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Here at CRMchump.com we read a lot of press release with self-congratulatory material and overblown statements, but when the announcement today came about “a major initiative,” well, this one had to be listened to. As it turns out, said major initiative involves CompUSA and that mammoth retailer’s offer of products by on-demand business software suite provider NetSuite, Inc. to small- and medium-sized businesses.

This is reportedly a first in the industry, as it is the first time a mass-market retailer will offer on-demand software, in what NetSuite is calling “a major milestone for the industry. CompUSA’s rolling out of NetSuite will begin in ten New York and Connecticut CompUSA outlets on June 27. The NetSuite application will be available to business through the CompUSA Business Services direct-to-business sales force. The NetSuite products to be available through CompUSA include NetSuite Small Business, NetSuite, NetSuite CRM, and NetSuite CRM+.

NetSuite will provide sales training and train-the-trainer training for CompUSA service personnel who provide technology services such as installation and setup. Some NetSuite solution providers will be given the right to provide NetSuite implementation services to CompUSA customers. Two hundred and twenty-five of the CompUSA outlets sport business services centers for business representatives to get advice. Why the move now? NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson flat out claims that “Software on-demand is truly replacing software shipped in a box.”

The NetSuite / CompUSA partnership has promised a dedication to small- and medium-sized business of a single business management software application, the avoiding of information technology personnel employment, and a single point of contact for emergency problems. Dallas, Texas-based CompUSA, Inc. is a leading retailer and reseller of technology products and services in America. CompUSA has more than 240 locations in the United States and Puerto Rico.

CompUSA Business Services offers business consulting and technical services, training programs, and e-commerce solutions. NetSuite, Inc. is billed as the leader in on-demand business software suites and the fastest-growing software company in North America, according to the Deloitte Fast 500 study. NetSuite seeks to enable management of accounting, enterprise resource planning, CRM, and e-commerce.

Wait, more Oracle!

Yesterday, Oracle released financial results for the fiscal year and today results for Oracle Europe, Middle East and Africa. Good news for the big boys, bad news for their competitors: “Oracle Europe, Middle East & Africa Reports Strong Performance for the Fiscal Year 2006 as Total Revenues Increase by 10 Percent” read the headlines. And Oracle Europe, Middle East and Africa executive vice president Sergio Giacoletto was able to just tick items off the list in his announcement: “We have increased our revenues; consolidated our leadership in our bedrock markets of public services, financial services and telecommunications; and extended our presence substantially in the healthcare, retail and transport and logistics industries.”

Specifically, Oracle Corporation in the region pulled in US $4.708 billion in fiscal year 2006, which ended 31 May. This represents a ten percent growth rate over fiscal 2005, and new license revenues grew 10% compared with the previous year.

Operations in the region accounted for one-third of total Oracle 2006 revenues. Growth in applications sales in the region increased by more than one hundred percent. As in North America and overall, Oracle’s fourth quarter was a doozy. In that quarter, new license revenues were also up twenty percent over fourth quarter 2005. Noted high-growth sectors in the region included public services, financial services, retail and telecommunications. Small- and medium-sized enterprise markets also grew.

In the region, clients such as Thomas Cook AG, Telecom Italia, Virgin Atlantic and Société Générale particularly boosted revenue with new deals in fiscal year 2006. Giacoletto commented with understatement, "This has been a good year for the region, with growth across all lines of business.”

Enterprise marketing management solutions provider the Unica Corporation today announced the deployment of Unica’s Affinium software by Bulldog Solutions. Affinium will be deployed during the second and third quarters of 2006 for delivery and measurement of Bulldog’s strategically targeted B2B marketing campaigns. Bulldog Solutions will employ Unica’s Affinium Suite in end-to-end marketing management, lead acquisition, web analytics, predictive modeling, marketing resource management, and cross-channel campaign management. Affinium seeks to enable Bulldog to monitor and analyze customer behavior across the internet and other channels.

