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Acxiom Corporation company leader Charles D. Morgan together with Bill McDermott, President and CEO of SAP Americas, announced that the two companies will jointly market Acxiom product in delivering a single customer view within SAP’s CRM solution, mySAP Customer Relationship Management.

The philosophy has SAP clients and prospects leveraging Acxiom AbiliTec customer data integration technology and InfoBase products. By combining Acxiom’s consumer content with SAP’s marketing and sales functionality, the firms hope to assist companies in maximizing marketing and sales efficacy. The players had much to be proud of during SAP’s annual summer sales meeting where the announcement was made, touting SAP’s ability to deliver enterprise-wide customer information and Acxiom’s over thirty years in data, analytics and customer data integration.

SAP stockholders had to have been pleased with the announcement, as the day previous Acxiom released some fairly impressive financial results from the first quarter of fiscal year 2007. Year over year, first-quarter earnings per diluted share at Axciom increased 186 percent to US $0.20. Consolidated net earnings for the quarter increased 168 percent to US $17.8 million.

First-quarter revenue totaled us $336.7 million, representing an 8.5 percent increase over the same quarter last year. Other highlights of Acxiom’s first-quarter performance include reported revenue of US $336.7 million, up 8.5 percent from US $310.3 million in the first quarter a year ago; income from operations of US $36.3 million, a 143 percent increase compared to US $15.0 million in the first quarter last year; pre-tax earnings of US $29.2 million, up 173 percent from US $10.7 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2006; diluted earnings per share of US $.20, a 186 percent increase compared to US $.07 in the first quarter last year.

Services gross margin increased to 25.1 percent from 18.5 percent in the same quarter last year and from 23.7 percent in the sequential quarter ended March 31, 2006; computer and related expense continued to decline as a percentage of revenue. This key performance metric fell to 21.7 percent versus 25.0 percent in the first quarter last year; finally, share repurchases for the quarter were approximately 576,000 shares for a total value of approximately US $13.9 million.

On announcing the results, Morgan stated that “We are pleased with our performance in the first quarter, but we believe we have considerable opportunity to improve operating performance and deliver additional growth through execution of our long-term strategies.” Acxiom Corporation integrates data, services and technology to provide customer and information management solutions for larger companies.

Core components of Acxiom solutions include customer data integration technology, data, database services, IT outsourcing, consulting and analytics, and privacy leadership. Founded in 1969, Acxiom is headquartered in Bill Clinton’s old stomping grounds of Little Rock, Ark., and has office in the United States, Europe, Australia and China.

Meanwhile, the SAP guys have another trophy for the company mantelpiece. In what company PR sees as “further validation of its continued leadership in customer relationship management,” SAP representatives were able to close out the week on a partying note, having been named the 2006 Operational CRM Vendor of the Year in Asia Pacific by global growth consulting company Frost & Sullivan.

The award was bestowed at the 2006 Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific ICT Awards and marks the second consecutive year in which SAP has received this same honor. In judging the quality of performance in Asia Pacific in 2005, Frost & Sullivan experts together with a panel of independent judges comprising influential personalities and leaders in the Asia Pacific information and communications technology industry evaluated key players in that segment.

Criteria used included growth in license revenues; market position; growth in market share; product innovation; breadth of product and solutions; customer base; growth in customer base; and business and market strategy. Upon presentation of the award, Nitin Acharekar, head of enterprise research at Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific, said, "SAP has consistently invested in developing and expanding their presence in the CRM market.

This award is a reflection of CIOs’ belief in SAP’s vision and its ability to deliver on that vision in the CRM market." Company figures show that SAP can also lay claim to the title of “fastest-growing CRM vendor in the Asian Pacific” and includes customers such as Suzhou Lopsking Aluminum and Tsinghua Tong Fang Computer in China; Tata Motor Finance and Hero Honda in India; Epson and Korea Electric Power in South Korea; San Miguel Purefoods and Manila Water in the Philippines; the Queensland State Government and Cement Australia in Australia; and City Developments in Singapore.

Gartner has a message for all interested in CRM, and that message appears to be: Choose Sides Now. Gartner analysts say, despite the frankly crazy number of mergers and acquisitions in the CRM market as of late, no end in sight is seen for this mass consolidation.

Through 2008, says the latest Gartner analysis, one in three CRM software vendors will merge, acquire and / or be acquiring in both 2007 and 2008. The Gartner party line goes on to imply that such movement is good for consumers, arguing that mergers and acquisitions involving, say, Oracle, have led to significant reductions in software license fee prices and fees.

