On the Mark: Do like Letterman when CRM...

06.03.2006
John Carini, CEO of iEnterprises Inc.... deployment is on your agenda. That is, make a top 10 list of required features and stop there. "People try to do too much with CRM," observes John Carini, CEO of iEnterprises Inc. in Murray Hill, N.J. "Do the top 10 things people do every day, and stop. If all CRM applications were rolled out in that fashion, you'd bring more value and have more success." Of course, he says, once you get those 10 things right, you can do more. But, he contends, the value of each subsequent item on the list diminishes in comparison with the effort it requires. Carini's company has been creating CRM tools for Notes users since 1995 and wireless CRM apps for the past five years, and he concludes that the best implementations -- whether wireless or wired -- have been highly focused on achieving specific goals. The CRM on the Go technology offered by iEnterprises lets you deploy in-house software as well as Salesforce.com, Siebel and most other commercial CRM applications on BlackBerry handhelds, and it can be bought as either a service or as packaged software. Expect to see CRM on the Go on Windows Mobile devices in Q3 and on Symbian-based handhelds by year's end. Write up your top 10 list of got-to-have mobile features and then stop scribbling. Annual subscription pricing starts at US$200 per user.

Richard Stone, vice president of marketing at CredantOnce they're mobile, it's nice to ...

... know that you can kill them. Not end users, of course. Just their devices. You can do that and more with an update to Credant Mobile Guardian Enterprise Edition, a mobile security tool sold by Credant Technologies Inc. in Addison, Texas. Richard Stone, Credant's vice president of marketing, said Version 5.1 lets you secure all manner of mobile devices -- even to the point of sending over-the-air "kill" signals that render them useless. Stone says Credant's intelligent software agents can run on everything from BlackBerries to laptop PCs and enforce security policies that you set from a single management console. You can encrypt specific files or all the data on a device. You can even password-protect files on USB fobs or iPods, he says. The update also offers support for two-factor authentication. The revision is available this week and starts at $42 per user.

Carrier-grade and real-time security ...

The ISM Express 1000 helps manage global security policies.... are being brought to the corporate enterprise. So promises Arun Chandra, CEO of iPolicy Networks Inc. in Fremont, Calif. He says iPolicy's line of appliances evaluates every single packet on your network in real time and applies firewall, intrusion detection and prevention, virus protection and other security measures controlled from a console called the iPolicy Security Manager. With an ISM Version 2.5 update that becomes available today, you can virtualize sales, engineering and other business domains across physical locations and manage them as a single entity. The software lets you define security policies on more than 500 of iPolicy's appliances worldwide. You can run it stand-alone or on the company's new ISM Express 1000 management appliance, which costs $20,000.

Everyone knows that the trouble with ...