And welcome back my friends, to Radio CBM 98.6, the Voice of the Tri-State Area, all Dexter Gordon all the time. As part of the Radio CBM Tenth Anniversary Road Trip we’re broadcasting from northern New Zealand.
Here’s the job I want – Northland New Zealand weatherman. Make a tape loop of “There’ll be rain this afternoon, scattered showers in evening, easing up to a light drizzle overnight with thunderstorms possible through the weekend” and spend the rest of the week playing golf. In the rain.
There aren’t any rural water systems up here, everybody collects rainwater in tanks and pumps that to their houses. Piping in water to Northland is like trucking snow to Alaska. The indigenous Maori people’s name for New Zealand is Aotearoa, “Land of the 24/7 Free Car Wash.”
Looks like Larry Ellison’s decided that weeel, maybe all this cloud business has sticking power: The Oraclians are beefing up their CRM On Demand Release 16, adding a self-service e-billing module and a sales library, as well as deal management, disaster recovery and JD Edwards integration. California’s state government has ordered rush delivery of the disaster recovery tool.
The deal management feature has deal scoring and price recommendation support, what-if modeling, and customer purchase history to save a lot of red-faced explaining away in front of the customer.
Facing the first real criticism of his tenure over the massive pork spending bill, President Barack Obama left for Canada as the benchmark Rasmussen Reports show his Approval Index rating has fallen from 30 percent to 13 percent in the month since his inauguration. Obama said he intends to remain in Ottawa for four years, saying “I never realized what a great sport curling is, I can’t get enough of it.”
Not everybody’s business is toes-up these days, Jenzabar’s saying that demand for its “flagship products” in 2008 has surpassed previous years, achieving “record-high total revenue,” and the company has actually increased its workforce by 11 percent since 2007.
The Jenzabarbarians say they’re concentrating on adding “emerging technologies” to their product lines and throwing more bells and whistles on their flagship products. They report that the current hot seller is a map of directions to Bernie Madoff’s house.
In tough times like these we gotta buddy up: Insight Enterprises and Tectura, a provider of business consulting services, have announced an alliance to expand Insight’s sales of enterprise resource planning and CRM products.
The Insightlians say the alliance with Tectura will “enhance” Insight’s capabilities around Microsoft Dynamics financial, customer relationship and supply chain management software. Tectura officials say they’ll benefit from “being associated with a name people can spell.”
In sports the Washington Nationals admit they were duped by Esmailyn “Smiley” Gonzalez, whom the Nats believed they were signing in 2006 as a 16-year old prospect from the Dominican Republic some had compared to Ozzie Smith.
Gonzalez cashed a $1.4 million signing bonus and was named the Gulf Coast League MVP in 2008, but was later found to actually be Bernie Madoff. President Obama immediately authorized a $27.3 billion bailout for the Nationals.
Microsoft Dynamics still have you buffaloed? Try the new open exchange community for Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM platform called DynamicsExchange.com, which has added a BlogCenter to a string of community Web-service releases.
Other tools include the AnswerCenter Wiki, the Dynamics CRM Library including “How To” Implementation Resources, technical resources, the Microsoft CRM Knowledgebase and to Gold Level members, Bill Gates’s personal cell number.
“New blogs can be added by anyone,” DE.com officials say, with RSS feed and new posts before Midnight EST to make the top lines of blogs in the night’s feed of Personal Knowledge Notices. Some recent additions include www.whousesthiscrap.com registered to a certain Steve Jobs, and www.softwareisofthedevil.com, run by someone named “Marc Benioff.”
Gartner has issued a new set of stone tablets from the mountaintop, this time in the form of a report titled “The Business Impact of Social Computing on CRM.” Gartner predicts that by 2010 more than 60 per cent of Fortune 1000 companies will have some form of online community that can be used for customer relationship purposes, “but which will probably just be used to argue sports and circulate lame jokes everybody’s seen a hundred times instead.”
That’s the show for today, we’re off to stand in line at the altar, it’s our turn soon.
