By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Kinky Friedman & the Texas Jewboys' album From One Good American to Another.
Online CRM NetSuite Inc. has filed a Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with its plan for an initial public offering of common stock, according to investment industry journal RTT.
Larry Ellison, the co-founder and CEO of Oracle, is a director of the company and owns a 74 percent stake. Evan Goldberg, also a former Oracle employee, started the company in 1998 with the help of Ellison. Goldberg is the presently the company's chairman and chief technology officer and owns an 8.1 percent stake in the company.
The company's CEO, Zachary Nelson, also a former employee of Oracle, owns a 3.6 percent stake in the company. The company began as the small arm business of Oracle Corp. and licensed the Oracle brand as well as introduced its Oracle Small Business Suite around 2000. In 2004, NetSuite stopped the development and marketing of Oracle Small Business Suite and changed its name to NetSuite.
The company has not been profitable on a quarterly or annual basis since its formation and added that it may incur significant losses in the future for several reasons, RTT report. The company has an accumulated deficit of $193 million since its formation.”
NetSuite was formed about four months before San Francisco, California-based Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com's annual revenue rose to about $500 million from $96 million since its IPO in 2004. The company's shares have quadrupled since its IPO to a total market capitalization of almost $5 billion.
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Automotive CRM vendor Autobytel and CallCommand have announced that Autobytel has sold its Retention Performance Marketing business to CallCommand for $7.6 million, subject to working capital adjustment.
The sale of RPM, combined with the earlier sale of their AIC business, allows Autobytel to sharpen their focus on “becoming the leading online automotive experience and destination for consumers and the premier online marketing partner for dealers and manufacturers,” said Autobytel President and CEO Jim Riesenbach.
Automotive dealers currently use RPM to deliver welcome letters or e-mails for new car buying and service customers, and to send service reminders and tailored campaigns on a regular basis based on each customer's specific spending, purchase and visitation habits. RPM also offers customers a range of reporting and analysis capabilities.
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Casio Computer Co. and NTT DoCoMo have announced that they have agreed to form a joint venture company to provide digital payment systems, mainly for DoCoMo's iD mobile credit-card platform, and related customer relationship management (CRM) services, according to industry observer Ed Voskeritchian.
The joint venture, to be named CXD Next Co., Ltd., Voskeritchian says, will be established next week and begin providing services on September 1. It will combine Casio's digital cash-register technologies and retail support know-how with DoCoMo's expertise in mobile payments, and develop services “centered around Casio's new cash register with virtual private network capability and reader/writer compatibility for mobile e-wallet services.”
Voskeritchian says both companies believe that “strong demand exists among retail stores and restaurant chains for introduction of IT based efficient business operations, enabling proprietors to quickly conduct data analysis and apply the results to systematic sales management,” as well as “more effective CRM initiatives, in the mobile environment.”
The company plans in future to expand its CRM offerings by incorporating DoCoMo's Osaifu-Keitai e-wallet and ToruCa information-capture services.
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Business & Decision, a consulting and systems integration company specializing in Business Intelligence, Customer Relationship Management and E-Business, has received Cognos' “Platinum Award” as one of its best resellers of 2007. This is the highest distinction in its category.
The Business Intelligence and Customer Relationship Management vendor unveiled its winning partners at its “Partner Summit Awards” ceremony, which was held this week at the Cognos Forum 2007. The partners were rewarded for “their innovative spirit, their influence and their intellectual resources”, as well as for their “vision and passion for performance management”.
Founded in 1992, Business & Decision specializes in working with clients to facilitate system implementation to assist business performance management (dashboards, reporting, consolidation etc., and customer relationship management products such as sales force automation, call centers, campaign management and analytical CRM.
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Savi Technology, a provider of RFID-based total asset management products and services, and IFS Defense have announced they will partner to provide integrated real-time information products for the Aerospace and Defense market.
The RFID-Enhanced Software Suite is touted by company officials as having the ability to improve visibility, accuracy and performance of in-transit assets and consignments throughout defense supply chains. The announcement was made at the Paris Air Show.
