The SITEFORUM platform is a comprehensive solution with applications including CRM, campaign management, content management, search engine optimization, polls, surveys, live chat, blogs, wikis, RSS syndication, user and role management, e-marketplace, online store/catalogue, event management, ad management, portal design builder, email, group calendaring, personal tools and space.

SITEFORUM is built on open standards that offer a scalable infrastructure. The solution is sold as software as a service starting at $2,995 a month.

HR.com holds a claim as the “largest online community and social network for HR executives,” and uses the web-based portal platform to support 135,000+ members and employees. HR.com “provides thousands of worldwide members with easy access to shared knowledge on best practices, trends and industry news in order to help them develop their most important asset – their people.”

SITEFORUM Group is a provider of real-time business portal solutions. Based in Germany, SITEFORUM currently has customers in more than 40 countries in Europe, Asia and the Americas from mid-sized to Global 500 companies.

“WorkCenter is a CRM Solution for Mortgage Professionals that defies traditional expectations,” reads the high praise. “This latest product by vForms makes contact communications and connectivity automatic, reliable and even invisible. It is astonishingly advanced, yet intuitive and simple to use.”

WorkCenter Software is a mortgage industry specific product boasting the ability to sync with loan origination software and capabilities regarding post-closing marketing. “Without a product like WorkCenter I don’t know how you would be able to manage the everyday tasking needed to make Requesting Referrals Marketing System work efficiently.” said IMSS’ Tim Kirsch, publisher of “Requesting Referrals.”

Infusion CRM won the jury over with its capabilities that wed contact management to Web 2.0 internet marketing capabilities. Infusion CRM also offers powerful drip marketing whereby you can initiate relationship building activities with thousands of prospects.
Critical CRM modules included in CRM include e-commerce, lead capture, email marketing, click tracking, billing and collections and other functions of sales, marketing and customer service that are not found in other CRM software programs.

Q4bis was also able to announce the release of Q4bis platform templates to speed implementation on Microsoft’s Dynamics AX ERP platform for sales and finance. The new platform templates will be exhibited alongside the suite at the conference. The integrated Q4bis business intelligence suite now consists of four principal products: DataServer 2005 is an extraction tool that can extract data from reportedly any source, transform or clean it and load it into a SQL datamart; Q4bis Analysis reads OLAP cubes, providing data manipulation and analytics functionality; Report Publisher, which exports extracted reports in different formats with drill-down functionality; and the Q4bis platform templates, touted as containing eighty percent of the business logic embedded for rapid implementation on specific ERP platforms such as MS Dynamics AX sales and finance cubes.

“Leading the Finance Industry Forward” introduced Eric Acree, executive vice president of operations for Vantage Credit Union, a full-service nonprofit financial cooperative. Acree stated that Vantage had been performing at “mediocre” levels: growth of 3-5 percent. Vantage consulted ISM to help develop a vision and strategy. Acree mentioned that this part of the process was most useful and opined that “It seems like a lot of companies forget to do this, to demonstrate ROI up front.”

Though the Vantage CRM implementation has taken two years already and remains imcomplete, Acree is not sweating, saying that “CRM is not a project, and it’s not a technology. CRM is an ongoing process of improvement.” Besides, Acree claims 50 percent improvement in sales efficiency, 20 percent improvement in sales production, 70 percent improvement in lending efficiency, and 15 percent improvement in member satisfaction already.

Gustavo Martinez Lira, CRM director of HSBC Mexico, followed Acree. HSBC Mexico is a chain of 1,400 branches and 5,176 ATMs with 6.2 million customers, making it the third largest bank in Mexico. HSBC Mexico had to protect-bundle in order to get many customers to take advantage of new services (and justify a radical switch in user fees), but has seen some success.

Lira also noted that HSBC needed to work harder at having the right relationship with the right customer, and that long-neglected data collection practices were properly addressed. “We used to have a lot of artists as customers, because that was the first profession listed in the account creation field,” he said.

