CRM News: Salesforce.com, Dell, Amazon EC2, NGenera and Hungarian Cops

Commence Corporation has released a cloud computing edition of its CRM software, scheduled release date, January 2010, for deployment for the Amazon Web Service's Elastic Compute Cloud environment.

Amazon EC2 is a Web service giving users "resizable computing capacity for the cloud," letting people dial capacity up or down in a few minutes.

Commence officials say with their new tool, "customers will not need a data center, additional office space, or a technology team." Common sense, however, as well as a genuine need for the service is recommended, as vendors cannot supply either.
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In politics the Mobile, Alabama County Democrats named Reynolds Smith, Jr. to their Executive Committee despite the fact that Smith died last November. State Democrat officials said he would be removed from the registered voter rolls "when he comes down to the office and fills out the appropriate forms."
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The Art Technology Group -- and isn't that a refreshing name? -- says their recent survey shows 67 percent of consumers "value the option of having both a live text chat and a live voice conversation" during online purchases, rating the availability of live help as "the third most important of seven core Web site features."

Seventy percent of consumers rated click to call, letting them speak to an agent without having to go through an IVR as "extremely" or "very useful." One wonders about the other thirty percent.
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NGenera Customer Interaction Management has announced nGen Knowledgebase in a Box, a.k.a. "Jack," in a limited-time promotion offering enterprise-edition nGen Knowledgebase with one year of free maintenance and deployment services.

The nGen Knowledgebase "captures and presents accurate information to customers in Web self-service mode and to agents," company officials.

Services included in this special promotion are the Product Immersion Workshop, Solution Business Assessment, Configuration Workshop, and the Post-Production Workshop.
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In sports the NFL announced the pathetic Oakland Raiders' home game against the powerful Philadelphia Eagles will be blacked out on the local broadcast market due to low ticket sales as well as "compassionate grounds. We do have the citizens of Oakland to consider," an NFL official said.
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Dell and Salesforce.com have announced the availability of new certified Dell-Salesforce.com cloud CRM products for SMBs

Subscription-based pricing starts at nine bucks per user per month. SMBs can get started today at http://www.dell.com/crm .

Steve Felice, president of Dell's global small and medium-sized business operations, said Salesforce.com "runs its data centers and PCs on Dell equipment and Dell has integrated Salesforce CRM with our on-premise applications."

Both firms have also agreed to serve only Peet's coffee, use the Google Chrome browser and root for the New York Yankees.
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Today's tip: Don't let your local cops buy lottery tickets.