The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is an iTunes play list arising from a Facebook discussion as to what the most listenable songs in our collections were -- the ones you can listen to over and over and over until your wife slams your office door shut. First Coffee came up with twelve. Current song: Bob Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again." Last song: Brook Benton's "Rainy Night In Georgia." Next song: The Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset," quite possibly the most beautiful song written in the rock era. On deck: Mundy's "Galway Girl:"

Calgary-based Cognera, which sells billing and customer management tools, says more companies in the utilities industry should consider the Software as a Service model.

 

More widely accepted in industries outside utilities, particularly prevalent in industries like telecom and financial services, the SaaS model is good if you want an IT that can both quickly adapt to tech upgrades and demands without large scale infrastructure investments.

"Many utilities are cautiously awaiting direction and regulation from Washington regarding technology upgrades, particularly in the area of helping consumers understand behavioral best practices for cleaner energy consumption," says Frank Hoogendoorn, Executive Vice President of Business Solutions for Cognera. "We are offering a solution to small to medium sized utilities who are not dealing with large capital upgrade budgets, but are equally concerned with meeting technology requirements."

 

In other words, nobody has any idea what new regulations are going to come sailing down the pike, so a tech model where there's not a whole lot that'll need to be ripped out and replaced should a senator decide to vote this way or that might be a good bet.

According to tech research firm Gartner, quoted by industry tech analysts the way fantasy baseball geeks quote Bill James, SaaS offerings are emerging as important security tools, "especially for cost-sensitive and highly distributed business and computing environments." That's from their "Cool Vendors in Software-as-a-Service Security, 2009" report, by Ray Wagner, et al, March 17, 2009.

 

SaaS products do give a company reliable cost forecasting, immediate access to the latest 'n' greatest upgrades, bells and whistles, but they're mostly making money because many companies simply don't want the hassle of maintaining an in-house IT department. It's one of those "if you don't have to, don't bother" decisions.

...

InContact, which sells on-demand contact center software and agent optimization tools, has announced that a provider of performance products for the casualty claims industry will be using inContact's product "with Salesforce.com for its multiple call centers."

"More and more companies are seeing the benefits of layering the inContact product over their existing phone system and using the inContact integration with on-demand CRMs like Salesforce.com," says Paul Jarman, inContact CEO. With the performance and enhancements these two products and companies bring to one another, we expect to see more and more customers utilize the integration."

The integration of the two products is supposed to let agents and managers work through a single user interface to resolve customer calls and run reports. And because both applications are cloud-based technologies, InContact officials maintain, companies using inContact and Salesforce.com "see a minimal cash outlay, a quantifiable return on investment, a reduced maintenance burden and a pay-as-you-go model."

...

Quantivo, a vendor on-demand Behavioral Analytics, has announced that the company's SaaS application is powering Behavioral Analytics across 7.6 billion transaction records for a single customer.

 

The odds that yours are in there somewhere: High.

 

Evidently that's some sort of milestone marking Quantivo's "ability to deliver answers for unrestrained ad-hoc analysis," according to company officials.

"We are proud to see a customer analyzing this vast amount of data," says Paul O'Leary, CTO at Quantivo, noting that his company's approach to analytics is used by their customers who are "analyzing anywhere from 10 million to more than seven billion records."

With more business data being generated every day, especially from Web sites, social networks, and online marketing activities, it is becoming even more difficult for companies to pick out the important trends amidst the mountains of data, to separate the wheat from the chaff and put the beer and diapers together.

 

Companies' data analysis appetites can no longer be satisfied with costly, decades-old relational database technologies," declared O'Leary.

 

Quantivo officials say they use the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure, which is used by retailers, media companies and B2B corporations to try to get answers to customer behavior questions. "

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SafeHarbor Technology has said that SmartSupport, its managed Web Self Service contact center product, will come with a Return on Investment Guarantee.

 

"There are so many priorities in business, and so few guarantees that a product will perform," correctly notes Dianne West, Vice President Sales.