As part of contractual obligation, Affinium will replace the extant Bulldog commercial system and other in-house developed applications. “Affinium will be used by everyone in the Bulldog organization – from account managers to campaign planners, the creative team, and business analysts,” promised Bulldog Solutions president / co-founder Todd Davison. Waltham, Mass.-headquarted Unica Corporation is a provider of EMM software designed for marketing organizations.

Affinium software addresses marketing and customer analytics, demand generation and marketing resource management. Unica clientele of over four hundred includes ABN AMRO, Capital One, Choice Hotels, Comcast, Lands’ End, Nordstrom, Reader’s Digest, Scotiabank and Vodafone. Unica has offices in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Singapore and India. Bulldog Solutions resides in the niche market of sales lead generation using webinar campaigns and web-based programs. Bulldog solutions are used in industries such as technology, financial services, life science, health care, telecom, insurance and publishing. Bulldog headquarters are located in Austin, Texas; EMEA operations are based in Brussels, Belgium. Among Bulldog clientele are Dell, BMC Software and Hoover’s.

Speaking of Oracle (and aren’t we so often speaking of Oracle?), Oracle PR has announced that Arby’s, slinger of roast beef sandwiches, has selected the Oracle E-Business Suite for financial reporting, workforce management, new store construction and procurement. Arby’s is on a roll (tee hee) as of late, having recently acquired RTM, its largest franchisee. Today, Arby’s has plans to massively expand, perhaps even further overseas. Arby’s, like many making the jump to streamlining CRM these days, needed to lose its archaic legacy information systems and to streamline its financial reporting.

The Oracle applications are scheduled to be implemented in multiple phases, with the first phase of completion expected by year’s end. Oracle financial management will comprise the first phase. A main selling point of the Oracle system for Arby’s with their current grandiose ambitions was the Oracle open standards employment, theoretically providing Arby’s with an easier path to future expansion and upgrades. "Arby’s is a cornerstone in American culture,” said Oracle Senior Industry Director for Retail Gladys Lau, giving way to a bit of hyperbole, “and we are pleased to play a strategic role in the company’s business expansion.”

All over the news first thing in the morning today was the big Siebel / IBM / Oracle brouhaha; of course, with names like this involved, who’s surprised at the prominence of this particular news bite? As is being reported everywhere, the Big Blue back-end powering Siebel’s CRM OnDemand hosted software service is “being ripped out” and replaced with Oracle’s own hosting infrastructure.

The announcement (and earnest near-violent imagery) came from Oracle president Charles Phillips yesterday in a conference call with press. Launched in October 2003, Siebel CRM OnDemand represented a joint offering with IBM, which acted as host to Siebel infrastructure and database software. Siebel was a nice big name SaaS client for IBM and likewise did the IBM name benefit Siebel. It was profit lust at first sight. As late as October 2004, Siebel and IBM were said to be connected together until 2009 via the building of a new service center.

Enter Oracle, exit previous Siebel alliances with IBM. Once he and his company were acquired in September 2005, Siebel product chief Bruce Cleveland was able to backpedal enough to state that the Siebel OnDemand system had no technical reliance on IBM infrastructure. Cleveland ultimately left Oracle last week and got on with InterWest Partners. Meanwhile, Siebel has migrated. And the Oracle beast still hungers. New Siebel CRM on-demand customers are already running on the Oracle technology stack, with others to be transitioned this summer. The move will be seamless and beneficial for users, pledge Oracle executives.

Sage Software made an introduction today, presenting to the world Client 1, Endeavor Commerce, InaPlex and QGate as Sage CRM Solutions premiere technology partners. Premiere partners develop value-added technology solutions to integrate with Sage Software mid-market CRM products including Sage CRM, SageCRM.com and Sage CRM SalesLogix.

