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Representatives of Verso Technologies, a global provider of next generation network solutions, have announced that Latin American broadband Internet and telephony provider BroadBandTech has selected and installed the Verso MetroNet VoIP Overlay solution, including the Verso Back Office solution, an integrated back office application that supports administration, provisioning and billing.

Integrating and packaging a standard set of features and capabilities, the MetroNet VoIP Overlay solution includes the Verso Clarent endpoint and tandem switching technologies, in addition to other core capabilities and services such as the optional back office component that assists in managing the solution.

To facilitate efficient route management on the network, the Verso Back Office solution monitors and controls all traffic while also providing for account status monitoring and bill tracking. The solution also allows for rates (and routes to and from various interconnect carrier networks) to be updated dynamically, while supporting multiple rate plans. PIN generation for prepaid cards and corporate accounts in addition to providing Web interface enables customers to check account balances.

BroadBandTech is now using Verso’ Class 5 Softswitch, VBO, IP Centrex and voice mail solutions. The combination is intended to drive call control and signaling, provisioning and monitoring, hosted PBX capabilities and messaging services. BroadBandTech chief executive officer Carlos Mora commented that because the company has a network infrastructure deployed throughout a vast territory, BroadBandTech requires provisioning and billing solutions that are IP-based, scaleable and cost effective.

Morea went on to note that after a thorough evaluation of the leading softswitch manufacturers in the industry, BroadBandTech selected Verso because of the firm’s leading softswitch, fully integrated back office solution, local support and general expertise in specific problems needed to be addressed by BroadBandTech. Yves Desmet, senior vice president of worldwide sales at Verso Technologies, proudly declared that that this regional win “illustrates the vast range of Verso’s carrier portfolio which traverses the market for carriers.”

Having reportedly seamless integrated the solution, Verso and BroadBandTech are planning further improvement to the existing infrastructure together and feel the company’s growth plans can be supported.

Verso partner IPVision assisted and supported in the deployment. “This win for Verso will further establish its strength in the market while adding credibility to its portfolio to assist in other competitive situations. BroadBandTech will gain substantial functionality through the implementation of Verso’s solutions,” said Desmet.

Encompix can hang another success story on its walls, as the Summer 2006 issue of International Food Safety & Quality Network features a story in which Encompix may take pride entitled, "Reading Bakery Systems selected Encompix ERP because of its clear focus on engineer-to-order companies."

According to Reading Bakery information technology manager Michael Cox, the ERP system was installed to address Reading Bakery Systems key requirements including partial release of bills of material; tracking budget to actual costs; and handling items of long lead time.

The RBS E.I. Groff Technical Center is a research and development facility that demonstrates Reading Bakery Systems’ equipment and provides complete processing lines for testing of new products, formulations, techniques and equipment with confidentiality. The Technical Center is also available to customers that wish to produce and package product for consumer or market testing.

As for the future, Reading Bakery Systems is expecting major improvements to improve business performance. "We expect to improve the accuracy and speed in which we generate our estimates," said Cox. Encompix is a business unit of Made2Manage Systems specializing in the manufacturing software requirements of engineer-to-order companies since 1992.

Made2Manage Systems Inc. is a twenty-year-old firm now boasting over 2,150 customers worldwide. Made2Manage Systems Inc. produces enterprise resource planning software and various related services in over thirty manufacturing sectors, including industrial and commercial machinery; fabricated metals; rubber and plastics; electronics; analytical and measuring equipment; furniture and fixtures; durable goods; and metals, wire and cable.

Batelco, Bahrain’s leading telecommunications company, has announced the addition of over 200 destinations and a reduction in rates for its international calling cards. The sweeping upgrade was made possible by what Batelco officials call the service’s “great success.”

At first, Batelco’s 123 numbers made international calls to only five countries available. Today, the Batelco system suddenly reaches 212 nations in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The 123 Calling Cards use VoIP technology and are available for calls made from both fixed lines and mobile phones. The cards are obtainable at all supermarkets, cold stores, Batelco shops and authorised resellers.

