Siemens upgrades contact centre offering

Siemens Enterprise Communications has upgraded its OpenScape Contact Centre, reports CRM News.

The V8 release will be generally available 18 May, says Ross Sedgewick, senior director with Siemens' large enterprise solutions group. The new version will provide virtualisation from both the server and client directions.

Virtualised servers will allow data centres to deploy the entirely software-based contact centre solution via hypervisors that allow for multiple operating systems and instances of application software to run on the same physical server, says Sedgewick.

Sysco, the largest foodservice supplier in North America, has selected SAP Business Suite and SAP BusinessObjects BI as the IT foundation for a business transformation project, states InformationWeek. The project is slated for initial roll-out in 2011 and staged deployment through 2013.

“We're starting to pilot some of the customer-facing applications, and in particular, an improved ordering platform for our customers,” says Mark Palmer, Sysco VP of corporate communication. “So far, we're very happy with what we're seeing.”

Customer contact teams will be created to maximise sales opportunities and the customer experience for existing customers, drawing upon customer information, including sales transactions, preferences and order history, from the SAP CRM application.

Beagle Research Group principal, Denis Pombriant, returned from open source CRM provider SugarCRM's tenth user group meeting in San Francisco, terming it a “great success,” writes TMCnet.

The meeting attracted more customers than ever before, Pombriant noted in a post-mortem on the Beagle site. “Some from as far away as India and the vendor ecosystem was well represented too.”

Pombriant finds that “by most objective measures, you have to say that Sugar is on track and gaining altitude in the CRM market. The company is aided by the fact that it is the biggest dog in the open source CRM space.”