The news, as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Robert Earl Keen, Jr.’s brilliant album, What I Really Mean:

Oracle today announced the availability of the latest version of Oracle’s Siebel CRM On Demand Release 14, which would be the 14th release in the past three or four years. Siebel CRM On Demand Release 14 combines CRM functionality with customization capabilities and comprehensive integration, Oracle officials say.

Oracle officials note that by “bringing Web 2.0 technologies to hosted CRM, Siebel CRM On Demand simplifies user tasks, minimizing navigation steps, mouse clicks and page refreshes.”

Siebel CRM On Demand adds homepage customization so users can arrange elements on the page, including lists, history and favorites, to suit the way they like to work.

This latest release is also being billed as making it easier to tailor the application to support business process, by using comprehensive process, data and UI customization features. Users can embed best practices, streamline data entry, and configure different layouts for different types of records.

Additionally, support for complex, cross-matrixed organizations “makes it easier to set up the system to model their business structure and provide access to the appropriate information,” officials say.

Siebel CRM On Demand Release 14 is now available to new customers, starting at $70 per user per month. Terms, conditions and restrictions apply.

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SugarCRM, a vendor of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, has announced the upcoming release of Sugar Community Edition 5.0 will be licensed under the new Version 3 of the GNU General Public License. The GPL is the most widely used free and open source license in the market.

“We are proud to adopt the GPL V3 with our next major Sugar Community Edition release,” said John Roberts, CEO and co-founder of SugarCRM Open Source Project. “We would like to thank the Free Software Foundation for leading such an important effort to deliver the most modern FOSS license.”

Sugar Community Edition 5.0 is expected to be released around September, with platform features, CRM functionality,and community development tools.

In early May, SugarCRM announced plans to expand support for customers of the Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support Program across all SugarCRM products.

Based on the growing demand, SugarCRM and Oracle can now provide their joint customers what SugarCRM officials call “a robust, fully supported product.”

The support of Oracle Unbreakable Linux is “a direct result from the SugarCRM customers demanding high-quality, reliable CRM applications,” said Paul Oh, director of technology alliances at SugarCRM. “SugarCRM has been a member of the Oracle open source partnership for the last two years, and this announcement expands our Oracle database integration into the Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support Program.”

Sugar’s commercial open source model is built on modern open source and Web 2.0 languages and relies heavily on customer feedback, community contributions and strategic partnerships to bring CRM features to market.
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Xactly Corporation, a vendor of on-demand sales performance management, has announced that RightNow Technologies has implemented Xactly Incent as its sales compensation management product worldwide.

The new on-demand product lets RightNow model, create, deploy and manage “more sophisticated and strategic compensation plans for its sales team and drive more effective sales behaviors,” according to Xactly officials.

“As a fast-growing company, we had a compelling need for a scalable, automated compensation management product that would let us implement more complex and ultimately more profitable compensation programs,” said Kim Scurry, RightNow director of sales operations.
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AIRS, a vendor of recruitment training, technology, and outsourcing, has announced four new integrations of job boards into its recruitment CRM product, AIRS SourcePoint. These integrations are intended to give clients “the expanded ability to source new talent quickly and easily, further develop their recruitment prospects,” and import these clients into their applicant tracking systems, according to company officials.

Chris Forman, CEO of AIRS, identified the new entries as “Corporate Gray, BioSpace, BioHealthRx.com, and HireDiversity.com.”

With the recent integration of Corporate Gray Online into AIRS, companies seeking military-experienced talent for civilian careers can now directly access those resumes following a paid Corporate Gray Online subscription. Employers can post jobs and search the resumé database on a number of discrete fields including rank, branch of service, education level, security clearance, keywords, location, and date of resume submission.

BioSpace, a subsidiary of onTargetjobs, offers a distribution channel for life science recruitment, investment, product, and event information. BioSpace is a regional life science career event management and production.

BioHealthRx.com is a career site and resource center for the biotechnology, healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, founded to provide a single resource featuring medical jobs with access to applicant tracking system, job seeker skills assessments, unlimited job postings for a flat fee, top candidates, and other features.

HireDiversity.com is the career branch of Hispanic Business Media. The integrated membership packages include job posting with custom wrapping and access to HireDiversity’s OFCCP compliant resumé database of 140,000+ candidates.
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Altitude Software, a contact center products vendor, and Unity Telecom, a Canadian IP-based business communication systems provider, have announced a partnership to add Unity Telecom as an Altitude Software global reseller partner. Unity now offers the Altitude uCI customer interaction management suite in Canada and the United States.

The Altitude Unified Customer Interaction suite is billed by company officials as a tool that “manages and improves customer relationships for each new interaction in a wide range of contact centers, from SMEs to large multi-site organizations.”

Unity Telecom sells IP-based business communication systems. A private company, Unity is headquartered in Newmarket, Ontario with offices in Toronto and Montreal. The company has an extensive history with Avaya products going back to 1989.
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UDS Group, a vendor of Delivery Management Solutions, has announced it is moving its location mapping processing in-house. By moving the mapping program in-house, UDS saves a three week lead-time and $80,000.00 per 100 locations.

In the past, UDS purchased for each franchise location data, which was imported into its systems that routed the delivery to the closest participating franchise to facilitate delivery. UDS now can create all location maps electronically, in-house, and in real time.

The company’s system is designed on both a customer relation management (CRM) system and a service integrated technology backbone between customers, call center, and the personal industry provider of choice.

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