Perhaps the best part of fashioning the CRMchump blog daily is the reportage of free stuff; here’s some more. In an effort to boost sales on individually owned e-Commerce sites, Volusion has offered free live chat software. Volusion Live Chat Software is a 100 percent hosted solution with no server installation needed.

The solution was reportedly developed somewhat accidentally. With the announcement of the release, the mono-monikered James (Hey, he’s like Sting or Cher. Or Socrates!), Volusion sales manager, told the story of a monthly sales meeting a short while back. In the meeting, the question, “What have customers asked lately?” was summarily answered with “What’s the quickest way to increase sales on my e-Commerce site, without paying any money?”

Members of the Volusion sales staff mentioned that several customers had asked questions regarding finding and installing third-party chat software on their sites, primarily with the intention of being able to answer online customer queries in a timely manner, which has been demonstrated shown to reduce cart abandonment and increase sales.

Talk of creating Volusion’s own live chat software began, and gradually the development of Volusion’s own live chat software evolved. Indeed, James reported that just two days after the precipitous meeting, work on Volusion Live Chat began. Volusion Live Chat is being touted as an instrument for success in real-time live help; live customer support; saving of money and resources; less expensive live online support, as opposed to telephone support and / or chat support.

Volusion Live Chat is promised to assist in completing the sales cycle by giving quick online answers. Founded in 1999, Volusion is a supplier of e-Commerce solutions, website design, merchant accounts, SSL and search marketing services. Version 4.0 includes One-Page Checkout with guest registration, and a new GUI with integrated help and training videos.

All Volusion stores come standard with built-in business and marketing functions in one customizable package, including analytics, reporting and return on investment features; CRM; a phone order and POS system, automated drop shipping; a five-tier affiliate system; import / export functionality; and free 24/7/365 support and upgrades.

ReachForce officials closed out their week with the introduction of ReachForce Connect. Connect, according to company PR, is designed to open up ReachForce’s partner-based ecosystem in hopes of providing CRM users and vendors with the ability to present sales and marketing professionals with more ways to request qualified role-based contacts.

The program is built on the ReachForce platform. ReachForce Connect provides a web services API that software developers and independent software vendors can leverage from within personalized applications, thereby offering on-demand access to ReachForce role-based data services. ReachForce Connect is developed on JBoss and MySQL open source technologies.

Company philosophy dictates that ReachForce Connect was developed on an open source platform to allow leveraging across a broad range of CRM systems. ReachForce theoretically enables B2B sales and marketing professionals to build high-quality role-based custom prospect databases. ReachForce, Inc, is a privately held venture backed company based in Austin, Texas.

Evolutionary Technologies International Inc., a provider of data integration solutions, has announced the general release of a couple new products determined to prettify databases worldwide: ETI Data Profiler and ETI Data Cleanser.

These products are touted as making extendable the functional capabilities of ETI Solution V5 software and ETI High Performance Connectors to provide data quality in a full-feature platform offering. The ETI Data Profiler product offers a solution that proports to discovers the content, structure and quality of data sources from the start of an IT project; through counts, advanced statistics, pattern recognition, inconsistency identification, anomalies, unique key values and data relationships does the program buzz away, using automated discovery and analysis.

Company figures show that ETI Data Profiler can reduce the total cost of analysis by almost one-third. Theoretically, ETI Data Profiler than takes on associated data quality improvement, trackable through the integrated issue management feature; said feature promises greater visibility. ETI Data Cleanser deals with data quality problems, and specializes in what the firm’s brain trust sees as the most troublesome of all problems in data loss: the random nature of many data errors.

