Fonality acquires Aussie CRM developer

LEADING US-based unified communications and contact centre specialist Fonality has acquired Sydney-based SugarCRM development house Insightful Solutions for an undisclosed sum.

The acquisition is part of a Fonality initiative to create the industry’s first phone system that unifies both telephony and CRM for small and medium sized businesses.

Insightful Solutions is one of the world’s largest SugarCRM development companies and is a SugarCRM Gold partner for the Australia-New Zealand and Asia Pacific regions.

SugarCRM is a commercial open source customer relationship management software platform.

Over the past two years, Insightful has made substantial enhancements to SugarCRM and hosts more than one thousand seats in 13 countries at the company’s three global data centres. By combining Insightful’s CRM expertise with Fonality’s telephony suite, small businesses will have an affordable solution that unifies employees with presence management, instant messaging, fixed and mobile calling, and provides a single 360 degree view of customers and business partners.

“Fonality has over 1,000 hybrid-hosted call centres deployed in 25 different countries and our hybrid-hosted platform is a powerful framework for delivering integrated applications directly to the SMB with no investment in premise equipment required,” said Fonality chief executive Chris Lyman.

“Telephony and CRM have a naturally concentric relationship, so this is good place to leverage hybrid-hosted and we are thrilled that the great folks at Insightful have joined forces with us to accelerate our unified offering to the global SMB marketplace,” Mr Lyman.

As part of the deal, Fonality will also begin selling Insightful’s SugarCRM managed service offering immediately, branded FonalityCRM.

Insightful co-founder and chief executive Marc Englaro has been appointed general manager of Fonality’s CRM Division. Before founding Insightful, Englaro was Director and Principal Consultant with Si2, leading its open source consulting practice. He will remain in his role as director of Open Source Industry Australia (OSIA), the country’s national industry body for open source adoption.

Insightful’s Australian team of CRM development and marketing experts have all taken positions with Fonality. The Insightful offices in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore will remain open.

“In Fonality we found a like-minded team which values going beyond simple integration, and building fully conjoined products that expand the definition of what’s on the market today,” said Englaro.

“Together we’re going to continue to raise the bar for what people expect from both VoIP and CRM.”

For more Open CeBIT news, click here.

Salesforce adds content management system

HOSTED application specialist Salesforce.com has added a content management service as part of a dramatic expansion of its platform for managing and sharing business information.

The new Apex Content is a major extension of the Salesforce platform and is based on technology developed at San Francisco-based collaboration developer Koral, which Salesforce acquired in March.

Salesforce ContentExchange is the first service that lets customers manage documents and other unstructured data on demand as easily as they manage their structured data within the existing Salesforce CRM applications.

“Salesforce Content represents a decisive step towards our vision of managing all information on demand,” Salesforce.com chairman and chief executive Marc Benioff said.

“With Salesforce Content, we not only manage a company’s traditional structured information, but their unstructured information as well,” he said.

Benioff said the company revolutionised the sales force automation (SFA) market in 1999 by removing the cost and complexity associated with client/server software like Siebel. It now wanted to the same in the content management sector by extending the on demand software model and Web 2.0 innovations throughout the enterprise.

The Saleforce Content would compete with platforms like EMC Documentum and Microsoft SharePoint platforms, he said.

Salesforce ContentExchange will help companies store, share, find and manage the business information that currently lives in documents, emails and HTML – while keeping all users and content in sync.

Salesforce ContentExchange will take the best concepts of Web 2.0 applications such as community participation, tagging, recommendations, subscriptions, and an AJAX user interface and apply them to enterprise content management.

For more CRM news, click here.

Radio Shack racks up Teradata systems

ONE of the world’s largest consumer electronics retailers Radio Shack is seeking to get a better idea of what its customers want, installing a series of enterprise data warehousing solutions from NCR unit Teradata.

The company combined its new data warehouse systems with business analytics software from Hyperion, while Teradata has also provided the company with professional services covering installation and on-going maintenance and consulting.

Radio Shack said last week the first implementation phase had been completed in just nine weeks in the fourth quarter last year.

“We are deploying Teradata and Hyperion technologies to enable RadioShack to quickly access and respond to changing demands in the marketplace,” RadioShack senior vice-president for information technologies Cara Kinzey said.

