February 18, 2005

ON THE MOVE Kintera, an on-demand software provider in the government and nonprofit markets, has named Greg Kostello its senior vice president of product management. Kostello comes to Kintera from MP3.com (later Vivendi-Universal Net Technologies), where he rose to the position of president. Previously, Kostello had been with other technology corporations, including Netscape and Apple. CUSTOMER WINS Transaction Network Services (TNS) disclosed details of a five-year agreement to handle point-of-sale transaction traffic for Japan's CARDNET credit-and-debit processing service. TNS says it will handle the challenging traffic growth on the 10-year old payment network. RightNow announced that application network traffic software developer Packeteer has adopted its on-demand CRM solution. Packeteer employs the RightNow system worldwide for customer support services, and has integrated active triggers to monitor customer behavior and provide proper post-sale support. The RightNow solution distributes support queries between various corporate locations in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, removing the need to staff a 24-hour support location, and helping to optimize support employee productivity. Pivotal has sold its healthcare insurance-specific vertical offering to AvMed Health Plans. AvMed plans to use the system to improve adherence to the steps in its sales process, drive out errors and administrative inefficiencies, and improve online services to policyholders and insurance brokers. The online registration process generates customer-printable documents that meet AvMed's state regulatory compliance requirements. IN THE NEWS Recent figures from Gartner show that overall PC sales will continue to grow this year, but at a slower pace than 2004's strong rebound. Gartner is calling for an overall 9 percent increase, driven primarily by the ongoing enthusiasm for mobile PC solutions. NEW PRODUCTS Analytics providers ASA and Quest Analytics have formed a partnership to bolster the banking industry solutions offered by ASA. The two companies will focus on improving retail banking sales performance through enhanced tools to identify prime selling opportunities, as well as better sales training and opportunity management. Experian has unveiled the first cobranded product resulting from its purchase of demographics researcher Simmons last October. The Addressable BehaviorGraphics product provides marketers with a cross-channel campaign design and management system allowing for multimedia campaigns to be conducted with data at both the aggregate and household level of behavior. Related articles: Along Data's Journey Into Might The Ideal Shopping Experience RightNow Announces a Major Extension to its CRM Suite