ETI Data Cleanser reportedly features advanced fuzzy matching technology including Soundex, a phonetic-based algorithm. Along with fuzzy logic, ETI Data Cleanser includes algorithms to clean replacement, transposition and semantic errors; the cleanser can also parse, standardize, correct, enhance, match and deduplicate data from virtually any source.

ETI Data Cleanser can run in line with production systems or offline for batch-based projects using traditional servers or grid computing infrastructure. Founded in 1991, Evolutionary Technologies International Inc. is a provider of enterprise data integration solutions for government IT organizations and Global 1000 companies.

Applications implemented by ETI include SOA, ETL, EAI, EII, CRM, ERP, compliance reporting and data warehousing. Among the Evolutionary clientele base are Caterpillar, the Department of Defense, Hallmark Publishers, and Royal Bank of Canada. ETI provides software and services that automate the seamless exchange of data between incompatible systems.

Britain-based software provider Respond has announced that Momenta, a consultancy and outsourcing services provider for the financial services industry, has invested in its complaint and feedback management software to automate the complaints management process for outsourced clients.

The deal marks the beginning of a strategic business partnership between Respond and Momenta. Respond is a firm that hawks software to solve problems in enterprise complaints, feedback and customer service. The firm focuses on the high-profile financial services sector and the highly-regulated public sector. Momenta is a British service provider to the financial services industry, including in-house and outsourced consulting "designed to help businesses capitalize on market opportunities while ensuring their operations and products are compliantly structured.”

Under auspices of the agreement, Respond software will be implemented to manage the complaint process and business review operations. Momenta client engagement director Steve Johnson hinted at further agreements between the two firms, saying that "There is a lot of synergy between the two companies.”

Representatives of Intervoice, Inc., a converged voice and information solutions provider, have announced that Technology Marketing Corporation’s Customer Interaction Solutions magazine has given a CRM excellence award for the Intervoice Personalize IT solution.

Personalize IT seeks to empower companies in automatically synthesizing a customer’s user profile with live data such as current company promotions. The Intervoice system recognizes and anticipates customer needs and preferences in hopes of enabling an individually tailored customer experience.

Companies can also proactively connect callers to the appropriate customer service agent based on pre-determined criteria. The CRM Excellence Award winners for 2006 were published in the May and June issues of Customer Interaction Solutions magazine. Intervoice, Inc. provides leading enterprises and network operators with the Intervoice Solutions Framework, which includes platform, software, applications and services for voice automation solutions.

Intervoice Media Exchange is a standards-based multi-media platform offering unparalleled flexibility for advanced multimedia messaging, portal, IVR and payment applications. Intervoice is focused on the enterprise and network markets, and has implemented more than 23,000 systems worldwide at companies across a variety of industries.

Intervoice is a Microsoft certified partner and Learning Solutions certified partner; its headquarters are located in Dallas, Texas. Customer Interaction Solutions has been the flagship publication of the Technology Marketing Corporation print house since 1982, and focuses on the customer relationship management, call center and teleservices industries.

TMC publications include print magazines Customer Interaction Solutions, Internet Telephony, SIP Magazine and IMS Magazine, and digital publications Speech-World, WiFi Telephony Magazine, VoIP Developer, IPTV Magazine and WiMA.

The big boys have shown up to play in Talisma Corporation’s ballpark. The Bellevue, Wash.-based enterprise customer interaction management solutions, have announced the launch of the CIM Forum, a business and technology consortium with a mission statement of exclusive focus on managing online customer interaction.

The murderer’s row lined up to bat at the CIM Forum are Epson, IBM, Microsoft, Outsell, Pitney Bowes, and Sprint. Through events and research co-developed with CRM strategic advisory firm eVergance, the CIM Forum will promises to explore key areas of CIM management such as thought leadership opportunities, key performance indicators, and technical infrastructure associated with positive customer experiences.

The CIM Forum was created as a result of the charter members’ mission to continuously improve enterprise CIM and the overall customer and agent experience. Built upon a strong customer service background and combined knowledge gleaned from hundreds of millions of chat, email, and online support sessions, the CIM Forum provides thought leadership and best practices for companies worldwide.

