By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Vivaldi's The Four Seasons:
Interesting news, that Google and salesforce.com could be joining up here to fight off Microsoft.
The Wall Street Journal, which notes any official confirmation or announcement could be a couple weeks off, said this morning the two firms are "discussing an alliance that could help them compete more effectively with Microsoft."
The companies are "still hashing out details of a potential partnership," but one possible outcome, speculates whoever the insiders were the WSJ talked to, is a "Web-based offering that integrates some of Google's online services such as email and instant-messaging with those of Salesforce.com."
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O2, a vendor of mobile services to consumers and businesses in the United Kingdom, and Vettro have recently announced a partnership to offer mobile enterprise applications for the business segment in Europe.
As part of the agreement, O2 is also deploying Vettro 360 for Sales & CRM to its own field sales organization as part of "a joint effort to embody the best practices of mobile application deployment, training, and usage," according to Vettro officials.
Vettro has been accepted to O2's Preferred Partner Program in the UK. This agreement makes Vettro one of only a handful of application partners to have been accepted to O2's program, and enables its entire Vettro 360 suite of mobile applications to be sold directly by O2 sales personnel.
The Vettro partnership is expected by O2 officials to strengthen O2's portfolio of offerings targeted to a growing population of mobile workers, and is intended to help corporate customers deploy mobile applications for field service, sales, IT service management, and pickup and delivery.
Starting with their Data Mobilization specialists, O2 is extending the Vettro CRM deployment to its entire field-based sales force within the next few weeks.
The Vettro 360 suite of applications integrates with multiple enterprise systems, on-demand services and has mobile capabilities such as GPS, Bluetooth peripherals, RFID, point-of-service transactions, and printing
Joe Rymsza, President and CEO of Vettro, called the deal "another opportunity for Vettro to gain a larger foothold in a lucrative international market."
O2 owns 50 percent of the Tesco Mobile joint venture in the UK, as well as having 100 percent ownership of Be, a leading UK fixed broadband provider.
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Marketbright has announced the availability of eMarketing Enterprise for salesforce.com's AppExchange. The Marketbright product allows companies to implement self-service campaign execution, automate lead qualification and routing, and "gain visibility into closed-loop campaign-to-cash metrics via real-time dashboards," according to company officials.
Basically the product lets users deploy and manage Web sites with full membership and enterprise content management features such as workflow, versioning, and personalization. In addition, it provides a full channel marketing solution for syndicating campaigns to your channel, enabling deal registration and lead distribution, and for managing partner programs and self-service profile publishing.
Erik Bower, president of Marketbright, said the product "complements and extends the capabilities of Salesforce CRM applications by providing a way for marketing people to maximize the number of high quality leads generated while keeping costs under control."
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Austin, Texas-based QuickArrow, Inc., a vendor of professional services automation and management products, has announced the availability of its Spring '07 product release.
This latest version of QuickArrow's Software as a Service application incorporates automatically calculated Earned Value Management metrics to provide clients with "greater visibility into project health from a cost management perspective," company officials say.
"Our clients asked us for the capability to better track project status and to identify and correct any cost performance issues before the project scope is affected," said Louise K. Allen, QuickArrow Vice President of Product Strategy.
This release also includes upgrades to QuickArrow's auditing capabilities, with a Read-Only project view that allows clients to restrict access to the editing of financial data, and the ability to report on all historical Time and Expense activity through a Data Download utility. These features assist QuickArrow's clients with SOX compliance and reporting.
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Autonomy Corporation plc has announced that it has been chosen as a preferred partner for enterprise search and Meaning-based Computing technologies by WM-data, an IT services working the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) space.
A division of international IT services company, LogicaCMG, WM-data has approximately 9,000 professionals spanning the Nordic countries.
With this agreement, WM-data will extend its Nordic alliance with Autonomy to offer consulting and systems integration services in the Enterprise Content Management segment.
Autonomy and WM-data have been partners in Sweden for several years and have collaborated in a number of public sector projects. The partnership between the two companies is now being extended across the Nordic region and into all vertical markets.
Jonn Mahlgard, WM-data's ECM partner manager and manager of Emerging Markets, explained that the agreement "enhances WM-data's ECM product for customers in the Nordic region."
WM-data is a part of the LogicaCMG Group, which employs 40,000 people across 41 countries. In the Nordics, the company has about 9,000 employees and operates under the brand WM-data, a LogicaCMG company.
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BPO vendor eTelecare Global Solutions has announced it will invest in its sixth delivery center in the Philippines. The new center, located in the Annex@Shaw facility in Mandaluyon City, Metro Manila, will open in the third quarter of 2007 and employ more than 3,000 employees when fully deployed.
Funding for the new center comes from eTelecare’s recently completed initial public offering of American Depository Shares. eTelecare is the first Philippine-incorporated business process outsourcing company, and the second Filipino company overall, to trade on the NASDAQ stock exchange.
“We plan to invest a significant portion of the proceeds from our IPO in further expansion in the Philippines,” added Fred Ayala, Chairman of eTelecare.
The Annex@Shaw facility will be situated on a 13,000-square-meter site on Shaw Boulevard. The center will be eTelecare’s 13th overall and sixth in the Philippines, including existing sites in Makati City, Quezon City, Muntinlupa City and two in Cebu City.
The new staff at the center will increase the number of Philippines-based eTelecare employees from 7,300 to more than 10,000. Another 2,600 eTelecare employees are based at the company’s seven U.S. centers, three in Arizona, two in North Dakota, one in South Dakota and one in New Mexico.
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Happy Victoria Day for our Canadian readers, and happy Adelaide Cup Day for our South Australian friends. Evidently that's a holiday.
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