“Providing detailed information to our business partners will allow RadioShack to more effectively compete in the very aggressive consumer electronics business.”

The platform for the new system is Teradata's 5450 server, which features a boost of 18 per cent in the price/performance ratio over previous models and more powerful utilisation of Teradata's market-leading analytical software.

Teradata Americas sales vice-president Rocky Blanton said RadioShack had been attracted to the combined solution with Hyperion because the companies demonstrated they could deliver improved visibility, reduced business risk and better decision-making across the enterprise.”

For more CRM news, click here.

Salesforce adds Wealth Management, bags Merrill Lynch

ON-DEMAND application specialist Salesforce.com has launched a new Wealth Management Edition, its most serious foray into a vertical market.

The company also announced it had bagged Wall Street giant Merrill Lynch as a user, with the stockbroker signing on to deploy a 25,000-seat salesforce.com Wealth Management Edition CRM solution.

The financial services market is the biggest vertical market user of customer relationship management systems, and Salesforce.com has long focused on the industry.

The company is working with Cisco, Dell, Dow Jones and Thomson Financial as partners to define the next generation of financial adviser desktop.

Salesforce.com chairman and chief executive Mark Benioff said Merill Lynch was now the “showcase example” for on-demand applications

“Salesforce Wealth Management Edition changes the game for financial institutions,” Mr Benioff said, adding that “more than 1,200 financial services companies are already using Salesforce as the on-demand standard to manage their business.”

Salesforce Wealth Management Edition will be the next generation desktop for financial advisors, discount brokers, private bankers and independents, built on the award-winning Salesforce CRM application and the Apex on-demand platform.

Created with high user adoption in mind, Salesforce Wealth Management Edition will be an industry specific CRM application that gives advisors a 360 degree view of their clients and allows them to manage client data and information in one place.

Saleforce.com’s AppExchange partner eco-system means wealth management and financial services mash-ups with more than two dozen pre-integrated partner applications that are available today.

For more CRM news click here.

NCR prepares to carve off Teradata CRM unit

THE world’s oldest technology company, US-based NCR Corporation, is preparing to spin off its lucrative Teradata data warehouse and data mining business unit.

The company has not talked about a specific buyer for the unit, but said NCR and Teradata would be structured to operate as two distinct companies.

NCR was founded in the 1880’s as National Cash Register, originally making mechanical adding machines.

Though it has continually evolved in the past 120 years, the company has remained true to its roots, specialising in retail technologies ranging from automatic teller machines to automated payment terminals and retail point of sale systems.

The Teradata unit was acquired in the 1990’s when NCR was a owned by telecommunications giant AT&T. Teradata was and remains a specialist in enterprise class data warehousing and business intelligence applications used heavily in the massive retail applications – in particular in managing massive Customer Relationship Management issues for telecommunications companies, banks and other finance companies, and global retailers.

In total NCR generates annual revenues of about US$4.5 billion of which $1.5 billion comes from Teradata. The unit is the most profitable part of the company.

Though Teradata has been at the pointy-end of technology innovation and is considered by many to be the jewel in the NCR crown, it has long been considered an odd fit for the century old firm.

The company has spawned a slew of top executives, including Mark Hurd who was credited with turning Teradata into a profitable unit before moving on to first manage NCR and then to his current job as HP chief executive.

NCR president and chief executive officer Bill Nuti said the move was a logical strategic step for NCR.

“Teradata and the new NCR operate in different markets each with solid prospects for the future, but they have markedly different business models,” Mr Nuti said.

“Both new companies should benefit from sharper management focus on their unique business opportunities. Each new entity should be able to more effectively pursue their specific growth and research and development agendas, while designing employee incentive plans that are more directly aligned with their own performance and growth objectives,” he said.

“In addition, NCR investors should benefit from increased transparency and clarity, which will allow them to more appropriately value the merits, performance and future prospects of both companies.”

NCR believes there are opportunities to expand earnings and cash flow following the Teradata separation by continuing to leverage its leadership position in the emerging self-service market, further enhancing operational excellence, and securing additional manufacturing cost reductions and supply-chain efficiencies.

In addition, NCR expects to benefit from increased investment in its sales organization, which should further strengthen the company’s competitive position, market share and brand as it pursues self-service opportunities in new industry and geographic segments.

For more CRM news click here .