The Week in Review: September 19, 2003

This month Accenture is introducing Accenture Marketing Sciences, a new practice developed to bring clients the solutions they need to extract greater value from their marketing investments. The new offering combines Accenture's capabilities for CRM strategy development, marketing analytics, brand analytics, and other related areas, according to Accenture. More IT projects are being outsourced offshore. To compete North American and Western European IT services vendors must shift their domestic resource mix to meet three criteria: interact face to face more often, allow for competition based on business value instead of price, and establish requirements for innovation and quality, according to the latest research from Gartner. Dendrite International announced this week that it has established a fully dedicated pharmaceutical CRM-effectiveness business unit. It will include Dendrite's recently established CRM Center of Excellence, and will support the company's new CRM Software Enhancement Kit offering. It will provide specialized services to life-science and consumer-goods companies that have deployed software that has not been developed by Dentrite, including proprietary solutions and those developed by third parties, such as like Oracle, Siebel, and SAP AG. IDT Corporation Thursday announced the creation of IDT Contact Services, a new business unit that will develop, manage and provide call center services to IDT and to external clients. In addition, the company announced the acquisition of two existing teleservices companies, Marketing Ally, based in Provo, UT, and Contact America, headquartered in LaJolla, CA. IDT Corporation is a multinational carrier, telephone, and technology company. The Help Desk Institute has announced a new course for service and support professionals, "Knowledge Centered Support--Foundations." The new workshop was developed to address the trend in the service and support industry toward adopting knowledge management strategies. Deals of the week... Construction BidBoard, a construction services company, has selected UpShot's Web-based CRM solution. Wadsworth, a part of The Thomson Corporation, has selected Participate Systems' hosted solution Participate Enterprise 3, to launch a series of new online customer support initiatives. Verint announced that Home has selected and is currently deploying its Loronix Digital Video Solution. Executive changes... SupportSoft has named Joseph D. McCarthy vice president of finance. He previously served as vice president of finance for KANA. Pragmatech Software, a provider of sales effectiveness and proposal automation solutions, has appointed Michael Po to senior vice president of products. Po previously served as executive vice president of engineering and CTO at Centive Technology. Concerto Software announced the appointment of Peter Nicol as vice president of the company's European and African operations. Prior to joining the company, Nicol was director of sales for the EMEA region at Proxim Corporation.