In publicly announcing some of the results, Gartner senior research analyst Chris Pang predicted that “The next wave of [activity in CRM mergers and acquisitions] will spark a burst of innovation in CRM application research and development from 2006 to 2010." At present, Pang opines, the industry is entering a more realistic phase of buying and industry positioning.

Martin Schneider, an enterprise software analyst at The 451 Group, kicked in his two cents over at CRMBuyer.com as well. Since the lead driver behind much merger and acquisition is the desire to build out functionality into a suite, “even the major suite providers will continue to add onto their capabilities,” he argued. "We will see everyone from SAP and Oracle on down either making vertical plays or making one-off acquisitions to improve a certain feature like marketing or e-mail management.”

While the big guys therefore would seem to have their agenda set (Buy! Buy!), there is only one certainty for the small fish in the CRM sea: Nothing is certain. Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner, Inc. is a combination of four branches devoted to the gathering and analyzing of “technology-related insight”: Gartner Research, Gartner Executive Programs, Gartner Consulting and Gartner Events. Founded in 1979, Gartner now has 3,900 associates (including 1,200 research analysts and consultants) in 75 countries worldwide and serves 10,000 organizations.

Nuance Communications, Inc., speech and imaging solutions provider, today announced that its software solutions are put to good use in powering an innovative speech portal handling over 30,000 customer enquiries daily for Telekom Austria. The project was implemented by CreaLog, a solution house for voice portals, CTI solutions and unified messaging for telecommunications call centers, banks, insurance companies, and utility companies.

Through the Nuance-powered service, Telekom Austria customers now receive the information with everything delivered through the caller’s voice commands and dynamic, computer-generated responses. The system, after testing, was then implemented by CreaLog in three different locations, all controllable by the caller’s voice. Each portal uses Nuance’s text-to-speech and speech recognition software.

The new Nuance voice portal solution is called upon to deliver flexibility and malleability in configuration and dialog design; integration of CTI with the extant networked Aspect ACD solution; and high accuracy in text-to-speech or speech synthesis. At present, Telekom Austria customer care regional manager Alois Miedl said that the Nuance application “means that we can handle volumes of around 30,000 customers [on our hotlines] every day…”

Added Peter Hauser, Nuance Communications general manager / senior vice president, International, “we are very pleased to be part of such a high-profile and integral project.” Nuance’s previous big claim to headlines prior to this week was the firm’s implementation of Europe’s largest mass-calling platform for the Vodafone company ARCOR, the second largest fixed-line telco provider in Germany, in April. Telekom Austria is the largest telecommunications company in Austria and also one of the country’s top five leading corporations.

Telekom Austria managed revenues for financial year 2005 were approximately €4.4 billion (US $5.6 billion) and employed around 15,600 employees. CreaLog is the leading provider of Voice Portal solutions in Europe, with references in 16 countries. CreaLog’s voice XML-based and web-controlled voice portals are currently employed at 320 firms in thirty sectors.

Last week, Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2, a database design and extraction, transformation and load (aka ETL) tool to assist in managing the lifecycle of data and metadata.

Also announced was that the core database design and ETL capabilities of Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 are now included with Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition, and Standard Edition One at no additional cost.

Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 promises enhanced features designed to improve data quality including name and address cleansing, and de-duplication functionality. Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 also seeks to be able to design relational and OLAP database structures, easing in data storage in a common Oracle Database repository while simultaneously offering a business intelligence tools such as Oracle Business Intelligence Suite and spreadsheets.

In addition, new connectors are available to assist in the transformation of data from disparate application repositories. The Oracle Warehouse Builder Enterprise ETL Option seeks to support multi-environment deployments typical of enterprise data warehouse projects by enabling improved performance and scalability of ETL processes. The connecters are all about extraction of data and can even sometimes target data to and from their core CRM and ERP applications including the Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft Enterprise.

A free evaluation version of Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 is available at www.oracle.com. The Oracle Warehouse Builder Enterprise ETL option is priced at US $10,000 per CPU or US $200 per user. Oracle Warehouse Builder Data Quality starts at US $15,000 per CPU or US $300 a user. Finally, the Oracle Warehouse Builder Connectors for the Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, and SAP are priced at US $20,000 per warehouse builder connecter.

This would typically be the space in which a blurb would be running describing firms mentioned in the blog entry running above. Here quoted verbatim is the Oracle story according to that firm’s PR: Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world’s largest enterprise software company.

Questex Media Group’s ICCM Conference & Expo announced last week that eighteen new exhibitors have committed to participate in this year’s event. This year’s ICCM Conference & Expo will be the nineteenth annual gathering for the global contact center community.

