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According to NetWorld.com, IP PBX maker Shoretel is about to release a new product that promise to integrate workflow software with phone systems. The Shoretel Salesforce.com integration package includes a software developers’ program designed to encourage the integration of third-party and Shoretel software. Another program reportedly performs the integration.

In the end, Shoretel’s VoIP will be integrated with Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management package. Shoretel representatives have also announced its upcoming public release of its “Custom Developer Services,” which promises pretty much what it advertises: application integration on request. This program is designed for use by small- to mid-sized businesses, and with the offering Shoretel unabashedly enters into competition with firms such as Avaya, Cisco and Nortel. Shoretel also has added emergency-911 notification application to its phone system.

When 911, the U.S.’ emergency services telephone number, is dialed, an extension on the PBX network is notified. Shoretel Salesforce.com Integration costs US $100 per client seat. E911 Notification Application is US $2,000 for up to five clients and US $5,000 for six or more.

Not since Titanic has a behemoth won this many awards on the same day.

Workforce optimization software and services provider Witness Systems today announced its reception of top honors for innovation in workforce optimization and IP recording. The IP Contact Center Technology Pioneer Awards was bestowed by Customer Inter@ction Solutions. The awards honor IP contact center technologies “with the most admirable feature sets and best track records of dramatically improving the operations of today’s call centers.”

Meanwhile, a twin killing was completed with Communications Solutions also acknowledging the Witness’ Impact 360 IP Recording solution with a product of the year award. This award is given to companies that “have demonstrated excellence in technological advancement and application refinement.”

Finally, Impact 360 was selected as a winner of the Customer Inter@ction Solutions 2006 CRM Excellence Award and was designated as a recipient of Customer Inter@ction Solutions’ Lifetime Achievement Award. Selected by the publication’s editors, this award recognizes companies and individuals that “are dedicated to advancing the success and reputation of today’s call center industry.”

Convergys Corporation, a customer care, human resources, and billing services provider, announced a huge five-year professional services outsourcing contract with VIBO Telecom, Taiwan’s no. 1 3G mobile operator, to manage VIBO’s back office operations. Under terms of the contract, Convergys will continue to manage all aspects of VIBO’s customer care and billing systems. Originally, the firms had signed a one-year deal in 2005.

As part of the earlier agreement, Convergys implemented and integrated its Infinys rating and billing and mediation software with VIBO’s third party CRM, activation, provisioning, and partner management platforms. Convergys’ services framework includes managed services, business consulting, technology services, and staff augmentation.

A member of Standard & Poor’s 500, Convergys Corporation is a provider of customer care, human resources, and billing services. Headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, Convergys has more than 65,000 employees in 75 customer contact centers, three data centers, and other facilities in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

Data access solutions provider McDATA Corporation has a new point of pride, and a new benchmark for others to live up to. McRepresentatives were happy to announce that CRM consulting firm Ambient Consulting has placed their McCompany atop the list of high industry standards for call center customer support.

Indeed, Ambient Consulting managing director David Reiss stated emphatically that “Other call centers would be well-served to follow McDATA’s example.” According to Ambient consultants, who evaluated call center efficiency, employee knowledge, process / procedures and overall customer satisfaction, McDATA’s call care “consistently exceeded industry benchmarks for both peer companies and best-in-class call centers.”

McDATA showed exceptional scores in Customer Satisfaction and First Call Resolution categories. In overall caller satisfaction, McDATA scored 38 percent higher than the industry average and 18 percent higher than top performers’ average. McDATA scored 33 percent higher than the industry average and 8 percent higher than the top performer’s average for first call resolution.

McDATA is a leading provider of data access solutions, specializing in building, globally connecting, optimizing and centrally managing data infrastructures across SAN, MAN and WAN environments.

Another neat-looking webinar is on tap for all those of you into that sort of voodoo (i know you’re out there). Jacada Ltd., a leading provider of unified desktop and process optimization solutions for customer service operations, today announced the webinar entitled “Unified Agent Desktop: The Key to Improving Customer Service Effectiveness.” “Unified Agent Desktop” will feature Yankee Group analyst Sheryl Kingstone as featured speaker. Kingstone will speak on customer service operations and the need for unified desktop solutions.

The topic kicks off from a recent Yankee Group study, which showed that 72 percent of contact centers have failed to achieve a single view of their customer despite significant investments in customer relationship management solutions. Whoa. Kingstone will be elaborating further on the survey’s results, strengths and weaknesses in deployment, and associated topics. The webinar will take place on September 6 at 6pm Greenwich Meridian Time. Registration may be done at www.jacada.com.