Awarded the label were: Client 1 earned the title for its Quote Wizard, a program that generates customer sales quotations and sales orders within Sage CRM SalesLogix including price list view, product selector, and revision and copying functions for quick quotation preparation and delivery; Endeavor Commerce for SmartCatalog, a program that automates quote-to-order and proposal generation to reduce processing time and ensure data accuracy; QGate earned kudos for its product intelli-CTi.

intelli-CTi connects phone activity with contact records in Sage CRM SalesLogix and features desktop dialing and call recognition screen pop-ups; QGate grabbed a second premiere label for Paribus, a program designed to identify matching information within Sage CRM SalesLogix or between different data sources when importing, integrating or finding and removing duplicate accounts and contacts; QGate crashed the boards yet again with Power Entry, which captures name and address details for accounts and contacts through Sage CRM SalesLogix; and InaPlex bagged the sixth with Inaport, a data migration program to transfer data between third party sources and Sage CRM, SageCRM.com or Sage CRM SalesLogix. Congratulations to all the winners.

Sage CRM is a CRM solution for integration of vital sales, marketing and customer support information for small- and mid-sized businesses. Sage CRM provides flexible deployment options and is available as an on-demand CRM solution at SageCRM.com, or as an on-premise CRM system. Sage CRM also includes a remote data synchronization client and support for wireless devices. Sage CRM SalesLogix now has 7,000 customers worldwide. Sage Software is a provider to more than 2.6 million small- and mid-sized business customers in North America.

Sage products support accounting, operations, customer relationship management, human resources, time tracking, merchant services and the specialized needs of accounting practices and the construction, distribution, manufacturing, nonprofit and real estate industries. Sage Software is a subsidiary of The Sage Group plc. Formed in 1981, Sage was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1989 and now has 5.0 million customers served by 10,500 employees worldwide.

Fairfax, Va.-based Fairfax County Federal Credit Union is pairing up with Open Solutions Inc., a provider of integrated enabling technologies for North American financial services providers, to implement Open Solutions’ “Complete Credit Union Solution” for its data processing needs. Together with the solution will be provided complementary applications such as CRM tool cView and ProfitVision.

Fairfax County Federal Credit Union came to the decision to upgrade when faced with the bank’s recent growth spurt. Fairfax County FCU had recently expanded its charter to serve the entire county and now serves over 18,000 members while handling US $210 million in assets. The 27-year-old legacy system formerly employed by the credit union was to be done away with and a new core processing system brought in.

The Complete Credit Union Solution is built on a centralized Oracle relational database and is designed as an open architecture application for service-oriented financial institutions. Complete seeks to provide credit unions with a fully featured strategic product platform in integrating core data processing with strategic applications such as internet banking, business intelligence, financial accounting applications, electronic imaging, payment and interactive voice response solutions.

Open Solutions Inc. offers a product platform that integrates core data processing applications with Internet banking, cash management, CRM, business intelligence, financial accounting tools, imaging, Check 21, digital document, interactive voice response, network services, web hosting, web design, payment solutions, and loan origination solutions. Open Solutions specializes in banks, thrifts, credit unions and financial service providers in the United States and Canada.

Open source business intelligence solutions provider JasperSoft today reported the 15,000th download of Jasper Reports for SugarCRM, the first open source reporting engine for the SugarCRM Sugar Suite. Jasper Reports provides a library of preset reports that run with Sugar Suite, allowing the ability to generate customer interaction-based reports. JasperReports focuses on transactional reporting displayed in multiple visual formats including Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, PDF, and web-based.

The solution is available at www.sugarexchange.com. Jasper Soft for SugarCRM also provides Sugar Suite users a real-time reporting system for accessing and displaying information stored within Sugar Suite. JasperReports for SugarCRM promises seamless integration into existing IT infrastructure and communication with other third-party applications via HTTP or Java APIs. Data can be pulled from extant databases with JDBC, POJO, and XML. Due to the popularity of Jasper Reports, the product has been made a high-ranking SugarForge project and has earned the SugarForge Editor’s Pick and the Project of the Month awards in June.

