By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is k.d. lang's hymns of the 49th parallel, a nice Christmas present from our Canadian sister-in-law last year:
IDS Scheer, a vendor of Business Process Management products, has announced that its Small and Medium Enterprises business unit has concluded a deal with the consumer packaged goods brand Hero, Inc. a holding company for Signature Brands, LLC and Beech-Nut Nutrition Corporation.
The company chose IDS Scheer's ARIS SmartPath for CPG Foods, a product including SAP All-In-One enterprise software from SAP bundled with ARIS industry-specific reference models and consulting services. Used to align the company's supply chain, this implementation will support 250 employees at Signature Brands and Beech-Nut.
Tim Kennedy, CFO of Signature Brands, said he hopes the move "will help us to reduce manufacturing costs and improve business processes throughout our organization."
Hero works in the consumer goods and infant feeding sectors with its subsidiary units Signature Brands and Beech-Nut. Established in 1951, Signature Brands sells in the retail dessert decorating products sector.
Formed in 1931, Beech-Nut Nutrition Corporation sells baby food.
The implementation, led by a team of seven IDS Scheer deployment experts, will go live at Signature Brands on June 1, 2007, and the Beech-Nut installation is expected to be complete by August 1, 2008.
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A new on-demand application from Model Metrics called Web2Anything, which "enables data to flow from a company's Web site directly into salesforce.com without any coding or re-keying," has been introduced.
This would include CRM-friendly customer surveys, orders, job applications and literature requests, which can go directly from a Web site into a new or existing record in salesforce.com.
Web2Anything associates entries from a Web site to records already in that user's system, based on an e-mail address or any other field. It lists all salesforce.com fields, letting users choose any combination of Objects, Tabs or Fields to include.
Web2Anything was developed by Model Metrics, an on-demand CRM consulting firm and salesforce.com implementation partner. Initially developed to enable Model Metrics' customers to capture and automatically upload data from their Web page for various applications, Web2Anything is now available to companies and individuals worldwide via the AppExchange.
After downloading Web2Anything from Salesforce.com's AppExchange, the user creates a Web2Anything account, then selects the Objects to link to their site. Web2Anything generates HTML that is placed on a user's Web site to enable the capture of data.
When data is input on the site, Web2Anything creates the record in Salesforce.com. Workflow can notify users to view the new entry, and reports run in Salesforce.com will include the new data.
Web2Anything is free to try for 30 days. Basic pricing is $1,500 per object per year, with other pricing options available. More information is available at www.Web2Anything.com.
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Microsoft CRM provider Iteration2 Australia has announced that Fleetrisk Technologies, a claims management organization, has selected them to be its Microsoft Business Solutions partner.
Sydney, Australia Iteration2 Au will provide Fleetrisk with services and support for its Microsoft Dynamics AX business management platform.
Microsoft Dynamics AX's features help automate and streamline financial, customer relationship, business services, human resources management, and supply chain processes.
Iteration2 provides its clients with software implementation experience "more attractive and affordable than products from SAP and Oracle," company officials say.
Iteration2 is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and provides Microsoft Dynamics AX, CRM, Sharepoint, and Field Services.
Established in 1995, Fleetrisk provides a complete solution to the management of fleets and insurance repair across Australia and into New Zealand and Asia.
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ELoyalty Corporation , a CRM services and products company, has announced financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2007.
For the first quarter of 2007, total revenue was $27.9 million and the net loss was $4.5 million. The net loss available to common shareholders was $0.61 per share. eLoyalty realized an "Adjusted Earnings" loss of $0.5 million for the first quarter of 2007, a $1.4 million improvement over the prior year period.
Adjusted Earnings is a non-GAAP measure.
ELoyalty focuses on two emerging market niches: Behavioral Analytics and Cisco's Converged IP for Contact Centers. During the first quarter of 2007 the company grew CIPCC Services revenue 60 percent and Behavioral Analytics revenue 685 percent year over year, and increased CIPCC Managed Services Backlog 43 percent sequentially.
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SAS, a privately-owned CRM vendor, has announced that it is positioned in the Leaders quadrant in Gartner Inc.'s Customer Data Mining 2007 Magic Quadrant.
According to the Gartner report, "leaders are vendors whose performance excels in the customer data mining market."
SAS officials say the company ploughed 24 percent of its revenue back into research and development in 2006, and that in data mining, SAS "continues to strengthen its capabilities and integrate them further into the SAS Customer Intelligence suite of products."
Major focus areas include improving usability and easing the deployment of analytic insights into a wide range of systems.
Jim Davis, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at SAS, said the Cary, North Carolina-based vendor is "adding more automation to our data mining and analytical offerings."
Users will have the flexibility to apply new automated classifiers and variable selection techniques with the ability to customize the model development process at any stage, SAS officials say. New interactive data preparation and exploration tools will also be added to help better discover trends and anomalies and speed the data preparation process.
Coming this fall, SAS Real-Time Decision Manager will let firms combine SAS Analytics with business logic. The product will deliver real-time recommendations for the Web and other interactive customer channels, company officials say.
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Rackable Systems, Inc. has announced that CRM vendor RightNow Technologies has deployed Rackable Systems servers to power its hosted enterprise products in the company's Chicago data center.
The need for a disaster recovery plan and geographic redundancy drove the purchase of the highly dense, energy efficient rack-mount servers, RightNow officials say.
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