December 10, 2004

CUSTOMER WINS EdGenuiti announced it has been selected by the University of Bridgeport to help improve falling student enrollment. The university is adopting edGenuiti's CRM For Higher Education suite, a prospecting and relationship management system designed to help schools attract and "close" high school students in the college market. Marqui, which provides on-demand, Web-based communications management, has been selected by the Shriners of North America to operate an information portal for members, donors, and beneficiaries of the group's charitable activities. The managed service replaces an overtaxed in-house system. BT has elected to use Nortel's IP contact-center solution in its refresh of 10,000 agent positions in over 120 sites across the United Kingdom. The $5 million project will create a new, unified virtual call center and includes new IP-based telephones for nearly every agent. ON THE MOVE Salesforce.com plans to add talent in the wake of sweeping changes in the Cabinet, announcing that it has engaged outgoing U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce Kenneth Juster as vice president of legal affairs and corporate development. Juster had oversight of the Bureau of Industry and Security and formerly chaired the U.S.-India High Technology Cooperation Group. Concurrent to the move, Salesforce.com is promoting general counsel David Schellhase to the position of senior vice president. Juster is expected to join the company in late January. WebSideStory has hired technology consulting veteran and author Warren Raisch as senior vice president of professional services. Raisch will be charged with developing the company's internal services group. He served in a similar capacity with content management vendor Interwoven as well as dot-com consultancy MarchFIRST. NEW PRODUCTS DWL, a data integration developer, has released version 5.5 of DWL Customer. The latest revision of the company's flagship product improves privacy compliance in data integration tasks, reduces barriers to integration with other enterprise applications and services including IBM WebSphere Business Integrator and Acxiom data services, and provides expanded data quality tools. EdGenuiti has released CRM For Higher Education for Apple servers based on Mac OS X, which the company says makes it the first in the industry with a CRM system that runs on Macintosh servers. Like the other versions of the edGenuiti system, the Macintosh servers support browser-based clients on Windows, Macintosh, and other PC desktops. Although Mac OS X is based on UNIX, a popular platform for CRM infrastructure, few to date in the CRM industry have shown interest in explicitly supporting the Apple hardware. SAP announced that it has added new vertical industry support to mySAP CRM in the form of telecommunications-specific extensions. The vertical functionality is tailored specifically to the billing and contract cycles of telecom clients, and is int4ended to help reduce loss through inefficiency and error in the billing and customer dispute resolution process. Related article: Schooled in CRM An increasing number of universities are offering courses and degree programs in CRM that educate current and future executives on the hottest customer-focused strategies.