Essential Industry Announcements

Entellium announced the commercial availability of PRO-Activity Release 2005, a set of enhancements for its CRM suite based on what company officials claim is more than 43,000 hours of research into CRM usage behavior. Entellium’s new offering has a single location for tracking all activities to minimize navigation fatigue, and activity-centric quota planning for cold-calls, appointments, sales contests and other such activities.

FirstResearch announced today its alliance with Sage Software (formerly Best Software) as a part of their Saving Money with Sage Program. The program is a referral service designed to enhance the purchasing power of more than 10,000 Sage Software business partners. Sage Software Partner Advantage Program business partners now are eligible to receive discounted First Research annual subscriptions with unlimited access.

FrontRange Solutions announced attainment of Gold Certified status in the Microsoft Partner Program with a competency in ISV/Software Solutions. This recognizes FrontRange Solutions’ expertise and impact in the technology marketplace. Microsoft Gold Certified Partners receive certain benefits from Microsoft, including access, training and support.

IDG World Expo announced the Real Time CRM Solutions Conference, November 29-30, 2005 at the Colonnade Hotel in Boston, MA. Conference co-chairs are Barton Goldenberg, a well-known CRM/RTE strategic advisor and president of ISM Inc., and Tim Bajarin, a consultant on consumer technology who writes and speaks frequently on the new wireless, mobile consumer.

Macromedia announced the availability of an all-inclusive Web event solution that provides customers the ability to create, host and manage a Web seminar. Macromedia Breeze supports data exchange with a company’s marketing and customer relationship management (CRM) system, enabling the import of prospect contact information, registration and attendance tracking, and the export of results to CRM systems for sales follow up.

Onyx launched a new global alliance program to expand its market coverage and use specialized partner capabilities to support its customers and corporate strategy. The company recently announced a strategy to enable enterprises with complex customer processes to automate, manage and evolve their operations. Onyx is developing and expanding its partner community to align with these enterprise-level customers.

Sage Software announced the general availability of Sage Fundraising 100 – Rainbow Edition, the latest version of its software offering United Way organizations a full suite of fundraising management and development tools, including managing United Way workplace campaigns. The new release features several enhancements, such as a new Grants Management module, an interface to several additional Sage Software products and expanded Endowment Module features to support additional planned giving activities.

SugarCRM announced download availability of Sugar Open Source 3.5.0 that provides an upgrade script and instructions, improved subpanels that provide paging, sorting and the ability to expand and collapse each subpanel, an upgrade Wizard, a Module Loader, HTML emails and an Improved Sugar Plug-in for Microsoft Outlook.

Synygy announced new subscription pricing. By supplying application management services through its own data center and providing incentive compensation plan management services with its global professional services staff, Synygy intends to offer the market a choice of EIM deployment options, including installed software, hosted software-as-a-service, installed managed services and hosted managed services.