April 8, 2005

IN THE NEWS Siebel Systems has announced its preliminary financial results for the first quarter, ending March 31, 2005: The company expects total revenues for the first quarter to be approximately $297 million to $300 million. License revenues are expected to be approximately $75 million; maintenance revenues approximately $122 million to $123 million; and services and other revenues to be approximately $100 million to $102 million. "Though our services and maintenance businesses continued solid growth in the first quarter, we are disappointed in our application license revenue," CEO J. Michael Lawrie says in a statement. "Though we predicted some license revenue softness going into the quarter due to normal seasonality, we did not expect the results to be this low. We believed we had a sufficient number of deals in the pipeline to make our management guidance, but during the last several days of the quarter a number of deals were delayed by customers. This was a combination of poor execution on our part, exacerbated by a challenging economic and IT environment." Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories and Viecore have enhanced their current partnership to deliver enterprisewide speech-enabled self-service solutions to verticals, including financial services, healthcare, insurance, retail, and utilities. Viecore, a strategic partner in the Genesys InterActs Partner Program, will create VoiceXML-based solutions for the Genesys Voice Platform. CUSTOMER WINS Premier Healthcare Informatics has selected StreetSmarts, a Web-based tool from Involve Technology to provide its hospital clients with best practices, case studies, and evidence-based guides and orders. ShareMethods has announced that HID, JMJ Associates, and Salesforce.com will use its sales and marketing document-management and collaboration service. ShareMethods provides Web-based delivery of documents into hosted applications, CRM solutions, email, portals, Web services, and Web sites. ON THE MOVE Patrick Quirk has been appointed executive vice president of worldwide customer operations, a newly created position at Keynote Systems. Quirk served as general manager and group vice president at PeopleSoft. Keynote Systems also appointed Vik Chaudhary vice president of marketing and corporate development. Prior to joining Keynote Systems, Chaudhary was CEO and founder of e-business measurements company Bizmetric, ran product management at Gupta Technologies, and led software engineering teams at Oracle. Related articles: Hospitals Improve Service With Real-Time Patient Interaction Local Government Goes High-Tech A new Web-based technology allows for paperless tracking of citations and other government services.