The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is ex-Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen's Quah, an overlooked gem from the mid-70s and a welcome acoustic folk-bluesy counterpoint to the crashing glam rock and twee prog-rock frippery of the era:
InsideView has announced that SuccessFactors, a vendor of on-demand performance and talent management products, has implemented InsideView's on-demand business search and intelligence application, SalesView, throughout their sales organization to "tap into more C-level connections and increase overall sales productivity."
SalesView is described by company officials as a "socialprise application," designed to bring together intelligence from subscription-based sources and the information living on the social Web directly into existing CRM applications.
SuccessFactors officials say they considered "a number" of applications before bringing InsideView's socialprise application on board. Ultimately, the company selected SalesView "due to the product's ease of use as well as features, such as alerts on business events and connections to prospects garnered from the social Web relevant to SuccessFactors' core sales efforts."
Additionally, a determinant in the selection was the InsideView mash-up with Oracle CRM On Demand, the CRM product currently used by SuccessFactors.
With the deployment of the Oracle CRM On Demand mash-up, intelligence will now be delivered directly into the sales reps' "lead" or "account" views and is expected to drive CRM adoption, SuccessFactors officials say.
"The social Web is a critical and immensely valuable part of the sales process, but it can be unmanageable for sales teams to use without wasting time," said Alex Saleh, vice president, sales operations, for SuccessFactors.
SalesView is engineered to bring together social data with enterprise-grade business search and intelligence capabilities to help sales teams automate prospecting. The product presents customer data discovered and distilled through Web harvesting, specialized research providers and social networks, within the context of enterprise applications like sales force automation systems.
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Jenzabar, a vendor of software for higher education, has announced that the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University has selected the Jenzabar EX Total Campus Management product.
The software and services agreement includes the Jenzabar EX enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and Jenzabar's Internet Campus Solution.
Harvard Kennedy School chose the Jenzabar EX Total Campus Management product "for its ability to align the product with the institution's objectives and its strategy for implementation," according to the Jenzabarbarians.
Jenzabar EX, offered on the Microsoft SQL Server platform, delivers data to offices across campus. Jenzabar's Internet Campus Solution, a portal product designed for higher education, is expected to provide the school with a single point of access to a number of Web-based self service, communications, and community building and e-learning applications.
With the Jenzabar product, Harvard Kennedy School officials say they plan to expand self-service capabilities for constituents, provide easier access for students, faculty and staff for key information, and improve administrative processes related to admissions and registration.
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In a new white paper, ABI Research examines the mobile messaging adoption and usage patterns of mobile business customers from four United States operators, finding that mobile IM adoption is actually "negatively correlated to mobility."
According to principal analyst Dan Shey, the greatest adopters of mobile IM are "T-Mobile subscribers whose demographic profile shows a high percentage who only work in an office. As office work typically requires PC access, mobile IM adoption appears more related to familiarity with IM through the PC rather than mobility itself."
Other data from the survey analysis shows that Verizon customers are the greatest adopters of picture messaging services and use them the most frequently, AT&T customers are the highest adopters of mobile e-mail services and "more Sprint customers use mobile e-mail on a daily basis than other carriers."
All the usage and adoption data is combined with pricing analysis to provide a comparison of messaging ARPUs for each mobile operator, ABI officials say, adding that the results demonstrate "the important demographic factors that drive mobile messaging ARPUs."
Shey says that while smart phone penetration is "a big factor driving mobile messaging ARPUs, personal usage of mobile services is also an important factor. AT&T appears to have successfully combined these two drivers, showing the greatest overall mobile messaging ARPUs in this survey set."
The white paper is intended to provide a snapshot of mobile messaging services to business customers based on survey data, primary research and pricing analysis. It includes a demographic comparison of each operator's customers, adoption and usage data, and ARPU calculations, as well as data about their interest in improved device features. The Web-based survey was conducted among 750 wireless business user respondents.
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Sybase, a vendor of enterprise infrastructure and mobile software, has announced the availability of the Sybase IQ Real-Time Loading Solution, described by company officials as "a combined software and services offering" designed to provide continuous loading of real-time data into the Sybase IQ analytics server.
The new offering is marketed by Sybase officials as providing enterprises with "the ability to use fresh data by continuously loading transaction changes, which enables real-time reporting and decision-making."
"This product is intended to take organizations beyond intermittent batch loading to continuous loading of operational database changes," said Dan Lahl, Director of Sybase Intelligent Enterprise Solutions.
Spice Telecom, which "adds a new customer every second of every business day," company officials claim, uses ASE as a staging repository, in conjunction with Replication Server and PowerDesigner, to load external data sources in real-time into Sybase IQ.
This new real-time analytics capability "lets Spice Telecom analyze trends and ask the 'what if' questions that were previously out of reach," Sybase officials say.
Sybase IQ is an analytics server designed to deliver results for business intelligence, data warehouse and reporting products on any standard hardware and operating system. It works with diverse data -- including unstructured data -- and diverse data sources.
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With the love-in at Dreamforce, First Coffee, who always enjoys providing alternate points of view, notices that Sridhar Vembu, CEO of AdventNet, identified by industry observer Charlie Cooper as "the company behind the Zoho suite of online applications," takes Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff to task for Benioff's comparison of Microsoft and Salesforce as "they hate everybody and we love everybody, and that's pretty much the difference. We even love Microsoft. ... This is our core strategy, love."
Vembu notes that when Salesforce invited Zoho us to take part in their AppExchange (now renamed Force.com) ecosystem, "they said they knew we had a CRM offering of our own, but still felt our online office suite would be a good addition to their ecosystem."
Zoho assigned an engineering team to do the integration, had a bunch of meetings and calls with their technical team, and with their full support, completed the integration work, Vembu recounts, adding that "it was literally days from launch when we got the call: the VP in charge of AppExchange told us the project was on hold and Benioff would be calling me."
That's when "I got the full measure of the man," Vembu says acidly: "Benioff told me he could not permit us to play on the AppExchange as things stood, but he would be happy to acquire us."
After several rounds of meetings Vembu says he told Benioff he really didn't see any cultural compatibility between the companies, and claims Benioff "changed tack and repeatedly tried to get us to discontinue Zoho CRM, in return we would get to play on AppExchange. I was furious because both Benioff and his team clearly knew we had a CRM offering going into this engagement, and if they had set this as a pre-condition for us to integrate into AppExchange, we would never have put in the resources we did."
Since then, he claims, "Salesforce has repeatedly tried to block customers from migrating to Zoho CRM, by telling them (falsely) that they cannot take their data out of Salesforce until their contract duration is over. We have e-mails from customers recounting this."
Vembu puts it in perspective by writing that "we face a far, far bigger competitor in Google, and yet we have nothing but praise for the way they have worked with us."
Cooper says Vembu told him that he had had a private e-mail exchange with Benioff as recently as a month ago, "where the question of Zoho applications running on the Force.com platform again got raised." Cooper says Vembu told him Benioff refused. "That's part of their business strategy and their prerogative," Vembu told Cooper: "No one is questioning his right to do that but it's not consistent with openness. They claim that Force.com is open but that's really not true."
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