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CIBER, Inc. today announced completion of the first stage of the SAP MySAP enterprise resource planning business suite implementation project for the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission. In fact, stage one, the CIBERians are happy to report, was completed thirty days ahead of schedule.

The project is commonly known as PRIDE and is an example that rare but disturbingly more prevalent beast known as an acronym containing an acronym: PRIDE stands for “PTC Readiness for an Integrated Decision-making Enterprise,” where “PTC” refers to the commission.

In any event, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission Readiness for an Integrated Decision-making Enterprise represents a thorough transformation of PTC’s disparate information technology systems into a single integrated system.

Project planning was a collaborative effort between CIBER and PTC professionals on functionality needs. In November, CIBER conducted system training for more than 700 PTC employees across the entire length of the turnpike. Transition to the new system began November 27th and was completed on December 1st.

The remaining stages of the project will involve enabling functionality for work orders, purchasing, inventory, human capital management, and financial processes, including treasury.

Also during 2007, CIBER, SAP, and the PTC plan to implement SAP and Microsoft’s new “Duet” functionality. Such a project would represent one of the first public sector Duet implementations in North America.

PTC employs approximately 2,400 people and earns $580 million annually in toll revenue. PTC operates a transportation route, which accommodates more than 500,000 vehicles per day, and includes 531 miles of turnpike, 59 fare collection facilities, 21 maintenance facilities, five twin tunnels, ten state police barracks, 21 service plazas, and two traveler information centers.

CIBER, Inc. is a pure-play international system integration consultancy with private- and government-sector clients. Founded in 1974 and headquartered in Greenwood Village, Colo., the company now serves client businesses from over 60 U.S. offices, 22 European offices and five offices in Asia. Operating in 18 countries, CIBER employs some 8,250 and boasts annual revenue of approximately $1 billion.

Representatives of Cincom announced today that the City of Tampa’s Solid Waste Department has implemented the hosted version of contact center solution Cincom Systems Synchrony to improve customer service.

Tampa now replaces what is reportedly fifteen-year-old technology. Said City of Tampa Solid Waste Department deputy director of administration and finance Varghese Jacob: “It would take so long for our desktop screens to prompt us for a call that many of our customers would hang up before we ever got to answer.” Ouch.

With Synchrony, the department can now reportedly handle up to 500 calls per day and manage complaints through the system. Cleverly, Synchrony generates reports four times a day that itemize specific complaints in different geographies, resulting in resolutions within three hours or fewer.

Another benefit of hosted Synchrony, report Tampanians, is its ability to continue to manage incoming interactions, even when the physical location of the contact center may have to shut down. This is, as PR points out, important to a hurricane-prone city such as Tampa, Florida. Synchrony is hosted in Cincinnati, Ohio, where they have different problems.

The City of Tampa Solid Waste Department serves some 80,000 residential and commercial customers. Approximately 360,000 tons of solid waste are processed annually at its McKay Bay Refuse-to-Energy Facility and converted to electrical energy.

Late last week, Cincom Systems announced the opened of a shiny new office in Moscow, Russia, to serve the Commonwealth of Independent States region. "We feel it is the perfect timing for Cincom to enter the market in the CIS territory, as the market here is now reaching a maturity where local businesses need to move the customer experience to the next phase to take advantage of the significant opportunities which are present," said Jason Ayers, Cincom CIS director.

Founded in 1967, Cincinnati, Ohio-based Cincom delivers and supports software and services to streamline complex business processes. Among the Cincom client base are BMW, Citibank, Boeing, Northwestern Mutual, Federal Express, Ericsson, Penn State University, Milacron, Siemens, Rockwell Automation and Trane.

Dynamism in Sarasota? Stop the presses!

O, yes, it’s true. That haven of the American’s retirement lifestyle and university partying, Sarasota, Fla., has awarded Hansen Information Technologies a US $1.1 million contract to provide the Hansen 8 Community Development and Regulation solution to the city.

Hansen is a leading provider of software applications for the public sector market. The four phases of the CDR solution will be entitled Licensing and Escrow; Code Compliance; Building and Permits; and Development Application Review.

Also included in the deployment plan will be a mobile solution and Hansen’s DynamicPORTAL. DynamicPORTAL is designed to provide citizens the ability to input service requests, apply for permits, schedule inspections, and the like.

The city of Sarasota serves over 58,000 citizens and 22,000 properties. In 2005, the City issued over 5,600 permits, managed over 2,300 code enforcement cases, and processed over 6,100 occupational licenses — up from 5,300 permits, 1,800 cases, and 5,800 licenses in 2004.

From the Sarasota tourist office: Those who call Sarasota home enjoy its small-town charm along with amenities often found only in larger cities. Sarasota is known as an arts and culture capital of the Southeast and boasts a surprisingly-large array of museums and arts organizations for a city of its size. Sarasota attracts economic innovators from around the country, and has several colleges, including the nationally renowned New College of Florida and the Ringling School of Art & Design.