The partners will integrate Savi's Radio Frequency Identification systems with IFS' ERP software, company officials say, “which will improve planning, decision-making and performance when transporting assets and consignments across the extended supply chain — from factory to foxhole.”
I tell you, there's a country 'n' western song title there: “From Factory to Foxhole.” Maybe if Toby Keith isn't too busy?
“Our customers increasingly want to augment their ERP products with real-time information across the entire breadth of the supply chain, to optimize cost savings and improve asset availability,” said Iain Green, managing director of IFS Defense.
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Autonomy Corporation, a vendor of infrastructure software for the enterprise, has announced that it expects to report record second quarter 2007 results, with revenues and profit before tax (adjusted and IFRS) significantly ahead of consensus estimates and ahead of the top end of analysts' forecasts.
Commenting on trading in the second quarter, Dr. Mike Lynch, Group CEO of Autonomy said recent trading has been “further testament to the central importance of unstructured information in the next generation of the IT market.”
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Impartial software evaluation firm Technology Evaluation Centers has launched its Merchandising Systems Evaluation Center to help companies select the software products they require for their specific business requirements.
Featuring research on retail vendors, the center allows software buyers to compare products based on over 3,000 criteria, in areas including inventory replenishment, purchasing, and vendor management, across multiple retail channels and countries.
“As retail organizations shift strategies to become more customer-centric, products that can facilitate, streamline, and automate operations are becoming 'must haves' in any size retail organization,” says Christina Park, TEC research analyst for retail.
Before approaching software vendors, TEC suggests companies engage in an online comparison of merchandising products using services such as TEC's eBestMatch software evaluation tool. This step can save firms time, money, and staffing resources during the critical selection process.
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Without an efficient software infrastructure, we could not have coped with the expansion of the past years. Previously, financial accounting and retail were accommodated by stand-alone applications. A custom interface supported communication between the two applications, which meant that data had to be captured twice or imported a second time.
We realized that at some point in the near future, this type of data handling and storage would no longer support our expanding business and would render the system too inflexible to support the expanding number of product variants. This led to the decision to implement a new solution that could handle everything – now and in the future.
We are in San Diego and were paired up with a company called Tryarc in Los Angeles. They are a premier SAP business partner. While our first impression was SAP is too much for what we need, Tryarc turned us onto the SAP solution for small and midsize enterprises; it's called SAP Business One. A subsequent presentation of the product had us convinced. SAP Business One was implemented in just a matter of weeks – in part because the standard functions of SAP Business One matched 95% of our business processes. We implemented an interface to our Web shop using SAP Business One Software Development Kit, enabling incoming Internet orders to flow automatically into the business software.
Now, all enterprise management functions are accommodated in one system. SAP Business One provides entirely new opportunities. The only alternative would have been to invest considerable sums in additional stand-alone solutions. Our infrastructure made this pointless. In addition to being the more economical solution, SAP Business One is more comprehensive. It plays its part in making the processes in the company much more transparent than before. Purchasing and sales processes used to be separate, manual transactions supported by paper forms that were stored in file cabinets and forwarded by hand when required. Today, when an order is created and confirmed, a delivery note and invoice are generated, giving the warehouse the go-ahead for delivery. In parallel, the transaction is shown as an open item in accounting. If the merchandise is in stock, customers can receive their order immediately.
Finally, each department can access this system and exchange data with the other divisions. The result is a significant improvement in the internal information flow. This is particularly important for an enterprise like ours that covers all of the manufacturing steps – from development and production to sales and technical support. Today, the time between placing an order and delivery averages less than 24 hours. The improvements delivered by SAP Business One lay the groundwork for the continuing growth of our company. For example, we are planning to exchange price and delivery data with its customers via an electronic data interchange interface in the near future.
The enterprise wide system is an investment worth it's weight in gold. We could not be happier with SAP and the people at Tryarc who helped us get up and running.