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A partnership has been announced between eBusiness software, service firm GorillaSoft, Inc. and Stirrings; GorillaSoft, Inc. has been given the task of powering the complete Stirrings eBusiness initiative, from outsourced web services to the GorillaCore Enterprise Framework implementation. With the GorillaNet extranet module as template, GorillaSoft designed a custom partner resource center for Stirrings cocktails.

GorillaSoft module administration facilitates have been promised to centralize management, deliver analytical reports and concomitantly real-time content management. The date for GorillaSoft systems integration with the company’s in-house CRM system has not been announced. Stirrings web services are supported through GorillaSoft’s GorillaRequest outsourced web services and product management module, deployed for all GorillaSoft customers.

GorillaSoft CEO Patrick van den Broek naturally had a few kind words to say about Stirrings in press material, namely, that “Stirrings’ unique demands were an ideal match [for] GorillaSoft’s customized applications.” Stirrings is a company dealing in all-natural cocktail products such as mixers, bar supplies and infused essences. GorillaSoft is a leading inernet software and service provider; the company touts its tightly integrated suite of modules which are rapidly deployable, highly scalable and easily customized.

Small business solutions provider Office Interactive, Inc. has announced the launch of the first free Web-based application designed for individuals and small teams. Office Interactive an Internet-based suite of collaboration and productivity tools developed for individuals and small businesses. The eponymously named Office Interactive provides extensive collaboration capability available to individuals and small businesses for the first time, and includes tools for work involving calendars, contacts, discussion boards ocument management, team mail, team messenger and XML/RSS feeds, among others.

Powerful CRM and management modules allow solutions in billing, customer service, human resources, expense management, marketing, project management, and sales. Office Interactive Inc. trumpets their products as an answer to the “neglect” traditional software vendors have shown toward to the small business segment. Office Interactive, Inc. President / Co-founder Raz Choudhury says that “Most products were either too expensive or were inadequate for small business.

Office Interactive was built from the ground up on the belief that individuals and small businesses should have access to a free and easy-to-use platform that will grow with their needs.” The New York City-based Office Interactive, Inc. was established in 2004 to build Internet-based applications for the small- and large-sized company markets.

Harris Interactive has recently released their “UK Customer Experience Report 2006,” and the results for CRM providers are… well, not so good. In spite of burgeoning CRM and the ever-increasing presence (and market share) of companies such as RightNow, salesforce.com and Siebel, a great majority of consumers in the United Kingdom report dissatisfaction with service.

Almost two-thirds of the British consumers polled in the extensive 2,300-poll survey indicated that they have ceased business with a company due to poor customer service; twenty-seven percent said they’d had such an experience and would not return. This trend in bad service flies directly in the face with consumer expectations: A full-on seventy-eight percent of those surveyed stated that good service is “extremely high” in importance, a rating that made it almost as important as price itself. Despite this, more than one-quarter of customer service experiences had been negative, according to those surveyed. Fifty-three percent of those surveyed stated that evidence of improvement in customer service would be necessary before they would return to a company that had previously dissatisfied them and almost fifty percent stated that an organization would have to prove it “valued their custom.”

Such evidence would be supported: almost eighty percent of those surveyed by Harris stated they would be “most likely, greatly or somewhat” to actually increase their custom, should consistently excellent service be provided. On-demand CRM vendor RightNow commissioned the survey, and comments from RightNow vice president of UK business affairs Wayne Foncette accompanied the results in press material. According to Wayne Foncette, RightNow’s UK vice-president, the long-standing issue of balancing cost and customer service remains unresolved. “We know that consumers vote with their feet and defect if the customer experience isn’t up to scratch; we also know that businesses are being mandated to control or reduce operating costs,” said Foncette. “It’s a Catch-22 situation: Either spend money to improve the customer experience or cut costs and risk losing customers.” Foncette went on to opine that “what’s needed is a breakthrough to resolve this service / cost dilemma that drives enriched customer experience across all key interactions.”

Draig may not yet be a household name in most markets, but in Wales, they’re discussed in two languages. This Bangor-based firm represents one of suddenly many companies specialized in bilingual software and bilingual business solutions. Early results from 2006 have shown two new Draig-produced products based in the Welsh language to have seen notable success.