In turn, the popularity of Jasper on SugarForge will give it the status of inaugural featured product once SugarExchange, SugarCRM’s new marketplace for Sugar Suite extensions, is released early next month. JasperSoft has also announced a webcast in joint co-production with SugarCRM entitled "Turning Data into Decisions." Jasper Soft for Sugar CRM will be on display at 6pm Greenwich Time on June 29. JasperSoft CTO Barry Klawans and SugarCRM VP of Worldwide Sales Lars Nordwall will host. San Francisco-based JasperSoft now boasts one million downloads and 10,000 corporate deployments in 200 countries, and touts its product as “the most widely used open source BI software in the world.”

The company’s Jasper Intelligence architecture is comprised of open source server, report design, analytics, and commercial software for scalable enterprise applications. Venture capital firms invested in JasperSoft include Morgenthaler Ventures, Doll Capital Management, Discovery Ventures, and Partech International. SugarCRM is a provider of commercial open source customer relationship management software for companies of all sizes, offering deployment options in on-demand, on-premise, and appliance-based formats.

Oracle public relations somehow managed to wait until just past midnight EST to release their final earnings figures for fiscal year 2006. For the record, Oracle net income for the period through 31 May was US $3.4 billion, an increase of seventeen percent over the previous year. And in the fourth quarter alone, figures show income of US $1.3 billion, an amazing twenty-seven percent increase. And the bottom line says that Oracle’s 2006 revenues were up twenty-two percent to US $14.4 billion. The success story within the Oracle success story of fiscal year 2005 was the applications business. New software licensing revenue from applications was $640 million in the fourth quarter, up eighty-three percent over the previous year.

Total applications software revenues for the period were US $1.3 billion, a whopping sixty-six percent increase from the previous quarter. Licensing revenue from the Oracle applications business grew fifty-six percent. "We saw extraordinary growth in the quarter," proudly stated Oracle CEO Larry Ellison in a conference call (currently available at www.oracle.com/corporate/), followed by an irresistible swipe at his firm’s bitter rival: "We are growing the applications business faster than SAP." In database and middleware, software license revenue was US $1.48 billion, up eighteen percent over the previous year. Total database and middleware software revenue was US $2.68 billion, an increase of fifteen percent. Revenue from the sale of Siebel CRM software for the quarter was $81 million, more than twice as much as what Oracle forecasters had expected, representing a huge piece of the revenue pie chart.

Oracle’s growth came both from increased deal activity and from a higher number of large deals. During the quarter, the number of transactions valued at over $1 million grew by thirty-nine percent over the previous year. Company forecasters expect GAAP earnings per share to grow from US $.10 US $.11 in the first quarter of fiscal year 2007, with software revenue rising as much as twenty-five percent over first quarter 2006.

Oracle expenses rose during the fourth quarter, with operating expenses up twenty-one percent; sales and marketing expenses were up a big thirty-six percent. (Oracle spokespeople chalk this up to rises in salaries.) Service costs were up twenty-four percent. Finally, on-demand business revenues grew to $130 million, up a wowing sixty-two percent.

In more salesforce.com-related news, the customer relationship management tool provider reminds of the imminent launch of Partnerforce, a service intended to assist companies in better interacting with business partners. The Partnerforce program is promised to allow employees share data with sales staff internal and external to their firm. The on-demand data service is touted as using an interface similar to that of Salesforce CRM software. Naturally, too, salesforce.com PR reminds of the seventy-seven percent growth rate Gartner recorded the firm at last year.

With Partnerforce, either partner or parent company URLs can theoretically become a portal for the service. This portal can then be customized to a given web interface. A chart dashboard provides a changing view of relevant sales partner activities, and there are security controls to restrict outside access to internal company data. The advantage of Partnerforce, says promotional material, is its portals, which no competing on-demand PRM provider offers.

The disadvantage is that those already using the salesforce.com CRM system must access a separate portal for each company that enrolls them in the PRM program. Partnerforce will be available at US $1,500 per partner per year, including five users. And the licenses for PRM may also be pooled, explained a salesforce spokesperson said, meaning ten partners require ten licenses, but fifty resultant users may be distributed however the parent company chooses.