By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Cannonball Adderley's Somethin' Else:

The Fourth Oracle Grid Index Report, released today in Australia, points to "growing momentum in grid computing adoption" across Australia and New Zealand.

The latest figures confirm that grid computing is finding fertile ground down under. In fact, ANZ ranked fourth worldwide (3.9) in terms of adoption, behind the US (4.3), Germany (4.3) and the Nordic region (4.7).

Grid computing is useful for moving core business systems including data warehousing, document management and CRM applications. The idea is that grid computing uses low cost commodity hardware, creates a consolidated computing infrastructure that virtualizes and provisions computing resources dynamically and "this," says Oracle officials, "leads to a higher quality of service, improved performance and better reliability."

According the Grid Index, ANZ's adoption index progressed by more than one index point, the sharpest rise in adoption worldwide in a six-month period. The Asia Pacific & Japan (APAC) region progressed faster than the U.S. and Europe, recording 83 per cent growth in either planned or actual deployment.

ANZ has consistently kept pace with or led the APAC region since the Grid Index began in April 2005.

Almost 90 percent of organizations in APAC see a move to Grid Computing as a possibility; 60 percent indicated this was very probable or inevitable, the report's authors say, adding "these signs suggest that the technology is moving from an early adoption phase to becoming a mainstream" product.

The report talked with New Zealand's Public Trust's principal database specialist, Simon Brock. Public Trust its CRM applications and other functions onto Oracle Real Application Clusters 10g. "The new infrastructure has allowed us to cost effectively scale our processing capacity in line with future growth," he said, "while delivering significant improvements in the reliability and performance of our document management system."

A major advantage gained by the move to an Oracle grid computing solution is the time saved on Public Trust's month-end processing. "One of the month-end reports previously took over 29 hours to run, but now takes 72 seconds. Aggregated data summaries, known as materialized views, can now be created four to eight times faster than they used to be," Brock said.

Oracle started the idea of building a scalable application grid with the introduction of Oracle Real Application Clusters, a key building block for grid computing architectures. Oracle Real Application Clusters enables companies to virtualize their computing resources on a single consolidated and standardized commodity hardware platform. The technology provides the same benefits as a grid but on a smaller scale, i.e. fewer nodes.
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Another study released recently by Bullhorn, which sells on-demand front-office staffing and recruiting software, is titled Cornerstone Survey Update, "Trends in Staffing and Recruiting: Front-Office Synchronization."

It finds that staffing firms often overlook automated staffing technology -- "more than 64 percent of respondents are dependent on non-industry specific tools such as the Microsoft Office Suite or non-integrated, non-synchronized CRM and ATS applications," and some Philistines and Luddites "still manually manage all leads and jobs," report officials say.

The report covers the software that companies are using to manage and streamline recruiting; the technology used by recruiters and how synchronization affects sales and recruiting. Receive a free copy of the report at www.bullhorn.com.

More than 500 staffing and recruiting industry workers completed the survey. 75 percent believe they would see "higher placement rates" if they employed a more integrated front office. In addition, 50 percent of those surveyed felt that "real-time collaboration between job orders and candidate sourcing" could significantly impact revenue growth.

The survey also found that sourcing new candidates is the top priority for almost half of the respondents.

The recruiters who use only Microsoft Outlook and an ATS were the most likely to name a need for enhanced placements, i.e. improved access to qualified candidates and faster rates of placement. Respondents who relied on rudimentary front-office technology had the most need for upgrades to enhance placement rates, the survey found.

Seventy-one percent of respondents felt that sourcing candidates from multiple job boards and sites, directly from their front-office software, would improve their placement rate, and eighty-seven percent of respondents agreed that an integrated front-office would have a positive impact on revenue growth; while 15 percent thought that such an integration would have a substantial impact on revenue growth.
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RemarkableSelling has announced that it has designed its RemarkableMail application tool to offer direct mail via the Web by integrating functionality with the Sage SalesLogix Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system from Sage Software.

Direct marketers can now use RemarkableMail to send custom, four-color, laminated postcards directly from Sage SalesLogix the next business day. It uses the AmazingMail.com platform for the creation of direct mail campaigns via the Web.

Users can upload their own images and text for the front and back of the postcard, add variable data if they choose, and hit send -- postcards, whether one or thousands, are printed and mailed the next business day and there is not a minimum quantity to send.

RemarkableMail for Sage SalesLogix is available via direct resellers or from RemarkableSelling for $295 per organization for licensing the software. Postcard charges are additional, and volume discounts for postcard printing are available.

Robert Yu, RemarkableSelling president. “Furthermore, Sage SalesLogix users will find RemarkableMail easy to use due to its familiar and intuitive design.” For more information visit www.remarkableselling.com.

In semi-related news, Software India announced the appointment of Patni Computer Systems Ltd. as Business Partner for positioning and implementing Sage CRM SalesLogix in India.

With more than 300,000 users at over 7,300 companies, SalesLogix has a hefty slice of the CRM for mid-market companies and enterprises worldwide pie.

Sage Software India Managing Director Thomas Abraham said SalesLogix has over 45 customers in India across a number of verticals, and believes "With the Patni Computer Systems partnership, we hope to bring in world-class consulting expertise in the CRM space to Indian customers… The CRM opportunity in these businesses is huge."
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Happy birthday to my now-9-year old son Dylan. We got him a clip-on iPod. Love that parental volume control feature, thanks, Apple. It'll be useful for a kid who has crammed his new iPod with The Clash, The Supersuckers and Elemeno P as well as Weird Al Yankovic and Veggie Tales's Silly Songs With Larry.

We also got him the Star Wars trilogy, and I watched the first one (the 1976 release, which I guess is actually #4 now) with him and the rest of the family last night. Funny seeing it for the first time after twenty years or so, you realize yeah, it is great storytelling with probably the lamest script in existence. Every corny, cliché line makes an appearance, and there's hardly an original line in the entire thing. Humbles us writers everywhere to see that no, a movie does not need a decent script to be wildly successful.
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First Coffee's starting a pool for how long Larry Caretsky keeps running the same press release with a new dateline day after day after day.  In on six months if you want.

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