Founded in 1983, Hansen Information Technologies is a provider of adaptive solutions that manage the transactions of government. Hansen’s integrated suite of performance management solutions includes Enterprise Asset Management, Building Permit, Business Licensing, Business Intelligence, CIS Billing, Citizen Relationship Management , Code Enforcement, Financials, GIS, HR & Payroll, Property Tax, Timesheet Reporting, Transportation, and web portal applications. Hanson boasts 15 of the 25 largest city and county governments in the United States among its clientele. Headquartered in Rancho Cordova, California, the company employs over 330 people in offices in Auckland, London, Melbourne, Perth, Sydney, and Toronto.

The Analysis Corporation, a subcontractor of counterterrorism and anti-crime systems and services for the U.S. federal government, and operational business intelligence solutions provider Infoglide Software Corporation today announced a strategic alliance.

The partnership, say spokesmen, will greatly enhance the services the two companies offer to the intelligence community. Under terms of the alliance, TAC will deploy and maintain Infoglide Software’s Bladeworks solutions for intelligence, counterterrorism, law enforcement, defense, and homeland security customers. Infoglide Software will integrate the TAC Celatro products suite, including Fuzzy Finder, Russian Name Search, and Arabic Name Search with Bladeworks.

TAC provides expertise in data management systems, client support, and analytic services for the national security agencies and organizations. Celatro features a diverse assortment of algorithms. Fuzzy Finder was designed to match inconsistent, incomplete, or erroneous alphanumeric data.

Since 1990, Fuzzy Finder has been continuously operational within the U.S. government and has been employed in the search for names of suspected or known terrorists in various databases. Fuzzy Finder was extended with Arabic Name Search in 1997 to search terrorist watch lists maintained by the government. In 2000, Fuzzy was further enhanced with Russian Name Search as part of a government effort to fight organized crime in Russia.

Bladeworks is an enterprise software platform that accesses, analyzes, and delivers the most relevant information to the most appropriate resources in real time. Bladeworks features an open framework that theoretically enables organizations to easily incorporate multiple technologies, analytics, software components, and both internal and external data sources. The system performs tasks such as decision automation, transaction processing, and extraction of knowledge from data sources.

For the past 16 years, The Analysis Corporation has serviced the U.S. Government’s national security effort, particularly in the counterterrorism realm, supporting activities that include watchdogging communications among citizens. The Analysis Corporation takes pride in its position at the forefront of the fight to safeguard U.S. national interests.

Infoglide Software Corporation supplies operational business intelligence solutions to the retail, insurance, and government markets. Flagship product Bladeworks applications include enterprise risk management, automated fraud detection, enterprise identity management, transactional CRM, compliance, enhanced data connectivity, and enhanced data mining.

Incorporated in 1996, Infoglide Software is a privately held company headquartered in Austin, Texas.

E-governance is rapidly finding favor with governments across the world and the US government is in the forefront of e-governance initiatives. By using the internet and other modern communication technology, governments can hope to reach out to the populace in larger numbers.

The internet is a powerful medium for customer relationship management and it enables governments to extend service more effectively to the people. E-governance models are built around objectives that include better use of information, quicker dissemination of information, transparency in government-people transactions, and creating services that cover as broad a spectrum of society as possible.

E-governance also allows governments to participate in business transactions in a more profitable manner. For the government, the benefits of CRM include better service to the citizens, reduced transaction costs, reduction in paperwork and paper records as well as better utilization of space that would otherwise be used for storing documents.

Communication between the various government departments improves, information sharing is much better which aids governance, business transactions, and stimulates the growth of a new economy. The overall reduction in transaction costs can be up to 45%. Companies that deal with government organizations too stand to benefit by the implementation of e-governance measures. They can customize their bids and their offerings to government requirements more quickly.

They have constant access to relevant government information and the stimulus provided by increased business opportunities can lead to all-round infrastructural development. The taxpaying citizens, who are in a way customers of the government, benefit from 24 x 7 access to information via 3G, call centers, the internet, etc. The response time of the government improves and an aware citizen can make better use of government services.

Also, a citizen can avail multiple government services from a single point. With respect to managing its relationship with the citizen/customer, the government has to strategize in terms of the various delivery channels that it can use for E-governance. These channels include internet, digital TV, handheld PCs, and mobile phones. As with every new enterprise, initiating and sustaining E-governance ventures has its own set of challenges.

Government organizations need administrative support and a go ahead from state and federal departments; in order to obtain this they need to first convince the bureaucracy of the benefits of E-governance. Legacy systems need to be incorporated into the E-governance infrastructure. Information needs to be dispensed almost in real time to the government, business partners, and citizens.

