Wires: News and Technology for November 5, 2004

SPL World Group announced a tender offer from GFI Energy Ventures for all its outstanding shares. The transaction is expected to conclude before the end of the year, pending regulatory approvals--financial terms were not disclosed. Upon completion of the acquisition GFI will incorporate another of its investments, Synergen, into SPL. "The SPL and Synergen companies will be merged and will operate as one company under the SPL brand," says Harry Debes, CEO of SPL, who will continue to run SPL. Richard MacDonald will continue to lead the Synergen Series product within SPL. The combined company will offer each of the respective applications both as stand-alone products and as a preintegrated product with one or more additional offerings. "Each of the products in the SPL solution set will be best of breed and have the ability to operate either stand alone or in integrated sets of two or more products," Debes says. "This provides companies the opportunity to gain the advantages of the solution set incrementally as their business needs dictate." BEA Systems unveiled its BEA Enterprise Solutions program, a solution based on BEA WebLogic PlatformTM 8.1 that leverages products and services from more than 40 strategic partners to tackle business and technical challenges, and to help customers accelerate innovation. BEA also announced the availability of BEA Solution Frameworks, which comprises solution components, sales and marketing tools, and services capabilities and offerings, to increase customer innovation in customer service, employee service, service delivery, trade processing, and RFID. According to Mark Atherton, vice president of the enterprise solutions group, the goals of the Enterprise Solutions program are to articulate customer value in both technical and business terms, extend the reach of BEA's platform, and advance go-to-market alignment. "We can seamlessly extend partner technologies into BEA, and then reach other major applications," like Clarify, E.piphany, KANA, and Siebel, and "seamlessly pull those all together into BEA to represent a truly seamless environment." Unisys and the SAS Institute have announced that they are teaming up to make Linux enterprise-ready for BI. Currently, many companies operate using Intel's Itanium 2 as the foundation of their BI solutions. Unisys and SAS are now working together to offer these capabilities to the Linux operating system at what they say will be a lower cost than RISC alternatives. PeopleSoft announced PeopleSoft Enterprise Sales for BlackBerry, a new wireless Sales Force Automations solution designed to help sales professionals manage time-sensitive sales tasks and increase their productivity. The new program will work in conjunction with the BlackBerry wireless platform developed by Research In Motion. It will also give sales reps quick access to business information. PeopleSoft is using Sendia's wireless technology platform to power the wireless SFA product. eUnify Networks announced its new online shared database. Features include the ability to create databases either from scratch, CSV import, or by selecting one of several predefined templates. Integrated database views and field-level permission give the managers control over the database by granting specific users and groups the ability to view, edit, and delete information. Dendrite International a provider of clinical, marketing, and sales solutions for the pharmaceutical industry, today announced the launch of First Source, a packaged offering of clinical, marketing, and sales products and services for the industry. Users will have the ability to access such solutions as data analytics and technology, in an independent format or in an integrated offering that aligns with pharmaceutical business practices. First Source solutions will combine dozens of Dendrite's individual leading offerings into categories that parallel steps in the pharmaceutical product life cycle. Avolent, a provider of financial relationship management software, announced a strategic partnership with Siebel Systems. The partnership aims to allow customers to automate financial processes within their customer-facing systems, such as electronic invoice presentment and payment, invoice management, and e-billing, through Avolent's BizCast software. The combined solution is designed to enable invoices from multiple back-end systems to be consolidated into a centralized customer database for streamlined service management. RightNow announced results for the third quarter, which ended September 30, 2004. It reported consolidated revenues of $16.4 million for the quarter, an increase of 78 percent. Revenues for the nine months were $44 million. Third-quarter net income was $1.4 million, or $0.05 per diluted share. Net income for the nine months was $2.2 million, or $0.08 per diluted share. CiDirect, a provider of outsourcing solutions for mortgage servicing organizations, has chosen Taos, New Mexico, as the location for its new bilingual insurance sales and service call center. The call center will employ licensed bilingual insurance agents to provide call center and marketing campaign services to its clients that serve the Hispanic market. Related articles: Siebel Caps User Week with Stronger Earnings and Refined Offerings