By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the Dust Rhinos’ Sociable — Live. Guinness all around, please…

 

Hypercom Corporation officials say the company’s SmartPayments product suite has become “the first electronic payment processing software to pass certification tests ensuring compatibility with Windows Vista.”

 

The Hypercom SmartPayments Client and SmartPayments Server product lines have earned the “Certified for Windows Vista” designations from Microsoft Corp.

 

The certified for Windows Vista logo helps ensure that Hypercom SmartPayments products work smoothly with Windows Vista-based PCs and enable merchants to make full use of the new security features and other enhancements of the new Microsoft operating system.

 

Hypercom SmartPayments products still maintain their certifications for earlier-generation operating systems, including Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

 

“Products that carry the Certified for Windows Vista logo have met explicit standards of reliability and quality, and have been tested and proven to deliver a superior experience with Windows Vista,” explains Dave Wascha, Director of Windows Client Product Management at Microsoft Corp.

 

Hypercom’s SmartPayments’s products are designed to provide a secure, scalable platform for integrating payment processing solutions with point-of-sale, accounting/billing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Internet shopping cart systems.

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Lumen Software, a vendor of CRM and other commercial open source Software-as-a-Service and portal products, has announced its decision to employ the PostgreSQL-supported LAPP (Linux-Apache-PostgreSQL-PHP) stack for its open source development platform Lumenation.

 

After consideration of PostgreSQL and MySQL, which is part of the LAMP stack, developers at Lumen found that the PostgreSQL database offered “a higher level of functionality and handled large amounts of data and traffic better than the alternatives.”

 

“It’s fantastic to see open source continue to push farther into the enterprise like Lumen is doing. Enterprise-class apps require enterprise-class databases, and PostrgreSQL is the most advanced open source database on the planet,” said Josh Berkus from the PostreSQL Project. “Best of all, PostgreSQL’s source code is available under the most open of open source licenses, the BSD license. This gives the user freedom to use, modify and distribute PostgreSQL in any form you like. Any modifications, enhancements, or changes you make are yours to do with as you please.”

 

PostgreSQL is freely available for commercial purposes,

 

“We picked PostreSQL four years ago based solely on the merits. This isn’t religion for us, we’re just looking for the best. Just this year we did an extensive technical comparison and PostgreSQL is still just plain better for our users,” said Don Keeler, CTO of Lumen Software, adding “I’m not denigrating MySQL. They’re good for a lot of different types of projects, and I can see why they’re popular. But when it comes to the most advanced features that enterprise customers expect and the maturity of PostgreSQL’s features, it’s really not a hard choice.”

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Pegasystems, a vendor of unified process and rules technology, has been named by Technology Marketing Corporation’s Customer Interaction Solutions magazine as a recipient of its 2007 CRM Excellence Award for Pegasystems’ Customer Process Manager.

 

“Pegasystems is elated to have won such a prestigious award for two years in a row,” said Jay Sherry, vice president, Marketing, Pegasystems. “Customer Process Manager continues to prove itself as a powerful, rules-based solution that truly strengthens the call center. Global organizations need to stay ahead of the competition, and Pegasystems provides them with a powerful tool to do that.”

 

Built on Pegasystems’ SmartBPM suite, the CPM framework provides a combination of customer service capabilities that match customer and business intentions at the moment of interaction. This real-time customer response processing is aimed at improving the customer experience and increasing user productivity.

 

“Pegasystems has demonstrated to the editors of Customer Interaction Solutions that their products and services have substantially improved the processes of their clients’ businesses by streamlining and facilitating the flow of information needed for companies to retain their most precious asset...their customers,” said Nadji Tehrani, founder and chairman of TMC, publishers of Customer Interaction Solutions.

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Saaspoint has recently announced the availability of TimeTrack, its salesforce.com’s AppExchange application that enables the recording of time spent of projects and tasks.

 

TimeTrack automates the reporting process by capturing the time electronically, providing a quick and convenient way to record, view, adjust and report time, reducing errors and the time and effort required, when compared to manual recording methods.

 

Built on the AppExchange on-demand platform, TimeTrack is immediately available to download for a free 14-day test drive at www.salesforce.com/appexchange.

 

The product provides the management of any service based business with visibility of how and where people resources are being consumed, along with the tracking of associated expenses. Its new architecture has boosted the performance, look and feel of the application. Its capability for project analysis provides transparency to the labor involved in completing the project and can show you exactly where the time is spent, by task, by staff member or by date, officials explain.

 

“All the costs associated with any organization’s most valuable asset, their people, can now be easily allocated and tracked to calculate accurate billable and non-billable time. This eliminates the administrative nightmare of tracking and allocating time and expenses to particular projects or clients,” said Jay Noble, President, North American Operations, Saaspoint.

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Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation, has announced that Bank Leumi, an Israeli financial institution, has begun using its data warehouse-driven event triggers for event-based marketing.

 

EBM uses software-based rules and triggers that detect, analyze and interpret customer events, transactions, and interactions. The idea is to enable companies to provide timely and personalized attention to customers who may be in decision mode with regard to a product or service.

 

The latest Teradata customer to deploy Teradata EBM technology, Bank Leumi, was ranked one of Israel’s top five companies in 2006 in trade volume, according to a new Business Data Israel report.

 

“Communicating to millions of individual customers through a variety of channels is complex and challenging,” said Itzhak Malach, First Executive, head of operations, information systems and administration at Bank Leumi. “Bank Leumi is using its Teradata data warehouse-driven CRM tools to create relevant dialogues with customers across channels and serve them wherever they are.”

 

Ten years ago, Teradata’s first data warehouse-driven EBM implementation was launched, and numerous Teradata customers across the world have since added event-based communications to their customer relationship management portfolio.