We Blog CRM

The Maktoob business news reports that slightly oddly named LINKdotNET has introduce the “revolutionary” (yes, it’s certain to overturn governments, change consciousness, etc. etc.) Microsoft Customer Relationship Management. The CRM module promises to allow the ministry of state for administrative development call center to field, track and resolve citizen complaints, questions and suggestions regarding services offered under the E-Government project.

Using CRM to assist in CRM … hmmm. Interesting, but is it “revolutionary,” really? Citizens now need only to call 19468 or check out www.egypt.gov.eg. This CRM module is planned for implementation in services provided by the ministry of Health and the ministry of social solidarity.

Believe it or not, the sitting president is also able to make the implementation a political issue. Dr. Ahmed Darwish, minister of state for administrative development was quoted as stating, “President Mubarak’s election program includes the widening of the communication base between the government and the citizens to guarantee better services, promoting transparency, and interacting with them. This is what the project is truly focusing on, and what the ministry is setting the base for…” Of course, Mubarak and co. are also ostensibly taking time to “discuss” Israel and Palestine with a certain Bush guy.

Back in business land, the project could be considered an early move in the big play in the CRM industry of the “Middle East and North Africa region” company PR promised less than two weeks ago.

LINKdotNET is a subsidiary of Orascom Telecom Holding Company, a large-scale integrated telecommunications services provider in the Middle East region. LINKdotNET has regional offices in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and Islamabad, Pakistan. The company employs over 800. As firm PR would have it, “LINKdotNET is, in brief, the Region’s powerhouse that provides, maintains, develops and promotes internet solutions and services.”

Infrastructure software provider Autonomy Corporation plc had a good week this week, with company executives today announcing that Verdasys, a provider business process integrity solutions for information risk management, has signed an OEM agreement with Autonomy to integrate the company’s Extractor, Profiler and IDOL technologies into Digital Guardian, Verdasys’ flagship product.

Verdasys has integrated Autonomy’s the three products into the latest Digital Guardian module, known as Adaptive Content Inspection. The Autonomy products allow Verdasys to extend Digital Guardian’s data protection and business process integrity management capabilities by enabling Verdasys customers to search across over a whopping 250 file formats.

With Autonomy products, Verdasys hopes to provide customers to ability to “train” a system to recognize highly sensitive information, later applying it to Verdasys’ context-based data policies monitoring and controling data security and business process integrity.

Also announced today was the bestowal of an International Information Industry award on Autonomy. Autonomy representatives revealed that their TNA Global Search project undertaken with the UK’s National Archives had won the Best User Experience category at the International Information Industry Awards.

The award “recognises any project or service that has shown outstanding innovation in improving the user experience” and are hosted by Online Information 2006 and Information World Review.

With the award, TNA Global Search was recognized as an essential component of The National Archives’ project to digitize one of the largest collections in the world, ultimately “mak[ing] 1000 years of British history available online.” The Autonomy software provides a unified enterprise platform that can simultaneously query the Archives’ 30 million documents (!) across eleven disparate catalogues and databases.

Finally, perhaps least surprising but still most impressive, Autonomy earned a spot for the fourth year running in the “EContent 100.” EContent publishes the list annually, bantering it out among judges to describe the “the stand-out companies that demonstrate the winning strategies and solutions which define the digital content industry.”

In selecting Autonomy for the 2006 EContent 100, the panel of judges noted the company’s leading market share, thought- and technology-leadership, as well as innovation. EContent editor Michelle stated that "Autonomy, like the others on this year’s list, is a company that is having a significant impact on the quality, breadth and depth of our industry."

The entire list, “another fine list that represents the evolution of our industry, from one that began its sheltered life in the ivory towers of the academy to one that today finds itself pulsing through every corner of the wide world and, of course, the web,” can be read on the EContent website.

Verdasys is headquartered in Waltham, Mass., and its flagship product is Digital Guardian. Verdasys specializes in “Business Process Integrity,” with which the company seeks to serve and protect, i.e. “protect information, applications and processes essential to maintaining the market value, proprietary assets, intellectual property, [the] reputation and process integrity of a global enterprise.” Among Digital Guardian platform clientele are those in government agencies, and financial, pharmaceutical, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, and entertainment industries.