 

Through December 31, 2009, SafeHarbor Technology officials say, they will guarantee "a complete return on investment within 12 months of deployment" or they will refund the difference.

 

In order to qualify for SafeHarbor's guaranteed ROI program, customers must meet minimum contact center volumes and mutually agreed upon key performance indicators.

"SmartSupport is one of the best products on the market. Over our ten year history we have consistently delivered a positive ROI to our customers in the first year. None of our competitors, such as RightNow or InQuira, are able to offer such a guarantee," says Greg Clark, President of SafeHarbor Technology, talking smack and naming names.
 
SafeHarbor Technology Corporation, founded in 1998, is a Washington-based corporation with clients such as American Airlines, IBM, State of Washington, SunTrust Banks, Sprint, TiVo and T-Mobile.

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That WiMAX has struggled to establish a foothold in the mature broadband markets of Europe, North America and Asia is probably too well-known to need a rehash here, and a recent study explores the question of whether there might even be a chance for WiMAX in the emerging markets.

In Ovum's recent report "WiMAX in emerging markets: the opportunity assessed," Ovum finds that "the confluence of several factors including technology cost, coverage, vendor support and service provider choices will limit WiMAX to only a niche technology in the emerging markets."

 

Seeing so many reports whose sunny outlooks aren't always equally merited by the actual research, it's refreshing for First Coffee to see a report examine an issue and say you know, this might not work out the way you want. Adds a bit of credibility, you know?

 

Basically Ovum sees WiMAX's meal ticket as being part of established fixed and mobile operators' broader broadband access portfolios, never the main course.

Angel Dobardziev, Ovum's Practice Leader, stresses that there will be lots of WiMAX networks, however low the uptake: "Two thirds of the 300+ WiMAX networks globally are in the emerging markets of Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Latin America," she points out.

 

Dobardziev says WiMAX will remain a niche broadband technology in emerging markets -- "we forecast that WiMAX will account for less than five percent of the 1.5 billion fixed and mobile broadband access connections in emerging markets by 2014."

 

The stubborn fact remains that emerging market WiMAX operators still count their subscribers in thousands, or tens of thousands, rather than the hundreds of thousands they planned to have at this stage. Scartel in Russia is the first WiMAX operator in the emerging markets to even hit 100,000 subscribers, and second place, Packet One in Malaysia, has but 80,000.

 

Why is this? Dobardziev suggests that WiMAX is not competitive against fixed or mobile broadband alternatives in most urban areas of emerging markets -- where virtually all existing WiMAX rollouts are -- on either coverage or price.

 

It's certainly not a mass market-affordable technology either: "On a non-subsidised basis, it is currently priced and positioned as a broadband option only for businesses or wealthy consumers," Dobardziev says, citing the cost of customer equipment "where both DSL and HSPA outperform WiMAX with significantly greater economies of scale."

Ovum expects the growth, funding and margins pressures to lead to large-scale consolidation among WiMAX service providers in the next two to three years as well.

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TargusInfo, a caller name provider, has announced that Onvoy Voice Services, a Zayo Group company, has renewed a multi-year agreement to provide caller name services.

 

The agreement provides Onvoy with both CNAM services and storage, company officials say, adding that the idea is to make CNAM listings more accessible to nationwide providers.

"Offering caller identification services with the widest coverage and accuracy is a necessity for providers of all types and sizes," says Fritz Hendricks, president, Onvoy Voice Services. 

"For many providers, attempting to keep up with the rapid changes in CNAM data in 2009 is like trying to take a sip from a fire hydrant through a straw," said George Moore, CEO and chairman, TargusInfo, adding that their CNAM repository of more than 410 million CNAM records sourced by telecommunications companies allows such benefits as standardized display, flexible pricing model and multiple connectivity options.

TargusInfo is a privately held company headquartered in Vienna, Virginia. Onvoy Voice Services is headquartered in Minnesota.