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Indus Acquires Wishbone Systems
Indus International announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Wishbone Systems. The acquisition will allow Indus to offer a suite of customer information systems/customer relationship management (CIS/CRM), enterprise asset management (EAM) and workforce management solutions. More than 150 organizations, most of which are Fortune 1,000 companies, use Wishbone Systems' workforce management solutions. Indus agreed to acquire Wishbone for approximately $6.65 million in cash.

NetSuite Adds To Real-Time Dashboards
NetSuite announced the next generation of business intelligence and analytics dashboards. This new release adds more than 20 key performance indicators (KPIs) -- pre-configured, best practices metrics that provide views on the status of a business. Also, new usability features provide flexibility for ad hoc querying, editing, searching, sorting and working on dashboards.

LiveTime Support 3.0 Will Use Web Services
LiveTime announced the inclusion of Web Services for the LiveTime Support release scheduled for Q2 2004. The LiveTime Web Services Gateway will enable organizations to integrate LiveTime Support 3.0 with in-house applications.

UK Bank Selects Blockade
Blockade announced that a major financial institution in the United Kingdom has selected its identity and password management solution, ManageID Syncserv, to automate the password administration and management process for enterprise users. ManageID Syncserv will act as the single password management platform, deployed across the client's enterprise on RACF z/OS mainframes, Windows 2003 Active Directory Servers and Windows NT servers, enabling the client to reduce the number of passwords to one per user across multiple accounts.

ePeople Teamwork Integrates with Microsoft Outlook
ePeople announced the release ePeople Teamwork 5.1. Without leaving Microsoft Outlook, ePeople Teamwork 5.1 lets knowledge workers access information, find help from experts, capture knowledge and work in a collaborative fashion with customers and partners.

			Required Reading
		The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers    Thanks to the rapid spread of cell phones and other mobile devices, Web sites and media channels, consumers now have access to more information at greater speed and lower cost than ever before. But the information technology explosion has not necessarily resulted in better consumer experiences. In their upcoming book, "The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers" (Harvard Business School Press), University of Michigan Business School professors C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy say globalization and ubiquitous connectivity are forcing companies to re-examine how they deliver value to customers. more >>
Archive of past Required Reading articles

Elix Announces Success of Voice Application
Elix, Nü Echo and CONCEPT S2i announce an overwhelming response to their www.talktosantaclaus.com voice application launched on December 8th for the holiday season. The applicationwhich combined speech, VoiceXML and the webprovided children with an opportunity to have a personalized 'chat' with Santa and his automated elf, Pixel. The web site received over 130,000 visits within 2 weeks, and more than 72,000 people had a chat with Santa.

Datamonitor Report on Offshore Call Center Job Threat
After all the hype surrounding offshore call center outsourcing during 2003, and concerns of jobs moving overseas, a new report by independent market analyst Datamonitor, predicts that only 5% of an estimated 4.78m agent positions worldwide will be located offshore by 2007. According to the report, Mexico, South Africa and Malaysia are among the leading offshore locations. They are growing in stature at the expense of India and the Philippines whose share of the offshore market will drop to 64% in 2007 compared to 70% in 2002.

infoUSA Offers New Business Credit Subscription
infoUSA and its division BusinessCreditUSA announced it is offering its customers unlimited access to its Business Credit reports for a flat fee of $50 per month, per person. BusinessCreditUSA provides its clients the opportunity to do sales prospecting, skip tracing and due diligence on potential customers.

eLoyalty Customer Expands IP Contact Center Deployment
eLoyalty announced it recently went live with a project that expanded a government client's distributed, converged Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP)-based customer interaction network. This expansion has added over 350 agents to the network, by utilizing eLoyalty Contact Center Managed Services (CCMS) and converged IP contact center technology from Cisco Systems.

Transversal Survey on Call Centre Impact
A survey undertaken by Transversal, a provider of web self-service and knowledge management solutions, has revealed that consumer opinions of particular brands have decreased after contacting a call centre. Over half of the respondents (53 per cent) said their opinion had decreased with financial services companies, in particular, cited as the major culprits. Contacting a call centre by phone was still the favoured medium for 83 per cent of respondents, with the remainder opting for e-mail.

Toyota Deploys LivePerson
LivePerson announced that Scion, part of Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc., has deployed LivePerson Service Edition on their website. Through Service Edition, Scion's customers can receive sales and customer service assistance online through live chat while they browse Scion's website.