By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Charles Mingus' Mingus Ah Um:
Driven by "significant gains in license" and "maintenance revenue," worldwide customer relationship management (CRM) total software revenue totaled.$7 billion in 2005, a 13.7 percent increase from 2004, according to Gartner, Inc.
Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner, credited the "robust gains" as the result of "strong vendor performance across the market, continued rapid adoption of on-demand solutions, increasing penetration of emerging markets, and buyer recognition of CRM applications as key drivers of customer acquisition and retention."
SAP was the No. 1 CRM vendor based on total software revenue, with a 25.9 percent market share in 2005. Increased midmarket opportunity drove growth across the CRM market for both the large suite vendors and on-demand providers, Gartner reported, "such as salesforce.com."
Siebel's strong fourth quarter results drove growth, but at the expense of Oracle and PeopleSoft CRM solutions. Industry specialists such as Amdocs also benefited from high demand for vertical market products.
Gartner has traditionally measured market share in terms of new license revenue. However, due to the emergence and increasing popularity of open-source software and buyer consumption models such as hosted and subscription offerings, Gartner has moved to measure market share in terms of total software revenue. This includes revenue generated from new license, updates, subscriptions and hosting, technical support and maintenance. Professional services and hardware revenue are not included in total software revenue.
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Dynmark officials describe themselves as "buoyant" about the functionality in the company's new release, specifically its ability to "publish and maintain mobile content, and send and receive SMS messages from a range of APIs, web-based applications or Microsoft Windows PC applications."
Saying the company now has "the capital, a strong board with respected credentials, a range of plug-in applications for CRM applications, a thriving reseller program, and there are positive signs of a potentially business-changing partnership," Dynmark CEO, Oscar Jenkins said Dynmark is set for "spectacular growth in 2007."
Dynmark's confidence in mobile messaging for business productivity is reflected by analyst predictions. British market research group Gartner has forecast global text message traffic of 2.3 trillion messages a year by 2010, and total global SMS revenues of $72.5 billion.
The major feature difference of e-txt 5.2, according to company officials, is its power. Based on Microsoft's MSDE SQL database, an enterprise standard database, e-txt 5.2 users can import "thousands of contacts in seconds, with one click."
The company has recently secured about a million dollars in funding and appointed ex-Vodafone UK Corporate Managing Director, Graham Ward as a non-executive Director. Jenkins said e-txt 5.2 "is the significant skip before a colossal jump, and marks the first stage of a new deployment."
E-txt 6 is due for release later in 2007 and will see the climax of Dynmark project, Ascension, culminating in more industry leading PC-to-mobile messaging features, officials promise.
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Salentica Systems Inc., a vendor of client management products based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and InfoGrate Inc., a custom consulting services firm in Chicago, have announced a partnership to deliver hosted, client relationship management products to the Private Client, Family Office and High Net Worth markets.
Probably more fertile ground than the infamous Low Net Worth markets.
"Partnering with InfoGrate allows us to extend our AdvisorDesk to a group of boutique financial services clients," said Bill Rourke, President Salentica Systems, adding that through InfoGrate's hosted offering, "more wealth management firms will be able to access a customized set of CRM products at any level."
By combining InfoGrate's CRM consulting services, current relationships and knowledge in these boutique markets with the knowledge and implementation skills of Salentica's AdvisorDesk CRM solution we can address the needs of a more diverse group of clients."
Salentica's purpose-built CRM "desk" modules allows many levels of wealth management companies to use the best products and components of a large CRM system.
"The relationship with Salentica will allow InfoGrate's family office and advisory clients to integrate their portfolio accounting, custodial, and performance data into Outlook such that they will have true entity partnership management," said Tania Neild, CEO of InfoGrate, adding that while not a traditional software reseller, InfoGrate forms partnerships with software providers like Salentica, because "the partnership enables us to gauge the best fit for the clients and follow up with implementation and integration."
Salentica AdvisorDesk is the Wealth Management solution which allows users to work with Microsoft CRM in a manner that reflects their normal business dealings with clients. Whether a sales representative or manager, the Wealth Management component will display the information needed.
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PRC, a provider of outsourced customer management, has announced that it will open a new contact center in Carrollton, Texas. PRC plans to bring over 530 new jobs to the area.
The location of PRC's 70,000 square foot operation in Carrollton, Texas will be at 3350 Boyington Drive. PRC will be hiring associates at all levels including management and technology team members to support the Company's Fortune 500 client base.
"Carrollton balances a dynamic corporate and residential community setting, which is an ideal fit for PRC," said John G. Hall, PRC CEO. PRC runs contact centers for other companies. The company employs over 14,000 team members worldwide.
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South Carolina's largest public school system, Greenville County Schools, has recently embarked on a project to streamline infrastructure, technical support and instructional support departments, and improve "customer service" as part of the effort to streamline call center procedures. The school system decided to use FrontRange Solutions' IP Contact Center.
After upgrading to high-speed infrastructure, consolidating servers and implementing Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Greenville implemented an IP contact center with trouble ticket application HEAT.
One important criterion for the school system was to have a call center application to manage the IT infrastructure with features like identifying inbound callers and an emphasis on first call resolution.
As a result, school officials say, the technical, instructional and application support departments now operate together. IPCC has increased customer satisfaction by routing calls to the appropriate individual the first time, IPCC performs "data dips" in HEAT to intelligently route callers based on skill sets. Technicians also benefit from automated screen pops that identify callers.
In fact Andy Poston, Manager of ETS Customer Service Desk for Greenville, sees improved productivity from screen pops alone. "Screen pops, along with IPCC's metric reporting, has improved help desk operations across the school system.
Greenville is also interested in the feature that allows after-hours callers to automatically open new service tickets that include caller contact information and voicemail attachments within the ticket.
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