By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
ARC Advisory Group, an independent research firm in manufacturing and supply chain management, has named Oracle the "leading supplier in the worldwide master data management market."
IBM placed second with 8.8 percent market share.
"Oracle MDM is a core 'Fusion' technology that will enable them to integrate their diverse portfolio of acquired solutions (PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, etc.) and allow them to work together much more effectively," according to Steve Banker, ARC's Service Director and author of the MDM report.
MDM is -- evidently -- a key component of Oracle's middleware strategy to "aggressively target heterogeneous environments -- products running on different databases, operating systems, and using different data warehouse or analytical products," the report said.
Oracle sells ERP and CRM applications, "but more broadly," the report notes, "they are a provider of core platforms that help pull together and harmonize all a company's IT assets."
According to ARC Advisory Group, Master Data Management provides the ability to consolidate and federate master information from disparate systems and lines of business into one central data repository, or hub.
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Seagull Software, which sells products to "transform legacy business applications into service-oriented architecture assets," has announced that BlueZone Version 4.1 has achieved Windows Vista certification from Microsoft.
Microsoft's Vista certification program is designed to ensure that third-party software applications operating on Windows Vista meet specific technical requirements. It generally deals with third-party software applications in four areas: security, compatibility with Vista, installs and uninstalls, and reliability.
Seagull officials say the company is "one of the first companies to have an application certified for Microsoft Windows Vista," noting that "BlueZone was previously certified on Windows XP."
What it means is that "BlueZone 4.1 takes advantage of the enhanced manageability and productivity features within the new operating platform," said Steve Bireley, vice president product development.
Jeremy Sharp, vice president of sales for Seagull Software's BlueZone business unit, called Vista certification "important to our customers, and now BlueZone has met the stringent Microsoft Windows Vista certification requirements."
BlueZone is one of several application access and integration products from Seagull Software. BlueZone 4.1 is scheduled for general availability in April 2007.
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Interactive Intelligence Inc., which sells business communications software, services for contact center automation and enterprise IP telephony, has announced enhancements to Interaction Director, the company's intelligent, network-based, pre- and post-call routing system for contact centers.
Designed to help distributed organizations create a "virtual" contact center by more effectively routing interactions across sites, these latest enhancements add the session initiation protocol -- the new standard for Voice over IP (VoIP) -- which, according to company officials, "eliminates the need for carriers in a pre-call routing configuration, thus reducing costs associated with complex set-up, ongoing third-party service, and per-call charges."
It also provides interoperability with SIP-compliant third-party products, such as PBXs, automatic call distributors and gateways.
Michael White, senior vice president of information technology infrastructure for InfoCision, the world's eighth largest outbound contact center, said Interaction Director automated routing rules to process between 40,000 and 50,000 inbound calls daily, distributed across our 28 contact centers. It allowed InfoCision officials to "re-allocate existing fail-over servers, which further increased operational efficiencies," he said.
Interaction Director works in conjunction with the Interactive Intelligence contact center automation software, Customer Interaction Center, which is part of the company's standards-based unified communications software suit. Routing rules can be flexibly pre-configured using ANI, DNIS, as well as real-time statistics, such as average hold time, occupancy, whatever.
Using Interaction Director's new SIP-based pre-call routing, a gateway replaces carrier-based routing by passing instructions directly to the gateway at a customer's site. In addition, Interaction Director's built-in server switchover provides full redundancy across sites.
Also included in this latest version of Interaction Director are new supervisory enhancements, such as new interfaces for viewing workgroup summaries, agent detail, and other critical data, all designed to make analyzing and improving upon existing routing configurations faster and easier.
Interaction Director is marketed to multi-site, outsourced contact centers and teleservices firms, as well as enterprises with internal, distributed contact centers, including multinational companies.
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DealerAdvance, Inc. has announced today that the company will target sales of its proprietary WEBDA program towards the 21,500 new car dealers across America.
Steven Humphries, Dealer Advance CEO, said out of the 21,500 new car dealers, "only about 50 percent have a Customer Relations Management tool in place." He said through his firm's "concentrated sales and marketing efforts," the company can capture approximately two percent of the total market over the next 24 months, "generating over $8 million in sales."
Because of the slowdown in automotive sales and the desire of dealers to maximize the management of their customer relations programs, the market for the WEBDA program has "really heated up," Humphries said. "We are now taking aggressive sales measures, assuring DLAV the maximum amount of business in the shortest period of time."
WEBDA is the newest iteration of DLAV’s CRM application, a Web-based system. The original server-based system is now being replaced in the almost 100 dealerships previously served, according to Humphries.
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Providence, Rhode Island-based OpenBOX Technologies, which sells Web-based CRM and enterprise software, has launched its OpenBOX v9.0 technology built on Microsoft’s .NET framework, and which works "regardless of which databases are deployed."
OpenBOX v9.0 includes a Data Presentation Layer that enables organizations to access information from their existing databases, such as DB2, SQL or Oracle, into one view. This back-end DPL is invisible to end users. The application can be customized using CSS style sheets, not just at the user interface (UI) level, but also forms and fields. The product uses XML and AJAX.
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