CRM Deals and Products for March 7: Siemens and Microsoft, Soffront, Selectica's Fastraq

CRM deals and products announced recently:

Soffront Software, Inc., a vendor of mid-market CRM, today announced that THEMA Consulting has upgraded to the latest version of Soffront CRM.

A Soffront customer since 1997, the Swiss consulting firm is using Soffront CRM to "improve the efficiency and management of their help desk and software development," according to Soffront officials.

Francesco Mollisi, senior consultant at THEMA Consulting, SA said the features included in Soffront Help Desk are "robust and useful -- features such as email notification, statistics, query, and report manager. We have stayed with Soffront and continue to upgrade the software because it is easy to configure and customize."

Selectica, Inc., a vendor of sales execution and contract management applications, today announced the immediate availability of the latest version of its Fastraq sales productivity product.

Certified for the Salesforce.com AppExchange, Fastraq is designed to "integrate and automate Product Advising, Configuration and Quoting to enable Salesforce.com users to accelerate sales transactions, regardless of product complexity or channel distribution," according to Selectica officials.

And it's coming soon to a town near you, too. Selectica will showcase Fastraq in six North American cities in conjunction with Salesforce.com's Success on Demand Tour, a multi-city roadshow held around the world.

The newest version of Fastraq is being billed as bringing functionality to mid-market organizations across the globe. Its entrance into the market comes at a time when interest in on-demand sales productivity tools continues to rise. In a December 2005 report, Aberdeen Group noted a resurgence in sales productivity tools that are specifically designed to enhance an organization's existing CRM system by addressing key activities that shorten the sales cycle and increase sales effectiveness.

Siemens Communications Inc. has announced its pre-built Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration with Siemens HiPath ProCenterAgile and HiPath ProCenter Standard contact center products.

The out-of-the-box integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM software, coupled with HiPath ProCenter products, is engineered to deliver customer information to contact center and enterprise desktops, "enabling faster first-contact reproduct of customer calls," Siemens officials say.

The HiPath ProCenter portfolio's pre-built integration reduces the need for manual configuration of the product on each agent's desktop, as the integration is embedded within the contact center's routing workflow for ease of business process integration.

David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.