PARTNERSHIP DELIVERS CRM SOLUTION

Bellevue, Wash.-based Onyx Software Corp. and business intelligence company Cognos, of Ottawa, are promising to help large organizations retain and acquire customers by providing them with a suite of integrated reporting and analysis tools.

The two companies recently announced a partnership whereby Onyx will bundle and resell Cognos’ enterprise-wide line of business intelligence solutions in conjunction with Onyx’s customer relationship management (CRM) portal suite. They say the CRM solution for managing prospects, customer and partner information, combined with Cognos’ reporting and analytics suite for analyzing customer data across marketing, sales, service and support functions, will ultimately allow companies to better track customer interactions, and in turn analyze the data to identify new business opportunities.

Initial target markets for the offering include the financial services, telecommunications, health care and high technology industries.

UPGRADE SPEEDS UP CRM IMPLEMENTATION

In an effort to meet the needs of small and mid-sized businesses that can’t or don’t want to spend the time it takes to implement a typical CRM solution, Multiactive Software of Vancouver recently unveiled an upgrade to its CRM program that’s designed to speed up evaluation, implementation and training time.

According to the company, its new Fast Track feature now allows typical CRM installations to be completed in less than a week, allowing clients to start managing their customer relationships immediately. The upgraded solution – called Maximizer Enterprise 6.0 – also features order management functionality (to allow users to create and track orders from purchase to delivery) and support for remote users.

PARTNERS LAUNCH TARGETED E-BROCHURES

Two U.S. companies are joining forces to help businesses incorporate ‘eBrochures’ into their relationship marketing efforts. MindArrow of Aliso Viejo, Calif., a provider of Web-based solutions that enable the delivery and tracking of targeted, multimedia communications over the Internet, and Cambridge, Mass.-based CRM company PrimeResponse are helping clients move from text or html-based marketing offers via e-mail and the Web, to targeted marketing messages using electronic brochures.

The companies say that users will be able to deliver rich media marketing communications from a Web browser interface. The eBrochure technology combines video, audio, graphics, and hyperlinks into highly compressed, self-contained files that can be delivered via e-mail or downloaded from a Web page. According to the partners, eBrochures perform better than other rich media solutions because they do not require plug-ins, players or media streaming applications.