A government department’s work processes will have to be altered to accommodate CRM and E-governance; this will require educating employees in facets such as human resources, customer management, information technology, risk management, etc. A government with an online presence is in a position to tap emerging markets for its requirements, have its finger on the pulse of the populace, and address citizen needs according to demographics.

E-governance requires support from the private sector which can share its experience and know how with the government. Some US govt E-governance links here, here, and here.

Hosted communications provider Visitar kicked off August by welcoming two key executive appointments: Stephanie Anderson has been named vice president of channel and alliance marketing, while Tommy Nijem will be Visitar’s chief architect and vice president of engineering.

Anderson will lead Visitar efforts to deliver a proper channel program. Anderson will craft strategy and design of the channel and alliance programs; channel governance; sales enablement; and marketing programs.

Prior to joining Visitar, Anderson was vice president of services solutions sales for Avaya Inc. Prior to this, Anderson held positions with AT&T, Lucent Technologies and Avaya in areas of executive leadership; strategic and integrated marketing; and channel and alliance management. Also jumping ship from Avaya is Nijem. Nijem will lead the Visitar development team, and will team with Visitar CTO George T. Sullivan in advancing the company’s solution architecture.

Most recently, Tommy held the position of director, services technology strategy and development. Nijem also held key positions with Tier3SME, VistaIT, First Union National Bank and TEAM Software. Tommy also founded the professional services consultancy AR-Experts LLC, which was later merged with Venimex, Inc.

Visitar is a provider of customer relationship management and sales force automation solutions that link telephony capability with business applications. Visitar specializes in small- and mid-sized businesses and its flagship solutions are known as “360° Care via Visitar.”

eGain Communications representatives have announced the future opening of a new office in Amsterdam, Holland in order to increase the firm’s European presence. European headquarters will remain in in Slough, UK, with the Amsterdam office seeking to “help fulfill the growing need for multichannel customer service solutions for enterprise clients in Europe.”

eGain’s Amsterdam team will focus on developing the business across northern and central Europe, while providers local support and professional services to regional customers. “Our office in Amsterdam will enable us to bring the cost advantages of eGain’s proven global operating model to our clients,” claimed eGain Europe vice president / general manager Andrew Mennie. eGain already has a long list of blue-chip clients in the UK and continental Europe, including ABN AMRO, Vodafone, HMV, RDW, Barclays, TRW and Virgin Mobile.

eGain also announced the recruitment of a homegrown senior marketing manager for EMEA from Holland, who will be based in the UK office, but did not name the party.

Computer Associates International, Inc. representatives have announced the company’s acquisition of records management software and services provider MDY Group. Computer Associates promises to make no immediate changes to MDY and will continue to sell and support MDY product.

Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Industry buzz finds the deal a wise one of the part of Computer Associates, providing the firm with a content management technology crucial to extending its archiving platform. Computer Associates has made a number of deals lately in order to increase its presence in the storage management software market. The acquisition of iLumin about eight months ago was a viewed as a shrewd move by CA.

The iLumin Assentor product line provided Computer Associates with a nice extension to their extant BrightStor solutions, thanks to Assentor’s comprehensive enterprise message management and archiving for email, instant messages, and other unstructured data across platforms including Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino and Novell GroupWise.

With Assentor product, BrightStor solutions can include addressing of message management objectives, including records management, discovery, litigation support, compliance, and supervision. Computer Associates partnerships with firms Arkivio and CaminoSoft provided file archiving, and Gartner, Inc. analysts say “CA is starting to bring together the key components to build an integrated content archiving platform.”

Gartner sees the Computer Associates move as confirmation of their own predictions regarding the emergence of a distinct market for integrated content archiving. CA plans to continue marketing and supporting the full MDY FileSurf product and service suite. This acquisition gives CA an important technology element for developing its archiving platform. MDY FileSurf is a strong records management product with strengths in federated records management and integration with existing content management and e-mail archiving systems.

Vendors operating in the content management space will likely respond by continuing to enhance and extend their offerings to become more serious competitors in e-mail archiving. Headquartered in Islandia, N.Y., Computer Associates International Inc. was founded in 1976 and today operates in more than one hundred countries. CA delivers software and services across operations, security, storage, life cycle and service management.

MDY was founded in 1988 by industry “experts” CEO Galina Datskovsky, Ph.D., and President Mark Moerdler, Ph.D. MDY is a firm specializing in records management, assisting in the control of volume and complexity of physical and electronic records through the entire life cycle from creation to disposition. The bulk of MDY’s clientele is in the legal, corporate and government sectors. MDY is a Microsoft gold partner and a Novell silver developer and integrator partner.

