August 26, 2005

IN THE NEWS Business Objects has closed its acquisition of SRC Software, formerly a partner of the company. The deal gives Business Objects financial planning and performance management products, which offer integrated budgeting, planning, forecasting, consolidations, productivity measurement, and reporting systems. Tom Malone, former CEO of SRC Software, has been named group vice president and general manager of the Business Objects business planning unit. The acquisition was an all-cash transaction of $100 million for all outstanding shares of SRC Software. Experian Marketing Solutions acquired Vente, a supplier of online consumer research and permission-based targeting. Combining Vente's consumer information with Experian's data assets will allow Experian to provide multichannel marketers greater insight into their customers so they can more effectively match marketing offers with customers most receptive to their messages, according to the company. FrontRange Solutions has reported total revenues for the quarter ending July 31, 2005, increased to $21.9 million, a roughly 10 percent increase from the $19.9 million in the same the same period last year. It also reported and operating profit of $2.4 million, a 15 percent increase from the last comparable period. The company has produced seven continuous quarters of revenue and profitability growth. "Our fiscal Q1 results are a continuation of our solid financial performance, especially considering that this past quarter is traditionally the weakest quarter," FrontRange CEO Michael McCloskey said in a written statement. NEW PRODUCTS MicroStrategy has announced expanded integration with SAP NetWeaver in its latest release of MicroStrategy 8. With this release business users can further leverage their existing SAP investments to report on, analyze, and monitor data contained in SAP Business Information Warehouse. ON THE MOVE ICT Group, a global provider of customer management and business process outsourcing solutions, appointed Gordon Coburn to its board of directors. He also will serve on the board's Audit Committee. The appointment will increase the size of the board to six members, with four independent directors. Coburn is executive vice president and CFO of Cognizant Technology Solutions. e-Dialog has announced that John Polcari, the company's vice president of sales, has been appointed to the Direct Marketing Association Retail Marketing Council. CUSTOMER WINS NetVision has deployed tools from Nortel for its new contact centers. The system allows NetVision to route customer inquiries to the most appropriate of its 300 service agents with pop-up screens of account information to personalize assistance. AIM Technology announced that the U.K. multichannel retailer Argos has selected AIMCall to help drive performance improvements at its contact centers. AIMCall will enable Argos to centrally compile and pull data from each of its main contact centers and the management team will be able to identify customer service and adviser deployment best practices and pinpoint problems in real time, according to the company. Recent articles: BI Tools to Manage Real-Time Response Additions to Business Objects' operational BI platform still require integration, but address the trend of operational and tactical analytics. Experian Delivers Small-B2B Marketing Intelligence