By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is an odd album, Dire Straits' 1980 effort Making Movies. When it hits me right now is that it's one of the best albums I've ever heard. Other days it's average, even tepid, and I can't make it through "Tunnel of Love," which today happens to sound like one of the greatest guitar songs ever recorded:

 

I-Vision Technology has announced the launch of its Abu Dhabi-based contact center for outsourcing operations. The company considers itself "the first and only provider of inbound and outbound CRM outsourcing services in Abu Dhabi, which is considered to be the richest city in the world."

 

Established in 2000, IVT provides IT and security products. The United Arab Emirates-based company recently created a division, I-Vision Contact Center, in order to offer outsourced services in the GCC region with a specific focus on IT, banking and telecommunications. The new contact center facility uses Altitude Software technology.

I-Vision currently manages outbound telemarketing campaigns on behalf of a major financial institution in the Middle East, as well as customer service operations for an IT products provider in the UAE. The outsourcing company is today able to handle various business campaigns including lead generation, inbound customer service, help-desk, appointment scheduling, market research, surveys as well as client retention.

Hamdan Sayah Al Mazrouei, I-Vision Technology Group Chairman & CEO, says the move "enables us to broaden the delivery of services to our customers, and ideally position our CRM outsourcing operations in the Gulf region."

 
Riadh Boukhris, Altitude Software Vice President Middle East and North Africa, said the agreement with I-Vision "strengthens our number one positioning in the Middle East & North Africa region for that vertical segment, which is approaching a 90% market share in some GCC countries such as Saudi Arabia."

 

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If you're in Turkey today, happy Cumhuriyet Day.

 

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Following its summer series of free, online Webinars focused on selling advertising, Matrix Solutions, a vendor of sales management software products for the media sales industry, announced its Fall Webinar line-up.

 

Gary Crawford, New Business Development Manager for Matrix Solutions, has more than 13 years combined media and sales experience and will present the two Webinars.

The first, "Sell Successfully: The Sure Way to Find, Grow and Keep Your Business," gives sales managers "insights on developing an effective strategy for new business from the beginning in order to build lasting relationships with clients," according to Matrix officials.

 

The second, "Insights into Account and Business Planning to Transform Your Sales Team," focuses on how sales managers can "transform their sales staff and improve their sales efforts by utilizing the right sales team management tools and techniques in their sales strategy."

"Sell Successfully: The Sure Way to Find, Grow and Keep Your Business" airs Thursday, November 1, at 12:00 p.m. in the Eastern US. "Insights into Account and Business Planning to Transform Your Sales Team" runs Thursday, December 6, at noon.

Register at http://matrixplus.com/media_center/webinar_intro.asp.

 

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If you're in New Zealand today, happy Marlborough Anniversary.

 

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CDC Games, a business unit of CRM vendor CDC Corp. and a provider of the "free-to-play, pay for merchandise" model for online games in China, announced that CRM veteran Jeffrey Longoria has been appointed as president of CDC Games International.

CGI, a subsidiary of CDC Games, was created to launch new games internationally and to position CDC Games as a global publisher of online games.

Longoria takes the position of president of CDC Games International, moving over from CDC Software, a sister company in the CDC family. At CDC Software, Longoria most recently served as senior vice president of strategic alliances.

 

Longoria came to CDC Software through the acquisition of c360 in May 2006. At c360, a global provider of CRM add-on products, industry-specific CRM solutions and CRM
development tools for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Longoria headed sales, where he and his team grew sales 173 percent in the first quarter of 2007 compared to the first quarter of 2006 through a distribution network that now totals more than 700 authorized partners.

Longoria will work from the Atlanta office, the headquarters of CDC Games USA, a business unit of CDC Games International.

 

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JasperSoft officials say the next upgrade of the company's open-source business intelligence suite, due out November 1, will "improve the ability for users to create their own customized reports."

JasperSoft has "found that the end users of a BI system often need a developer's help to create more complex reports," said Paul Doscher, JasperSoft's CEO. "That takes time away from the developer that could be used to work on other IT projects… the last thing the developer wants to do is develop reports."

With the new release, Business Intelligence Suite 2.1, JasperSoft has expanded the ability for someone in the accounting department to customize their own BI Web portal to generate new kinds of information, Doscher said. Previously, end-users could build simple reports, but "we want to make this more sophisticated."

 

For example, an accounts payable clerk can drag and drop elements within the BI Web portal to produce a report showing which customer has the most receivables. Previously, that job would have required the clerk to dictate to the developer what kind of report is needed, and the developer would build it, Doscher said.

JasperSoft has also expanded the range of calculations the software can perform, he said.

JasperSoft's open-source BI tools are integrated by developers for use with other applications and even hosted CRM (customer relationship management) services such as Salesforce.com and SugarCRM. Customers set up their customized charts and graphs that give information about their business through a Web portal or another application.

 

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Interactive Intelligence moved up 21 places this year to rank 209th among the world's 500 largest software and services suppliers. The CRM vendor increased its position in Software Magazine's 2007 Software 500 ranking by posting 2006 revenues of $83.2 million, up 32 percent from revenues in 2005.

 

Interactive Intelligence founder and CEO Donald Brown said the company's growth last year was "fueled by our voice over IP components, which helped us attract many more large enterprise customers."

The Interactive Intelligence unified communications software suite, first released in 1997, was designed to eliminate the cost and complexity introduced by product portfolio vendors. The company's software is marketed primarily to contact centers and enterprises seeking lower costs.

Financial information for the 2007 Software 500 was gathered by a survey prepared by King Content Co. The 2007 Software 500 25th annual ranking was published in the October issue of Software Magazine and can be accessed online at http://www.softwaremag.com.