By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Cracker's Kerosene Hat:

 

AsiaInfo Holdings said it has won a contract with China Telecom to develop a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) for deployment in China's northwest.

 

Under terms of the agreement, according to reports, AsiaInfo will develop a CRM system to cover 14 cities and regions in Xinjiang.

 

Beijing-based AsiaInfo, a provider of telecom software products and IT security products and services, did not provide financial details.

 

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Saying the CRM market "performed well" for the company, Pegasystems, a vendor of Business Process Management, announced its results for the third quarter of 2007. Total revenue for the quarter was $42.0 million, up 18 percent from the second quarter of 2007 and up 25 percent from the third quarter of 2006.

 

License revenue increased 33 percent to $13.7 million from the second quarter of 2007 and 61 percent from the third quarter of 2006. Services revenue increased 12 percent to $28.3 million from the second quarter of 2007 and 13 percent from third quarter of 2006.

 

Net income for the third quarter of 2007 was $3.5 million, compared to $0.6 million for the second quarter of 2007 and compared to a net loss of $0.4 million in the third quarter of 2006. Through the first nine months of 2007, the Company generated $18.1 million in cash flow from operations and ended the period with $145.2 million in cash and short-term investments.

 

Alan Trefler, Pegasystems founder and CEO, said the company's "target industries — insurance, banking and financial services, and healthcare — and the customer relationship management, or CRM, market all performed well for us during the quarter."

 

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Storis Management Systems, a vendor of products for big ticket retailers, announced the availability of its newest Vision R8 product, Executive Vision. "At the foundation of Vision R8 lies a real-time system that integrates all the essential aspects of retail operations, from Sales Order Management and Inventory Management, to Business Intelligence tools, Merchandising and CRM," company officials say.

 

With its graphical 360-degree display of analytical data, Executive Vision "serves as a single customizable gateway to a company's information, enabling vast amounts of data to be displayed into manageable, actionable analytics," company officials say.

 

"We are proud of our latest executive analytical tool. Our Executive Vision application delivers instantaneous access to Key Performance Indicators from a single location on the desktop," said Storis' Director of PC & Analytical Applications, Michael Alvord.

 

The product configures business information within graphically enhanced displays such as odometers, gauges, and graphs, using portal and docking technology. Included is the ability to view a filterable grid display which the user can use to click and drill down to specific detailed contents. Because this acts as a portal by way of extracting information, the user can access data from various sources.

 

Storis officials say users will benefit from the product's features, including instantaneous three-dimensional graphical display capabilities of all pertinent data in real-time, extensive file sharing capabilities via advanced import and export tools and user protection via security features.

 

Storis is an IBM Business partner, claiming that "over 350 retailers, small and large," have installed Storis products.

 

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Zaltbommel, Netherlands-based Qurius has acquired Microsoft Dynamics CRM provider Cabus Holding, a German firm. Cabus has about 140 employees and offices in its head office in Hamburg, as well as Bremen, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Lubeck and Nurnberg.

 

Its profitable 2006 turnover was over $23 million, including the consolidated figures of three smaller participations.

 

"By finalizing the acquisitions of both Cabus and Wilhelm+Zeller (W+Z) we added another European country to the list of countries where we are able to play a dominant role in the Microsoft market for Business Applications," said Qurius director Tom Stolk, responsible for the international business.

 

"The activities of Cabus, W+Z and Qurius are complementary in terms of geographical regions and product market combinations. Economies of scale, especially in the smaller offices should lead to further improvement of profit ratios as well," he added.

 

Kay Laukat, co-founder and former Managing Director of Cabus will be appointed as Managing Director of the German Qurius operation. Qurius will pay in cash between 0.5 and 0.6 times turnover for the acquisition, depending on the final results for 2007.

 

Qurius has been publicly listed on Euronext Amsterdam since 1998.

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Canadian firm Plus Computer Solutions has been named to Sage Software's President's Circle for 2007, a distinction given to business partners and national consulting partners generating the highest sales revenue during the previous fiscal year, according to Sage officials.

 

This is the second consecutive year the company has achieved this status. "President's Circle winners are at the top of the industry," said Laurie Schultz, senior vice president and general manager for Sage Accpac and Simply Accounting. "We congratulate them."

 

Plus Computer Solutions represents the Sage Accpac ERP and SageCRM product lines, the small to medium enterprise accounting software and CRM software products in the Canadian marketplace.

 

Plus Computer Solutions is one of the largest Sage Accpac ERP business management software service providers in North America. It focuses exclusively on the Sage Accpac and SageCRM product families.

 

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Autonomy Corporation announced that NASDAQ-listed Huron Consulting Group has chosen its Electronic Data Discovery and Investigator products as software components of its electronic discovery service offerings.

 

With Autonomy, Huron officials hope to be able to better address the challenges of its client base arising in litigation, disputes, investigations, regulatory compliance, and other document-intensive legal matters.

 

"One of Huron's core strengths is in providing our client base with an integrated set of discovery services and related best practices using a comprehensive suite of tools for electronic discovery, from collection through production," said Bob Rowe, managing director, Huron Consulting Group.

 

Combining their business expertise with Autonomy's eDiscovery and Investigative technologies "will enable us to provide business products to clients to reduce the potentially high costs and risks associated with electronic discovery and enterprise information management," he added.

 

Huron provides services to both corporate law departments and law firms using best practice approaches and methodologies. Huron officials say Autonomy offers technology that can "automatically understand the content and inter-relationships of all enterprise information, independent of language and file format including e-mail, instant messaging and rich media such as voice and video."

 

Huron officials say they selected Autonomy for its "scalability" and "ability to create a single index of any corpus of information." In addition, the EDD and Investigator products are expected to provide Huron with a single unified platform that can be integrated into its Digital Evidence and Discovery services. Autonomy's financial stability, extensive experience and successful track record of working with more than 17,000 customers worldwide were also considerations for Huron.