Hitting on a Point, but not quite

How do you do!

Office Live Goes Live on November 15
PC World - Oct 31, 2006
The service also will be available in beta versions in France, Germany, Japan and the UK on November 15. New Online Ad Service Microsoft will also introduce a beta of a new service at that time, Office Live adManager, which lets users purchase online advertising for Microsoft's MSN. And in the next six months, the company also plans to add the ability to let users purchase ads for search engines from Google, Yahoo, Ask... But on its most recent quarterly earnings call last week, Chris Liddell, Microsoft's chief financial officer, said the company was seeing progress in this area, though he was not clear on exactly what metrics the company is using to track that progress. Office Live Details Office Live will be available in three versions: Office Live Basics, which is a stripped-down, free version; Office Live Essentials, which costs $20 per month and can support up to 10 users; and Office Live Premium, which costs $40 per month and can support up to 20 users. All three versions will include adManager, as well as another new service called Office Live Business Contact Manager, a CRM service, Cetinok said. Another change to the full version of Office Live will be a simplified Web-site design tool, Cetinok said. The new tool made it easier for users to bring custom HTML to their Web sites, something beta users requested, he said. More than 160,000 businesses have tested Office Live so far.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,127715-page,1-c,enterprisetechnology/article.html

Hitting on a Point, but not quite
CNET News.com - Oct 26, 2006
Microsoft just might have enough bright minds in all their offices combined to pump out a seriously good operating system. If you have 1 good mind in charge of parts of IE security but 10 other guys working on the part, your weakest link is going to hurt you. This seems to be across the board for Microsoft IMO. Looking at your comment about using the right tools in Firefox for the right job, Microsoft should take that advice and realize that people who do use Windows are often using it for it's ease of use... Microsoft just might have enough bright minds in all their offices combined to pump out a seriously good operating system. If you have 1 good mind in charge of parts of IE security but 10 other guys working on the part, your weakest link is going to hurt you. This seems to be across the board for Microsoft IMO. Looking at your comment about using the right tools in Firefox for the right job, Microsoft should take that advice and realize that people who do use Windows are often using it for it's ease of use. (For those using Windows, it's somewhat of a dumb reason, but some people pick their cars based only on looks too.
http://news.com.com/5208-1002-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=22308&messageID=197105&start=-167

Cisco teams up with Microsoft on CRM
VNUNet.com - Nov 1, 2006
0 customer relationship management product on theformer’s Unified Communications software for IP-based environments. Aimed at UK small and medium-sized companies or branch offices, the effortwill link Microsoft’s software to Cisco’s Unified CallManager infrastructure viathe free CRM Communications Connector computer-telephony integration software tooffer basic services such as in-bound screen pop-ups with caller details, callerservice history and click-to-dial capabilities. The service will also offerintegration with Cisco’s 7960 and 7970 IP screen-phones. “We’re aiming this at companies rather than call-centres and we think thesweet spot is companies with about 50 users,” said Steve Frost, Cisco UnifiedCommunications marketing manager.
http://www.vnunet.com/itweek/news/2167712/cisco-teams-microsoft-crm

