By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the first cup of coffee this morning, and the music is The Bay City Rollers' "Saturday Night." Laugh all you want, aesthetes, this is One. Great. Song:

 

CRM vendor NetSuite has announced three mid-market and enterprise companies to go live on NetSuite -- Intuitive Surgical, Nestle UK, and Wasserman Media Group.

 

Intuitive Surgical sells operative surgical robotics, and will use NetSuite CRM to integrate and manage a number of complex business process services that they provide to hospitals across the United States, NetSuite officials say.

 

These services include tracking where and when its operative surgical systems are used, as well as which surgeons are using them. In addition, Intuitive Surgical's sales organization uses NetSuite to manage sales business processes, including tracking all new sales opportunities with surgeons and hospitals, and managing long sales cycles.

 

Nestlé UK used NetSuite Ecommerce to build an integrated online store, and now runs its online store for employees and local communities on NetSuite.

 

The company is famous for Nescafe. Nestle also sells Kit Kat, and is known in the United Kingdom for its brands of milk, cream, and pasta.

 

Following legislative changes, the company underwent a major reorganization of its manufacturing and distribution site in York, resulting in the loss of space for its popular staff shop. NetSuite helped develop an online store where current and former employees and selected members of the local community could log on, browse available stock, place orders and collect them later.

 

Wasserman Media Group replaced Microsoft Dynamics-Great Plains -- always have to get that in there -- with NetSuite to run its front and back-office operations, including partner athlete commissions management, and tracking and billing direct costs to customers.

 

All three companies used NetSuite's Professional Services team for the implementations.

 

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Saaspoint, which deals in business and systems consulting for customers using Software-as-a-Service applications such as Salesforce.com, has established a new consultancy division that aims to generate $15 million in revenues by the end of 2010.

 

The company has recruited UK consultancy veteran Tim Pullen to head up the group. Pullen has 30 years' experience in business and IT and has worked with financial services institutions and telco firms. More recently he has been responsible for a business transformation program in Ireland at First Active, a subsidiary of Ulster Bank, part of RBS.

 

The primary practice of the new division, Saaspoint Consulting, will specialize in business transformation, according to company officials. "As we implemented Customer Relationship Management products for our customers we identified the change this often requires in an organization," said John Appleby, chairman, Saaspoint.

 

"We will do for business consulting what SaaS has done for technology," added Tim Pullen, practice director, Saaspoint Consulting. "In the same way that firms cannot wait around for 18 months and don't want to pay armies of IT consultants and technicians to implement traditional software, they want a quick payback from their business consulting programs as well."

 

He said that the current business environment mandates that companies evolve their business practices. "The global credit crunch combined with increased energy and finance costs will highlight inefficiencies that in the past may have been papered over by a growing economy and buoyant sales environment."

 

"Throwing technology at a problem will not work unless you can manage the change required to implement it across the organization," Pullen said, adding that "these changes will impact on a company's ethos, beliefs and values and if not carried out correctly will actually have an adverse effect on performance and numbers."

 

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SnapLogic has announced the Salesforce.com Solution Pack, an extension to the SnapLogic open source data integration framework.

 

The company lets enterprises integrate data "on both sides of the enterprise firewall," company officials say, and "create custom integration products, including application integrations, enterprise mashups, and rich Internet applications."

 

The Salesforce.com Solution Pack is intended to allow integration of Salesforce.com with other SaaS applications, behind-the-firewall enterprise applications, Web sites, and other data sources.

 

It's the second SaaS integration product pack offered by SnapLogic to date. Recently, SnapLogic announced its SugarCRM Solution Pack, which supports both standard SugarCRM deployments as well as Sugar On-Demand implementations.

 

The SnapLogic Salesforce.com Solution Pack will be available as a free download from www.snaplogic.com beginning Aug. 18.

 

The pack includes SnapLogic Resources for reading, writing, and updating data in Salesforce.com accounts. Integration pipelines can be created, and uses of the Salesforce.com Solution Pack include integrating Salesforce.com account records with in-house accounting systems and other enterprise applications, as well as migrating customer records from internal CRM systems to Salesforce.com.

 

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LogMeIn has announced the release of a standardized set of Web services giving support technicians "the ability to streamline processes," according to company officials.

 

The release of this Application Programming Interface lets LogMeIn's on-demand support tool, LogMeIn Rescue, integrate into existing helpdesk, CRM and support management systems.

 

LogMeIn Rescue is a Web-based support tool allowing helpdesk representatives and IT professionals to access, diagnose and repair a remote computer without any need for pre-installed software on the target system.

 

The new integration services provide IT and support organizations access to both their remote support service and their session data through a set of standard Web services accessible via SOAP, HTTP GET and HTTP POST methods. Users can connect onsite systems and legacy IT support applications to LogMeIn Rescue.

 

With the API large organizations can use single sign-on integration or link Rescue support session information to current in-house helpdesk systems. Smaller users can display on their own Web site the status of technicians currently available for support.

 

Support technicians can start remote support sessions and access their Rescue session data from within other applications, whether it is a CRM or a custom ticketing product.

 

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Customer FX Corporation has announced the release of Power2Assets for Sage SalesLogix, which "streamlines management of both digital and physical assets all within the SalesLogix CRM suite," according to Customer FX officials.

 

"If you deal with assets in SalesLogix, you need this," says Brianna Tinjum, Channel Partner Manager for Customer FX and winner of the First Coffee Name of the Week Award. "It allows you to create activities and history for assets, add attached files to assets, associate tickets (and ticket parts), contracts, RMAs, defects, even contact's with roles for the asset."

 

Features for Power2Assets include the ability to create and work with asset groups, schedule phone calls, meetings, to-dos for assets and track history of an asset, among other functions.