Week in Review: May 7, 2004

In the news... FrontRange Solutions announced an increase in revenues and profits for its third fiscal quarter, reporting a boost in revenues for the quarter to $18.7 million; this marks an increase over both the prior year and prior quarter. The company also reported an increase in operating income of 12 percent to $1.7 million, or 9 percent of revenue. "The results we are beginning to see are a validation of the strategy we started to implement nine months ago," according to Michael McCloskey, CEO of FrontRange. "We're focused on delivering families of solutions specifically developed for unique market segments within the SME and Distributed Enterprise market...we're working to provide complete service management capabilities to IT and technical support centers within the SME and distributed enterprise market." Convergys Corporation announced that it is acquiring Encore Receivable Management, marking its entrance into the accounts receivable management market. Convergys has agreed to acquire 100 percent of the outstanding shares of Encore, and will operate the company as a wholly owned subsidiary. SPL signed an agreement to acquire the major assets of CES, a provider of utility outage management. Under the acquisition SPL plans to offer the Centricity outage-management solution, and Netricity, the Energy Delivery Management solution, as both stand-alone products and as preintegrated parts of SPL's customer care and billing solutions. In addition, existing and new SPL CorDaptix customers will have the opportunity to preintegrate their CIS and outage management functions. "We have been offering individual modules of our CorDaptix solution for some time," says Harry Debes, CEO of SPL, "primarily to help customers bolster the performance of legacy systems.... The Centricity and Netricity products will become additional offerings." Deals of the week... Salesforce.com announced that TACA Airlines has implemented Spring '04 service in 19 countries and 35 destinations throughout the Americas. Pegasystems announced that Aetna has selected its PegaHEALTH contact center solution as part of a corporatewide initiative to enhance the value of the company' s benefit offerings. Maytag Services has selected ClickSoftware, a provider of end-to-end service optimization solutions, to support its nationwide customer service initiatives and manage its field service resources. Altitude Software, a global technology provider of contact center solutions for Unified Customer Interaction (uCI), announced Globalcom as a new customer in Syria. Globalcom will implement the Altitude uCI suite to automate CRM campaigns and enhance customer service levels. Connextions Health announced that it will develop and operate a call center solution for Florida Hospital, part of Adventist Health System, providing training and implementing a population and disease management program. Executive changes... Metreo, a provider of price and profit optimization software, has appointed Pamela Kline Smith as its vice president of marketing. Smith comes to the company with more than 20 years of strategy and marketing experience.