Gaming for the Broadband Era
BusinessWeek - Oct 26, 2006
So the challenges in this next generation of gaming are not only about dealing with the scalability issues and process tools through it, but also how do you deploy these games online. We have architected from a system level a modular system that allows you to go from the day you start production to prototyping to the day you deploy. … It’s hosting, e-commerce, CRM [customer relationship management], the whole ball of wax. ”Selzer added, “The way we’re looking at it is we’re probably the only company out there external to say Microsoft or Sony that is looking at the direction of the industry and creating solutions starting at a systems architecture basis. ”A beautiful friendship?Buttler and Selzer are clearly ambitious executives and it remains to be seen whether or not their plans will take with consumers. If Trion’s games coupled with Emergent’s tools can deliver an online experience that gamers crave, we could see truly “dynamic online content” and “large-scale” TV programming-like experiences in online games. For now, though, both Trion and Emergent share a common vision... We have architected from a system level a modular system that allows you to go from the day you start production to prototyping to the day you deploy. … It’s hosting, e-commerce, CRM [customer relationship management], the whole ball of wax. ”Selzer added, “The way we’re looking at it is we’re probably the only company out there external to say Microsoft or Sony that is looking at the direction of the industry and creating solutions starting at a systems architecture basis. ”A beautiful friendship?Buttler and Selzer are clearly ambitious executives and it remains to be seen whether or not their plans will take with consumers. If Trion’s games coupled with Emergent’s tools can deliver an online experience that gamers crave, we could see truly “dynamic online content” and “large-scale” TV programming-like experiences in online games. For now, though, both Trion and Emergent share a common vision. "Our visions are so closely aligned that we are attempting to make our roadmaps and product roll outs tie together, and to the extent they do we will be working together.
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/oct2006/id20061026_124883_page_2.htm

Salesforce prepares to build platform
VNUNet.com - Oct 30, 2006
This could be the biggest platform play by a business software company sinceMicrosoft corralled thousands of independent software vendors through Windows3. 0 and associated developer tools. In an updated version of what Microsoft didwith Visual Basic and other tools, Salesforce is making the Apex tools that itsdevelopers use available to end-user organisations to create so-calledmulti-tenancy online applications that run on shared datacentre infrastructure. Salesforce's approach dovetails with AppExchange so that applications createdthrough Apex tools can be made available for third-parties to try out andpurchase. The company is also providing facilities for startup ventures that commit toits platform. Customers will gain access to computing infrastructure and getsales, marketing and other help from Salesforce for about $20,000 per cubicleper year. Salesforce has acquired an office complex in San Mateo, California that wasformerly the home of Siebel Systems, the leader in traditional client-servercustomer relationship management (CRM) software... "However, client-server systems built up over the past 15 years are unlikelyto go away anytime soon, and Salesforce and others in the sector will need todemonstrate scale to continue their progress. Muj Harris, a marketing adviser for Shell Energy Europe, said the prospect ofSalesforce being acquired by a larger firm remained "one area of concern in thisworld of consolidation". Harris also noted that Salesforce's focus on CRM and salesforce automation,leaving most other applications to partners, could be another weakness becauseit made it easier for buyers to focus on suppliers with bigger estates. Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:.
http://www.vnunet.com/itweek/analysis/2167545/salesforce-prepares-build

Software needs help to be born again
VNUNet.com - Oct 26, 2006
Until recently I would have thought this quixotic but by opening up the Apexdevelopment platform that underlies its core code, Salesforce declared itsserious intent. Nevertheless, Salesforce’s biggest challenges lie ahead. Salesforce’s smart, pluralist answer is to create a platform forcomplementary capabilities through Apex and the AppExchange marketplace forprograms. AppExchange is growing nicely but many of today’s transactions arefreebies, Salesforce-built, or add useful but not critical functionality. Itremains infant compared with the proven and adhesive – albeit pricey andsometimes clunky – apps on offer from giants. Second, Salesforce remains a minnow that is only beginning to compete inmarkets such as government, manufacturing and energy.
http://www.vnunet.com/itweek/comment/2167288/software-needs-help-born-again

Have a nice day!

S&P Cuts Microsoft to Hold

Hello!