Draig’s web-based information directory draig.PMD enables organisations to publish directories containing records from a range of information providers. The fully multilingual customer relationship management application produced by Draig involves data management, addressing, mail merge, language tracking and switchable user interface features and is based upon good old Microsoft CRM. Draig is representative of the bilingual solutions market at present; the firm has remained small though growing and has essentially cornered its native market.

Draig, like many others, are considering markets across the Atlantic, including Canada, which is sorely lacking in certain necessary multilingual CRM requirements currently unfulfilled by extant solutions. According to Draig spokesman Wayne Francis in an online interview, however, some things will remain no matter how large or bizarre the expansion: “The core offering has always been the provision of high quality bespoke software development services. Typically solutions are database-oriented, utilise a web architecture and are based on the Microsoft platform. This will remain a key focus of the company.”

Enterprise customer interaction management and customer relationship management solution provider Talisma Corporation has announced their first quarter results, and they are impressive indeed. Alongside strong bookings growth, Talisma representatives were pleased as punch to announce the company’s attainment of no fewer than sixty-eight new customers for the fiscal quarter ending March 31.

Now included on the Talisma customer list are prestige members such as Defence Communication Services, Eli Lily Corporation, Get Friday, Global Investment Services, the JM Mutual Fund, Kansas State University, the OptiMix fund, Plaxo, Seventy mm, Toyota Motor Europe, and the Xerox Corporation. Over the first quarter, Talisma owed some of the thanks for its growth to IBM, from whom Talisma was able leverage innovative technologies in enhancing search, access, and retrieval of contact center functions.

Internationally, Talisman expanded thanks to new partners in Australia, Belgium, China, France, Germany, Israel, and the United Kingdom; in addition, Talisma Knowledge Base has been released in India. “The dramatic growth across our strategic CIM business and on-going CRM vertical businesses, new key partnerships, and expanded sales geographies position Talisma for still greater success in 2006,” Talisma CEO Dan Vetras promised.

Kintera, Inc. announced that the Community Renewal Society has completed integration to Kintera’s social CRM system. Nonprofit sector consultants the Alford Group integrated more than 50,000 records and 23,000 historical financial transactions into the Kintera Sphere social CRM system by means of coding accuracy support system address validation. The Community Renewal will now be able to capture subscriber information and billing information in the consolidated Kintera Sphere database. “Community Renewal has a complicated data structure, and integrating and consolidating on the Kintera Sphere database platform enables us to better manage information at our organization," said Community Renewal Society COO Marsha S. Clesceri.

“The Alford Group’s integration has allowed us to synchronize data between Kintera Sphere and our existing data sources and accounting software.” The Chicago-based Community Renewal Society was founded in 1882 with a mission statement to “build a just society in Chicago, free of racism and poverty and in which all of its members live with dignity.” More concretely, the Community Renewal Society network includes advocacy, training, various organizational services and print media. The ages-old organization decided to make the large leap in modernization as adaptation. Said Alford Group senior consultant Brian M. Worrall, “In today’s competitive environment, nonprofits are increasingly required to streamline their operations and increase philanthropic revenue.

The decision Community Renewal made to improve its efficiency and streamline information and knowledge management utilizing Kintera Sphere will position it strongly for the future.” The Alford Group Inc. was founded in 1979 to, as stated in its mission statement, “provide leadership in improving the quality of life by strengthening not-for-profits.” Through providing services such as fundraising and resource development, knowledge management solutions and organizational development has the Alford Group strengthened some 1,500 nonprofit businesses since its inception.

Kintera Inc. is an online solution provider for nonprofit organizations. Kintera’s trademarked innovations such as the Friends Asking Friends program and the software platform Kintera Sphere, and claims over 15,000 accounts. As timely and tangible proof of their results, Kintera representatives announced three weeks ago that the rise in customer growth has continued into the first quarter of 2006 and that new agreements representing a value of approximately $8.8 million had been sealed in the quarter alone.

Collegedale, Tenn.-based McKee Foods Corporation has announced their choice to upgrade their StayinFront Consumer Goods CRM system to version 9.3. McKee Foods has been a client of the enterprise-wide CRM applications vendor StayinFront, Inc. for five years already. Commonly known for its production of snack food, McKee boasts some 3,300 distributors in North America.

McKee Foods Corporation Sales Information Systems Manager Jerry Griswold was quoted as saying that “we felt the core functionality [StayinFront] offer in their new Consumer Goods product supports our initiatives,” and so the upgrade proceeded. “We’ll make some configuration changes to meet our exact workflow processes,” assured Griswold, “and I think our field users will appreciate the new features.”

