Welcome to the week in review for the customer relationship management, or 'CRM,' industry. Below are some of the top stories that came across the TMCnet news wires this week.

Early in this week, PortaSwitch Procinctus, billing provider PortaOne's (News - Alert) ultimate high capacity telecommunications services and subscriber management software platform, has gained a completely redesigned and fully clustered architecture.

Officials with PortaOne said that the new architecture, made possible by PortaOne's Maintenance Release 21, or "MR21," places the business critical elements of the system in a cluster that runs in parallel on multiple servers.

Company officials said that previously, PortaSwitch Procinctus distributed the various billing engine functions among multiple dedicated servers in order to leverage the power of several machines and boost overall performance.

On Tuesday, Intelestream, Inc., the leader in open source and online CRM consulting, has signed a partnership agreement with BCS and Sales Teamsource.

By virtue of this agreement, the two companies have now become Value Added Resellers, who are authorized to sell intelecrm, Intelestream's award winning small business on demand CRM solution.

In addition to this, the companies have become eligible to receive discounted rates on Intelestream Professional services that are related to CRM implementations, customizations and trainings.

Welcoming BCS and Sales Teamsource into the Intelestream family, Julian Kopald, channel program manager for Intelestream, said it was a special honor to have two highly regarded IT firms that recognized the value in delivering enterprise class CRM technology to SMBs as partners.

Also this week, IVR provider Angel.com has deployed Empirix (News - Alert) Inc.'s voice watch monitoring solution through a Software-as-a-Service, or "SaaS," platform.

Angel.com, a provider of cloud based customer engagement solutions, also delivered the Hammer Test Engine for testing, monitoring and measuring network performance in real-time using a SaaS (News - Alert) platform, said Empirix company officials.

David Toliver, senior manager, marketing and communications, Angel.com, told TMCnet in a recent interview that the company has been using the hammer for over a year now, and that it became essential in its Caller First Analytics platform, as well as its IVR systems.

"Hammer - for Angel.com - is essentially a system that we can program to test out our customer applications before they go live," Toliver said. "So, we build an IVR or a front end to a call center, and before we make it live for our customer, to their customer, we test out the application and make sure the call flows and menu options work properly.

That's the top CRM News for this week. Check back next week on TMCnet for more breaking news in the CRM industry.