International shipping giant COSCO Container Lines Americas figures produced some good news for FrontRange Solutions partner First Direct Corporation this week regarding that company’s CRM solution implementation, and First Direct representatives were all too pleased to show how COSCO “faced a dilemma that most companies without a unified CRM system encounter.” To address this issue, CCLA chose First Direct Corp. to implement their FrontRange GoldMine and iGoldMine solutions for the entire North American COSCO sales team.

In choosing GoldMine, CCLA North America sales assistant vice president Tim Marsh knows of what he speaks when discussing CRM solutions and the selection of First Direct products: “I’ve used them all," Marsh said. One of CCLA’s biggest challenges in this initiative was keeping up with customer records and correspondence. Without CRM practices in place, insufficient and disorganized information was rife. The lack of a centralized system meant that regional managers were unable to access comprehensive sales information, and salespeople struggled to piece together required weekly sales reports. District and regional managers had no way to analyze weekly sales reports quickly or readily share them with CCLA executives around the world. The GoldMine product seeks to streamline these processes, collecting data through a series of questions ensuring the sales force keeps comprehensive and standardized customer records for data such as call types, import/export, and type of cargo.

An automated GoldMine process generates team-wide sales reports showing a summarized breakdown of activities, time spent and results by individual, district, region and nation. CCLA reports “outstanding” results thus far. Salespeople have reportedly saved at least two hours per week in compiling reports, and managers now save a whopping ten hours a week in report reviewing. New employee training has been reduced by some ninety percent, and chances of losing information with a sales rep’s departure from the company has “greatly decreased.” A future project will feature CCLA and First Direct Corp.’s configuring of GoldMine to track cargo within COSCO’s fleet of ships throughout the world. Additionally, CCLA will soon pull U.S. Customs information into the GoldMine system in order to “better understand the competition” (read: get a serious edge on the competition).

Marsh said CCLA will eventually use GoldMine to forecast shipments, and launch e-mail and other marketing campaigns. According to Marsh, the company’s ultimate plan is to expand GoldMine worldwide and refine its global processes further with help from 1stdirect.com. "First Direct opens our eyes to what we are doing, and shows us how we can apply practical business models to our processes," Marsh said. COSCO Container Lines Americas, a division of CCLA Group Worldwide, currently boasts coverage of 160 countries and regions with 600 shipping vessels in over 100 ports with more than 90,000 employees in all facets of the shipping industry.

First Direct Corp. has been a FrontRange Solutions partner supporting all FrontRange/GoldMine products since 1992. Services handled by the firm include analysis/process design, installation and configuration, customization, training, automated processes, data conversion, reporting, on-site support and help desk support. FrontRange Solutions software and solutions are used by over 130,000 companies and 1.2 million clients. FrontRange product specializes in small- to medium-enterprise and distributed enterprise organizations.

GoldMine is for business relationship management, team-based contact management and sales forces automation solutions; IT service management has HEAT and ITIL standards-based modules for complete service management; communication management including IP Contact Center promises reduced telephony costs, increased agent productivity, streamlined customer service and communications; and their infrastructure management, promises to optimize the full lifecycle of a company’s assets. FrontRange clients include Coca-Cola, Shell Oil, Prudential Securities, Electricite de France, Mack Trucks, Campbell Soup, Avaya, Bechtel Corp, Bank of America, and the Turner News Network.

Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation, announced that Gartner Inc, leading provider of research and analysis on the global information technology industry, positioned Teradata in the leaders’ quadrant among customer relationship management vendors who provide multichannel campaign management solutions. Gartner analyst Adam Sarner’s wrote the report, entitled “Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Campaign Management, 1Q06.”

The announcement comes a bit late, as the report was released at the end of March, but PR departments in the industry are no doubt having problems putting positive spin on the report. The report provides a market overview of thirteen CRM vendors in the multi-channel campaign management space. The key statistic in Sarner’s report is the prediction that “by year end 2008, 75 per cent of Fortune 1000 companies will increase their investments in multi-channel campaign management, with the objective of attracting new customers, increasing sales revenue, and increasing customer satisfaction rather than reducing the cost of sales.”

Commenting on Teradata’s positioning in the leaders’ quadrant, Teradata customer management solutions marketing vice president Sam Gragg, stated that Teradata managed to distinguish itself from the CRM vendor pack because “Advanced campaign management is all about using […] customer data effectively. Data latency can be an enormous issue […] Teradata embraces an integrated, in-data warehouse approach to analytical customer intelligence – required for the most current and comprehensive view of the customer.” “Teradata provides a one-stop shop to take the worry out of data integration, with a complete solution stack including technology and services,” claims Gragg.

The announcement comes as a response to Teradata’s introduction of Teradata Relationship Manager Version 6 in 2005. That portfolio is a browser-based application suite that combines analytical intelligence and marketing automation. “Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Campaign Management, 1Q06” is available in its entirety over here.