The National Archives is a British government department and an executive agency under the secretary of state for constitutional affairs. The archives employ over 600 in offices in Kew, Norwich, central London and Islington. The National Archives seeks to open up and encouraging the reuse of public sector information. As the UK government’s official archive, this mighty institution boasts mementos from 900 years of history from Domesday Book to the present; records ranging from parchment and paper scrolls through to recently created digital files and archived websites. Nice.

About EContent, this says so much: “EContent is dedicated to one of the most essential commodities any business has to offer – content.” Well put. The Wilton, Ct.-based online publication is a division of Information Today Inc. Its continuing mission: to clearly identify and explain emerging digital content trends; to report on and analyze strategies that will help readers navigate the content maze; and to boldly find “a clear path to profits and improved business processes.”

Autonomy’s customer base now numbers over 16,000 global companies and organizations including BAE Systems, Boeing, Ford, Daimler Chrysler, Shell, AOL, BBC, Reuters, Hutchison 3G, Ericsson, T-Mobile, Philips, Coca Cola, Kraft Foods, Nestle, Lloyds TSB, GlaxoSmithKline, KPMG, Citigroup, ABN AMRO, Deutsche Bank, Hewlett Packard, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the New York Stock Exchange, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy. Autonomy has over 300 OEM partners and more than 350 VARs and Integrators, numbering among them leading companies such as BEA, Citrix, EDS, EMC, IBM Global Services, Novell, Symantec, Vignette, Tibco, Stellent and Sybase.

Software evaluation firm Technology Evaluation Centers announces the launch of its ERP for Services online evaluation center. Roll up for the magical ERP tour: TEC recommends service companies visit the new ERP for Services evaluation center, enter their priorities into TEC decision-support engine eBestMatch, and compare ERP solutions.

TEC philosophy revolves around the belief that improper ERP implementation is “primarily a failure in the request for information (RFI) process, by which customers evaluate their shortlisted vendors.” TEC therefore promises its sophisticated tools for evaluating and selecting the right enterprise software solutions, particularly at the critical RFI stage, can help eliminate these kinds of problems.

For TEC’s purposes, Enterprise Resource Planning for Services is defined as an “enterprise-wide, integrated information system that manages the operations, services and resources for service organizations.”

Established in 1993, Technology Evaluation Center touts itself as “the leading on-line source for impartial technology and consulting evaluations.” TEC boasts some twenty-two on-line technology evaluation centers, including those in PPM, ERP, CRM, SCM and BI, offering critique on more than 800 software solutions.

The ERP for Services Evaluation Center is an on-line decision support system featuring research on the leading ERP for Services vendors. The ‘site covers solutions ranging from financials, project accounting, CRM, resource planning, performance management, portfolio management, project management, time management, expense reporting and project billing/costing to workflow, knowledge management, and collaboration.

Salesforce.com today announced that Magma Design Automation Inc. has extended Salesforce from sales to its four customer support contact centers in the U.S., Asia and Europe. Further, Salesforce numbers show that Magma achieved a nearly 10 percent increase in staff productivity thanks to the customer service benefits of the program.

Using the on-demand platform Apex, Magma developed custom applications in its Salesforce solution to track pre-sales activities, post-sales activities and concomitant product requests. The company also leveraged Apex to integrate its existing source code management application to enable tracking of all product management activities, for an integrated CRM solution.

Magma’s software for integrated circuit design is a company specialty and is recognized as a major player in semiconductor technology. Magma provides software for IC implementation, analysis, physical verification, characterization and programmable logic design. Magma is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif.

Salesforce.com is currently the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. Salesforce.com’s on-demand platform AppExchange allows the building of new applications, customization, and integration of the Salesforce suite. Salesforce.com today manages customer information for approximately 23,000 customers and approximately 501,000 paying subscribers including Advanced Micro Devices, America Online, Cendant Rental Car Group, Dow Jones Newswires, Nokia, Polycom and SunTrust.

Over in the UK, four more borough councils have signed contracts to improve their CRM systems.

Pendle Borough Council, Melton Borough Council, Scottish Borders Council have contracted ndl-metascybe to assist in integrating standalone applications into their main CRM system.

Melton Borough Council has asked ndl-metascybe to help enable the effective integration of a housing project it is currently undertaking. The ndl-metascybe integrationists will be helping Scottish Borders Council to put their environmental health facilities online, so that “residents can have a fast and effective way to advise the council on environmental and health issues.” And Pendle Borough Council will be using ndl-metascybe’s AWI tool set to integrate back office systems with front offices systems and enable document retrieval for local residents needing to find information on a specific property in the area.

