By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring:
Congratulations to Nicholas Sarkozy, the president-elect of France. I must confess, First Coffee was rather hoping to see Mlle Royal elected, it would have been such evil fun to watch France as a serious country go swirling down the ol' porcelain pony.
But in electing Sarkozy the French have shown a realism First Coffee frankly doubted they had, an acknowledgment that Socialist delusions are worthless in reality, so maybe the place is salvageable after all. Of course it remains to be seen how much opposition trade unions, "students" and "youths" throw up. They've already started burning cars and rioting, it will get worse before it gets better. Much worse, we might be back to 1968.
When faced with protests to badly-needed reforms outgoing President Chirac simply caved in and, in the fine French tradition, meekly surrendered by abandoning reform efforts first under Prime Minister Alain Juppe and later under Dominique de Villepin, but First Coffee thinks Sarkozy is made of sterner stuff than Jacques Chirac. Of course a marshmallow and banana croissant is made of sterner stuff than Jacques Chirac.
Thankfully Sarkozy has little time for the banal, thumb-sucking anti-Americanism so favored by the crumbling losers among the French elite, who had to manufacture some reason other than their own ineptness for France's failures. Let's hope Sarkozy's as good as his word and puts such immature petulance away.
Yes, a President Sarkozy might cause intelligent, thoughtful observers to start taking France seriously again.
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Jitterbit, Inc., a vendor of open source integration productivity software, has announced the general release of Jitterbit 1.2, what company officials call a "major upgrade to its Jitterbit business integration" product.
Jitterbit 1.2's new features include plug-in functionality that lets users customize their products and comprehensive software-as-a-service (SaaS) application connectivity. A revamped formula builder also aids intuitive data manipulation. These upgrades make the Jitterbit platform more flexible and extendable, company officials say, and provide "significant productivity gains."
With Jitterbit, users and developers can connect customer data from a variety of sources and formats, such as local and hosted ERP and CRM applications, legacy systems, data warehouses and online marketplaces.
"Every organization manages their data a little differently, so every integration is unique in some way," said Ilan Sehayek, CTO of Jitterbit. "Proprietary software companies lack the bandwidth and incentive to support every single user requirement and this leaves many customers out in the cold."
With plug-ins, the open source community can easily add new functionality to meet their individual needs, such as a specific type of security encryption, alternative data cleansing mechanisms or event-based triggers to launch other in-house applications.
Jitterbit 1.2 also includes more comprehensive built-in support for web services and SaaS connectivity, such as Salesforce.com's new Apex API. Currently, some organizations that use SaaS applications struggle with integration and often have to resort to problematic scripting products.
"When companies adopt an on-demand model, they suddenly face the complex challenge of sharing data between their internal systems and their applications beyond the firewall," said Sharam Sasson, president and CEO of Jitterbit. "As spending on on-demand ERP and CRM products continues to experience double-digit growth*, we've seen increasing customer demand for flexible, affordable integration products, and we expect this trend to continue over the next five years."
Analyst firm Gartner has predicted that 25 percent of new business software will be delivered as a service by 2011 and analyst firm IDC lists the current SaaS market at $8 billion annually.
To download the latest version of Jitterbit, please visit www.jitterbit.com.
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From Basque Research, a source for news First Coffee doesn't run into daily, we get word that www.b-kin.com, an online services Web page, is providing a new version of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software specially designed for PDA or Smartphones.
According to IDC Consultancy Services, during 2006, more than 57 per cent of organizations are working with mobile devices.
Now, B-kin CRM Mobile "brings together software in order to accede, in reading mode, to data that you already have in CRM. This is a version designed for PDA and Smartphone for Windows Mobile 2003 SE / 2005," company officials say.
The goal of this combined software solution, company officials say, is to enable enhanced customer service, providing resources such as access to accounts, contacts and the management of opportunities, "efficiently sharing all information relating to trading activity in a simple manner and without investment cost."
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FrontRange Solutions, a vendor of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), IT Service Management and voice applications for the mid-market, has confirmed the availability of GoldMine Premium Edition.
This edition of the GoldMine product line provides a common platform for sales force automation, direct marketing, customer service and CRM.
GoldMine PE, based upon the familiar structure of GoldMine Corporate Edition and GoldMine Standard Edition, is pitched at existing customers familiar with GoldMine who want to add customer service and many new features in Premium Edition, including a new workflow, user interface and service and support module.
The release of Premium Edition follows GoldMine Enterprise Edition (EE). GoldMine EE is tested and compatible with Microsoft Windows Vista.
The new user interface in GoldMine Premium Edition is more efficient and includes links for recently viewed items, improved search capabilities, fields that auto-complete to reduce typing, and tabs and workflow that can be personalized.
In addition, GoldMine PE features dynamic sorting and filtering, which allows users to add attributes and criteria to a search by clicking within results, as well as sort by different criteria on-the-fly without re-running a query.
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Meijer, a family-owned chain of 177 superstores in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky, has deployed a new CRM tool that optimizes delivery of individualized promotional offers to Meijer customers.
Provided by NCR Corporation and Teradata, a division of NCR, the Enterprise Offer Management product includes NCR’s Copient Logix software and Teradata Customer Relationship Management (CRM), an analytical software portfolio.
Meijer Director of Retail Systems Elmer Robinson, said they wanted enhanced ability to manage the promotional offers they extend to shoppers at the checkout "and, potentially, at other touchpoints in the future." The product gives the retailers "a closed loop" product, "from data warehousing to campaign management, to offer optimization, to content management to multichannel execution."
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So here's hoping that, according to the principles of good CRM, the incoming French presidential administration gives the customers what they want, which is what was advertised. No bait and switch, Sarko, or else your customers might go elsewhere.
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