SAVVIS gives CRM startups Google-style resources - Oct. 17, 2006
CNNMoney.com - Oct 17, 2006
-- to handle the massive number of servers needed to help the software company move more of its product line to the Web. (These centers, sometimes called "server farms" because of the rows and rows of computers housed therein, require factory-grade electrical switches and cooling systems, and can cost tens of millions of dollars to build. )What Google and Microsoft are doing to move applications from the desktop to the 'Net is just the start. In fact, the Internet is making it surprisingly easy for a bunch of new software companies to distribute their products -- and easily upgrade their applications -- without having to spend huge sums. How? By leasing space in data centers especially built to house the servers and other gear of companies that can't build their own Googleplexes. The big timeThis week, Entellium, a small, privately held maker of so-called CRM (customer relationship management) software is expected to announce a wide-ranging alliance with data center operator... In fact, the Internet is making it surprisingly easy for a bunch of new software companies to distribute their products -- and easily upgrade their applications -- without having to spend huge sums. How? By leasing space in data centers especially built to house the servers and other gear of companies that can't build their own Googleplexes. The big timeThis week, Entellium, a small, privately held maker of so-called CRM (customer relationship management) software is expected to announce a wide-ranging alliance with data center operator.
http://money.cnn.com/rssclick/2006/10/17/technology/pluggedin_mehta_savvis.fortune/index.htm?section=money_technology

S&P Cuts Microsoft to Hold
BusinessWeek - Oct 13, 2006
Plus opinions on Centex, American Tower, and La-Z Boy. Delivery of worldwide availability for volume license business customers.
http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/oct2006/pi20061013_883598.htm

Office Live to complement Office 2007 in SMBs
InfoWorld - Oct 13, 2006
However, collaboration features available in the Enterprise edition and some other versions of Office 2007 will not be offered in the Small Business version of Office 2007, Capossela said this week in Bangalore, India. Small businesses want the collaboration features that are available in the enterprise edition of Office 2007, but they don't want to have to install and run the servers for it, Capossela said. Instead Microsoft is developing Office Live services that complement the Office desktop for small business users. Office Live will for example host some of the capabilities of Microsoft's Office SharePoint collaboration server, that will enable small businesses to share documents with business associates, Capossela said. Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps organizations gain better control and insight over their content, streamline their business processes, and access and share information, according to Microsoft. The current focus of Office Live is on small businesses, the segment that is likely to find these services more valuable, but Microsoft is also adding Office Live services that will help students and home users share information with others, Capossela said. Microsoft will package Office 2007 with different features for different categories of users... It has announced on its Web site eight versions of Office 2007, including Office Small Business, Office Home & Student, and Office Enterprise. The small business version of the product has a contact management system that is not available on the enterprise or home versions. Small businesses are not likely to buy a separate, stand-alone CRM (customer relationship management) system, but they want contact management capabilities, Capossela said. "The contacts module in Outlook has been beefed up, and it is almost like a CRM lite," he added. There are some other business capabilities in the enterprise version of Office 2007 that will not be available in a version for students and home users, he said. Home users will not, for example, be able to digitally protect documents they send to others. Now will they be able to use workflow tools to automatically route a document to other people for approval or comments.
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/06/10/13/HNofficeliveinsmbs_1.html

Long: Oracle; Short: Salesforce.com
Forbes - Oct 20, 2006
We believe that Oracle is well positioned to benefit from increased corporate spending on new technology. In the past two years, the company has been on an acquisition spree, acquiring PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems and 20-plus other companies to boost its presence in the market for application software used to help automate and manage business processes. Oracle's diverse suite of products, combined with its database management software, will surely enable the company to gain greater ground and compete directly with Microsoft (nasdaq:... While we do not doubt its near-term potential, we do not believe that the company can maintain this kind growth rate for long, as competitors and increased pricing pressure bear down on its growth and bottom line. Disclaimer: Maltbie's firm is currently long ORCL and short CRM. Robert Maltbie is a principal of California-based Millennium Asset Management. More On This TopicCompanies:.
http://www.forbes.com/columnists/2006/10/20/maltbies-mix-oracle-salesforce-oped-cx_rm_1020maltbie.html?partner=netscapetix