The announcement of McKee Foods Corporation’s upgrade to the CRM solution StayinFront Consumer Goods 9.3 followed on the heels of an earlier announcement that North Carolina-based Talecris Biotherapeutics had contracted the enterprise-wide CRM applications vendor StayinFront, Inc. to “manage all points of customer interaction,” according to StayinFront press material.

Talecris will be using StayinFront Pharma 9.3, a product touted as specific to needs of pharmaceutical firms. StayinFront Pharma Companion will be used on Mobile 5.0 hardwarde, StayinFront Analytics will be initialized, and Talecris will employ StyinFront support in help desk services, data center hosting, asset management, and project management. Through this far-reaching deployment of product, StayinFront aims to provide all implementation services and data services in migration and integration. Talecris is a company representing $1 billion in revenue in 2005 and over 1,800 employees.

Firm headquarters are located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Talecris is a biotherapeutic and biotechnology company involved in critical care treatments for life-threatening disorders. Talecris represents yet another conquest for StayinFront CRM in the pharmaceutical sphere. Last year, Bradley Pharmaceuticals, Inc. implemented the StayinFront CRM platform, StayinFront Panorama and StayinFront Visual Elk.

Software as a service (SaaS) promises to free enterprises from the annoyance of having to deploy and maintain software applications that require frequent upgrades and qualified personnel to run apart from taking up valuable floor space. The two most prominent SaaS providers include Salesforce.com with its CRM applications and NetSuite with its ERP applications.

The two companies have created a niche as service providers who help organizations to reduce the time and costs required for installing and running applications by taking over these responsibilities. Yet, even though SaaS has its advantages, not every one is buying into it; there are companies that just cannot afford to have their data outside their systems and others point to the recent outages at Salesforce.com which left several users helpless.

These companies have recognized the inherent inefficiencies of the traditional software market, including the tremendous time, effort, and cost that organizations — especially large-scale midsize businesses — have to expend to install applications and keep them up and running.

It is a common misconception that SaaS is a largely untested phenomenon. Salesforce.com, with its 399,000 subscribers and 20,500 locations has been offering SaaS solutions for the past five years. The company is growing at a rate of 80% per annum. NetSuite, which has thousands of customers all over the world, has been in the business for eight years. ADP, which is the largest payroll application company in the world, has been in business for 60 years. It is the biggest and the oldest SaaS provider with around 590,000 clients around the world.

SaaS has a better chance at succeeding as compared to the ASP models that preceded it. It is favored by a congenial economic climate and new generation application development tools. Hosting solutions and ASPs that came earlier did not succeed because they essentially just sold old wine in a new bottle. The architecture of the software was unchanged; the only service that the ASPs offered was that they housed the applications. However, the ASPs found the operational costs of hosting legacy systems too high and many of them folded up. Also, in the early days of online business, companies viewed their IT departments as strategic assets and were loath to outsource their application needs to third parties. However, the competitive business environment of today and the improved services offered by third parties mean that companies now look at IT as just another business function and not core competencies.

SaaS helps in achieving lower costs by eliminating the license fees and also the infrastructure costs that are a major cost component with on-premise applications. SaaS can be metered as per actual usage and increasing capacity is easily achieved. This means that the cost-of-ownership is significantly reduced, there is no capital expenditure and on-going costs are in sync with the business trend.

SaaS initially found its footing with SMBs but has added scalability to its architecture so that now even mid-sized and large companies can start with a limited deployment to assess the service for reliability and performance and then increase the extent of deployment. SaaS vendors have successfully adopted the strategy of acquiring individual users by offering them free trials or single user subscriptions at very low costs. This has helped companies like Salesforce.com to achieve market penetration and catch the attention of enterprises. The level of acceptance that SaaS has gained can be gauged from the fact that several top companies like SunTrust, AOL, and Nokia are customers of Salesforce.com.

SaaS has made appreciable headway in CRM and salesforce automation and is well suited for several front-office functions. At the same time SaaS is increasingly being looked upon as a solution that can be implemented for managing finance as well as the supply chain. Click Commerce, which is an on-demand supply chain management vendor, has Arrow Electronics and Volvo as its customers. SaaS talent management solution by Taleo is used by Aramark, Honeywell, and Dow Chemical.