Much of Talisma’s motivation for founding the forum is rooted in the Forrester report of October 2005 entitled "Twenty-Three Best Practices for Customer Service Center.” Of particular importance to the CIM Forum philosophy is the report’s statement that "With similar products and services offered by multiple suppliers or vendors, customer loyalty is low."

The CIM Forum therefore seeks to foster change in online customer service business processes that increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. "The formation of the CIM Forum couldn’t have come at a better time," states Allen Bonde, eVergance strategy and marketing senior vice president. "Streamlining service delivery … has become a key business priority.

Yet many companies are unaware of the best practices and key steps to truly transform the customer experience.” As proof of the potential power of the gang, the CIM Forum also announced the release of its first white paper, focused specifically on enterprise chat. (CIM Forum PR explains the study’s purpose via citing a statistic from a May 2006 report by JupiterResearch stating that 63 percent of U.S. online consumers who contacted customer service used text chat at least once in 2005, up from the 41 percent reported in 2001.)

The white paper offers analysis of enterprise chat topics such as best practices, performance management, key metrics, and technical infrastructure. Future white papers will study email management, web self-service, knowledge management, and cross-channel analytics. Though the page on which CIM Forum sits (www.cimforum.org) was kicked off at the beginning of 2006, the page has been sadly devoid of content. Concomitant with the announcement, the CIM Forum blogosphere over there has seen its first settlers.

The page is also certain to be loaded with material quite soon, as this week marked the first-ever CIM Forum roundtable. The program featured representatives from Talisma and eVergance among others kicking around a few possibilities and such in exploring enterprise chat to deliver improved customer service and enhance communication efforts.

The next CIM Forum webinar will be held on August 10 at 2 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time (US EDT 9 a.m.) That webinar will address the topic “Developing and Maintaining a Successful Knowledgebase, with topics of discussion to include importance of corporate buy-in and support; real-world examples of project scopes and timelines; expansion of extant knowledgebases; and measuring user satisfaction.

The media information read similar to so many others we get here at CRMchump: Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. has outlined new software and hardware features that it plans to add to its PlayStation Portable during… (Sound of needle scratching across the already broken record.) What was that? New features for Play Station? Including VoIP? VoIP for PlayStation.

Right, now, we’re reporting… SCEI president Ken Kutaragi stated at a briefing for software developers in Tokyo that Sony was indeed planning three software updates during 2006. Update no. 1 is actually overdue by my calendar, having been planned for spring, but hasn’t yet left the cocoon. This update will add support for Macromedia Inc.’s Flash, a new camera and a Global Positioning System unit; the update also promises the ability to download audio podcasts, a Chinese font set.

The camera and GPS unit themselves will be launched in September and October, but, goes the reasoning, by adding software support earlier developers can write software to make use of the new hardware. The second software update adds video podcast support and expands the video profile for the universal media disc removable media that the PSP uses.

And finally, slated for winter (read: before Xmas), is the game set’s ability to boot games from Memory Stick media and VOIP telephony. The pair will enable software companies to offer games downloadable across the network and runable from the memory stick. The memory stick is promised to work with the camera module to enable the PSP VOIP handset capability or a video conferencing tool. The PSP includes a Wi-Fi adapter for network access.

Now this is what i want for the holiday … imagine actually calling in plays in NFL football. And o, the trash talking possibilities. Whoa. One has to wonder exactly who might be using this for video conferencing; i’ve got a pretty good imagination, though. Sony also announced plans to sell a cheaper version of the PSP in Europe and the U.S.

In Japan the handheld gaming device has been available in basic and value pack, but in other markets only the more expensive value pack with extras such as the memory stick memory have been available. The basic model will be available in Europe at approximately US $240 and in the United States at approximately US $199 both in late March.