By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Lou Reed, now that iTunes has finally made the complete Rock 'n' Roll Animal available for download:

Knova Software Inc. a vendor of "customer experience" applications, has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by privately held M2M Holdings Inc., a holding company jointly owned by Battery Ventures VI LP and Thoma Cressey Equity Partners.

The assets of M2M Holdings currently include Onyx Software Corporation and Made2Manage Systems Inc., among others. The all-cash transaction is valued at $5.00 per share, or approximately $47 million, and is expected to close in the first quarter of 2007.

Closing of the transaction requires approval by the holders of a majority of Knova's outstanding common stock and is subject to other customary documentation closing conditions.

Bruce Armstrong, president and CEO of Knova Software, said as an independent product line within a private company, "we will have the flexibility to further accelerate the adoption" of the company's service resolution products."

Jeff Tognoni, chief executive officer of M2M Holdings, said Knova "fits perfectly" into M2M's enterprise application portfolio, "complementing" their existing CRM and ERP companies.

Once the transaction has closed, the company will continue to market, sell and support Knova products for "any CRM platform." With the addition of Knova, M2M Holdings officials say they gain a "broader worldwide sales and services presence and greater coverage across numerous industry segments, including high technology, financial services, and telecommunications."

As part of M2M Holdings' standard acquisition model, the Knova service resolution management product line would continue to be supported by dedicated product development, product management, and technical support resources. Knova's board of directors has unanimously approved the merger agreement and has recommended that the stockholders vote in favor of the merger agreement.
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Canada's Resolve Business Outsourcing Income Fund has announced a cash distribution to unit holders of $0.0833 per unit, covering the period from December 1, 2006 to December 31, 2006.

The distribution will be paid on January 19, 2007 to unit holders of record at the
close of business on December 31, 2006. This cash distribution is consistent with disclosure of the Fund's distribution policy in the prospectus dated March 9, 2006.

Resolve is a business process outsourcing firm, providing services to over 1,000 businesses and governments across North America. Resolve sells business functions to its clients on an outsourced basis, including Finance and Administrative, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supply Chain Management.
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First Coffee's happy to publicize announcements like, complete with puffy comments, around Christmas in the hopes it'll prod imitators: Seagull Software, which sells products to transform legacy business applications into service-oriented architecture assets, has surpassed its employee United Way campaign goal for 2006 just four hours after kicking off the campaign.

For the past five years, Seagull Software has sponsored a United Way campaign for U.S. employees, matching employee contributions fifty cents on the dollar. Contributions
this year exceed the campaign goal by 56 percent.
    
"I am really proud to say we knocked our United Way campaign goal out of the park this year," commented Don Addington, CEO and president. "Our employees are some of the most caring and giving people I have ever had the privilege to be associated with. They give selflessly of their time and their money to local community organizations throughout the year," he remarked.

Several years ago, Seagull Software decided to consolidate its philanthropic efforts around the United Way to make the biggest impact, and to give back to the local communities that support its employees in Atlanta and other cities in the United States.

According to local officials, 91 cents of every dollar contributed to the United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta goes to the programs, with only 9 cents going to administration. "This is one of the reasons we support the United Way so enthusiastically," said Addington.

Seagull Software employees also participated in TechBridge's Habitat for Humanity building project and the U.S. Marine Corps Toys for Tots program this year.

Seagull sells technology that transforms "legacy" applications into SOA-compliant Web services. Their LegaSuite software platform includes integration, GUI, workflow and terminal emulation technology. With LegaSuite, customers connect legacy applications on IBM mainframe, VME mainframe, System i5, UNIX/VT and Windows client/server platforms to the Web, to other middleware and to newer- generations of applications such as portals, CRM and SCM.

The company has direct operations in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, UK, France, and Germany.
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Salesforce.com has announced that the wealth management department of a large international bank has been "standardized on salesforce.com to be the business web desktop for their relationship managers."

The department is projected to receive an annual return on investment of 112 percent in a payback period of only 1.75 years, according to Nucleus Research.

(Evidently Nucleus calculated the costs of software personnel, training and other investments over a three-year period to quantify the company's total investment in salesfore.com. Direct benefits included reduced software, hardware and IT staff costs associated with retired system; indirect benefits were quantified based on time savings of relationship managers, using a correction factor to account for the inefficient transfer of time. Not quantified in this analysis was the change in working capital the company achieved by accelerating the account opening process or the ability to attract new clients through better customer service.)

The wealth management department chose salesforce.com to store and bring together all of their customer information. Since large client teams of relationship managers work together on each customer, according to salesforce.com officials, the ability to update and access the 360 degree view of their customer from anywhere, at any time is essential for customer retention. So they picked salesforce.com for "all their CRM needs."

In addition to the usual litany of CRM functions, the customer said Salesforce helped the department stay in compliance, which is a consideration in this age of Sarbanes-Oxley. There was also the ability to implement salesforce in weeks, and not months.

In building their wealth management business web desktop, the department used the Salesforce CRM application and integrations with the Apex platform to front-end, middle and back office functions such as wire transfers and account changes.
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StreamServe Inc., a vendor of Enterprise Document Presentment, has announced that it received a United States patent (# 7,127,520) for a “Method and System for Transforming Input Data Streams.”

The company says the technology processes and automates the analysis of incoming data streams from a variety of applications, enabling organizations to create personalized, consistent and targeted customer communications on a massive scale.

It works for unstructured data coming into an organization’s applications, including ERP, CRM, SCM and content management.

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