permit BT unlimited,
worldwide use of TS Quality as part of its Total Data Quality drive for
continuous improvement in customer service and business performance.
“Customer name and address information is an extremely valuable BT asset,” said James Gault, program director, product and customer data platforms. “We must manage the quality of that data with strategic intent in all corners
of the organization.”
According to Gault, TS Quality enables BT to standardize
source data formats, to recognize and handle duplicates, and to mold fragmented
records into linked information. Across multiple systems, BT officials expect this
data quality regimen to benefit “hundreds of vital business processes.”
One such vital business process is regulatory compliance
with undertakings agreed with OFCOM’s Telecomms Service Review, to ensure all
service providers have transparent and equal access to the nationwide local BT
network.
OFCOM is the United Kingdom Office of Communications, the
regulating agency of UK telecommunications services.
…
Today In Business History: On this day in 1886, John Pemberton perfected a headache and hangover remedy
he had cooked up over a fire in his backyard, according to Writer’s Almanac: It
contained coca leaves and extract of kola nut, and he advertised it as an “Esteemed
Brain Tonic and Intellectual Beverage.”
He had been making something called “Pemberton’s
French Wine Coca,” but Atlanta had just passed a prohibition law, and he had to
come up with an alcohol-free formula. He sweetened the new elixir with sugar
instead of wine, and his bookkeeper suggested he name the beverage “Coca-Cola.”
...
Think of a company whose business it is to help people track
down old tableware patterns, complete sets and find particular antique pieces.
Images of lacey old ladies sitting around polishing the tea service, right?
Actually, try a highly-sophisticated
information technology operation.
Founded in 1981, Greensboro, North Carolina-based Replacements,
Ltd. is the world’s largest retailer of old and new tableware,
including china, stoneware, crystal, glassware, silver, stainless, and
collectibles. In 1984 the company deployed its initial IT system.
Today, the company stands at approximately 550 employees
with 300,000 square foot facilities – roughly five football fields – housing an
inventory of 10 million pieces of tableware in over 200,000 patterns.
The company uses extensive, internally developed inventory,
sales, and CRM systems, including an enterprise grid computing infrastructure
built using Oracle 10g software.
By switching from UNIX servers to four HP ProLiant DL 385
servers with AMD Opteron processors running Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Real
Application Clusters, and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g on Red Hat Enterprise
Linux, company officials say, Replacements, Ltd. has increased its IT
performance, automated their data center operations and reduced related costs.
Since upgrading to a clustered Oracle database environment
in September 2005, Replacements, Ltd. has improved application availability and
performance – four to five times faster than before. This move to a clustered
environment has “virtually eliminated user complaints about the hindered
performance of their previous single-server implementation,” according to
Replacements officials.
…
Good Australian CRM observer Iain
Ferguson writes today that Charles Lawoko, the former head of
Australia National Bank’s CRM operation, “is
in the very earliest stages of building his newly-created CRM consultancy,
styled Insight2Action.”
Lawoko tells Ferguson that the shift gave him a chance to
reassess his life’s goals and directions, which “could best be realized outside
of a large corporation.”
He described his passion as helping companies who do not
fully use, or know what to do with at all, the data they gather on their
customers to deliver better offerings more efficiently, Ferguson says.
…
TMOne, an Iowa direct marketing firm, has
announced that it has acquired its
250,000th competitive telecom subscriber for providers in the local
exchange carrier, internet service provider and VoIP space.
The company has been specializing in the telecom vertical
since its inception in 2002 and recently expanded its contact center division
to a 300 seat, 27,000 square foot facility formerly managed by the Mass Markets
division of telecom giant MCI, now Verizon Business.
Specializing in B2B and B2C sales and marketing for the VoIP space has been a
focus of the company and “a catalyst for ongoing success,” according to TMOne
officials.
With VoIP penetration growing by the minute, company
officials say, the race between voice over broadband providers and multiple
service operators has picked up speed.
…
For the contact center market experiencing strong growth in
Latin America, etalk, a vendor of contact center quality management and
speech analytics software and services, has
introduced its Qfiniti Enterprise suite of call center applications in
Portuguese and Spanish.
By offering its marquee product in the native languages
spoken in Latin America, etalk expects to spur further growth in an already
burgeoning contact center market.
Etalk’s regional sales increased by 54 percent in 2005. In
addition, the number of contact center agent positions in the region is
expected to increase by 17 percent annually to reach 730,000 in 2008, according
to Datamonitor, an independent marker research firm.
Qfiniti Enterprise is, etalk officials claim, “the industry’s
first unified call recording, agent evaluation and advanced speech analytics product
for the growing contact center market.” Qfiniti Enterprise delivers services on
a single platform that allows contact center users to simply log in with the
language of their choice. In addition to the user interface, the speech
analytics capabilities are also localized, so searching and script analysis
occurs in the user’s preferred language.
…
Oh, hey, and happy
birthday, Eric Idle, wink wink,
nudge nudge.
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