By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is an iTunes (version 7.1.1!) shuffle. Current song: The Archies' "Sugar Sugar:"

SugarCRM Inc., a vendor of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, has announced the immediate release of Project Management for its Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise product lines.

Sugar's Project Management offers what company officials call "the advanced capabilities of a standalone project management application" integrated into SugarCRM's CRM suite.

"As companies become more service-based, managing customer and internal projects becomes even more critical," said John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM.

According to a recent on-demand survey by Nucleus Research, 32 percent of on-demand customers are using on-demand CRM and only 23 percent are using on-demand project management. However, future buying intentions in on-demand shift from CRM to project management, with 29 percent of companies planning to buy on-demand project management and 16 percent planning to buy CRM in the next 12-18 months. 

"Managing customers and projects is the next step after acquiring them, making integrated project management a key factor in driving greater value from CRM," said Rebecca Wetteman, Vice President of Nucleus Research.

First Coffee is of the belief that customers don't particularly want to be managed. Any customers who enjoy being managed please do write in.

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Current song: "You Can't Always Get What You Want," by The Rolling Stones.

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PAR3 Communications has announced the unveiling of "a new corporate identity," changing the company name to Varolii Corporation.

Ten points if you know what "Varolii" means. No peeking or Googling.

Okay, we didn't either: The name is derived from Pons Varolii, a pathway in the brain that unites intelligence and learning with the ability to communicate. The name, according to company officials, reflects the company's vision of providing enterprise customer interaction products, while using its infrastructure, people and knowledge to deliver customer service.

And, well, Hole In One was taken, and it sounded better than the Pons Corporation.

Varolii delivers via the Software as a Service model, with a fully managed environment.

Nicholas Tiliacos, president and CEO of Varolii, said the new brand identity also represents "a stronger expanded company." In December 2005, PAR3 acquired EnvoyWorldWide, a provider of notification services for business continuity and emergency communications.  The companies have integrated both technologies. 

Varolii sells products ranging from standardized applications to fully customized deployments.  A customer management group focuses on post-deployment results.

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E-mail-to-Lead runs as a Microsoft Office Outlook add-in with Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook add-in on one or more designated CRM user's computer. Company officials say it automatically detects incoming e-mails in Microsoft Outlook and tosses them over to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Leads based on saved configurations, or lets them be used on-the-fly.

CRM marketing automation uses for E-mail-to-Lead include processing Web site form generated e-mail communications into leads, as well as partner provided e-mail leads. You'd like this tool if you're into manufacturer provided leads, or if you want something that gives you automatic processing of buying service leads and solves lead generation vender handling issues as well as field lead consolidation.

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Current song: Aimee Mann's "Long Shot," the blazing version from Live At St. Ann's Warehouse. If you've ever thought, as First Coffee does, that Mann's one of the best pop songwriters working today but that her studio-recorded songs sound like rather bloodless glass-case specimens, get this CD where the songs are allowed to breathe and live and all the emotion comes through loud and clear.

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InvisibleCRM, a salesforce.com partner, joined the Salesforce.com Foundation's "The Power Of Us" partner initiative to help nonprofit organizations obtain, implement and maximize the use of technologies to reduce administrative costs and to better achieve their goals.

As part of the program, InvisibleCRM will be implementing a similar model to the salesforce.com Foundation's 1 Percent model. InvisibleCRM officials say the company already donates up to 10 licenses of its products -- Sales Folder, Sales Desktop and Sales Alerts -- to qualified nonprofit organizations.

The vendor also donates one percent of their employees' time in two ways -- via normal technical support, which is made available to nonprofit organizations that have signed up for InvisibleCRM products, and via volunteer events.

"We believe that InvisibleCRM products are engineered to simplify the way users work with salesforce can save nonprofit organization's time dramatically, so they can maximize their strengths fulfilling their missions and devoting more time to people, not software," said Vlad Voskresensky, the CEO of InvisibleCRM.

Future Leaders, an Australian non-profit organization in the area of education, has already used InvisibleCRM applications.

The Power of Us partner program was created to increase salesforce.com Foundation's community benefits by increasing the number of companies committed to a similar method of corporate social responsibility, according to saleforce.com officials.

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Current song: Crosby & Nash's "Lay Me Down."

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IBM provides a scalable infrastructure that currently supports more than 740,000 users in the SAS70 Type II certified environment.

Axentis sells products to address areas such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Information Privacy, Ethics & Integrity, Legal & Regulatory and Enterprise Risk Management. The recent deal with IBM expands the SaaS facility, including increasing the processing power and SAN data bandwidth by 200 percent.

Axentis uses a pure SaaS model to deliver workflow, reporting, security, and content and learning management products. Headquartered in Cleveland, the company has data centers in Boulder, Colorado and Basel, Switzerland.

"No, no, please don't banish me from headquarters to Boulder or Basel, nooooo… I love Cleveland, I bet the river's never caught fire once in Boulder or Basel…"

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