Surveys carried out by several research firms indicate that industry people and industry watchers feel that SaaS is here to stay and so long as it provides quality and reliable service at a good value for money, its popularity will only continue to grow. The sentiment was most pertinently endorsed in the now famous memo by Bill Gates in which he stated "This coming ’services wave’ will be very disruptive….Services designed to scale to tens or hundreds of millions will dramatically change the nature and cost of solutions deliverable to enterprises or small businesses."

The growth of SaaS poses a challenge for the established software vendors who are now being forced to remodel their existing applications, alter their sales and marketing strategies, and also redesign their financial models so that they can factor in the pay-as-you-use fee structures. Companies dealing in legacy software are also focusing on changing their corporate culture and making it more receptive to a service orientation.

The itch to implement a CRM system, first on a small scale and then build on it is strong with many managements. The reason being the myriad purported benefits of CRM and the easy availability of hosted solutions, some open source options are free of cost. However, before deciding upon which CRM solution to purchase, one needs to answer the question whether a company actually needs a CRM solution in place.

One way of finding out is to calculating the ROI over a given period of time; the other is to assess current practices in order to find out if they are providing sufficient information on customer needs and preferences and if the business has mechanisms in place for taking advantage of that information. For a customer-oriented business to succeed, it is important that the sales and operations departments have access to the most current customer data so that short term trends can be spotted and decisions taken accordingly.

Customer opinions should be worked upon and the marketing department should have data that allows them to cover different customer segments through targeted marketing. Employee remunerations and customer satisfaction should be tied together. If a company is failing to do the above mentioned things in a consistent manner then perhaps it does need to implement a CRM system. The key to success with a CRM implementation is to have a customer-centric philosophy without which all the information provided by a CRM implementation may come to naught if the desire to serve the customer is not present in the company.

An investment in CRM can help companies achieve significant cost savings. The savings occur from improvements in internal processes, order handling getting automated results in reduced sales cycle time, transactions gets executed faster and customer queries can be replied to quickly. Information made available from the CRM database is an invaluable asset for the marketing department that can carry out targeted marketing which is not only more effective but also cheaper with a low expense to revenue ratio.

The data in a CRM system when used in conjunction with back end systems that manage stocks can help salespeople to cross-sell and up-sell to customers, thereby increasing revenue. Customers who are regular spenders can gradually be moved up the profit chain by gaining an understanding of their likes and dislikes. CRM also enables marketing departments to respond more efficiently to the information thrown up by their targeted marketing campaigns. An important aspect of CRM is that it helps in retaining customers; this is a big money saver over the years because it is much easier to retain an existing customer than acquire a new one. For companies that are faced with the problem of employee turnover, CRM can be of great help.

Often, it is easier for contact centers to add a CRM system that helps improve employee performance rather than go for a wholesale systems change. A CRM solution that integrates with the already present multi-vendor back-end systems helps to save costs and enables a company to fully realize the ROI from existing investments. The prime function of CRM is to enable a company to take better care of its customers and in the process it improves customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and increases the customer-orientation of the staff. Also, by deploying a CRM solution, a company can continue to serve its customers even if the customer-service staff has a high turnover.

This is an important benefit of CRM that helps to make a company more systems-dependent rather than people dependent. It is not very easy to justify a CRM deployment purely in terms of ROI; the focus should be on improving the customer’s experience with the company as this will ultimately result in increased revenue. A company needs to assess its readiness for CRM before deploying it, it needs to set down strategic and tactical achievements to be accomplished by CRM, there should be a consensus on the way forward between the senior management, and key measurable metrics should be defined for tracking the performance of the CRM system.

Tmcnet says that Miami, Florida, based mid-market customer relationship manager software and service solutions firm TechWhale Solutions today announce the release of BlueWhale CRM 2.6 in three formats: standard, hosted and developer. This last provides the source code needed in order to customize the application while integrating the program into current structure, and TechWhale offers training in the developer version so that a private enterprise may perform customization inside.

All versions of the application can be customized to customer needs with administrative console and API access. The benefits promised by TechWhale for BlueWhale 2.6 include improvements across the board to their extant product: new functionality, security and ease of use are said to be included. Quickening BlueWhale 2.6 are improvement to workflow functionality, email, file management and AJAX, therefore reportedly making the software their fastest ever. A web-based demo of the BlueWhale software can be seen at www.techwhale.com