Meanwhile, West Dunbartonshire Council is working with Graham Technology to provide advanced customer relationship management capabilities for its contact centre. This project, reports the council, directly addresses the Scottish Executive’s Modernising Government initiative, which has the objective of introducing business processes that will eventually deliver 80 percent of core service requests by citizens at the first point of contact.

Graham technology’s flagship software product, ciboodle, will initially provide the council’s contact centre staff with a central interface for enquiries concerning council tax, housing benefits, housing allocations, rental accounting and housing repairs. The phased deployment will be gradually expanded into other areas of the council.

Features of the deployment include the provision of contact management and work management capabilities, with additional measurement and reporting functionality also included. ciboodle’s multi-channel approach is also used extensively, with phone, email, scanned mail and face-to-face meetings all to be managed through its central interface.

Building on recently delivered integration with the council’s back office systems, including iWorld and Saffron, is a key component of the project. This integration enables ciboodle to access all of the relevant information required by a contact centre staff member to resolve a citizen’s enquiry at first contact.

Founded in 1986, Graham Technology specializes in contact centre software and services. Headquartered in Scotland, Graham now has nine global offices.

ndl-metascybe specializes in data integration solutions providing full bi-directional integration from mainframe to mobile using industry standards such as web services (e.g. SOA, XML).

That’s a wrap! Ideaca Knowledge Services, a Canadian-based technology consulting firm and gold-certified Microsoft partner, announced that Cineplex Entertainment LP, the largest motion picture exhibitor in Canada, has gone live with their implementation of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Ideaca’s Dynamics CRM solution seeks to allow Cineplex Entertainment employees a “holistic view of operations that consolidates several disparate customer databases into a single centralized repository.” Headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Cineplex Entertainment LP owns, leases, or has a joint venture interest in 132 theatres with 1,309 screens; Cineplex Entertainment rolled out Dynamics CRM nationally across media, corporate sales, group sales and gift certificate program groups.

Ideaca is a Canadian-based technology consulting firm that sells, develops and implements business software solutions. Ideaca employs over 140 information technology professionals in its Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver offices.

Now this is an excellently-named bunch. The folks at Xactly Corporation (oh, that’s Xcellent), an automated on-demand sales compensation management solutions provider, are publicizing recent market research findings showing that “sales performance management is a fast-developing category which is likely to be dominated by the leading sales incentive compensation management vendors.”

Gartner Inc. has some compelling words on the subject, as they always seem to do. The market research firm’s “Predicts 2007” series of studies reads, “A sales performance management market will coalesce around best-of-breed vendors largely originating from the sales incentive compensation management market. This is the domain that has developed into a sustainable, discrete market” and “SaaS has become the preferred model for add-on applications on top of an existing ERP/human resource management solution. Significant uptake of SaaS solutions has already occurred in recruitment and employee performance management.”

Xactly founder/president/CEO Christopher W. Cabrera is seeking to draw attention to his claim: “Xactly is the only vendor to offer a true multi-tenant on-demand sales compensation management application with extensive data management and analytics capabilities.”

That application is known as the Xactly Incent on-demand sales compensation management solution; the program is designed for sales and finance executives, compensation analysts, sales operations and sales professionals.

The holiday’s over for Oracle, too. Tomorrow, buzzes the news, Oracle will, in the words of say, Australian IT News, “launch a push to see customer relationship management software to small- and medium-sized businesses following a three-month delay to its program.”

Along the way to said push – originally scheduled for September, reports the News, was the high-profile “departure” of former Oracle Asia Pacific CRM head Paul Appleby. Reportedly, some 25 partners are on-board for the blitz and at one point, Oracle planned to employ 100 in the sales program. The only customer explicitly named in reports is the New Zealand subsidiary of 3M.

Meanwhile, techie reports out of New Zealand are saying that Oracle New Zealand has “released a new range of customer relationship management options to help small- and mid-sized businesses compete with larger ‘customer-centric’ organisations.

“Customers can chose either Siebel CRM Professional Edition On Premise, Siebel CRM On Demand hosted or a hybrid solution comprising the best of both. Oracle says the advantages of its CRM offerings are that they are tailored to the needs of sectors, can be deployed quickly and affordably, and can also be scaled easily through a transparent upgrade path.”

“Oracle in low-end CRM push” by Ben Woodhead can be read in full at Australian IT News. Ken Lewis’ “Oracle releases CRM range for SMBs” is available at M-Net.

Okay, it appears that pesky non-news producing four-day Thanksgiving holiday thing is over. The proof? Salesforce.com today announced the forthcoming release of a “Family of Multi-Tenant Integration Solutions” known as ApexConnect. Release date on this mammoth project was announced as Winter 2007.

Apex promises “revolutionizing” (there’s that word again) and “simplifying integration for CIOs and IT departments at customers of all sizes.” More specifically, ApexConnect seeks to provide a comprehensive set of services designed to address all major integration needs for CIOs and IT departments, providing for “everything from pre-integrated AppExchange applications to custom integration with the Apex API.”

The ApexConnect category will feature more than 25 partner solutions for integration between Salesforce and common back-office, legacy ERP and custom applications. Integration solutions are currently available from folks such as AboveAll, Business Objects, Bluewolf Group, Bridgewerx, Cast Iron, Composite Software, Data Backbone, Dynamic Ventures, forceAMP.com, ilink, Informatica, Integration Technologies Inc., InvisibleCRM (sweet name), Ipedo, Jitterbit, OpenAccess Software, OKERE, Pervasive, Tibco, Salescentrix, Scribe, Sesame Software, SGC Software, Synergex and TwoConnect.

ApexConnect includes the ConnectOut feature of the Apex on-demand platform, which employs reportedly the industry’s first on-demand outbound messaging API. The feature promises to allow other applications to be immediately notified of business events in Salesforce, the classic real-time function. The ConnectOut feature is currently scheduled to be available in conjunction with the release.

ApexConnect will also include the new ConnectOracle for integrating Salesforce with Oracle 11i, and a new ApexConnect category of integration partners on the AppExchange.

Using a nice simile, Salesforce.com chairman / CEO Marc Benioff said that “ApexConnect is a multi-tenant aspirin for the headache of application integration that today’s CIO’s have inherited from their predecessors.” (If a guy is talking aspirin on Monday, you know he had a good holiday. How else would you come up with that particular example? Good on him.)

Of course, this announcement gave Salesforce.com PR a prime opportunity to release some number. During salesforce.com’s third quarter, Apex API transactions surpassed CRM page views on its service for the first time ever. Reportedly, over half of 3.7 billion transactions (a number derived from the sum of page views and API calls through Salesforce and AppExchange applications) on Salesforce service were handled through the Apex API. Nice.

AppExchange, meanwhile, now boast 230 partners offering more than 430 applications. Built on the Apex on-demand platform, these partner applications are integrated with the salesforce.com suite of on-demand business applications. Company numbers show that 7,400 salesforce.com customers have deployed applications via AppExchange.

With ApexConnect, Salesforce.com is also offering native connectors for common applications. In addition to integration with Office, Outlook, Lotus Notes, and ConnectSAP for integrating Salesforce with SAP R3, the company is announcing ConnectOracle for Salesforce integration with Oracle 11i.

That’s right: ConnectOracle, a product that promises what you’d expect, the ability to “enable customers to seamlessly integrate Salesforce with their back-office Oracle 11i database to gain a completely integrated view of all relevant customer data in one place.”

ConnectOracle will be available upon request for a $12,000 annual fee for customers of Salesforce Enterprise Edition and Unlimited Edition.

Eastern Software Systems Pvt. Ltd., a provider of IT products and services, has entered into a distribution agreement with Cote d’Ivore-based Inova Systems D’Informations. (Now how often do you hear of a company based on that lovely bit of Earth?)

Under the agreement, Inova Systems will assist ESS in marketing its flagship ERP product "ebizframe" in Africa’s francophone nations of Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Mali, Mosambique, Senegal, South Africa and Togo.

Inova Systems will reportedly begin touting the product in the water and electric supply sectors early on, as in these industries the firm’s current presence lies strongest. And company brass has stated their intention to make inroads into the government sector. Inova Systems’ first goal is to add eight ebizframe customers for in the first year of operation with marketing assistance and support from ESS personnel.

ESS’ ebizframe is a mid-range, web-enabled ERP specifically targeted at the mid-market segment and based on Oracle 10g and Developer2000. In addition to Windows, ebizframe also runs on Red Hat Linux. The program is designed for use in manufacturing, distribution, trading and/or retail environments.

ESS has successfully implemented ebizframe in industry verticals including auto ancillaries, engineering, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, textiles, garments, hospitality, and retail in India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Mauritius.