July 15, 2005

IN THE NEWS FrontRange Solutions has reported an increase in revenues and profits for the quarter ending April 30, 2005. Total revenue for the quarter increased more than 14 percent to $21.6 million, including an increase in license revenue of more than 22 percent over the same period of the prior year. FrontRange also reported an operating profit of $2.3 million. "Our Q4 results put an exclamation mark on a strong FY '05 performance. FrontRange has now produced six straight quarters of growth in licenses and total revenue, continuing our commitment to building a company that delivers steady and sustained growth," CEO Michael McCloskey said in a written statement. "The traction being gained by the first wave of new product releases indicates that our earlier assessment of the market and the kind of products that customers would be looking for is sound. We expect the additional investment in research and development to provide healthy returns over the next few years." Key releases scheduled for this coming fiscal year include GoldMine Enterprise Editions and several Infrastructure Management modules, including Inventory, Asset, and Patch Management. Omniture has closed a $40 million round of venture capital funding led by Bank of America Venture Partners. This is the third round through which Omniture has raised a total of $65 million. Rory O'Driscoll, a managing director of BA Venture Partners, will join the company's board of directors. The funding will act as a catalyst to accelerate customer training initiatives, invest in technological development, and increase marketing and distribution efforts for the Web analytics company. DoubleClick has announced the completion of the acquisition of the company by Click Holding, a subsidiary of private equity investment funds affiliated with Hellman and Friedman LLC and JMI Equity. DoubleClick stockholders approved the merger agreement this week. As a result of the acquisition, DoubleClick will cease to be publicly traded and will no longer be listed on the NASDAQ National Market. NEW PRODUCTS Entellium has announced the commercial availability of PRO-Activity Release 2005, a set of enhancements for its flagship CRM suite based on a year's worth of research of CRM usage behavior. The release includes a significant redesign of CRM built around the needs of sales and service representatives to finish their daily activities faster, according to the company. The redesign includes: a single location to track all activities; activity-centric quota planning for cold calls, appointments, and sales contests; creation of custom quotes, contracts, letters, and collateral by merging customer data with company templates directly from the application and automatically emailing them; and Report Automator, which generates and distributes reports at predetermined times. Five9 has announced a new feature for the Virtual Contact Center, called Five9 Soft Phone. It is included as part of the on-demand agent desktop, so customers only need a PC and any USB headset to use the Five9 solution. Customers also can deploy a complete contact center in three hours; add new contact center agents in minutes; support distributed call centers, including at-home agents; and eliminate the need to purchase and maintain additional hardware for each agent and location. Surado Solutions has announced the August release of Surado CRM 5.0, targeted toward the SMB market. Features include enhanced user interface, sales automation, email integration, and security; interactive work flow process manager, and an upgraded search engine with the ability to create, save, and run queries. CUSTOMER WINS KANA Software has announced that Bruce Power, an independent power generator in Ontario, has expanded internal help desk support with KANA Response, the company's email management solution. Since deploying the solution in January 2005, Bruce Power--which receives thousands of inquiries each month--has reduced the average response time for high-importance email requests to within 24 hours. The company used KANA Response to create critical tickets for emergency and urgent requests, which automatically move up in the queue of inquiries. ON THE MOVE Business Objects has named Sheri Anderson group vice president and CIO. Anderson will lead the company's IT organization, including the strategic design and deployment of its enterprise applications, internal client support, technology, infrastructure, and IT governance. Most recently, Anderson served as CIO for Xilinx, a provider of programmable logic solutions. Related articles: Reuniting Displaced Families FrontRange links Holocaust survivors and their families with relatives and events from the past. Call Centers 24x7 Goes Virtual The contact center outsourcer implements Five9's hosted solutions to keep up with burgeoning business. Analyzing Web Analytics for CRM The DoubleClick/Omniture agreement brings renewed attention to the power of the technology.