Intelligence quotient
VNUNet.com - Oct 12, 2006
But thefirst is how the term is regarded by most organisations, and until recently muchof the vendor community. Collectively we have bounded our understanding and expectations of BI, and ifwe wish our businesses to become more productive and competitive, with BItechnologies as supporting tools, that has to change. At its most basic, within this bounded view, BI is considered to be theanalysis of operational data extracted from transactional systems such asenterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM),and reported through numerical or graphical analysis. The tools from specialists such as... informationbuilders. With the launch of its Office 2007 products. Open source BI tools such as those from Pentaho and JReport are establishingthemselves as credible, lower-cost alternatives to products from the mainstreamvendors, offering organisations much of the standard functionality out of thebox without large deployment and training overheads. Consequently these attract attention from smaller firms.
http://www.vnunet.com/computing/analysis/2166240/intelligence-quotient

PlayStation 3's Tough Transition Game
BusinessWeek - Oct 17, 2006
But serious rivals await, from Nintendo and Microsoft—and other platforms. The PlayStation 2 was a game machine that could play DVD movies and would eventually be able to offer online gaming,.
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/oct2006/gb20061017_210482.htm?chan=innovation_innovation+%2B+design_insight

Sybase: All Mobile, All the Time
Motley Fool - Oct 23, 2006
Besides providing mobile messaging technology (such as through SMS or instant messages), Mobile 365 has more than 700 carrier relationships. In addition, Mobile 365's technology is delivered as a hosted application. This is becoming much more popular in enterprise markets, as seen with the success of Salesforce.
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2006/10/23/sybase-all-mobile-all-the-time.aspx

Take care.

Salesforce ups developer tools

How's things?

On the Record: Marc Benioff
San Francisco Chronicle - Oct 8, 2006
" That's a big change from the model we're talking about. They are preparing to release their most anticipated piece of software ever next year, called Vista. What they just said was all the Microsoft CRM customers are going to have to upgrade and change all their software if they want to run with Vista. Well, that is just a game that I think all of us are tired of playing. Every time Microsoft upgrades one thing, you have to change everything else, and you have to pay for the update fee. That's not how it is with Google. That's not how it is with Yahoo.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/10/08/BUG2QLICVV1.DTL

Salesforce ups developer tools
Register - Oct 9, 2006
Early next year the company will make developer tools and code available. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff will detail the announcement later today at the firm's user conference... CRM rival NetSuite is offering defecting Salesforce customers a discount for switching to its product. ® Track this type of story as a. Related storiesSalesforce. com targets Wall Street with wealth creation plan (27 February 2007).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/09/salesforce_dev_tools/

Salesforce.com CEO: Customization is king
CNET News.com - Oct 9, 2006
Hosted CRM competitors include. Apex is in a closed beta test now and will enter open beta in the first quarter of 2007, Benioff said. The production version will be available in the second quarter. The service will run on hundreds of Dell servers, Chairman Michael Dell said in a video appearance. The systems are Intel processor-based models, the PowerEdge 1850 and 1950, according to a presentation by Parker Harris, Salesforce.
http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-6124153.html

Salesforce.com CEO: Customization is king
USA Today - Oct 10, 2006
com offers an online version of customer relationship management (CRM) software, which tracks details such as customers' purchasing history, sales force quotas, or supervisors' approvals of discounted product prices. Hosted CRM competitors include NetSuite and RightNow Technologies, while traditional software companies including Oracle, SAP and Microsoft also are in the market. Apex is in a closed beta test now and will enter open beta in the first quarter of 2007, Benioff said. The production version will be available in the second quarter. The service will run on hundreds of Dell servers, Chairman Michael Dell said in a video appearance. The systems are Intel processor-based models, the PowerEdge 1950 and 2950, according to a presentation by Parker Harris, Salesforce.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/cnet/2006-10-10-apex_x.htm?csp=34

