By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is whatever’s playing n the Starbucks sound system here on the front deck along Istiklal Caddesi in Istanbul, one of the great pedestrian thoroughfares in the world, and since the music currently happens to be The Doors, the most wretchedly overrated hack band in history, whose inane, pretentious lyrics make Rush look profound by comparison, it’s time to go with the iPod:

 

Business IT Professionals, a North Carolina-based CRM training firm, has added custom, online courses to their service offerings. To introduce the launch of these courses they’re offering a free session of MS CRM 101 on Friday, April 18 from 1:00 – 5:00 p.m. Visit www.bizitpro.com/biz_it/announce for the scoop.

 

Biz IT Pro’s online courses are aimed at individual clients and include live presentations, hands-on exercises and student handouts.

 

“When we work with businesses, we always stress the importance of high-level training,” said Steve Noe, president of Biz IT Pro. “Training your team is the best investment you can make to ensure the success of your CRM project.”

 

Courses include MS CRM 101: User Training, MS CRM 201: Sales Training and MS CRM 202: Marketing Automation. In addition to their online courses Biz IT Pro instructs clients using Microsoft’s Official Curriculum as well as custom courses.

 

“Although Microsoft provides a wonderful curriculum for the average CRM user, it doesn’t always delve deep enough into the process most sales people use for converting prospects to clients,” Noe said.

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“One of the major themes of the recent LeadsCon 2008, an annual gathering of the online lead generation community, was how to improve lead quality and sales performance,” according to officials from Kaleidico, who recommend improving “the feedback loop between sales and marketing.”

 

Well, the Kaleidicians have announced the launch of this capability within their icoSales lead management product. In partnership with ZipSearch!, a vendor of online mortgage, insurance and other types of lead generation, Kaleidico is offering what company officials describe as “real-time closed-loop feedback” linking specific lead generation campaigns, lead identifiers, and sales results in real-time.

 

Bill Rice, Kaleidico’s CEO, says the current state of lead generation and traditional CRM is one of two distinct systems, leaving both marketing and sales at a disadvantage: “Online lead providers are trying to optimize their performance, but lack consistent and timely feedback. Meanwhile, sales is trying to improve their processes, often working against marketing adjustments.”

 

Kaleidico is currently working to finalize the development of this open API to provide simple closed-loop feedback for any participating lead generation marketing source.

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VoltDelta Resources and PossibleNOW have announced the availability of CallMatch Compliance Service, a contact center compliance application giving data services with regulatory compliance products for all inbound and outbound call center applications.

 

CallMatch Compliance Services lets contact centers integrate residential and business contact data from VoltDelta with Do Not Call compliance products from PossibleNOW for calling campaigns.

 

VoltDelta provides over 150 million listings of contact data from the telephone companies. This data can be integrated into the contact center for the generation of marketing lists, caller identification services, screen pops at the work station, and for CRM software uses.

 

CallMatch Compliance Services will be made immediately available via VoltDelta Hosted Solutions. The hosted product comprises of a carrier class platform for hosted telephony, switching/ACD, IVR, speech automation functionality, and CTI functionality.

 

VoltDelta customers can now use CallMatch for outbound applications to generate data for their outbound calling campaign that is pre-scrubbed for all Do Not Call and internal suppression lists. Inbound calls can be matched with VoltDelta listing data and internal CRM systems to identify callers before they reach the agent.

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Polish chemicals manufacturer Synthos says it go live with IFS Applications.

 

The company, which produces synthetic rubber and latex, styrene plastics and vinyl and such everyday household items as copolymer dispersions, plans to increase capacity for its styrene products, and invest in new production for polymerized rubber.

 

Synthos president Dariusz Krawczyk said the company will implement IFS software components for financials, distribution, manufacturing, project management, maintenance, HR, payroll, CRM, business performance, document management and quality management.

 

“Our goal has been to achieve the best possible production quality at competitive prices, while being environmentally friendly,” explains Krawczyk. “IFS Applications will help us to strengthen our position as the leader in the Polish market and abroad. We would like to become one of the leading suppliers, especially in respect of synthetic rubber, styrene plastics, and dispersion and copolymer products.” Hey, anybody would.

 

The system is to be implemented in Poland and the Czech Republic, eventually with some 550 Synthos users. Evidently almost 150 process industry users in Poland already use IFS Applications.

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Cardiff, a division of Autonomy Corporation and a vendor of BPM and intelligent document products, has been named a “Cool Vendor” in the recent Gartner report titled “Cool Vendors in Business Process Management, 2008” by Janelle B. Hill, Marc Kerremans, Michele Cantara, published on April 3, 2008.

 

Cardiff’s Business Process Management was cited for its rich user interaction, unstructured information processing and mobile process management. Its intelligence and automation is based on Autonomy’s Intelligent Data Operating Layer technology, which incorporates pattern matching and linguistic analysis capabilities to “make computers work more like people,” company officials say.

 

Using Autonomy’s IDOL technology is credited with letting Cardiff sell to the BPM market, including voice-based approvals, automatic location of subject matter experts and the ability to use process contents to drive information searches through unstructured enterprise content.

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Summa, a vendor of IT consulting and software products, and HarvestGold, which sells sales management practices and processes, have announced a partnership to offer a new product for salesforce modernization.

 

The Salesforce Modernization Offering combines the technology implementation and integration expertise of Summa with the sales operations and CRM knowledge of HarvestGold, officials of both firms say.

 

“Companies considering business process improvements in areas like sales often fail to consider both the impact on technology and business areas in tandem,” said Audrey Dunning, Summa CEO. “In our experience, this introduces unnecessary risk and can cause projects to fail.”

 

Bobby Napiltonia, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Channels and Alliances, Salesforce.com, said HarvestGold and Summa are “bringing together considerable expertise and a track record of success to helping our customers quickly implement Salesforce CRM and the Force.com platform.”

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Opera Software has announced that the Opera Mini browser for mobile phones is available for the Android platform. The technical preview release is available at labs.opera.com, inviting the Android development community to test the fresh build and share feedback with Opera for the forthcoming beta.

 

Opera Mini for Android makes the company’s Web experience available to any range of handset built on Android.

 

“We’re glad to deliver our mass-market mobile browser to the Android development groups,” says Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software.

 

Opera Mini claims more than 40 million users worldwide across mobile platforms. Company officials say it enables Web browsing from low-to-high resource handsets by compressing data at a remote server before sending content to the phone applet for rendering.