The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Tom Waits' Bone Machine. If you're looking for a good album to set a romantic mood, or use as background for your eight-year old daughter's birthday party, you'll probably want to look elsewhere:

WaveMaker Software, who sell a visual development platform for Web applications, say the ECN Group selected WaveMaker to "SaaS-enable" their ECN Round Trip Logistics application. 

 

Chris Keene, CEO of WaveMaker, pronounced the company "excited" about the deal. WaveMaker is based on the Java stack, offering WYSIWYG tools.

 

ECN needed help with their supply chain. "We wanted to get our RTL suite to market to take advantage of our niche market opportunity," said John Axe, CEO of ECN Group. "I want my development team focused on providing the middle layer smarts of our application. Being able to collaborate with one's supply chain partners across organizational boundaries without the usual integration issues allows customers to see their supply chain from both a forward and reverse logistics."

 

The ECN Group is a wholly-owned subsidiary of New Zealand Post, selling B2B messaging, business process management and systems integration, with a strong presence in New Zealand, Australia and Asia. ECN RTL is designed to give "all participants in the supply chain a Web-based, unified view of sales, inventory, returns and stock transfers between warehouses," WaveMaker officials say. 

 

San Francisco-based WaveMaker is privately held and funded by Allegis Capital, Sippl Investments, Hummer-Winblad and Worldview Technology Partners.

 

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Belfast-based Aepona, which sells telecoms software products and services, has acquired Valista, a Dublin-based provider of payment, settlement and service lifecycle management to mobile and broadband operators worldwide. Here's betting they signed the deal in a nice pub with a few hearty toasts.

 

The company will continue operating under the Aepona brand and position itself as a "Network as a Service" vendor to sell to telcos globally.

 

"Operators recognize the need to adopt a more collaborative approach to working with organizations such as enterprises and Web-based service providers," says Al Snyder, CEO of Aepona. "The move towards openness initially focused on the device side, but over the past year attention has shifted towards the network side."

New Buzzword Alert: NaaS is a term for how model, mobile and broadband operators "treat their network and informational assets as marketable resources that can be made available to third party application developers, upstream service providers and enterprises," according to Aepona officials. Evidently this helps with such telco services such as voice, location, messaging, profile, billing and so on.

The new Aepona will offer such products and services as open APIs towards core network capabilities, third party relationship management, monetization, billing mediation and settlement, and service lifecycle management. 

Snyder notes that while Aepona has contracts with Tier 1 operators to implement their Open Network API programs, "until now we have lacked the monetization and settlement capabilities that are required for a true NaaS offering. With the acquisition of Valista, we can now offer telcos the means to monetize their Open API initiatives, as well as offering third parties a way to bill end-users for their services."

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Level 3 Communications says it's expanding the communications services it provides biopharm company ImClone Systems.

 

"We chose Level 3 because they deliver what we require as our bandwidth requirements grow," says Stephen Davies, VP of information technology for ImClone Systems. 

Under the contract, Level 3, which currently provides data transport services to ImClone, says it will deliver colocation, Internet access and Internet-based private network services to ImClone's locations in New York City, a couple New Jersey locations and Heidelberg, Germany, "as well as ImClone's North American data center in Newark and European data center in Frankfurt." 

 

Davies noted that as ImClone's "international researchers pursue advances in oncology care, we need to be able to quickly transport files between our U.S. and German locations."

 

Level 3 officials say to deliver these services they'll have to expand the fiber network to directly connect to ImClone's two New Jersey locations and the Gotham location.

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Revenue management vendor Model N says that FCI's Electronic Division integrated Model N's Global Price Management application with Salesforce.com's lead and opportunity management capabilities. 

 

The integrated product is intended to "automate and streamline the division's lead-to-quote conversion processes," Model N officials say, adding that FCI deployed it within its Automotive Division. Model N's GPM automates and centralizes direct and channel quoting with a rules-based pricing and contract management engine. 

 

Rafael Mathieu, Chief Information Officer at FCI, said it "allows us to reference customer contracts, prices lists and business rules during the lead to quote conversion process," among other capabilities.

 

Model N officials explain that by integrating with Salesforce.com, FCI's Electronic Division has a single platform to track and convert "leads to opportunities to quotes." It also has reporting capabilities for visibility across the lead-to-quote lifecycle to ferret out and get rid of those nasty performance bottlenecks and margin leakage. 


 

Europe-based FCI began its relationship with Model N in 2003 by implementing Model N's Global Price Management and Deal Management. It's now live on Model N's Channel Revenue Management and uses Model N's Deal Analytics application as well.

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Austin, Texas-based KaleidaCare Management Solutions has signed nine new customer agencies this year to use the company's products. 

 

The new accounts are CEDARS, Childkind, Visinet, Walden Family Services, Baptist Children's Home of North Carolina, Masonic Home for Children at Oxford, York Place Episcopal Home for Children, CITY House, and Nazareth Children's Home. As one can tell, the company's into the nonprofit market - KaleidaCare provides private welfare agencies with Web-based case management and administrative tools, and currently have 86 private child and family services agencies across the United States as clients. 

 

And this is a crucial area: "The tough economy has led to more families who are unable or unwilling to care for children, and at the same time governments have been reducing funding," KaleidaCare President and CEO Alistair Deakin says, adding that there's a "growing awareness among child and family welfare providers of the importance that client workflow optimization plays in responding to the economy and changing regulatory landscape." 

 

KaleidaCare has been in business since 1995.

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Good news for all you PivotLink fans out there -- the vendor has, in its officials' words, "solidified its lead in the Software as a Service business intelligence market with record growth across all areas of its business."

 

Break out the champagne. Or, better yet, see "pub, Ireland" above. 

 

PivotLink's cloud-based SaaS BI solution is a business analysis, reporting and dashboarding tool marketed on its moderately-priced "scalability and analytical enterprise-class business intelligence. The company recently completed a $10 million round of venture capital financing in Q1 led by StarVest Venture Partners -- yes, that StarVest, the lead outside venture capital investor in NetSuite. StarVest recently announced that it closed its oversubscribed $244 million second fund involving PivotLink.

 

Much of the confidence is in the market PivotLink serves itself: A 2009 study by BeyeResearch finds that "SaaS has now gained a significant foothold in Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 enterprises," showing that more than 50 percent of the respondents were adopting SaaS BI based on such factors as "low cost approach, faster development time, being business -- not technology -- focused, easy maintenance and on-demand capacity. The study, titled "Pay as You Go: Software as a Service Business Intelligence and Data Management," by Colin White, BI Research and Claudia Imhoff, Intelligent Solutions, was issued in May.

 

The company's new bookings revenue for 2008 grew 100 percent over the prior year and 75 percent in the first half of 2009. New customers include CamelBak Products, FirstCare Health Plans, Guardian Home Care Holdings and MySpace.com.

 

Several major products were released by the vendor in Q1, including the PivotLink Gadget for Google. New resellers and partners include Appirio, a cloud provider specializing in Google Apps and Force.com, and Demand Solutions Group, which sells on-demand software and services.