By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Oliver Nelson’s album The Blues and the Abstract Truth:

 

CRM vendor Satuit Technologies, which concentrates on the professional investment market, has announced the expansion of its operation to Salt Lake City. The new sales office in Salt Lake will manage customer development and service functions for its corporate clients west of the Mississippi Leading the office as Vice President of Sales is new hire Michael Melis.

 

Melis previously worked for nine years at ChartLogic, a Salt Lake City software firm focused on medical documentation and payment process products. Melis founded Copper Mountain Development, a consulting firm to serve private equity and investment bankers seeking healthcare informatics investment and acquisition opportunities.

 

Karen Maguire, CEO of Satuit Technologies, said the new office will “allow us to serve new and existing clients and develop new sales opportunities throughout the region.”

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Protecode, a vendor of software for Bill of Materials (BOM) management and Intellectual Property determination, will demonstrate the Beta release of its preventative IP management product in San Francisco beginning today.

 

A fully functional beta version will be offered free directly from the company’s site.

 

The software is a plug-in development tool that creates a BOM list and manages IP by detecting and logging content entering a software project, and checking its IP attributes against specific policies.

 

With the beta version comes product updates designed to allow automated tracking of source and binary pieces of code, open source or commercial, that enter any project. This lets open source creators create and publish pedigree information and help developers accelerate managed adoption of open source code.

 

There’s support for Eclipse’s C Development Tool, now both Java and C/C++ are supported. Company officials say administration is now “streamlined with an enhanced GUI, complete with online help.” Project primes can now enter the admin site, create a user ID and password, define a policy, and assign it to developers or a particular project in a simple operation.

 

The Global Intellectual Property database has been enlarged as well, company officials say, with “millions of source lines and binary files.”

 

And nested IP is now supported, allowing users to look back many generations in external content.

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Go iTunes: 50 Glenn Miller Orchestra songs for $9.90 is a good deal.

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SAP AG has announced that ATB Financial, a financial institution based in Alberta, Canada, will replace its core banking and back-office systems with SAP for Banking products.

 

ATB Financial officials say they want to meet core strategic business objectives — faster development and introduction of unique products and services, improved customer relations and talent development, and enhanced revenue growth. Noble goals all.

 

ATB Financial’s offerings include retail and corporate banking, wealth management and mortgage services. The bank wanted a single platform to replace numerous legacy systems to improve business processes and create operational efficiencies.

 

Dave Mowat, president and CEO, ATB Financial, said his company expects SAP to result in “a direct return on investment.”

 

With the Enterprise Services Repository of SAP NetWeaver, ATB Financial hopes to be able to access enterprise services that can be reused throughout the enterprise, as well as configure new services for the creation of new and enhanced banking and operational processes such as obtaining deposits, setting up accounts and processing loans.

 

With the SAP Customer Relationship Management application, ATB expects to track the needs and preferences of its customers and use the flexibility of its new IT environment.

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OmniVue Business Solutions officials say the firm has achieved Gold Certification in the Advanced Infrastructure Hosting Solutions Competency from Microsoft. The designation recognizes proficiency in delivering hosted services built on Microsoft technology.

 

OmniVue adds the Hosting competency to their existing Business Solutions competency achieved in 2003.

 

“We’re pleased to have reached this level of achievement. The Advanced Infrastructure Solutions Competency allows us to identify our skill in helping customers access business management products,” says Jeff Pyden, managing director of OmniVue.

 

Founded in 2003, OmniVue does hosted deployments of Microsoft Dynamics GP (formerly Great Plains), SL (formerly Solomon) and Microsoft CRM.

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Vormittag Associates, Inc., a vendor of enterprise products for the distribution, manufacturing, retail and service industries and an IBM Premier Business Partner, has announced IBM’s integration of the System i and System p enterprise platforms into the Power Systems product portfolio.

 

The move gives VAI’s S2K Enterprise Resource Planning Software Suite a significant power boosting benefit, according to VAI officials.

 

The IBM Power Systems unifies the IBM System i, with the UNIX operating system platform, IBM System p. “Customers that previously operated the System i can now transfer data to the new systems, while continuing to run operating systems to which they have become accustomed,” company officials say.

 

VAI officials say the Power Systems launch enhances the processing power of its S2K product line. In particular, the company’s e-commerce and analysis applications will benefit from the increased speed and precision of the unified platforms, they say.

 

VAI’s S2K ERP Software Suite is billed as “maximizing productivity and profitability by centralizing company data” by company officials: “The System i and System p unification is a logical decision by IBM that reflects the growing needs businesses have for accurate information,” said Kevin Beasley, CIO, VAI, who added that this move “fits perfectly with VAI’s corporate vision.”

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Emerging Consumer Markets BP, which provides energy products to emerging consumers in South Africa, has contracted branded business and technology products provider Lorge to supply and implement a SAP Business One software product in its South African business.

 

The SAP product will offer financial, stock, warehousing and distribution in real time, according to Alex Viviers, Corporate Sales Manager of Lorge’s SAP Business One business unit.

 

“The CRM functionality will also integrate fully to allow ECM to track business partners, customers and leads through the system. This is particularly valuable because there is such high demand for their value-added products,” he said.

 

The materials resource planning functionality of the SAP product is intended to ensure that stock requirements are met. Lorge will also provide ECM with training and support services and the product is expected to go live at the beginning of June.