And a pleasant good morning to you this fine Easter weekend, thank you for tuning your dial to Radio CBM 98.6, western Rhode Island's finest, all Jorma Kaukonen all the time:
EGain, says that its knowledge management product, eGain Knowledge, has been recognized [1] as “Knowledge-Centered Support Verified” by the Consortium for Service Innovation.
What is KCS, you ask? Good question, my friend—the Consortium says it's used in the day-to-day operation of support centers to improve businesses' effectiveness in solving problems. That's right, you knew it was something you needed yesterday.
EGain merged with Inference Corporation in 2000 and introduced interactive knowledge management products for contact center agents in 1990, for Web self-service in 1995, and for the Central Intelligence Agency in 2002. "Man, if we'd had this sucker in 1961, let's just say the Bay of Pigs would have gone a lot differently, put it that way," CIA sources said.
Alterian [2], a seller of marketing platforms, has announced what the Alterians say are "several success stories from newspapers organizations" using G2 Discovery powered by Alterian and available through partner Marketing G2, to "create multi-channel campaigns and generate new revenue."
As competition increases for the shrinking American newspaper readership, recently estimated by industry experts at "six or seven, depending if Edna Horsewinkle's visiting her sister in Albuquerque that week or not," newspapers are digging into the trenches and taking what Alterian says is "an about-face approach with marketing campaigns," using sophisticated analytics to fine-tune marketing campaigns.
Recent examples of campaigns include The Detroit Free Press's "Free Lawn Care With the Purchase of the Sunday Paper," The Denver Post's "Fishwrap & Flyswatters: 101 Other Uses For Newsprint Around The Home" and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's somewhat less successful "HELP! Please Subscribe To Our Newspaper! We Have Kids! We Have Mortgages! We Don't Have Any Marketable Skills!" The Wall Street Journal reported a rise of 11 percent in revenue after their switch to running the Dilbert cartoon across eight pages.
In sports the Chicago Cubs opened their World Series-winning season by posting a 2-1 start. "With the toughest game on our schedule behind us now, we should sweep the rest of the season," said Cubs manager Lou Piniella. "I don't see any other team out there that can beat us."
Sage North America [3] has unveiled ACT! by Sage for Financial Professionals 11, described by the Sagians as "a contact and client management product that helps financial advisers develop their client and prospect relationships." The Premium for Financial Professionals 11 version, also available, helps larger advisor teams "collaborate, share contacts, and manage activities on a shared database." The Platinum edition of the product lets the user set the Federal Reserve's discount rate for the day.
CRM and ERP vendor Consona Corporation, a privately held company jointly owned by Battery Ventures and Thoma Bravo, has announced a definitive agreement to acquire the enterprise software related assets [4] of SupportSoft, in an all-cash transaction valued at $20 million. The transaction is expected to be completed during the second quarter of 2009.
The enterprise software related assets of SupportSoft will operate as product lines within Consona, specifically under the management of the Consona CRM division headed by General Manager Tom "Edna" Millay. “This transaction will combine two businesses with very similar go-to-market strategies and customer bases,” said Millay. “It burns at both ends, and gives a lovely light.”
Tim Hines, vice president of product management for Consona CRM, said it is Consona’s view that the combined products, "encompassing case management, knowledge management, self-service, chat, collaboration, and diagnostics and repair, will further distance both vendors from the rest of the CRM marketplace. We spit on Microsoft and laugh at Salesforce.com."
In politics President Barack Obama continued to show why he's so much better at bringing Americans together and reaching out to America's allies than Green Meanie George Bush, as he repeatedly snubbed French President Nicolas Sarkozy [5], rejecting Sarkozy's invitations to visit Normandy's Omaha Beach and to pay his respects at the American World War II cemetery in Colleville-sur-mer. "Oh right," the president said. "Like I came all the way to France to go see some moldy old graveyard. Get real."
Component Content Management technology, as you know, lets enterprises manage text content as componentized chunks of information rather than documents or Web pages. It's been dominated by a gaggle of small niche software vendors, but now ECM vendors, along with large digital publishing companies, are starting to take control of the space, potentially bringing XML to the masses.
"Component content management has traditionally been the purview of the technical industry, but increasingly organizations are adopting DITA and CCM to create sales and marketing, policies and procedures, and regulatory material," says Ann Rockley, lead analyst for The XML & Component Content Management Report 2009 [6].
The report found such definitely non-niche vendors as IBM integrating DITA with IBM FileNet Content Manager in partnership with Quark XML Author, and Microsoft dipping a toe in the water via a promotion of Intelligent Content Framework. Adobe and Quark have moved publishing from technical XSL-FO (XML formatting language) to high end digital media delivery, and EMC and Mark Logic are tackling content retrieval with with intelligent XQuery and dynamic delivery.
Rockley said CCM will soon sponsor a NASCAR driver, and is currently negotiating with Tonight Show officials for a CCM joke in host Jay Leno's opening monologue.
That's the show for today, we're off to apply for a job with America's last growth industry. [7]