Good morning one and all, thank you for tuning your radio dial to CBM 98.6, the pride of southern Wyoming, all Jerry Lee Lewis all the time, bringing you all the news what's fit to air.
And we kick off this morning with IT Service Management vendor Axios Systems [1], in a bit of good news for these tough times, opening four new offices in Atlanta, Denver, Dallas and Chicago, bringing their total number of offices to seven.
The company's pushing its chips in the middle of the table in a bet on the North American region. Ross McIntosh, Vice President of North America, said the opening of four new North American offices follows "record growth of our business in the region during our first fiscal quarter in 2009."
They might be onto something, folks. If you think things are bad in America you haven't been outside of it recently—Forrester Research thinks the US will be one of the strongest regional market opportunities in 2009, saying in its "Global IT Market Outlook: 2009" report published in January that "the US IT market will edge up by 1.6 percent in 2009, down from 4.1 percent growth in 2008" for "one of the strongest growth rates in local currency terms of all the major regional markets."
That's right, there's your good news for the day—things are expected to be only three times as sucky as last year. Now shut up and get back to work, you. And stop YouTubing Mystery Science Theater 3000 [2] when the boss isn't looking. Nobody here's irreplaceable, you know.
Also this week NetSuite announced the development of a set of connectors [3] from such third party developers as Cast Iron, Boomi, and Pervasive Software to hook up its enterprise planning software suite with Salesforce.com’s CRM apps.
This comes after Salesforce.com added Twitter [4] to its Service Cloud.
Following the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" philosophy, NetSuite, which just last October offered to halve the price of CRM for customers that switched from Salesforce.com to NetSuite CRM+, according to industry observer Barney Beal [5], is now admitting that Salesforce.com isn't going away any time soon, and might be a better partner than adversary.
The idea is to allow Salesforce.com customers to integrate NetSuite applications into their stable of software as service applications. It's called "SuiteCloud Connect for Salesforce.com," and is generally seen as more of a benefit for NetSuite than Salesforce.com -- seeing as how not a lot of Salesforce.com customers are using on-demand ERP at all, this could be a way for NetSuite to piece off some of that market.
NetSuite officials stress that they've retooled to be as user-friendly as possible to newbies, reconfiguring their interface to resemble NCAA brackets.
In politics the Democrat-controlled Congress voted to rename itself the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Democratic People's Republic of America and to make March 5th a national holiday named Josef Stalin Day. President Barack Obama marked the occasion by nationalizing all sidewalk lemonade stands.
Knoa Software, which sells experience and performance management software, has announced a partnership with Serene Corporation [6], implementers of Siebel CRM. The alliance is a marriage of Knoa’s experience technology and metrics and Serene’s Siebel-specific expertise to "identify systems issues and pinpoint targets for improving end-user performance on an ongoing basis."
Knoa officials say that most businesses can realize up to 35 percent improvement immediately by using their patented process of "erasing all NCAA brackets from your company's servers."
Forrester vice president and principal analyst Bill Band, a guy who has never been called "Rock," wrote in the Forrester report earlier this year, titled “How To Risk-Proof Your CRM Deployment Strategy,” that after surveying business and IT execs at 133 organizations, he has determined that of the major challenges in successfully implementing CRM vendors' products, thirty-three percent of the problems reported were related to technology, 27 percent to business processes, 22 percent to people, and 18 percent to CRM strategy and deployment.”
Band heard about more than 200 individual problems with their CRM projects, encompassing 27 risk areas, including "not reading the directions," "CRM project leader having the IQ of a dart," "not reading the directions," "wildly overinflated expectations which of course have absolutely nothing to do with vendor claims," "not reading the directions," "training sessions stretching out sometimes as long as six minutes," "just general damn stupidity" and "misplacing the directions before reading."
In sports Tiger Woods hit seven consecutive holes-in-one to win the Arnold Palmer Invitational by 14 strokes, remarking afterwards that his game "still had some rust." His fellow PGA golfers welcomed him back by stuffing him in his locker and throwing his clubs in a lake.
Satmetrix has released its 2009 Net Promoter Benchmark Reports [7], naming customer loyalty leaders and laggards in 11 segments in the telecommunications, financial services, technology and online services industries, finding the top five loyalty leaders were Amazon, Apple, Costco.com, Google and USAA.
Online services had the highest average Net Promoter Scores of all industries. Google was the loyalty leader in the online search sector, while Amazon led online shopping. Vonage was the breakaway winner in the local and long distance sector, one of the poorest performing industry segments with an average NPS of -7. Verizon led the cellular sector.
The financial services industry saw a decline in NPS from 2007 once Bernie Madoff's loyalty scores were factored in. USAA led the banking sector with an NPS score more than 100 points above the laggard, Citigroup. Charles Schwab led the brokerage sector, while USAA and American Express led the credit card sector.
Apple was the top performer in the computer hardware segment, while Adobe led the consumer software sector.
That's the show for today, we're off to iron our sheets [8] for the party tonight.