By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is X's More Fun In The New World. You kind of knew it was the end for this band when the most fun performances on this 1984 album, their best, were covers:

 

CRM's Sword ciboodle has been named as a "strong performer" in enterprise CRM suites by independent analyst firm, Forrester Research.

 

Sword ciboodle was among the companies invited by Forrester Research to participate in its August 29 report, "The Forrester Wave: Enterprise CRM Suites, Q3 2008."

 

The report says ciboodle (formerly Graham Technology) "has pushed into the CRM market with focus on the intersection of business process modeling, customer service, and customer interaction management."

 

As enterprises "begin to understand the importance of truly integrating end-to-end customer-facing processes from front office to back office," the report says, "they are turning to products with native BPM capabilities that can support highly unique -- and flexible -- process flows."

 

The Forrester report called ciboodle "a good fit for buyers who are looking for a vendor that can bring business process acumen," giving ciboodle the highest score in the report for time-to-value.

 

Targeted primarily to large companies in sectors such as banking, insurance, utilities, telecommunications and retail, ciboodle is a BPM-based CRM product that enables all service channels natively from a single platform.

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Intelestream has announced the company has released version 2.0 of its Web-based HR sourcing application Perpetual Sourcing.

 

Intelestream officials say "industry veterans Todd Davis and Shally Steckerl" worked with the vendor to design the application "according to talent acquisition methods proven to enhance sourcing results at Fortune 100 companies."

 

The application is based around a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) workflow that allows HR recruiters to manage talent acquisition similarly to how a sales force manages its leads.

New features added to Perpetual Sourcing 2.0 include automated Internet sourcing tactics integrating with social and business network sites including Linked-in, Spoke, Hoovers, Jigsaw and Zoom Info.

 

The product automatically ensures compliance with Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs regulations by documenting sourcing data and search strings, and its global keyword search is designed to simplify record searching by trolling through all modules and archives including Resumes stored as Microsoft Office documents, PDFs, and Excel Spreadsheets.

 

It also has on demand reporting metrics to show return on investment, recruiter productivity, recruitment conference results, and breakdown of talent pipeline that includes companies, regions, areas of expertise, and more.

 

The product is being marketed to organizations "requiring a passive candidate pipeline that assists in finding the best talent in the marketplace," company officials say.

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Sales-i, a sales intelligence service, has announced that Midwest Office Supply, an independent office supply and furniture dealers in America, has implemented the product to track customer buying behavior data and intelligence provided by the sales-i sales intelligence service.

Midwest Office Supply is identified by sales-i officials as "the first US dealer to implement SAP's enterprise resource planning software."

"I was introduced to sales-i by Jeff Gardner of Maximum Performance Group," Managing Partner, Steve DeMarco said. "Midway through the online sales-i demonstration, I knew this would transform how our sales team operates by delivering actionable customer alerts straight to their laptops or smartphones."

Midwest officials said accessing customer knowledge and data "often took until month-end when account summaries were completed, frequently too late to change buying patterns with current customers." Sales-i is expected to provide customer buying alerts by e-mail every Monday morning and direct to smartphones for the front line sales people."

 

A job that used to take a very long time and typically involved two or three people "is now automatically done by sales-i and the data instantly made available to the sales team at the push of a button," DeMarco said, adding that "if data is accessible from a laptop or a mobile device salespeople already use, the tool is much more effective."

 

Midwest officials say they plan to further extend their sales-i use by implementing its integrated contact management software, CRM Light.

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Lithium Technologies, which sells on-demand enterprise social media platform, has announced the growth of its client services group focusing on social media sites.

 

To that end Iain Grant, a 20-year industry veteran who most recently led Salesforce.com's social media delivery efforts, has been hired as Vice President of Client Services to scale and lead Lithium's team.

 

The Client Services group will now include strategy & planning services to help clients incorporate lifecycle planning into their social media initiatives, as well as education services to "propagate best practices among all social media stakeholders within an organization," company officials say.

 

There are also optimization services to measure and achieve long-term community growth with in-depth evaluation, benchmarking, reporting, and detailed community assessments.

 

Company officials say these programs are designed complement Lithium's existing services for launch and configuration, application engineering, and management and moderation.

 

All of Lithium's services are tuned for social media delivered through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) environment,

 

Prior to his tenure at Salesforce.com, Grant served as the Global Practice Director for Unisys, where he built and managed the Microsoft Dynamics practice, including CRM offerings. He has also held senior leadership positions at Versata, IBM, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

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Five9 has announced the launch of an electronic content channel with Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC). Call Center On Demand is the newest entry to the TMC news portfolio.

 

The Call Center On Demand channel promotes virtual call center products and includes an overview of Five9's products. In addition, visitors can find resources such as free quotes, white papers, an ROI calculator, feature articles and industry news.

 

The Call Center On Demand channel can be found at: www.tmcnet.com/channels/call-center-on-demand.

 

TMCnet's channels are micro-targeted information portals where readers can find topic-specific news, articles, feature stories and product reviews. TMCnet has over 100 channels covering important topics in the IP Communications, VoIP, IP Telephony, CRM, Call Center and Information Technology industries.

 

Five9's call center software products offer businesses of all sizes products for inbound, outbound, and blended environments, including predictive dialing and auto-dialing.