The Questex event will be held August 14-16 at Chicago’s Navy Pier. New exhibitors include Accutone, Inc.; Bell Industries; Co-Nexus, Inc.; ContractXchange; Fundacion Exporter; IBM; Info USA; Informiam; Integrity Systems; IQ Services; LiveVox, Inc.; Merced Systems; Onyx Software; Perimeter Technology; Teleformix; Ticomix; TTC Marketing Solutions and UmeVoice, Inc.

IBM and Oracle/Telephony@Work are gold sponsors of the event; Bell Industries, ContractXchange.com, Transera, and Witness Systems are silver sponsors. ICCM keynote sessions include author David G. Thomson on some themes from his “Blueprint to a Billion: 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth” and IBM Global Business Services’ Philip Grosch discussing “The Customer Focused Enterprise.” Newton, Mass.-headquartered ICCM is produced by Questex Media Group, Inc., a diversified business-to-business integrated media provider.

Questex is involved in industries including technology, beauty, travel, hospitality, leisure, home entertainment, industrial services and specialty services through its publications, events, interactive media and integrated marketing services. The company owns some 23 trade publications, 50 websites, 25 conferences and tradeshows. Questex employees more than 400 employees in offices in North America, South America, Asia and Europe.

EmailLabs, email marketing solutions provider announced a pair of appointments and a promotion kicker. Stefan Pollard was named director of consulting services and Akila Krishnamurthi manager of customer support. Lena Waters has been promoted to director of marketing. Pollard joins the firm from email trust authority Habeas, an email trust authority.

Prior to Habeas, Pollard built and executed email marketing campaigns at E-LOAN and Cybergold.com. Pollard will be putting his seven years’ worth of email marketing experience in advising EmailLabs clients in evaluating email marketing programs, training and return-on-investment strategies. Pollard is a graduate of California State University at Hayward, with an MBA in computer information systems and a BS in marketing.

Krishnamurthi joins EmailLabs from Oracle and Siebel, where she was a support team manager. She has seven years’ worth of experience in customer support and has twice received Siebel Support’s customer satisfaction award. Krishnamurthi has a master’s degree in computer applications from Bharathiar University. Lena Waters moves up from marketing manager to marketing director. In the post, Waters will be responsible for messaging, advertising, driving demand and lead-generation programs.

Highlights on her CV at EmailLabs include the establishement of print, online, search and email advertising programs across several vertical markets, and implementation of a reporting matrix that measures and improves the effectiveness of EmailLabs’ own programs.

Waters was credited with directly increasing sales leads by more than 150 percent in 2005. Not bad. Waters nine years’ worth of experience in business-to-business marketing and holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Northern British Columbia, which is to say that Waters has a UNBC BC.

EmailLabs is a provider of email marketing solutions to agencies, publishers and marketing, sales and customer service departments of middle-market and Global 2000 companies. The EmailLabs email marketing platform is provided as an web-based ASP service, and is easily customized and integrated with a company’s web site, sales force automation and CRM technologies.

The company provides email marketing solutions to more than 550 companies, including Nokia, Agilent, PalmSource and Jupitermedia. A subsidiary of J.L. Halsey Corporation, EmailLabs was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif.

After a quiet period of about six months, Sugar CRM Inc. is back in the news. The provider of commercial open source customer relationship management software today announced the beta release of Sugar 4.5. Originally due to appear in June, Sugar delayed the release to polish it up, explained Sugar CRM chief executive officer John Roberts said.

Sugar 4.5 is touted by company PR as “one of the most substantial application updates since the company launched two years ago.” Sugar 4.5 features a few new functions such as personalized views, internationalization and support for Microsoft Windows Server products. Sugar 4.5 will also include full support for multibyte characters used in languages such as Chinese.

The result of five months of technical collaboration with Microsoft Corporation, Sugar 4.5 seeks to offer improved support for Microsoft’s internet information services active directory and Microsoft SQL Server. Sugar 4.5 uses AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology throughout the application, and AJAX is employed extensively within the redone Sugar Studio. Ajax technology is generally designed to make personalization easier.

Ajax, or asynchronous JavaScript and extensible markup language, is the collective term used to describe a group of software development tools and standards that assist Web applications in trying to match the efficacy of their desktop counterparts. Indeed, Roberts, clearly search for the correct words explained Sugar 4.5 with “We’ve completely AJAXed pretty much the entire user interface so you can drag and drop components to fit what makes sense for you as an individual.”

Though Sugar PR (and much media coverage) indicates that Sugar 4.5 is the eighth major release for the company in two years, it has been six months since the last major release and 4.5 is the first SugarCRM release since its partnership with Microsoft was announced earlier this year. SugarCRM provides commercial and free open-source versions of Sugar. With its commercial Professional and Enterprise versions, the vendor charges for technical support and a variety of services.

