The Week in Review: June 25, 2004

In the news... Amdocs and IBM have entered into a global business relationship to provide billing and CRM solutions, primarily to telecommunications customers. Under the terms of the agreement, Amdocs and IBM plan to provide joint solutions and managed services, including IT management and business process reengineering. Telecommunications provider SFR of France is among the first customers between the two companies. Deals of the week... iPhrase Technologies announced that it is working with Verizon to deliver solutions for companies with contact centers that range from single sites to those with thousands of agents across multiple locations. Direct-Track, a distributor of aftermarket, antitheft GPS devices, has selected UCN's inContact as its inbound/outbound contact center solution. UCN, a division of Buyers United, is a provider of contact center software applications delivered through a national VoIP network. Direct-Track will use UCN to support its nine customer care centers. IEX, a Tekelec company, announced that Danka Business Systems has selected the TotalView Workforce Management system to help streamline its contact center operations. Danka plans to use the system's advanced resource planning, forecasting, and real-time agent management functionality. Switzerland-based healthcare company Roche has selected CRM vendor StayinFront to support Roche business units in 11 European countries. The multiyear agreement includes software, implementation, analytics and support. Roche plans to use StayinFront's Visual Elk for Life Sciences to help consolidate business processes across its European operations. Executive changes... Rivermine Software, a telecommunications management solutions provider, has appointed PeopleSoft CRM veteran Mark Logan CEO. Logan joins Rivermine with more than 20 years of sales and management experience with enterprise software companies. Prior to joining Rivermine, Logan served as a vice president and general manager PeopleSoft CRM. Logan replaces Bryant Dunetz, who served as the company's CEO since its launch in 2001. Dunetz is one of four company cofounders. He will remain chairman of the board. Walker Information has named Leslie Pagel as group director, training and development in its client service department. Pagel will handle the day-to-day coaching responsibilities for the client service director group. She joined Walker as a project director, and has held various positions in the company, working most recently as a Walker SmartLoyalty director. Current Analysis has announced that Larry Hettick will join the company as vice president of Wireline Services. Hettick, a 20-year telecom industry veteran, founded and was the president of Telecommunications Market Consulting prior to joining Current Analysis. Before founding TMCI, Hettick served as vice president of consulting at Telechoice, a telecommunications strategy consulting firm. New products... Oracle has updated its partner relationship management functionality in the release of Oracle 11i10. Personalization capabilities for downstream partners using the vendor PRM system have been improved, and multiple layers of partner relationships are now supported. A Channel Manager Dashboard provides better at-a-glance reporting to executives. The new functionality is expected to roll out by the end of the summer. Over 50 enterprise customers currently use Oracle's PRM capability. SalesJunction.com will announce the release of SalesJunction Professional, a new edition of its on-demand CRM service. Pro subscribers will receive expanded pipeline and opportunity management, along with customer support and e-marketing capabilities. SalesJunction Pro is available for $25 per user per month. FAST Search & Transfer launched its new FAST Marketrac, a solution for gathering, analyzing, and distributing market intelligence from disparate sources throughout an enterprise and the Web. Marketrac is based on the FAST ESP platform, can identify potential threats or opportunities in real time, and indexes source material from more than 225 data formats and 77 languages. Envision Telephony announced that Ai-Logix will supply voice and data hardware integration cards for the Envision Performance Suite. The suite comprises Envision Workforce Management, Envision Quality Monitoring, and Envision eLearning. By using cards from Ai-Logix, Envision can integrate with many top digital PBX telephone systems. The SAVO Group has launched a Web-based platform designed to help marketing and sales teams use technology to increase efficiency and effectiveness in driving revenue. Delivered as a hosted service, SAVO's Sales Asset Manager (SAM) automates accessing, creating, and managing customized marketing and sales presentations, proposals, email, and other collateral. The application is designed to give marketing centralized control over the content, design, and analysis of the materials SAM includes comprehensive reporting tools and the ability to import customer-specific data from data marts. It also has a feedback tool and a search engine, so users can find materials that specifically address a customer situation, stage in the relationship, or other situation.