By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is Dexter Gordon's Doin' Allright. Sure be nice if iTunes hadn't completely mangled his masterwork, the Go album. Honestly, what's so hard about offering a complete album for download?:

 

Compiere, a vendor of open source business products, has announced the addition of manufacturing-specific functionality for its open source ERP and CRM products.

 

The company is delivering manufacturing capabilities in phases, the first of which, available in their 3.1 product, is "targeted at manufacturers with assembly operations," company officials say.

 

Capabilities include support for multi-level bills of material, work-in-process tracking, completion of final assemblies to shipping, work order costing, the ability to create work orders and select customer specific options at order entry time and integration with Compiere's existing materials management, purchasing, sales order management and financial systems.

 

It's currently available in three editions -- professional, standard and community. Additional manufacturing capabilities will be announced in future offerings.

 

"Manufacturers today face new business pressures that are causing them to rethink their ERP strategies," said Don Klaiss, president and CEO, Compiere. "Most midsize companies that currently have an ERP system are using either custom, in-house developed software, or expensive, inflexible, vendor-dependent software based on technology that is at least a decade old."

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Etelos officials have announced six new partners have gone live with applications on the Etelos Marketplace.

 

The applications provided by these partners "range from e-mail management to business intelligence to CRM," according to company officials.

"As more and more businesses come to the Etelos Marketplace looking for Web applications, having partners such as these is essential," Etelos President & CEO Jeffrey Garon said.

 

Etelos is adding these business-focused applications to its marketplace "in order to bring businesses best-of-breed products," company officials say. All of these applications are now available on the Etelos Marketplace.

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BSG, a vendor of advanced payment services for digital media merchants, and ARIA Systems, a provider of billing and life cycle management products to monetize games, have announced delivery of a global risk management product specifically designed for gamblers.

 

"Ensuring safe and secure transactions is a key determining factor in protecting paying gamblers from a negative experience," BSG officials say.

 

The product is designed to help game publishers prevent fraud from occurring and reduces charge backs and revenue loss, while "maintaining a fair and positive experience" for their gamblers, officials of both firms say.

The joint product combines ARIA System's proprietary gambler billing and CRM data with BSG's Advanced Payment Gateway data for analysis of gambling transactions in real time, analyzing gambler membership profiles, forum, guild participation and unique registered user profiles to determine who could pose a risk to other customers.

 

By identifying those gamblers who have what BSG officials characterize as "an ongoing and trusted relationship" with publishers via third-party channels, and then customizing the product by geography, genre and industry experience, BSG and ARIA Systems officials say the products lets publishers "protect" gamblers and the gambling experience, as well as their revenue streams.

"Working with ARIA Systems, we're able to distinguish those pockets of suspect users from good users so that game publishers can reduce the incidence of fraud, charge backs and other forms of revenue loss," said Greg Carter, CEO of BSG.

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Open Text, a vendor of enterprise content management (ECM), has announced that Compassion International, a Christian child advocacy ministry, has selected Open Text's Artesia Digital Asset Management system to centralize the management of photos, newsletters, Web site materials and videos and "streamline processes for distributing and sharing content" between its field offices around the world.

 

Founded by the Rev. Everett Swanson in 1952, Compassion began providing Korean War orphans with food, shelter, education and health care, as well as Christian instruction. Today, Compassion helps more than 1 million children in 24 countries.

 

With 26 global field offices, Compassion made the move several years ago to centralize its media assets, but after growing out of the system it required a new product to help manage its assets on a larger scale "so that people in all offices could access the same content, use it in multiple formats and repurpose it," Open Text officials say.

 

"As an NGO, we have to be efficient in order to meet our mission of helping children around the world, so it's really important we expedite and facilitate the distribution of information to each of our offices," said Nydia Teter, Field Communications Director, Compassion International.

 

She said centralizing all the organization's content and "being able to access it whether we're in India, Ecuador, or Kenya" is going to "increase our productivity and help us find new ways of using content that we thought may have had only one use."

 

With Open Text, Compassion International will now have a single point of management for all of the organization's "storytelling materials" -- what Teter calls the photos, newsletters, Web site materials and video that help Compassion talk about the impact of the organization's work around the world -- and underlying metadata information.

 

Ultimately, Teter said she would like the Open Text product to be a chain in the CRM link so that Compassion's sponsor donors are able to access whatever information the organization has about the child or children that they sponsor and support.

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Eloqua, a vendor of automated demand generation applications and expertise for business-to-business marketers, has announced it has been selected as one of Oracle's Elite 8, a designation given to partners which have demonstrated products and customer integrations with Oracle CRM On Demand.

 

Eloqua's Conversion Suite, which provides a turnkey product for executing, automating and measuring multi-channel marketing programs, is a hosted marketing product for Oracle CRM On Demand -- "a combination for end-to-end marketing and sales automation," according to the Oraclians.

 

The Elite 8 partners, described by Oracle officials as "the first tier of Oracle's CRM On Demand Inner Circle Partner Initiative," collaborate with Oracle CRM On Demand product strategy, product management, engineering, quality assurance and Global Alliance organizations.

 

Eloqua's product is designed to be used to close the loop between marketing and sales, company officials say.

 

Erica Ruliffson, Group Vice President, CRM On Demand, Oracle, says Eloqua's automated marketing products are a "complement" to Oracle CRM On Demand, enabling organizations to have "insight into both their marketing and sales activities."

 

Working with Eloqua, "we look forward to enabling our customers to track and measure marketing outcomes, directly tie sales revenue to marketing spend and increase overall customer lifetime value," Ruliffson says.

 

"We are excited to expand our relationship with Oracle," said Rob Brewster, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Eloqua.