By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Lou Reed’s Live In Italy:

 

Infusion Software, a CRM vendor focusing on sales and marketing automation software for small businesses, has announced that Pat Sullivan, founder and former CEO of ACT! CRM software and SalesLogix has joined the Company’s Board of Directors, effective immediately.

 

“Infusion Software’s CRM program is built specifically for small businesses — which is really the last great opportunity in the CRM software market,” said Sullivan.

 

Sullivan is considered a pioneer and visionary in the sales automation industry and is attributed with creating the contact management software category. Sullivan most recently took public and sold ACT! and SalesLogix to Sage Software.

 

He was named one of the 80 Most Influential People in Sales and Marketing History by Sales and Marketing Management magazine, twice awarded the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award and recognized as one of the 10 most influential people in the CRM industry by Sales and Marketing Management.

 

“Of all the software companies in the market, Sullivan chooses Infusion to be aligned with,” an Infusion official said. “Sure validates their Web-based CRM application as an emerging player in the small business software space.”

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What Verticals onDemand officials are calling “the pharmaceutical industry’s first Software as a Service CRM application for managed markets” has been selected by Publicis Managed Markets, part of Publicis Healthcare Communications Group.

 

This marks Verticals onDemand’s first sale of VBioPharma and the first time an industry-specific CRM product has been applied to such a specialized area of pharmaceuticals as managed markets, vendor officials maintain. PMM, a comprehensive services provider for managed markets, goes live with Verticals onDemand’s VBioPharma Managed Markets Edition at the end of July.

 

New VBioPharma replaces home-grown systems and generic call reporting software with a complete CRM product integrated with primary and specialty care sales forces and marketing teams. VBioPharma Managed Markets Edition includes detailed contact, account, and activity management modules as well as business planning functionality.

 

Larry Green, President of Publicis Managed Markets Account Teams, said with VBioPharma’s” business planning functionality and automated data transfer, we expect a significant increase in our National and Regional Account Directors’ productivity.”

 

SaaS makes the development of highly specialized products, for equally specialized areas like managed markets, affordable. Because users can access VBioPharma through any Web browser, users benefit from the functionality of advanced software without some common technical challenges since all updates are handled remotely without the intervention of IT.

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ETelecare Global Solutions, a business process outsourcing vendor, has announced the construction of a new service delivery center, to be named eTelecare Center, in Makati City, located in the SM Cyberzone on Buendia Avenue.

 

With a total floor area of 18,000 square meters, the center will be one of the largest facilities in the Philippines dedicated solely to business process outsourcing.

 

ETelecare expects to employ at least 3,000 employees at the new facility, along with another 3,000 new employees at its previously announced Annex@Shaw facility in the Mandaluyong City center, which is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2007.

 

Once the facilities are operational, the company’s headcount in the Philippines will be 13,000. The company also has over 2,600 employees in the United States, spread among seven call centers in Arizona, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota.

 

ETelecare won the 2005 Employer of the Year award from the Personnel Management Association of the Philippines. It provides services including technical support, customer service, sales and customer retention from both onshore and offshore locations.

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Cambridge Technology Enterprises, a vendor of SOA based products and Enterprise Transformation applications, has entered into a definitive agreement with of Reilly & Associates, a privately-held company based in Michigan, to consummate the acquisition.

 

Reilly & Associates would give CTE the expertise in Oracle Financials, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), Oracle Process Manufacturing (OPM) and Oracle Accelerators, which benefits CTE’s customers, it also opens up avenues of providing value added SOA migration & global delivery services to the Reilly’s existing customer base. This agreement is subject to the approval by the shareholders of the company in the ensuing AGM in September 2007.

 

Reilly Associates is an established Subject Matter Expert for Oracle Process Manufacturing implementations for Big 4, Medium and smaller consulting firms with experience working with mid-sized companies and has a client base of over 60.

 

This acquisition would potentially bring in additional revenue in the ERP segment to CTE for the current financial year FY 2008, Cambridge officials say, and augment CTE’s SOA migration services portfolio and bring the combined entity closer to CTE’s vision of being a “go-to IT partner for mid-sized enterprises.”

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Oracle has announced that the Principal Financial Group, a vendor of retirement savings, investment, banking and insurance products, is using Oracle Identity Management to integrate its auditing functions to more effectively manage operational risks.

 

Faced with a growing list of compliance requirements that required significant time and resources, The Principal needed a scalable security offering capable of managing and auditing account creations, updates and assigned access rights across its enterprise. The Principal can generate reports regarding who has access to CRM or financial applications for the purposes of attestation.

 

As part of an 18-month development and implementation process, The Principal incorporated Oracle Identity Manager into its comprehensive security platform that supports all account provisioning processes. Today, the overall product provides end users and application owners with workflows for managing approval and provisioning processes across more than 100 systems and applications.

 

“Given the increasing complexity of regulatory requirements we face as a financial services provider, we needed to implement a system that could help automate our employee provisioning and deprovisioning process,” said Kevin Kelley, assistant director, IT, the Principal Financial Group.

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Canadian tourism gets the CRM treatment: “We are asking e-marketing experts to consider lessons from the past, to challenge the present, to debate the future, and to share their vision of what we can achieve together with the best and brightest in tourism marketing and online travel,” says Jens Thraenhart, Chair of Canada-e-Connect and Executive Director of Marketing Strategy and CRM at the CTC.

 

The Canadian Tourism Commission has announced “Canada-e-Connect,” the first ever Canadian e-Tourism Strategy Conference. Canada-e-Connect will bring together more than 300 travel and tourism industry leaders to “determine the impact that the internet and other emerging technologies are making on Canada’s ability to compete globally as a premiere, four-season tourism destination.”

 

The main elements of the travel distribution life cycle — Consumer Acquisition, Consumer Experience, and Customer Intelligence — will be addressed in order to tackle the bigger question: How to effectively market Canadian travel experiences to the world.

 

Hosted in Vancouver from November 7–9, the event will feature some of the best speakers in the industry, including Anthony D. Williams, co-author of the bestselling book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.