SugarCRM integrates with MS Azure

SugarCRM, provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, will offer its CRM applications on Windows Azure, reports CIOL.

"With Windows Azure, Microsoft has built a true cloud computing platform going well beyond the simple hosted infrastructure that most service providers offer today," says Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM.

The process for making SugarCRM applications available on Microsoft Windows Azure took just a couple weeks of development time. This rapid implementation period was enabled by the strong native support the Microsoft Azure platform delivers for PHP, the programming language in which Sugar is written.

Nexidia, a provider of audio search and speech analytics solutions, and Semafone, a contact centre security company, have partnered to address fraud and identity theft in the contact centre environment, states TMCnet.

The companies will work together to ensure past and future credit card details are inaccessible by contact centre staff. Semafone offers a technical solution that delivers secure voice transactions during a live call and ensures no new credit card details are stored.

With Nexidia's Enterprise Speech Intelligence solution, historical voice recordings of credit card numbers are quickly searched and located within the vast stores of an organisation's recorded data. Once the numbers are found they can easily be redacted.

The outsourced contact centre segment, e-mail and SMS services, health and medical, and public sectors are expected to become key areas of market growth from 2009 to 2015, says Call Centre International.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan: 'Nigerian Contact Centre Market', finds the market earned revenues of $8.29 million in 2008, and estimates this to grow more than ten-fold by 2015 to reach $114.45 million. The application segments covered in this analysis are vendors and system integrators.

"Nigeria is an emerging economy and the most populous country in Africa," says Frost & Sullivan research analyst, Jiaqi Sun. "The booming telecommunications and banking, financial services and insurance sectors are driving the demand for contact centre services, while competitive labour cost structures are attracting offshore operations."