By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Clash's Sandinista!, the sounds of a hypertalented band's mind shattering into a billion shimmering slivers:

 

Cambridge Investment Research has partnered with SalesPage Technologies "for all of its Advisor Relationship Management needs," Cambridge officials say.

 

SalesPage Broker/Dealer will initially be rolled out within Cambridge Partner Support Center, a new initiative launched in early September of 2008.

 

Designed as a one-stop, high-level support center, Cambridge officials say in addition to providing "a single point of contact and timely response," the Partner Support Center is "focused on achieving first time call resolution and direct, personalized communication with advisors."

 

The 11-member team is available 11 hours each business day to personally research and respond to advisor questions.

 

"We believe SalesPage will provide the tools we need to deliver the service our advisors deserve, especially for our new partner support center," said Marcia Martin, Senior Vice President, Operations & Partner Support for Cambridge, adding that the service to advisors in areas such as operations, commissions, compliance, and CIR statements was specifically targeted for improvement.

 

SalesPage Broker/Dealer sells a range of functionality tailored to the B/D community. SalesPage's CRM platform has been named one of ISM's "Top 15 CRM Solutions" for 6 consecutive years in The Guide to CRM Automation and Top 15 CRM and Real Time CRM software reviews.

...

 

MindTouch, creator of an open-source social enterprise collaboration platform, and SnapLogic have announced Deki for CRM, described by company officials as a product to help customers get more value from their existing CRM systems, such as SugarCRM and Salesforce.com, "through augmented intelligence and team collaboration."

 

The product is built on MindTouch Deki Enterprise Server and the SnapLogic open source data integration framework and SnapLogic Solution Packs for SugarCRM and Salesforce.com. It's designed to provide sales and marketers a dashboard of reports within their CRM application by pulling data from a variety of backend applications and Web services, company officials say. 

 

Users can create and collaborate on reports and mashups, accessing customer information in Salesforce.com and SugarCRM without the need for advanced SOAP Web services programming, MindTouch officials say.

 

CRM systems often require data from other applications and data sources in order to handle leads, manage accounts, and "coordinate strategy to win new business," SnapLogic officials say, adding that Deki for CRM allows employees to share expertise across the silos of the company "as independent systems are mashed up in a centralized space."

 

The product allows collaboration using SnapLogic data pipelines from CRM applications such as SugarCRM and Salesforce.com, and other enterprise data sources such as external financial systems, product databases, and order processing systems. 

 

A free, 15-day trial of Deki for CRM in a functional VMware appliance is available now from both www.mindtouch.com and www.snaplogic.com. Deki for CRM starts at $15,000 and is available for purchase from MindTouch at www.mindtouch.com.

...

 

Intridea has announced the debut of Present.ly, a Twitter-like short-form communication tool for the enterprise. The product "combines the universal premise of Twitter with collaboration, security and privacy, an API for enterprise integration and a software-as-a-service model," company officials say.

 

According to company officials, Present.ly "promises to revolutionize the way company employees let others know what they are working on, tap the collective knowledge of colleagues, and track relevant information in real time via the Web, mobile devices, instant messaging and more." You know, all in a day's work.
 
"Short-form communications and microblogs provide a way for consumers to reach out to each other, which is redefining interactions on the Web," notes Dave Naffis, president, products at Intridea. "With Present.ly, we are taking that inside the walls of companies and providing an alternative to the many 'status' meetings that drain employee resources and time."
 
Present.ly is described by company officials as "the newest Ruby on Rails-based, on-demand enterprise social media product from Intridea."

 

To use Present.ly, a company signs up online and is given a sub-domain to which it can add any number of users. Employees can post updates and follow the posts of others, create and join groups -- for example "IT" or "Accounting" -- and respond to other users' posts, which are indexed and archived to provide a record of status, discussions and decisions.

 

Access uses Secure Sockets Layer authentication and log-on credentials.
 
The product supports access points used by enterprise employees, including Web browsers, IM, and mobile devices such as the iPhone and Blackberry.

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GoldenGate Software, a vendor of data integration products, has announced that "interactive lifestyle network and e-retail destination" HSN has implemented the GoldenGate Zero-Downtime Migration software product to upgrade its CRM application from Oracle's Siebel CRM 6.2 to 8.0.

 

The migration includes going from Oracle 8i Database to Oracle Database 10g as well.

 

The retailer deployed the GoldenGate product as part of a large Siebel CRM upgrade project "to achieve zero-downtime in order to avoid any disruption to the business," GoldenGate officials say.

 

HSN is currently in its 31st year and has, among other ventures, a TV network with a reach of 90 million homes and hsn.com, an e-commerce site. Processing approximately 44 million calls each year, HSN officials says they needed to upgrade their CRM software from Siebel CRM 6.2 to 8.0, and database from Oracle 8i Database to Oracle Database 10g.

 

"Being a live 24/7 business, HSN simply cannot afford to take any outage, so when other vendors suggested we take the systems down for a week to complete the migration, we knew we had to find an alternate product," said Anitha Reddy, vice president of IT applications at HSN.

 

The bi-directional sync provided by the GoldenGate product allowed for upgrades and enhancements to the HSN system, with zero downtime, HSN officials say.

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IDGC of Centre is implementing a new SAP CRM platform, IDGC officials say.

 

"Improvement of the customer service quality" is one of the main goals stated by IDGC officials for the move.

 

IDGC of Centre is a grid company in Russia seeking to automate its customer service processes by using SAP CRM-based programs. "The existing customer relationship system does not stipulate customer identification at application to the company," said Anna Korneichuk, Head of the Department of Customer Service Organization, IDGC of Centre, JSC, and since that's a direct quote we'll leave it at that, folks.

 

"With the help of the CRM platform we not only keep the history of customers' applications, forming, thus, our database, but also reduce the time spent on interaction with customers at their repeated application to our company. The given system will work in the uniform information area and, already at the initial stages of its introduction, it will help to treat efficiently customers' applications," she added.

This year, by introducing CRM system, company officials say they plan to solve some of their most urgent problems at once as they "automate accounting and analysis of customer applications that the company receives through numerous communication channels, improve quality, reduce the time of study of customers' applications and start keeping the history of customer relationship."