Sheryl Kingstone is the Yankee Group program manager for the customer-centric strategies decision service, a service designed to assist in improving customer loyalty and acquisition. Kingstone researches and writes on top trends in marketing, sales, CRM application and delivery strategies. Headquartered in Boston, Mass., Yankee Group calls itself “the expert in navigating the global connectivity revolution.”

Yankee Group has consulting offices in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia-Pacific. Jacada is a provider of unified desktop and process optimization solutions for customer service operations. The firm’s flagship offerings are Jacada WorkSpace, a unified desktop for contact center agents, and Jacada Fusion, a process optimization for customer service centers.

Founded in 1990, Jacada’s clientele base today includes over 1200 customers worldwide. Jacada has offices in Atlanta, Georgia; Herzliya, Israel; London, England and Munich, Germany.

Coremetrics representatives today announced that apparel cataloger Blair Corporation has chosen Coremetrics’ web analytics platform to handle streamlined reporting for multiple sources of data. Blair will use the Coremetrics tools in the customer service sphere, and the visualization tools for its e-commerce website www.blair.com.

Coremetrics’ integration with the IBM Websphere Commerce Suite, e-mail service provider Silverpop and SAS Marketing Automation played “a major role” in Blair’s decision. Coremetrics is a provider of on-demand web analytics and precision marketing solutions.

Based in San Mateo, Calif., Coremetrics now services over 600 brands and takes pride in its status as the integrated web analytics solution for IBM WebSphere Commerce. The company is privately held with funding from Accel Partners, FTVentures, and Highland Capital Partners.

System integration software provider D-Tools, Inc. and Tigerpaw Software, Inc., a leading developer of end-to-end business management solutions, announced jointly yesterday that they have completed the integration of their products D-Tools System Integrator 5 and Tigerpaw CRM+ to form one solution for system integrators and custom installers of low-voltage systems.

Applications covered by the new product include design, estimation, documentation, project management, CRM, and business process optimization applications. D-Tools System Integrator 5 is assist users in generating data-driven floor plans, schematics, line diagrams, functional views, and visual proposals for commercial and residential projects. The Tigerpaw CRM+ program features applications in contact management, marketing automation, sales/pipeline management, service management, technician scheduling and dispatching, and inventory control.

The combined product promises to allow system integrators to create designs, proposals and sales orders using D-Tools SI 5, then convert those sales orders into projects within Tigerpaw CRM+. Invoices can also be generated along project timelines. Other functionality provided by the product includes complete service department automation; inventory management; change order management; subcontractor management; exchanges and RMAs; serial number tracking; and service contract management.

The partnership between the two firms began one year ago. The collaboration will be presented to the public at the CEDIA Expo 2006 in Denver, September 14-17. (In booth #126, to be exact.)

Quadrant Software has announced completion of the integration of its IntelliChief content management system with the product formerly known as MAPICS. (It’s now called Infor’s ERP XA.) Praiseworthily and refreshingly enough, Quadrant PR states that the main goal of combining the two solutions is cut down on paper use.

Quadrant Software unveiled the IntelliChief content management system in September 2005, and ultimately built support for Infor’s ERP XA product into IntelliChief. IntelliChief seeks to enable customers to automate tasks such as three-way matching of invoices, POs and bills of lading; indexing and archiving documents for later retrieval; and designing and printing checks.

IntelliChief also supports Positive Pay reports for electronic money transfers. IntelliChief runs on Windows servers, but it was designed to work with iSeries systems and iSeries data. The suite is composed of the ScanChief, PortalChief, WorkflowChief, ViewChief, and StorageChief modules. IntelliChief is designed for mid- to large-sized organizations, with implementation approximately US $50,000 on average.

With industry insiders and pundits circling like buzzards to proclaim the death of software solutions, it should come as no surprise that at least one market Nostradamus can imagine the demise of the ERP market. All over the online newswire lately is reaction to the proclamation by AMR Research’s Bruce Richardson that “rapid adoption of service-oriented architectures will lead to the end of the ERP market as we know it.” Said e-media reaction has ranged from “interesting” to “unthinkable.”

