Oracle on Tuesday upgraded its self-service offering with the release of Siebel Communications Billing Manager 5.1.1 and Siebel Communications Billing Analytics 5.1.1 -- applications built on Siebel's acquisition of eDocs in 2005. New changes to the systems will give users increased online access to billing data and improved reporting capabilities, among other features. This release was not built on the middleware that Oracle is developing to tie together its various acquisitions from the past few years.
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SAP will miss revenue targets for the 2006 fourth quarter, according to its preliminary review of the quarter's results. Wall Street's expectations have been that the company's Q4 sales would increase by at least 15 percent, based in part on SAP's initial guidance for the year, which projected revenue to grow by 15 to 17 percent. Late last year, SAP cautioned it would register growth at the lower end of the scale. Now it has announced that its software revenue is likely to increase by 7 percent in the quarter.
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Avaya said its subsidiary Avaya International Enterprises has made a recommended offer at $0.73 per share for Ubiquity Software, valuing the whole of Ubiquity at $145.6 million. The offer price represents an 86.5 percent premium to the $0.39 per share closing price of a Ubiquity share on Dec. 20, 2006, which was the last day before Ubiquity announced it was in offer talks with a third party. Avaya has received, in aggregate, irrevocable undertakings to accept, or procure the acceptance of the offer, and a non-binding letter of intent to support the offer.
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Renowned for building one of baseball's most successful teams on a shoestring budget, Oakland Athletics executive Billy Beane will test his business acumen by joining the board of NetSuite -- a rising Silicon Valley company backed by computer software mogul Larry Ellison. Beane will remain the Oakland A's general manager, a job that has attracted more attention since he was lionized in a 2003 book called
Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game.
When making forecasts for a year ahead, I have always found the "greater fool" theory comforting. In short, it takes a fool to make a forecast, and a greater one to believe it. On balance then, I think it wise to hide these predictions from children, the gullible, the insane, etc. Some people will look at this and see doom and gloom because there are some things to be concerned about, but the concerns are simply the environment we have to deal with. We can still find some ways to make lemonade out of our lemons, and that's what I hope to do here.
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Like many industry analysts and alumni, I find analytical concepts sexy. Add in creating strategies for serving customers more efficiently while being profitable at it, and the conditions are perfect for the creation of an Accidental Analyst. The analytical side of CRM experienced explosive growth in 2006 because there are so many of us out there. The era of the Accidental Analyst has arrived. Sure, many of us have marketing, sales and even senior management titles, but our breed is a quiet majority.
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M2M Holdings has signed an agreement to acquire CRM provider KNOVA Software, in an all cash transaction valued at approximately US$47 million. The deal is expected to close at the end of the first quarter of 2007, subject to approval by KNOVA shareholders. KNOVA provides a niche CRM application called Intelligent Customer Experience, which leverages adaptive search, guided selling and knowledge management functionality in the platform. According to M2M, KNOVA's features are complementary to the mid market CRM vendor and will integrate easily.
It's hard to believe that it's time to make predictions for the year ahead -- it feels like I just finished that job, but here we are again. I dug up my 2006 predictions and was amazed at how close some of them were. The lesson I derive here is that I must not have been trying hard enough. The funny thing is that no matter how advanced and risky you think your predictions are, reality and the march of time have a way of making them all look rather tame.
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Here are the most interesting CRM-related news stories from this past week: