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CRM solutions provider Business IT Professionals (a.k.a. Biz IT Pro) has announced its new partnership with PYA Wise Software Solutions, a provider of Microsoft-based management solutions. By partnering, the two firms will focus on developing customizable technology solutions to churches nationwide.

Now here’s a gauntlet thrown religiously: “The applications we have developed have the potential to revolutionize the way churches are organized,” said PYA co-managing director Bill Walker.

PYA Wise Software Solutions is a Florida-headquartered provider of Microsoft-based financial, customer relationship and supply-chain management solutions for small- and mid-market companies.

Mincom, a software solutions provider for asset-intensive industries, today announced the launch of Mincom Smart Billing. Smart Billing is an Advanced Metering Infrastructure (a.k.a. “smart metering”)-enabled solution for dynamic pricing, billing and customer relationship management.

Mincom Smart Billing is built on Service Oriented Architecture and automates real-time business processes such as billing and customer care.

Mincom Limited is an international company based in Brisbane, Australia, with over 25 years’ experience in providing business solutions to industries such as mining, utilities, transport, defense and government in 41 countries. Mincom employs over 1,300 in 18 offices on all six continents.

Relationals, customer relationship management and sales force automation solutions provider for the newspaper industry, announced today that The E.W. Scripps Company has selected Relationals as its company-wide CRM platform to streamline sales processes across its advertising teams.

Based on reported positive results at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Stuart, Fla.-based Treasure Coast Newspapers, and the Evansville (Ind.) Courier & Press, Scripps will now roll out Relationals to all of its newspaper properties. Scripps newspapers will use Relationals to "execute opportunity-generating telesales and email campaigns, enable precise account activity monitoring, integrate sales efforts with existing business systems, and consistently collaborate around (sic?) the sales process."

The E.W. Scripps Company bills itself as a diverse and growing media enterprise with interests in national cable networks, newspaper publishing, broadcast television stations, interactive media, and licensing and syndication. The company’s portfolio includes daily and community newspapers in seventeen markets and the Washington-based Scripps Media Center, home to the Scripps Howard News Service.

In common parlance, Scripps is perhaps best known for its sponsorship of the national spelling bee.

Representatives of Houston, Texas-based The Rand Group today announced the official launch of a Microsoft Dynamics Customer Relationship Management practice. Rand Group is solutions provider specializing in integration and deployment of Microsoft product.

In the practice, the Rand Group will be employing its expertise in Microsoft platform technologies including data warehousing, business intelligence and business process automation technologies.

The Rand Group recently achieved a Microsoft CRM 3.0 certification, which allows the group claim to the title of “premier Microsoft CRM 3.0 Partner in Houston and the entire Southeast Texas region.” Insert your own line about Texas here.

Consona CRM today announced the release of Onyx Adaptive CRM Version 6.0, KNOVA v. 7.1, and the interestingly-named Million Handshakes v. 4.5. The trio of pieces are the first fruits of joint labor between Consona and the now-subsumed Onyx Software Corporation, which was acquired from Consona roughly ten months ago.

The Consona CRM release promises a full suite of functionality, including sales, service, support, and marketing automation; service resolution and knowledge management; business process management; and business intelligence.

Enhancements touted in Onyx v. 6.0 include a SQL generation framework, new calendar functionality, a robust user interface configuration framework, and a comprehensive group collaboration tool named “Assignment Studio.”

KNOVA v. 7.1 is a service resolution and knowledge management solution; Million Handshakes v. 4.5 is a marketing automation and customer dialog solution from new technology partner Million Handshakes. Both are established atop the core Onyx CRM solution.

Meanwhile, Consona snagged another partner in Camisa Technologies; the two come together in an ERP-CRM integration partnership. Isn’t that nice?

The partnership seeks to deliver strengthened integration between Made2Manage ERP and CRM front-office system Sage SalesLogix. The new integration offering has been christened Camisa Connect and was reportedly developed by experienced integration specialists working directly with current Made2Manage customers.

CRM solutions provider Mindshare Technologies has announced that Firestone Complete Auto Care and Tires Plus have selected Mindshare’s Voice of the Customer solution. Voice is 24/7 and web-based reporting providing metrics such as store rankings, trends, and goal performance. Reporting includes customer voice, text comments, and customer call back tracking.

BFS Retail & Commercial Operations, LLC is headquartered in Bloomingdale, Ill., and is said to operate the largest number of company-owned automotive retail generalist stores in the world, with over 2,200 locations across the United States and Canada.

Go ahead, Google it.

You did, didn’t you?

No wonder one story dominated any remotely connected industry media today.

In the spirit of “My enemy’s enemy is my friend,” the breathtaking whispers say that Google is currently in discussions with Salesforce.com to design some sort of alliance against mutual foe, the biggest of them all, Microsoft.

The story appears to have been broken by the Wall Street Journal under the headline “Google, Salesforce.com Weigh Alliance to Battle Microsoft.” Reported in the piece was that some results from the discussions will be revealed “within the next few weeks.” (Tentative, ain’t it?)

The WSJ article went on to hint at what “could be a Web-based offering that integrates some of Google’s online services such as email and instant-messaging with those of Salesforce.com, whose customer-relationship management tools help salespeople track their accounts.”

Salesforce’s share prices rose by 5 percent, or $2.14, to $47.94 following the breaking of the story.

Over at the day job – a.k.a. the Budapest Business Journal – we recently scored an interview with Oracle Hungary CEO Peter Fuzes. An edited version of the piece in which Fuzes discusses Oracle’s European status as no. 2, acquisitions in the region, and ERP programs, runs below. Thanks to reporter Robert Higginson and the generally fabulous BBJ editorial team.

BBJ: What expectations does Oracle have for Hungary given that it is a small market with SAP far out in front?

Fuzes: We are experiencing a very strong consolidation wave not only in Hungary but also on the overall world IT market. Customers are looking for solutions from IT vendors that will keep them up with new innovations. They are looking for stability and vendors who will follow the technical improvements and can offer a visionary approach in terms of new IT architecture and IT solutions. We can see that small companies are struggling with providing customers a complete vision for the future and the capability to execute it. Oracle is one of the market leaders that’s acquiring and also growing through its own development, providing customers with the features and functionality that they need. This is the same in Hungary, where the market is becoming consolidated around a few larger companies.

BBJ: How many larger companies do you think the market has room for?

Fuzes: Globally, there are four major companies playing a strong role in IT: ourselves, SAP, Microsoft and IBM. In Hungary we see the same trend whereby local systems integrators are acquiring smaller ones. Companies like Freesoft and KFKI have played this role in Hungary.

BBJ: Oracle has bought many firms, especially in the US, but how can you make your solutions take account of European- and Hungarian-specific issues?

Fuzes: If it’s a very special solution for one particular, we rather work with a local partner company to tailor the solution to the requirements. The acquisitions we’ve made have focused on technology or customer-oriented solutions but not only for one country. When Oracle makes an acquisition it’s not for one specific feature but rather a solution that can be used by many companies. We’ve acquired more than 30 companies in the past two years and it’s required a very effective internal machine to integrate those companies into Oracle.

BBJ: Local ERP firms see their niche in providing locally specific solutions that could be added onto a big company’s system. Do you intend to cooperate with them or fight them and offer all solutions yourself?

Fuzes: What we’re doing with a number of local companies is to offer them our core solution and if they have a module that’s specific to the Hungarian market we then work with our partner who offers it to the customer as a total solution.

BBJ: Would you work with companies that are direct competitors in that they offer their own full ERP suite?

Fuzes: Yes, we see the opportunity in working with such companies. The customer needs infrastructure, the operating system, database, ERP and other solutions. It’s quite possible a company would provide the ERP solution to the customer and we put a reporting structure on top of it that provides the customer with business intelligence and other reports. There are many cases of this in Hungary already and it is very common in IT these days. It would be great for us if the customer only bought wall-to-wall Oracle, but when the customer already has a preference for existing systems the question is how we can work together. We’ve done a lot of work on standardization and interoperability to ensure that our business intelligence or our middleware, for example, works with other ERP solutions.

BBJ: Are you eyeing up any acquisitions in this part of the world?

Fuzes: We acquire firms that complement our portfolio. While we’re growing our portfolio through our own internal developments, we know we can grow faster through acquisitions. If we see a special feature that doesn’t exist within our portfolio, it could happen that the company’s in this part of the world.

BBJ: You said a couple of years ago that the PeopleSoft/JD Edwards would help you gain ground on SAP. Where do you stand now?

Fuzes: Globally Oracle is growing much faster than SAP, even without taking our acquisitions into account. With the newly acquired companies we’re growing around ten times the speed of SAP. In Hungary, with PeopleSoft/JD Edwards and our eBusiness suite, we have closed the gap between the new sales of SAP and the new sales of Oracle. SAP still sells more than we do but not much more these days.

BBJ: Is it true that a lot of ERP installations made in the 1990s could be ready to be replaced? Does this represent an opportunity for Oracle or do customers tend to upgrade with the existing provider?

Fuzes: On a worldwide scale there are quite a number of cases when a customer decides to swap from SAP to Oracle, or vice-versa. In Hungary for whatever reason we haven’t really seen switching by customers who have large systems installed. Probably the reason is that Hungarian customers are eager to customize within their own systems, which costs a lot. Customization is a good short-term solution [but] by doing this the customers lock themselves in, since it then becomes horribly expensive to replace the system.

BBJ: Do you put Oracle at number two on the local ERP market or is Microsoft claiming that spot?

Fuzes: We put ourselves in the number two position, although we’ve seen that Microsoft has had some success. However, when there’s a competition for a large system installation it’s usually between SAP and us. Microsoft is more of a threat in the SME market.

BBJ: Who is winning the battle for the SMEs: Local smaller firms or the big international providers?

Fuzes: If you talk to a small firm that has its own ERP solution, they will tell you that the small firms are winning, but my view is that there is a major consolidation wave going on and that the big firms are winning it. Even a lot of smaller firms who have their own ERP system are considering selling a large firm’s ERP system. They put their own specialized modules on top of it to resolve the one problem that can’t be solved by the large company’s ERP system, rather than competing for the ERP system.

BBJ: Is it in the SME segment in which the action is, or is that the industrial segment?

Fuzes: The SME is certainly one of the most dynamic. In the industrial segment, the tax increases of the austerity package have seen firms hold back on new investments. The financial services segment comprising banks and insurance companies is booming, though. People are taking more loans from the banks and signing more insurance contracts, and this is driving the need for ERP, CRM. data warehouses and Business Intelligence. Also, over the last six months, we’ve had large governmental projects related to EU accession, such as biometric passports and Schengen border agreements, and governmental reforms.

BBJ: Given that companies have had to pay part of the development costs themselves, what kind of take-up of EU funds has there been for ERP development on the part of Hungarian SMEs?

Fuzes: On a regional comparison the take-up in Hungary has been reasonably big and in terms of the money available compared to the money consumed, Hungary has exceeded several of its regional peers. It started slowly with the government set-up unable to distribute the money faster in the initial phase.

BBJ: Does the Hungarian language pose problems for localization of software?

Fuzes: It hasn’t been a big issue for us, but it is more difficult to follow the regulatory changes that are more frequent than in other countries. The regulatory environment is less predictable than in Western European countries.

BBJ: How quickly can you react to these changes?

Fuzes: There are two solutions: one is to update the system on the spot to solve the problem, maybe spending one or two days on the customer side, and the other way is to change something within the system and then distribute it to the customer. It normally takes a few days or a few weeks as there are legal deadlines, and we have to give the software to the customer in time to keep to their deadlines.

Tigerpaw Software, Inc., a provider of customer relationship management and professional service automation software for small- and mid-sized businesses, announced this week its first real-time seamless accounting software integration between Tigerpaw CRM+ and QuickBooks, known by name as QBTrak. (Is that “QB” as in “quarterback”?)

QBTrak was developed and sold by TigerTrak, a division of Action Networks, LLC. QBTrak creates a link between CRM+ and QuickBooks that seeks to allow seamless and instant transfer of data between the two applications. Touted features in the solution include real-time accounts receivable integration, real-time customer list integration, and automated customer credit hold.

QBTrak is a component of TigerTrak’s Sentry companion-product suite built for Tigerpaw CRM+. Sentry, which retails for $999, includes tools for contract expiration notification, quote expiration notification, service order escalation, closed service order reporting, and custom purchase order generation. Sentry requires Tigerpaw CRM+ version 10.5.

Features planned for future release include a wizard to configure CRM+ price book data for use with QuickBooks; quote-to-estimate integration; collection utilities; timesheet integration; and customer price level analysis to monitor and adjust rates based on payment history.

Software evaluation company Technology Evaluation Centers has launched its Enterprise Resource Planning Evaluation Center. The TEC ERP center seeks to “help organizations conduct a thorough and successful requirements-gathering phase.” Specifically, that’s to

• determine the right type of ERP system for the given enterprise;

• examine how each solution addresses management requirements;

• designate crucial operating criteria that any solution must meet to be viable in the given environment; and

• analyze each solution’s capacity to support company growth and operations, over time.

In conjunction with the release, the TEC website is running an article entitled, “Enterprise Resource Planning for Services: Has Software as a Service Become Service-oriented Architecture for Small to Medium Businesses?” by Neil Stolovitsky.