Lira also told an interesting story of how fact can overcome culture stereotyping: “Our agents used to believe that a customer who dressed well, or drove a nice car, or even one who was always coming into the branch was a high value customer. The analytics system said otherwise, but the agents didn’t believe it–until we tied compensation to the system. Then they saw.”

Today, according to Lira, HBSC’s CRM program has led to 82 percent of new personal loans, 65 percent of new credit cards, and 10 percent of new auto loans being made through channels other than the branches. In a typical month the branches see about 72,400 contacts, but 260,000 at ATMs, 19,500 in the call center, and 40,000 over the internet.

QuoteWerks promises to streamline “virtually any” sales quoting process and features touted within the ACT! 2007 compatible product include the ability to pull ACT! contact information, customer-specific tax rates and customer-specific terms into the quote; to insert specialized data fields into the QuoteWerks print layout; to allow scheduling of follow-up calls, to-do items, and appointments; to organize potential sales opportunity data; and to log emails sent from QuoteWerks directly into the ACT! history.

Sage Software is a provider to more than 2.6 million small- and mid-sized business customers in North America. Sage products support accounting, operations, customer relationship management, human resources, time tracking, merchant services and the specialized needs of accounting practices and the construction, distribution, manufacturing, nonprofit and real estate industries.  Sage Software is a subsidiary of The Sage Group plc. Formed in 1981, Sage was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1989 and now has 5.0 million customers served by 10,500 employees worldwide.

Aspire Technologies are the creators of QuoteWerks software, an application integratable with CRM packages such as ACT!, Goldmine, Maximizer, MS CRM, Outlook, TeleMagic, salesforce.com and SalesLogix. Aspire Technologies is headquartered in Orlando, Fla. and is a Microsoft certified partner.

The integration will allow users to access Sarbanes-Oxley compliance dashboards as well as reports and data available in the SAP Enterprise Portal. The SAP Enterprise Portal offers a company bundled knowledge management and collaboration capabilities within a portal infrastructure. The portal has been developed open standards such as Web services and it supports both J2EE and Microsoft .NET technology. It integrates information on SAP and third-party applications, data, Web content, etc in a people-centric manner.

OpenPages SOX Express, which is an enterprise compliance management solution, offers document management and business process management capabilities. The Web-based software helps companies to minimize the expenditure of resources in complying with Sections 302 and 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Entellium was recognized for its “innovative approach to usability, which has been shown to boost both sales team effectiveness and revenue, and for its strong reputation for customer support.”

Entellium thanked its “explosive growth” in the small- and mid-sized business market thanks to its June release of Entellium eDesktop, a downloadable "smart client" program. Available as a free download, Entellium eDesktop provides a new front end to Entellium’s core CRM functionality.

Founded in 2000, Entellium is an on-demand CRM software provider which specializes in small- and mid-sized companies. Formerly headquarterd in Malaysia, the Entellium board now calls Seattle, Wa. home. Entellium’s main desktop and server application is eSalesForce, a Web-based CRM application.

For the entire fiscal year, Oracle Fusion Middleware grew 34.5 percent year over year in license revenue. Training, education and other services revenue associated with Oracle Fusion Middleware are incremental to this total product revenue. Oracle Fusion Middleware surpassed 31,000 cumulative customers during fiscal year 2006. "Oracle Fusion Middleware is one of our most exciting success stories,” said the Oracle president himself, Charles Phillips, going on to point out that “Five years ago we weren’t in this business."

Phillips (and his numbers) indicate that Oracle is capturing market share faster than any other player in the industry and that nearly half of Oracle’s middleware revenue during fiscal year 2006 came from partners, which, in Phillips’ view “demonstrate[es] the strength of Oracle’s middleware product with developers and systems integrators.”

In addition to greater flexibility and customization, new packaged applications on the market now give organizations flexibility in terms of their delivery model. The solutions can be used through desktop applications, the Web browser or mobile devices. They can be deployed on-site as traditional software or acquired as a service over the Internet. They can also be purchased or rented.

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