The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Billie Holiday's Lady In Autumn: The Best Of The Verve Years:
Scanning the election results from yesterday, First Coffee sees that MSM-backed Nancy Pelosi and Hugo Chavez-backed Daniel Ortega both won. I can hear the champagne glasses clinking from San Francisco to Caracas.
Respond, a UK vendor of complaints and feedback software (some things are better automated, listening to ratchet-jaw complaints has to be one of them), has announced the latest version of its complaints and feedback management application, Respond CenterPoint 3.66.
Respond CenterPoint is a software system that has been "incrementally improved" to allow dedicated complaint and feedback handlers "within a customer service or feedback management department to automate the entire process from capture through resolution to reporting," according to Respond officials.
For version 3.66 company officials said they put the focus on providing deeper functionality and "expanding the application's capabilities for logging, tracking, managing and reporting on all forms of feedback data, including complaints, complex queries, enquires, issues, comments and compliments."
Respond's Head of Product Management, Ian Mapp, said all of the new features in Respond CenterPoint 3.66 "have been developed based on feedback from our customers."
Features include a new Outlook link that lets users register e-mails with existing complaint cases, open complaints or create a new complaint from an e-mail within Microsoft Outlook. This increases automation, reduces manual effort and errors, and integrates with familiar desktop applications.
A plug-in manager for enhanced system maintenance and a configurable repeat contact search facility have also been added along with what company officials say are "improved security options." This includes a powerful new feature to selectively manage confidentiality of individual data elements within a feedback or complaint case.
Respond CenterPoint 3.66 is part of the Respond 3 XA suite of enterprise applications
The company claims "significant market share" in both the high-profile financial services sector and the highly regulated public sector.
Vtiger, a vendor of enterprise-ready open source CRM, has announced the release of vtiger CRM 5.0. The vtiger business model is designed for small and medium businesses looking for an alternate to more expensive CRM products.
Company officials claim vtiger has been downloaded "close to 500,000 times already," and say it "ranks among top 5 most downloaded financial apps in sourceforge.net."
Vtiger CRM is built over LAMP/WAMP stack and other third-party open source packages. The software can be installed in Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 and different types of Unix/Linux-based distributions, such as RedHat 7.2/8.0/9.0, Debian 3.0, SuSe 9.0, Fedora Core 3.0, Mandrake 10.0, and FreeBSD.
Features of vtiger CRM include an Ajax-based user interface redesigned by implementing the best breed of Web 2.0 technologies, such as AJAX, Tag clouds, and mashups with other Web services
"Vtiger CRM has passed through more than 10 development cycles to ensure that the product is enterprise-ready and usable," said Shankar R.N.S, Product Manager at vtiger.
Pitney Bowes Group 1 Software has introduced its Customer Data Quality Platform, which is billed as letting businesses and government agencies "better manage their customer data by matching and consolidating information from across the enterprise into a single, comprehensive system of record."
Built on a robust service-oriented architecture framework, Group 1 Software's CDQ Platform has "built-in understanding to resolve both syntactic and semantic ambiguities and inconsistencies with global name recognition and advanced entity resolution," coupled with global address data quality and geocoding components.
The CDQ Platform uses a knowledgebase and allows analysts to create custom business rules as new composite services which can be published and extended to the enterprise. This can help a company unify customer account data, eliminate redundancies, link members of the same household, and generally expand customer knowledge.
Chris Baker, president of Pitney Bowes Group 1 Software, said by extending the functionality of customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and customer data integration (CDI) applications and initiatives, Group 1 Software "enables its customers to establish the foundation for important business decisions and protect their investments in existing customer information management systems."
In addition to providing an integrated framework for both batch and transactional CDQ, and rich support for integration with C, C++, VB.COM, C#/.NET, Java, Web services, and XML, the CDQ platform also supports Internet- based software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery mode, and certified application connectors for SAP, Siebel and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Princeton Softech, an enterprise data management vendor, has announced that Deutsche Bank has selected Princeton Softech Optim.
Optim is marketed as enabling organizations like Deutsche Bank "apply a consistent enterprise data management strategy across applications, platforms and databases," letting organizations "align application data management with business objectives to optimize performance, control cost and reduce risks."
The idea Princeton Softech's pushing is that while organic business growth can inflate any application database with a wealth of information, application upgrades, while enhancing application functionality, can also add to database growth. Ultimately, their marketing pitch goes, application databases that drive business initiatives can become overloaded and performance slows.
In response, the company's saying Optim has "proven archiving capabilities" which allow organizations to "meet application performance targets, which in turn drives revenue growth. Information is readily available, allowing a quick response to client inquiries and legal requests. And Optim protects the privacy and integrity of enterprise data, helping to support compliance initiatives."
Deutsche Bank uses a Credit Risk Management application that runs on Oracle 9i and uses a Solaris database server. Over 2,000 businesses use the Credit Risk Management application.
Princeton Softech enterprise data management products are available for Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Siebel Applications and Amdocs CRM, as well as all custom applications.
And First Coffee doesn't want to tell anybody how to vote, but when the likes of Jihad Jaara, a senior member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group and the infamous leader of the 2002 siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, as well as Muhammad Saadi, a senior leader of Islamic Jihad and Abu Abdullah, a leader of Hamas' military wing in the Gaza Strip are all encouraging Americans to vote for Democrats, I'd at least have thought twice before voting for them, otherwise it's kind of like Michigan agreeing to hire the guy Ohio State would like to see them hire to be their football coach.
The New York Times didn't report Jaara's endorsement? Oh. Hm. Strange, but no doubt it's for your own good. Don't want you to get all confused or anything.
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