By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is '80s Guilty Pleasure Day! Great White's "Once Bitten Twice Shy," The J. Geils Band's "Centerfold," Cinderella's "Heartbreak Station," Joan Jett and The Blackhearts' "I Love Rock 'n' Roll," bring it on! No Shame day -- heck, we might even dial up The Cure's "Just Like Heaven:"

 

CRM vendor EnterpriseWizard and 3Tera, which sells cloud computing technology and services, have announced that the Web-based EnterpriseWizard CRM is now using 3Tera's AppLogic utility computing platform for better scalability, reliability, security and more, "at commodity-level pricing," EnterpriseWizard officials say.

 

EnterpriseWizard CRM is an out-of-the-box J2EE-based product. The Web-based application can be adapted for issue tracking, helpdesk, customer support, sales, e-mail, and marketing automation. 

 

By combining the application with 3Tera's utility infrastructure, EnterpriseWizard officials say, users will have improved scalability and reliability, as well as "the security, direct database access and upgrade control of an on-premises product."

 

"3Tera is the industry standout in utility computing," said Colin Earl, chief executive officer of EnterpriseWizard.  "This combination is a breakthrough in the CRM field."

 

3Tera's AppLogic utility computing platform runs and scales existing real-world Web applications on grids of commodity servers. It moves applications from a fraction of a server to hundreds with a single command, 3Tera officials say, adding that "if any one machine in the grid dies, service is restored on another machine in a matter of minutes."

 

EnterpriseWizard's base CRM system can handle over 60,000 tickets per hour, company officials say, and "is comfortable with databases containing over 10 million records." EnterpriseWizard Grid CRM is available with Version 2.1 of EnterpriseWizard CRM.

 

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Here's today's Amazing Coincidence: It's the birthday of two of the three most influential economic thinkers in world history, Adam Smith (1723) and John Maynard Keynes (1883). Over 200 years ago Smith knew that market forces serve the public good and government regulation does not. And like #3, Karl Marx, who also advocated government action, Keynes has been proven wrong in less than half that time.

 

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Informatica has released Informatica 8.6. This release has new product and SaaS offerings, company officials say, including PowerCenter Real Time Edition, on-demand Data Loader Service, B2B Data Exchange, and Data Quality with identity resolution.

 

Sohaib Abbasi, chairman and CEO, Informatica, describes Informatica 8.6 as a "comprehensive, unified, and open platform for data integration."

 

The product offers technology in four categories, company officials say -- real time, near-universal data integration within an enterprise, on-demand data integration to retain control over outsourced, off-premise data, multi-enterprise integration to exchange data with partners and data quality products to "gain confidence in all data."

 

The product includes the PowerCenter Real Time Edition, with such features as streaming changed data capture, to support "the entire continuum of data integration latency or timeliness requirements from batch to real-time," company officials say.

 

"We used to write scripts to extract data from our local databases, transform the data, and schedule the file loads into Salesforce," said Mauricio del Rio, Senior CRM Analyst at Illumina. But with Informatica's On Demand Data Loader Service, "we can simply use a browser to configure and deploy our integration jobs."

 

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Customer Effective, a reseller of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, will host a series of four consecutive online forums for Microsoft Dynamics CRM in June. Company officials say the forums will include "information about ways to enhance the power of Microsoft Dynamics CRM with e-mail marketing, advanced data integration tools, consolidated configuration/price quoting and relationship charts."

 

All sessions will be presented online and are free of charge. To participate, please visit the events page at www.customereffective.com.

 

Session 1, "The E-mail Marketing Revolution," will be presented Tuesday, June 24, at 2:00 p.m. EST. It will feature ExactTarget to talk about the e-mail marketing capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

 

Session 2, "The Value of Data Integration," will be Wednesday, June 25, 2:00 p.m. EST and will have Scribe Software giving best practices in data integration and synchronization for Microsoft Dynamics CRM software.

 

Sessions 3 and 4 will be Thursday and the following Tuesday, July 1.

 

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Ascendix Technologies is pleased to announce the release of Real Estate Advantage 4.1 for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 platform.

 

"Our product for the commercial real estate industry just got a great deal more powerful," said Todd Terry, CTO and Managing Partner for Ascendix.

 

Along with what the Ascendixians characterize as "enhancements for the global enterprise," the Dynamics 4.0 platform adds new functionality for data management, duplication prevention, user-driven ad hoc reporting and "an even deeper integration with the Office suite."

 

Contending that "real estate professionals spend their entire day in Outlook and Office," Terry said "Real Estate Advantage is embedded in Outlook… When a user has to launch and log in to another application, adoption rates are already at risk."

 

Microsoft has also embedded their workflow engine in this release with Windows Workflow Foundation, described by Ascendix officials as an "engine for lease transmittal and approval processes and complex acquisition and disposition processes."

 

Ascendix has also added new enhancements for Real Estate Advantage with this release, which include functionality for managing multi-family properties and deals, deeper integration with Microsoft Virtual Earth for mapping multiple properties with embedded property data and images and improved quick searching "with the ability to save custom searches, making it easier to get to data within the system."

 

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SAP officials say that Abyaar, a Middle East real estate developer, is implementing SAP's Engineering, Construction & Operations and ERP product to "enable the company to integrate its expanding regional operations." Abyaar Real Estate Development Company sells high end real-estate in the Middle East.

 

With offices in Kuwait and Dubai and soon in Qatar and Saudi, Abyaar is implementing SAP's business software to streamline operations, improve productivity and provide its executives with information.

 

Daniel Zigby, Information Technology Manager, at Abyaar, said "SAP's EC&O product will amalgamate our branches in Kuwait and Dubai, helping us better manage our flagship projects, improving performance and  reducing costs."

The SAP EC&O product, scheduled to go live during Summer 2008, will provide Abyaar executives, project managers, and line managers with integrated customer relationship management (CRM), financial management, and project management processes.

The SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application supports customer-facing business processes across multiple interaction channels.

 

"When a company experiences a significant growth period, it is critical that customers are unaffected during the transition," said Kevin Scott, SAP's chief operating officer in the Middle East and North Africa region.