A hosted version of Sugar Professional costs from US $40 per user per month, while the on-premise version costs from US $239 per user per year. As for the future, SugarCRM hints at short-, medium- and long-term plans in the field. SugarCRM will also release a new Sugar distribution under the Microsoft community license beginning with Sugar 4.5, part of the Microsoft Shared Source Initiative, a program through which Microsoft shares source code.

The Windows distribution is the third optimized version of Sugar, following versions for the LAMP (an open-source Web development platform based on Linux, Apache, MySQL and programming languages PHP, Perl or Python) stack and Apple Computer’s Mac OS X. And here’s what’s not happening in the future: Roberts stressed over and over again in press coverage that Windows distribution of Sugar 4.5 does not mean the company is moving away from open-source. “We’re not leaving Linux,” said Roberts. “We’re big Linux supporters, but at the same time what’s really important is to listen to the requests of our community.

SQL server was a high priority.” SugarCRM ambitiously announced plans to keep their pace of releases regular, with a major software release promised every six to seven months. In the world according to Roberts, we could all be Sugar terminal cases: The company has plans to expand beyond the customer relationship management applications. Roberts suggested that Sugar 5.0, slated for December release, will include order-management functions and will augment existing CRM applications with features such as enhanced marketing automation.

The growing popularity of SugarCRM is oft-mentioned among the press corps, with downloads doubling from 400,000 to 800,000 in six months and a Microsoft partnership highlighting its growth. Since that time, Sugar Open Source has been downloaded over 800,000 times in 41 languages. More than 5,000 developers have contributed over 220 extensions to a community of over 15,000 members. SugarCRM today serves over 800 commercial customers. 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.

The Dragon is out: Representatives of Nuance Communications, Inc., provider of speech and imaging solutions, today unleashed Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical version 9, an upgrade to the firm’s speech recognition solution designed specifically for medical professionals.

According to Nuance’s numbers, Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical 9 converts up to 160 words’ worth of speech per minute into text, and the new release is reported to “[boost] accuracy by as much 30 percent, moving accuracy levels up to 99 percent, and also removes [a problem] that has typically created resistance to trying speech recognition – ‘training’ or ‘enrollment.’”

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 is purported to be the first-ever desktop speech recognition product to eliminate up-front training yet deliver accurate results from the go. Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical also adds speech to virtually all Microsoft Windows applications. Enhanced network support for version 9 should allow users to access Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical from any workstation, an LAN, or thin-client Citrix terminals.

Other new features and improvements especially pumped are improved system accuracy; enterprise features in an effort to ease administration; further optimization for medical environments; specific integration with Microsoft Office, Outlook, Internet Explorer, Corel WordPerfect, Mozilla Firefox, and Mozilla Thunderbird; fourteen medical specialty vocabularies covering sixty subspecialties, plus customization tools; and greater mobility via diction to mobile devices such as digital recorders, Palm Tungsten and Tablet PCs for automatic transcription when synched with the PC. The new release also allows network administrators to install and manage Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical over a network. The suggested retail price for Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical 9 is US $1199.

HP stockholders got over humpday last week upon hearing the news that their firm had signed a definitive agreement to purchase Mercury Interactive Corp., an IT management software and services company. The cash tender offer was US $52 per share, for an enterprise value of approximately US $4.5 billion.

Experts see the acquisition as instantly establishing HP’s portfolio of IT management software as a valid option for the large-scale operation. Did I write “large-scale”? No less than HP chief executive officer / president would agree: "Today,” he said, “we are combining two market-leading businesses to create the most powerful management software portfolio in the industry. … We expect this important acquisition to deliver significant value for our shareholders." And Mercury chief executive officer / president agrees: "Together, HP and Mercury instantly become the industry’s premier provider of business technology optimization (BTO) software.”

HP’s business plan reportedly seeks to combine the relative strengths of HP OpenView systems, network and IT service management software with Mercury’s strength in application management, application delivery, IT governance and service-oriented architecture governance. "HP’s software strategy is to be the clear leader in end-to-end enterprise IT management," said Thomas E. Hogan, senior vice president, Software, HP.

The Mercury acquisition is expected to increase HP Software business to over US $2 billion in annual revenue. HP financial forecasters told shareholders that the combined HP Software business will deliver revenue growth of approximately 10 percent to 15 percent and an operating margin of approximately 20 percent in fiscal year 2008.

The acquisition will be conducted by means of a tender offer for all of the outstanding Mercury shares, followed by merger of Mercury with an HP subsidiary. HP and Mercury today held webcasts and / or conference calls detailing the deal.