TMCnet News

The CRM Week In Review
[September 01, 2006]

The CRM Week In Review


Editorial Director,
Customer Inter@ction Solutions magazine
 
Greetings, CRM enthusiasts. Call this the “Welcome Ernesto” edition of the CRM Week in Review. Since the northeast coast is shortly to be covered in up to seven inches of rain over the holiday weekend, you’d best get caught up with your CRM news now before it becomes necessary to load the kids and the dog into a canoe and paddle upstate to Grandma’s.



First, let’s satisfy your desire to know which call center in New Zealand is the tops (you know you want to know). TMCnet editor David Sims reveals the secret.

Staying in the same bit of the globe for a moment, David also wrote this week about Australia’s Beach Hut Media, which is launching new database search technology using what it calls “the bubbler technique.” (A nice tie-in to the theme-of-the-week, flash flooding.) The company describes this technique as “relating to data searching and creating a user interaction tool that enables users to further refine a search criteria based on the tags and associated terms to aid in the search.”


Here’s a word you haven’t heard in a while: PeopleSoft. (Remember them?)PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management 9, which was announced by Oracle (News - Alert) on Monday, is an integrated suite of analytic applications to help businesses better match company data and resources to their operational goals. According to Oracle, the release “features improved enterprise planning in budgeting and forecasting and better compliance management around financial control and reporting.” Welcome back, PeopleSoft. It’s been awhile.

Surado Solutions this week announced the launch of Surado CRM 5.1, reported TMCnet’s Anuradha Shukla. Notable to this release is the solution’s Custom Application Designer (CAD), which provides organizations of all sizes with the ability to design, test and deploy custom applications within Surado CRM.

Here’s a piece of news that licensed CRM software providers may not want to hear: According to Forrester Research, competition from software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) vendors has hit software vendors hard. Spending growth on new enterprise software licenses has slowed to just seven percent in 2006, versus 10 percent in 2005, according to Forrester. What's the reason? Forrester theorizes that companies have other expenditure priorities on the menu, such as service-oriented architecture (SOA) or middleware integration projects, plus expensive ERP upgrades.

Kyliptix Solutions Inc., a company whose name I like because it sounds like a word in the Klingon language, is a vendor of Web-enabled, SaaS-based CRM solutions, including its flagship Kyliptix Integrated Business Suite. The company has just announced the appointment of former Oracle VP Paul Ulyett to its Board of Directors. Q’apla!

Aspect Software (News - Alert), Inc. this week announced Aspect Enterprise Contact Server 6.2, which offers a robust application that blends ACD functionality and computer-telephony integration (CTI), at the same time delivering greater capacity and improvements to availability and security. The new release provides adapters to support front-office integration with Siebel and SAP CRM applications.

Also this week, Epicor Software (News - Alert) put forth enhancements to its Enterprise Service Automation product, Epicor for Service Enterprises. According to the company, the solution “now includes extended service-specific customer relationship management (CRM) functionality.”

Finally, don’t miss David Sims’ interview with Mephistopheles about Dell’s (News - Alert) call centers. Not to be outdone, next week, I plan to catch up with Hades in an informal chat about the cost savings and benefits of outsourcing to the Underworld.

Stay dry, CRM enthusiasts. See you next week.

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