New Product Spotlight: September 3, 2003

SAP AG today announced complete details on the new intellectual property management (IPM) capability included in the recently announced new release of mySAP CRM. A core part of the SAP for Media portfolio of solutions, IPM streamlines the creation, production, and acquisition of intellectual property in the face of increasingly complex delivery channels. According to SAP, the new IPM capability is readily available, and will allow companies across many industries to better manage contracts and contract compliance, settle and report incoming and outgoing royalties, and track IP inventories and performance efficiently and profitably, according to the company. Hosted CRM solutions provider Entellium and Speechforms, a provider of interactive voice response applications, have announced a strategic alliance to integrate voice-based solutions directly into Entellium's CRM suite of products. By integrating voice into their CRM suite, users of Entellium-powered applications will be able to access, update, and make instructions to their customer database information by talking to their applications by telephone, according to the company. The first use of the application will be available in the fourth quarter of 2003. Expertcity has debuted an online ROI calculator, which enables an organization to validate and view cost savings using remote-support solutions. The ROI calculator shows a variety of environmental factors and industry standards for support. Evaluating ROI on a regular basis with Expertcity's ROI calculator helps an IT manager make informed decisions, validates continued cost savings, and gathers information about industry standards, according to the company. Positive Software Systems has announced the commercial availability of ContactQ, a customer interaction data warehouse solution that enables businesses to develop, execute, and manage in real time enterprisewide contact strategies from a single, secure server. ContactQ integrates with customer information management systems and multiple hosts, including CRM and other legacy systems, to provide a centralized contact-list manager that automates dynamic, real-time delivery of pertinent customer--or prospect information to the most appropriate agent at the most appropriate time. It can help maximize agent productivity and improve the effectiveness of each customer interaction. XO Communications, a national broadband communications services provider, this week announced a partnership with Echopass, a provider of hosted contact interaction solutions. The two companies will provide XO customers with a complete suite of telephone and Web-based contact interaction/call-center solutions delivered over the XO network and offered on a monthly, cost-per-seat basis. The Echopass suite of services provides a robust set of call-handling and e-media features, including universal queuing, skills-based routing, synchronized screen delivery, CRM integrations, email response, Web-chat and Web callbacks. Dictaphone Corporation's Communications Recording Systems has released its latest contact center workforce-optimization solution, ContactPoint. The solution focuses on improving three major functions within the contact center that ultimately impact contact center performance: recruiting, assessments, and training. "The ContactPoint workforce relationship management system is an unparalleled solution for optimizing contact center performance," Ed Rucinski, senior vice president and general manager at Dictaphone CRS, said in a statement. "With it, contact centers can make smarter hiring decisions, improve the effectiveness of their training initiatives, empower agents to perform better, and above all improve their relationships with their agent workforce by promoting a contact center culture that values employees."