New Product Spotlight

Oracle said today at DCI's CRM Conference in Boston that is has released the latest Version of Oracle Marketing, which it says includes improved analytics for customer targeting, personalized dialogs for sales and marketing effectiveness, and centralized content management for message consistency. Using the improved data-mining and analysis tools, marketers can more easily identify profitable customers or those that are most likely to defect, and develop loyalty programs to elicit a desired response, says Robb Eklund, vice president of CRM marketing at Oracle. "This version moves away from traditional marketing automation, which aims to generate a ton of contacts and leads, but drives more towards the end game of closing more sales," Eklund says. He adds that Oracle Marketing is now more closely integrated with Oracle Scripting and Oracle Content Manager, two modules of Oracle's E-Business Suite that work closely with Oracle Marketing. PeopleSoft Monday released its Customer Profitability Management for Communications, an industry-specific, enterprise software solution that links CRM, financials management and business analytics to enable communications companies to effectively manage profitability on a per-customer basis. The product uses analytics solutions to deliver real-time data to customer service representatives to help them determine the right product/service mix needed to make a customer profitable, or if an unprofitable customer should be allowed to churn. Salesnet announced today at the DCI Conference in Boston that it has integrated instant messaging capabilities from AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo! into its wireless CRM application. The addition will help sales teams better realize team-selling benefits, as well as provide sales associates access to real-time sales data, according to the company. RightNow Technologies has made its initial foray into business activity monitoring (BAM). Developed for both hosted and unhosted implementations, BAM allows RightNow better visibility into its customers' implementations of its software. This helps to enable the effectiveness and efficiency of a customer's business operations, according to RightNow. For example, BAM enables RightNow executives to quickly see if a customer experiences spikes in traffic levels, and proposes tactics and strategies to keep the quality of service high during peak times. Ascential Software has released version 7.0 of its Enterprise Integration Suite, as well as its Real-Time Integration Services. The solutions are built to work with service-oriented architectures, using open-standards tools to more easily integrate CRM systems with existing back-end systems at the data level. Unipress Software has released Footprints 6.0, the company's biggest release in two years, says Mark Krieger, president of Unipress. Version 6 of the Web-based service-desk automation software includes many new features and sports an updated user interface, all based on customer feedback. The many Version 6 upgrades include advanced workflow management, including the ability to handle global and parent/child issues; one-click graphic reporting and metrics with no custom programming; expanded knowledge-management capabilities, including an approval process for adding new entries to the database; a Web-based calendar and scheduling system that integrates with Microsoft Outlook; an XML and SOAP Web-services interface; Web-based support tools like live chat and remote handling; and a project Wizard. The price for Footprints 6.0 will not increase over the previous version, Krieger says. Exact Software has added a Supplier Portal to its e-Synergy product. The company says the Supplier Portal offers companies the ability to interact with their suppliers in real time and in a variety of ways. Via the portal, suppliers are integrated into the company's electronic workflow, document management, and item (product) management subsystems via the portal.