By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is from the 1980 Dire Straits album, Making Movies:

 

The Alzheimer’s Society, a British care and research charity for people with dementia, and their families, has partnered with content management specialist, Jadu, to underpin the growth of its online infrastructure.

 

The first phase of the program includes moving the Alzheimer’s Society intranet to Jadu Intranet 2.0, creating a payments system for receiving donations online, and giving users the ability to find local services by integrating with a back-office database. The second phase of activity will tackle CRM integration and begin the process of rolling out local Web sites using Jadu Galaxies.

The charity provides services, information, guidance, and help through its network of 25,000 members across England, Wales, and Northern Ireland and won disability charity of the year at the 2007 Charity Awards in recognition of its campaign to drive the issue of dementia up the public and political agenda.

Recognizing the increased demand for online information the organization has chosen Jadu’s technology for an ambitious program of redeveloping its online presence, in a way that caters for all its users.

The Alzheimer’s Society has selected Jadu CMS, Intranet 2.0 and the Jadu Galaxies platform for their Web based information systems. The new site will be launched later this year.

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Sobha Renaissance Information Technology has announced acquisition of SimpleRM assets from the U.S.-based TriVium Systems Inc., including its intellectual property rights, software engineers, and CRM specialists, customers, and relationships.

 

The key factor behind the decision is SRIT’s aim to “align its focused verticals with an integrated, value-enhancing CRM system,” SRIT officials said.

 

Since the company’s businesses in healthcare, telecom and other enterprise automation use CRM, SRIT officials considered it a “logical step” to own the IPs, customers, and staff members of TriVium’s CRM Business Unit. 

 

SRIT has been a source code licensee of SimpleRM from the year 2003.

 

Amongst the clientele of SimpleRM are IT vendors such as Infosys, which acquired the product in the fourth quarter of 2002, intending to add CRM capabilities to Finacle, its banking product.  Thereafter, i-Flex Solutions acquired the rights to SimpleRM in November 2004 to integrate the product with its own Core Banking Solution offerings.

 

Dr. Madhu Nambiar, Founder & CEO of SRIT, said of the deal, “it is a synergistic fit. With the need for a CRM product across almost the entire spectrum of 350 customers in healthcare, telecom and enterprise, we are confident of the immediate potential this acquisition has in realizing quicker turn around times, reduced time-to-market, flexibility in our products, and overall scalability.”

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Sage Software has announced the launch of its hosted CRM product, SageCRM.com in India. Sage CRM a mid-market CRM product billed by company officials as allowing organizations to choose either an on-demand or on-premises deployment, and providing the ability to migrate between them in order to accommodate an organization’s changing business needs and IT resource constraints.

 

SageCRM.com is the winner of a number of awards, including Product of the Year from Customer Inter@ction Solutions.

 

With built-in analytics and dashboards, users can access business, customer, and market events. Designed for the on-demand era, Sage officials say, the product is “a high-availability Internet utility that enables customers to start with a small CRM project, with practically zero start-up time, deploy rapidly, and grow the system as needs change over time.”

 

Thomas Abraham, Managing Director, Sage Software India, said SageCRM.com will “complete our CRM portfolio in the Indian market to address virtually every segment and extend choices to our prospects and customers. We will be the first global player to offer this service in India with localized technical support and a network of trained and certified partners.”

 

Abraham said two versions of the product will be introduced — the standard version will comprise sales force automation only, and the advanced version will be the full CRM suite with sales, marketing and customer support functionalities.

 

He said he believed SageCRM.com is “well-positioned to attract a large customer base who wish to get on the CRM bandwagon.”

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Microsoft CRM reseller Strophe has been named to the Microsoft Dynamics President’s Club, in recognition of its “business performance and high level of sales achievement and customer satisfaction,” according to Microsoft officials.

 

“Microsoft congratulates Strophe on achieving President’s Club status,” said Tami Reller, corporate vice president, Microsoft. “Strophe truly understands how important customers are to Microsoft and makes the extra effort to make their customers’ experiences memorable.”

 

This is Strophe’s eight President’s Club appearance. The vendor is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in Microsoft Dynamics, providing product building, consulting services, training, customized product development and integration with other systems along with dedicated support services.

 

Strophe specializes in Microsoft Dynamics GP & CRM.

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PBXpress Communications has announced the addition of Web-based operator’s console interface to its range of recording VoIP PBX.

The new operator’s console is described by company officials as “a convenient way for any call center or CRM operator to handle incoming and outgoing calls with a mouse using a Web browser. The console allows a call center operator to monitor users’ activities in real time, and perform typical operations.”

The console displays important real-time information about extensions and active conversations, allowing the operator to see who is on the phone and which calls are connected. The operator can park a call by simply dragging a call with a mouse into the parking zone.

 

Disconnecting, holding, and transferring calls to any extension or telephone number is just as easy and works in a similar manner. The operator has a choice of transferring any call directly to voicemail at any time by simply dragging the call onto the tape icon.

The new console is AJAX-based and is completely platform independent; it does not require installation of client software, and works right in the Web browser. PBXpress discloses and fully documents its API and uses XML RPC, allowing seamless integration with other call center and CRM software.

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CRM vendor Fineos Corporation, a vendor of enterprise software products for insurance, bancassurance and social insurance, has extended its relationship with IBM to enable the Fineos Claims product to now run on IBM System z.

 

The IBM System z enablement will allow insurers that rely on mainframes at the heart of their enterprise infrastructure to run Fineos products on their preferred platform. Fineos is a member of the IBM ISV Advantage program.

 

All Fineos products, including Fineos Claims, support IBM’s Insurance Application Architecture (IAA), are certified and scalability tested on IBM hardware and software, and can be delivered using IBM services.

 

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