By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is one of the finest listening experiences rock music offers, the 1969 classic album Crosby, Stills & Nash:

 

At Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, Oracle announced the general availability of OracleSiebel CRM Integration Pack for Oracle Trade Promotion Management.

 

Delivered “as part of Oracle Application Integration Architecture,” Oracle officials say, the product “reflects the company’s continued commitment to delivering pre-built integrations across Oracle ERP, CRM and industry applications.”

 

Used for integration between Oracle’s Siebel CRM and the Oracle E-Business Suite, the, uh, SCRMIPOTPM “enables consumer goods companies to create efficiencies across the enterprise and extract more value from promotions by synchronizing customer, product and financial information across Oracle applications,” the Oracle officials say.

 

This process integration pack uses a common object model and an open, Business Process Execution Language-based integration approach, and SCRMIPOTPM provides process maps for managing the entire promotion through settlement process.

 

Siebel Trade Promotions offers “robust functionality” which “enables promotion planning and simulation for accounts, including trade funds allocation against promotions, category level planning, flexible promotion setup and commitment, funds checkbook management and promotion plan performance analysis,” Siebel officials say.

 

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Titan Technology Partners, which sells hosted and managed industry products, has announced a successful go-live in four months using Titan’s S2V implementation methodology at Jewelry Television.

 

The deployment of the Oracle E-Business Suite Human Capital Management Solution is used to manage over 2,500 employees and “enhance Jewelry Television’s ability to manage their workforce,” Titan officials say.

 

Jewelry Television partnered with Titan to implement their first Human Resources system. Opting for a multi-phase approach, the initial phase went live with Oracle Human Resources; Oracle Advanced Benefits; Oracle Self-Service Human Resources; Human Resources Intelligence, a bi-directional interface with their payroll vendor, as well as a custom on-line pay slip and PTO product.

 

“We were able to capitalize on Titan’s recent purchase of GBSynegy by having them create training for our new system for every level in the organization,” said Wyndle Kingsmore, Vice President of Human Resources for Jewelry Television.

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Oracle and Cisco WebEx announced that they will offer Oracle’s Siebel CRM On Demand Service through the WebEx Connect application ecosystem. This means a WebEx Connect user can build a sales mashup with WebEx Sales Center, Siebel CRM On Demand, a social networking site, and an e-mail and calendaring client.

 

Also at Oracle OpenWorld, Cisco has announced that it has been collaborating with Oracle in the development and validation of Reliable Datagram Sockets, an acceleration protocol to further scale Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g, using InfiniBand.

 

Cisco has also worked with Oracle in testing and validating designs for integrating Cisco application delivery and storage networking technologies with the Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications 11i product families.

 

These efforts support Data Center 3.0, Cisco’s strategy to help customers develop data centers. Oracle Real Application Clusters supports the deployment of a single database across a cluster of servers to provide fault tolerance, high performance, and scalability.

 

Implemented as an OpenFabrics upper-layer protocol, the Reliable Datagram Sockets protocol is designed to improve the scalability of Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g deployments using industry-standard servers, and provide for modular growth and flexibility while helping to reduce both capital and operating costs.

 

Combining Cisco InfiniBand server fabric switches with the RDS interconnect protocol “helps accelerate and scale Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g to 16 industry-standard servers and beyond,” Cisco officials say.

 

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Graham Technology, a vendor of customer-oriented business software and services, announced that it has deployed the first phase of a ciboodle-based customer service platform at Falkirk Council. It gives Falkirk Council a complaints management system, letting the council “the ability to monitor the volume, type and status of complaints,” company officials say.

 

Falkirk Council is a unitary authority providing local government services for the Falkirk area in central Scotland. Covering 112 square miles, it has a workforce of 7,000 and serves a population of around 145,000.

 

“Addressing the handling of complaints was very much at the forefront of our objectives as it is an area where our citizens expect efficiency and responsiveness,” said Fiona Campbell, Head of Policy and Performance Review at Falkirk Council. “Ciboodle allows us to improve this area of our business, while laying the foundations to apply the platform to all customer service areas over time.”

 

The complaints handling system is the first step in an ongoing project designed to meet the Scottish Government’s Modernizing Government initiative, which recommends that 80 percent of core service requests by citizens be dealt with at the first point of contact.

 

The next phases will see ciboodle applied to all customer-facing areas of the council, the point being to give staff “a single, centralized view of the customer across all services, be it council tax, roads or freedom of information queries,” Falkirk officials say.

 

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PipelineDeals, which sells hosted CRM, announced the release of its Mercury upgrade, with new features and functionality “delivering on the promise of Simple CRM for Big Business,” according to company officials.

 

“This release continues our commitment to functionality with simplicity,” said PipelineDeals co-founder J.P. Werlin. “We have added more than 35 new capabilities, while keeping the simple, user-friendly interface.”

 

Using the software-as-a-service model, PipelineDeals provides online deal tracking and sales support to sales reps and management personnel. New developments include what company officials call “the cleanest and most intuitive user interface for a CRM product currently on the market,” and the ability to import contacts and leads from a host of other sources including: Outlook, Salesforce, SugarCRM, Highrise, vCard, or en masse.

 

There’s also new contact management functionality that allows you to begin to see relationships between and among contacts, a Drag and Drop calendar that allows customers to move appointments and the ability to e-mail into PipelineDeals to keep all sales related communications with sales leads in one place.

 

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Dealer Specialties, a division of Dominion Enterprises and vendor of data and photo collection, inventory management and data distribution services, has announced a partnership with Carfax to give dealers dynamic window labels with vehicle history.

 

Using the labels, shoppers can find details such as ownership history, including Carfax 1-Owner cars, whether the vehicle qualifies for the Carfax Buyback Guarantee and if no accidents or structural/frame damage have been reported to Carfax, among others.

 

Glen Garvin, General Manager of Dealer Specialties, called the inclusion of vehicle history data on window stickers a “merger of our respective industry strengths, which benefit both dealers and consumers.”

 

Labels can be generated by Dealer Specialties, a division of Dominion Enterprises, right on the lot, once dealers run a Carfax Vehicle History Report for their inventory.