Richardson begins with recent work from Oracle and SAP in the web-service enabling sphere. SAP, he says, recently announced their 500th enterprise service solution but that they may need to provide “up to 30,000 web services in order to fully web-service the whole suite across all the verticals served,” a seemingly impossible number. Richardson’s neo-sci-fi timeline has SAP and Oracle customers giving up on those firms’ ERP applications, instead contracting “low-cost Indian or Eastern European integrators to build custom composite applications.” (This feels quite plausible, with the amount the giants are plunking into education and development on the Subcontinent and the untapped, low-cost, high-expertise potential of the former communist states.)

By 2012, the old ERP backbones that had supported all the new independent work would simply become too expensive to maintain. By this time, figures Richardson, the vendors of applications in India and the former Soviet bloc will have discovered their own way to build business process platforms. Naturally, these would be cheaper. Richardson does see some big boys making some moves to prevent his future from happening.

In July consulting, services and outsourcing firm Accenture announced their Accenture Technology Lab for SOA Innovation, representing a three-year, US $450 million investment. The lab is designed to “accelerate the development of SOA applications customized for specific industries, including healthcare and financial services.” Partners in scenario building will be BEA, IBM together with – get this – Oracle and SAP. Strange bedfellows, indeed. Accenture is also helping Oracle develop an Oracle Innovation Center specifically built around SOA technology.

One Accenture exec informed Richardson that Accenture would be taking on at least 250 SOA projects this year. If this number seems miniscule, it is (and Richardson admits it), but Richardson’s tea leaf reading calls it a sign. Plus, Accenture also purchased life insurance market software and services provider NaviSys, with which Accenture hopes to build a life insurance process platform. Richardson goes on to tout a firm or two, young Workday in particular, that are “eying the ERP replacement market.” The analyst teases readers with hints that Workday’s future plans for writing software are “based exclusively on metadata.”

Unfortunately, “legal documents prevent me from disclosing [Workday’s] product plans and strategy,” he writes. Speculation is great fun (especially if you’re not too heavily invested in, say, Oracle’s success), and though Richardson invites readers to check out his article in 2010, he’s apparently not taking any literal bets. However, the AMR mouthpiece certainly seems to be on to something when he says that “SOA will make today’s ERP systems look like yesterday’s mainframe apps.”

So don’t get too too comfortable with your present system. The article, entitled “ERP Doomsday Scenario: Death by SOA?” is available at http://www.amrresearch.com/Content/View.asp?pmillid=19699&pubid=2726&custid=381817.

Bruce Richardson is a trends analyst with almost 25 years of experience in the field, almost 20 years of it with AMR Research and has covered the SAP market since 1991. He is responsible for spearheading new market research and contributing to the AMR analysis of leading market trends in areas including ERP, supply chain management, service-oriented architectures, and software-as-a-service.

Founded in 1986, AMR Research is an advisory firm focused on supply chain, enterprise applications, and infrastructure. The AMR Research Market Analytix Report Series provides technology vendors with targeted marketing and competitive information on key application markets of ERP, SCM, CRM, procurement and sourcing, PLM, and HCM.

CDC Software division Ross Systems today announced that BioConvergence LLC, a contract service provider for the life sciences industries, has deployed Ross’ ERP solution as its operational system of record. Ross was also happy to state that the implementation came through on time and – believe it or not – 15 percent under budget.

Ross ERP seeks to assist BioConvergence in streamlining inventory management, managing financial areas and processing transactional data. Interestingly enough, it was another bit of high tech that had BioConvergence looking to upgrade its ERP system. With the addition of a new storage facility for frozen, refrigerated and room temperature Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient product and raw materials, BioConvergence suddenly found a need for a properly focused ERP solution. BioConvergence is a contract service provider that manufactures and stores products for other life sciences companies.

BioConvergence representatives also confidently stated that they are expecting rapid growth in the near future, always a popular reason to deploy a new system. BioConvergence is a private business that partners with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to supply services such as cGMP-compliant storage and logistics, cGMP parenteral product development and consulting services to move new drugs from discovery to commercialization.

Company PR also wishes it known that BioConvergence is an all woman-owned firm. I like it already. Ross Systems, Inc. is a solutions provider specifically focused on the food and beverage, life sciences, chemicals, metals and natural products industries and has been implemented by more than 1,200 customer companies worldwide. CDC Software is a provider of enterprise software applications designed to assist organizations in delivering a superior customer experience.

The CDC Software product suite includes Pivotal CRM, c360 CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform development tools, Ross enterprise resource planning, Ross supply chain management, IMI warehouse management, order management, Platinum China human resource solutions, and business analytics. CDC Software now boasts more than 5,000 customers worldwide in the manufacturing, financial services, health care, home building, real estate, and wholesale and retail distribution industries.