The Week in Review: July 2, 2004

In the news... NetSuite announced that it has become the first ASP to offer native Apple Safari Web browser support for Mac users. "With NetSuite and Apple together...it is allowing us to compare what one branch is doing versus another branch," says Preston Poulter, vice president of The Poulter Company, who uses NetSuite to manage sales, inventory, and intercompany inventory transfers.
In a recent report issued by Forrester Research, Salesforce.com was coined a leader in the hosted SFA market segment in terms of market share and overall functionality. The report also evaluated SFA vendors Siebel Systems, NetSuite, and Salesnet, and predicted that deeper functionality and more vertical-specific industry offerings will further differentiate SFA vendors over the next year. SupportSoft and Tell-Eureka announced the planned integration of SupportSoft's VoiceAssist product with Tell-Eureka's LevelOne Virtual CSR solution. The combined solution is expected to extend to broadband service providers the ability to offer their customers telephone-based self-service that more efficiently resolves technical problems on the first call. According to the companies, the integrated capabilities will also allow customers to receive automated, one-click fixes directly at their computer desktops. Deals of the week... Siebel Systems announced that Jostens, a provider of products, programs, and services that help people celebrate important moments, has expanded its deployment of Siebel Analytics enterprisewide. United Mileage Plus, an airline loyalty program, has chosen Unica's Affinium Suite to enhance its marketing technology platform. Unica will be used for a variety of email and direct mail campaigns designed to increase Mileage Plus membership levels and enhance membership retention rates. Witness Systems announced that its eQuality software has been implemented by NTELOS, a digital wireless PCS provider in the mid-Atlantic region. Interface Software announced that New York-based investment firm MKP Capital Management has selected Interface Software's InterAction as the firm's CRM solution. Kalido announced that Labatt Breweries of Canada has selected the KALIDO DWLM Suite for its Enterprise Business Intelligence program. Verint Systems, a provider of analytic software-based solutions, announced that bankcard issuer Metris Companies has selected Verint's ULTRA Intelligent Recording solution to support its customer service initiatives nationwide. Executive changes... BeNOW has appointed industry veteran Andy Cutler to the position of chief strategy officer. Cutler is a founding member of BeNOW with more than 24 years of experience in database marketing, and held several positions at Epsilon prior to joining BeNOW in 1998. LiveBridge announced that it has hired Curt Swaggart as director of operations in the company's Delhi, India, contact center. Swaggart has more than 20 years of business experience, including international call center operations in India. Envision Telephony announced the opening of its new office in Australia, headed by Michael Langford, a 15-year veteran of the telecommunications industry. Prior to Envision, Langford most recently served as general manager for M5 Technologies. New products... Actuate has introduced Actuate 8, the industry's first real-time enterprise reporting application platform. Actuate 8 includes an EII option to support real-time integration of disparate data sources, providing real-time operational information to supplement information within a data warehouse; a unified metadata layer, to assist IT in creating complex distributed queries; and e.spreadsheet designer enhancements, to more readily identify problems and opportunities via Excel charts. Surado Solutions released its new Surado Web eLeads, an integrated solution for Surado CRM that enables information to be captured and routed internally. The technology allows companies to automatically create sales opportunities based on client service or product requests, and review and track sales opportunities obtained through a company or partner Web site. ClickFox unveiled its new Customer Behavior Intelligence solution suite, designed to model, measure, and improve self-service applications. The solution allows businesses and government organizations to translate customer interactions across a variety of self-service applications (including IVR systems, speech recognition, Web applications, CRM, interactive kiosks, and mobile devices) into fact-based decisions that optimize single-channel and cross-channel business performance. Trillium Software began shipping a Web Services interface for the Trillium Software System that expands its real-time data quality management capabilities to Web services environments. The interface allows the software to be implemented with any J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) Web server, and is customized specifically for IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic. Art Technology Group (ATG) released a new set of solutions designed to enhance the ability to assess and improve online marketing, sales, and service effectiveness. ATG also announced an alliance with Coremetrics' Web analytics platform that will integrate auto-tagging features with Coremetrics' data collection and reporting offering, enabling the measurement of e-business applications. New features include an enhanced shopping cart abandonment feature, and business process tracking capabilities. Involve Technology launched StreetSmarts v3.0, its new ASP/hosted solution that provides users with a single source for immediate answers and advice 24/7. StreetSmarts 3.0 provides information about product knowledge, closing techniques, best practices, RFP answers, latest objections, most relevant presentations, and customer responses. Questions that cannot be answered immediately are routed to a company expert in the subject area. Hyperion introduced the Hyperion Essbase 7.1, the latest version of its OLAP engine for business performance management. A new enhancement of the engine includes Aggregate Storage, a feature that according to the company provides higher availability, faster processing times, and improved data compression for applications outside of finance that require analysis of large and sparse volumes of data sets. TuVox has made available TuVox CVR 4.0, the newest version of its call center solution using conversational speech technology. TuVox CVR 4.0 enables the automation of calls of any type or complexity, including knowledge calls, routing calls, and sophisticated transactional calls. In addition, a new Predictive Recognition feature is designed to improve the prediction of unrecognized words or phrases.