EMC, Microsoft sing Duet
InfoWorld - Oct 9, 2006
"This is the culmination of a vision we've been working on for a number of years," Bernard said. "It's about unifying the front end with the back end that the casual user needs to interact with in ECM, ERP, and CRM. "And EMC and SAP won't be the only vendors to get hooks into Office, Bernard said. "Overall, we are seeing all of the major ECM vendors actively building tight links into desktop tools like Outlook and partnering aggressively with Microsoft," said Melissa Webster, program director, content and digital media technologies at IDC. Vendors of all stripes are beginning to collaborate to make it much easier for users to have full, unimpeded access to enterprise applications from their familiar desktop productivity software, she said.
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/06/10/09/41NNecmduet_1.html

Enterprise Content Management Systems
VNUNet.com - Oct 5, 2006
“This trend will accelerate with both Microsoft and. ” Needless to say,OpenText is working with those two named players on development projects... ”As Oracle sees it, there is a significant shift underway in how ECMapplications are perceived. Organisations have realised that content no longerneeds to be merely stored: it needs to be proactively managed and shared toenable companies to drive efficiency. “Many organisations are trying to drive increased process efficiencies byintegrating their knowledge workers with their process workers, whompredominantly use customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resourceplanning (ERP) and human resource management systems (HRMS) administrativeapplications,” says Elsham. Pete Atkinson, MD for European operations at Percussion, agrees there isgrowing realisation that CM is more than merely consolidation of infrastructure. “For the first time since the web bubble burst, business units are again incharge of budgets and purchases of CM solutions,” he says. “They desireapplications that let them utilise content more effectively to achieve theirline-of-business objectives. ”So, while traditional ECM vendors have been grappling with developing anaccommodation with the big infrastructure suppliers, mainly for scalabilityreasons, there has also been a seismic shift in consciousness about how theirapplications are marketed within enterprise business units.
http://www.vnunet.com/information-world-review/features/2165805/enterprise-content-management

SOA finds its VoIP | InfoWorld | Test Center | October 09, 2006 | By...
InfoWorld - Oct 9, 2006
But PBX vendors Siemens and Avaya, as well as data upstarts BlueNote Networks and Ubiquity Software, are laying the groundwork today. Back-office service and application providers such as Salesforce. com and SAP are also jumping on the bandwagon, communications-enabling CRM and ERP applications, along with enterprise integrators such as IBM Global Services and Accenture. SOA-enabled unified communications are not just another form of CTI (computer-telephony integration), more of the click-to-call and customer screen pops you’ve seen in the call center for years. Applications will no longer have to access these functions directly through the specialized CTI protocols, such as TAPI, JTAPI, and CSTA, of yore. Business developers will no longer need to learn the intricacies of SIP... Siemens has worked with Salesforce. com and Siebel to integrate its unified communications Web services with CRM applications, and it is working with IBM and SAP to embed its communications software components into IBM’s WebSphere Everyplace Service Delivery platform as well as SAP’s NetWeaver. OpenScape runs on top of Microsoft Live Communications Server, which federates with other LCS servers and public IM service providers to share presence information. BlueNote’s SessionSuite line provides a number of distributable software-based telephony services that, rather than using its own separate PBX provisioning and management system, run on typical datacenter servers and integrate with Microsoft’s Active Directory and Radius. “Our business model is not about PBXes and $200 desktop phones,” says BlueNote’s Bament. “We don’t provide reworked CTI APIs. We’re a software solution.
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/infoworld/article/06/10/09/41FEsoavoip_2.html

Google's Video-Search Challenge
BusinessWeek - Oct 10, 2006
"Some of Google's competitors in video search are very close to that future, if not already there. And many are sharing their technology with Google's biggest rivals. Microsoft (MSFT) has struck a deal to use Blinkx video-search technology. Similarly, search engine Lycos is also using Blinkx to find videos on its user-generated video site. PodZinger has agreements with leading video blog Rocketboom and other video sites. There are also YouTube competitors that have been steadily improving their video-search capabilities (see BusinessWeek.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2006/tc20061010_914750.htm?chan=rss_topStories_ssi_5

Bye.