The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Patsy Cline. Happy Fourth of July, and music is just one more reason to be proud of America -- any country that's given the world Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Muddy Waters, Woody Guthrie, Michael Jackson, John Cage, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Prince, Hank Williams, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, Cole Porter, Bruce Springsteen, Aretha Franklin, The Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, Mahalia Jackson, Johnny Cash, Duke Ellington, B.B. King, Charles Mingus, Frank Zappa, The Velvet Underground, the entire genres of blues, rock'n'roll, jazz, bluegrass, Broadway, gospel and country -- not to mention Tom Waits and Spike Jones -- deserves a tip of the hat on July 4th:

 

Guinean telecoms operator Sotelgui is set to implement Interconnect Manager from convergent billing specialist, Cerillion Technologies.

 

The new contract represents "an expansion of the relationship between the two companies," according to Sotelgui officials, who say Sotelgui has been a customer of Cerillion's CRM and Billing product for five years.

 

Cerillion Interconnect Manager will provide Sotelgui with revenue assurance by letting it bill interconnect partners and reconcile invoices received. The product will also allow Sotelgui to re-rate actual traffic data against individual offers from partners, so it can choose the most cost-effective route in each case.

 

Cerillion Interconnect Manager also provides a universal formatter for partners' tariff tables, so Sotelgui can accept tariff tables in multiple formats, reducing the time needed to load data and letting Sotelgui manage more partners than would otherwise have been possible.

 

Louis Hall, Cerillion's chief executive, said with growth in the African telecoms market continuing to escalate, "the need to have an efficient interconnect system in place is becoming an increasingly urgent issue for African operators."

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Mumbai-based Superfil Products has decided to adopt Oracle E-Business Suite, a suite of business applications to meet their growing business demands. Superfil officials say their existing legacy system, built on FoxPro, is "inadequate to handle information flow between different functions within the organization," so it is necessary for Superfil to migrate to Oracle EBS.

Systime was selected from among a number of vendors to supply licenses for the software. Superfil officials cited Systime's "competitive pricing and strong alliance with Oracle" as a major factor in the move.

 

Systime has the largest JD Edwards practice in India, and has done extensive work with Oracle software for customers "worldwide across various industry segments," the Superfillers say.

Superfil Products, established in 1986, began by manufacturing fishing nets for the domestic market. It has since branched out into more products made with synthetic filaments. In addition, it manufactures products for industrial applications.

With an increase in the number of enterprises in India adopting new technology and latest business practices that come with it, both local and global markets are likely to be more competitive, Superfil officials believe, saying "The change is bound to have a positive impact on the quality of products and services."

Maurice D'souza, Vice President International, Systime, said the Oracle E-Business Suite implementation "showcases Systime's expertise in providing Oracle products."

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Norwegian Internet browser developer Opera Software says that the Swiss operator Swisscom selected a version of its mobile browser Opera Mini for its mobile phones.

The value of the agreement was not disclosed, but Opera Software said that it will receive fees for licenses, development, and support and maintenance services.

 

Opera Software, headquartered in Oslo, develops the cross-platform Opera Web browser for PCs, mobile phones and other networked devices.

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Mobile CRM software vendor W-Systems has announced the acquisition of its 200th small business customer for its mobile CRM products for the small business market.

 

W-Systems reports increased customer acceptance for its mobile CRM software product w-Mobile over recent months, with "over 180 installed sites actively operating with a little as two users to as many as one hundred at a single installation site," company officials say.

 

WMobile is a mobile telephone client for the GoldMine CRM system and provides bi-directional interaction with the company's organizational CRM system. Christian Wettre, president of W-Systems, attributes wMobile's position to "its ability to empower small and mid-size organizations who, for the first time, can adopt a mobile CRM product."

 

"Most small businesses think that mobile CRM is just for the big players and is way out of their price range, but we've developed wMobile to provide a mobile CRM product scalable and cost effective for small to mid sized businesses," Wettre said, adding, "what makes wMobile particularly suitable for small businesses is that we can provide products for very small numbers of users. We have a number of clients with only one or two users and many more with five or six, something that is not very common in the current mobile CRM space."

 

Wettre believes that the future marketplace for mobile CRM is shifting and will see "many more businesses adopting mobile CRM products a much smaller scale. In fact, for some clients, wMobile has already replaced the need for notebook PCs."

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Raqmiyat, a UAE-based systems integrator, has announced that it is currently implementing a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) product for Masafi, a vendor of mineral water in the Gulf region.

 

The new system, which consists of Microsoft CRM and a Contact Center product from Avaya, is integrated with Masafi's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software -- Oracle E-Business Suite -- and is designed to manage the company's customer relationship cycle.

 

The main thrust of the implementation is to automate Masafi's entire processes, from capturing the customer order to its fulfillment, to billing and the completion of necessary back end supply chain processes.

 

Raqmiyat will implement its front end CRM with Masafi's existing back end ERP (Oracle E-Business Suite). The assessment and recommendation of the products and the actual implementation of the front end system was completed within three months. For the back-end integration, Raqmiyat selected a service oriented architecture to facilitate a straightforward integration of the CRM with the ERP, while the vendor driven Avaya-MS CRM Integration was chosen for integrating the contact center with CRM.

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Manpower Software, a vendor of workforce products, has appointed CRM veteran Allen Swann to serve as Business Development Director and a member of the Board of Directors with immediate effect.

 

Swann is a Non Executive Director of Chordiant Software, a software company selling CRM software platforms to financial institutions. 

 

"I am pleased to be offered this opportunity to join the Board of Directors," Swann said, adding that, "my association with the company over the past 2.5 years has highlighted how important a role Manpower Software is playing in the UK Healthcare market... There is an immense opportunity for the company to continue to make a difference."

 

Mr Swann first became associated with the Manpower Software during February 2006 whilst acting as Interim Sales Director. Since May 2007, he has focused on building a substantial presence in the UK Healthcare Market.