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CRM Week in Review: NICE Reports 17% Growth, Telinta Upgrades Switch Partition, Five9's Systems Help Home Agents

  By Kelly McGuire, TMCnet Editor

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.

This week, workforce optimization provider NICE Systems (News - Alert) (News - Alert ), a provider of applications for contact center, financial services and business intelligence, announced results for the first quarter ending March 31, 2010.

According to the results, NICE Systems achieved 17 percent year-over-year revenue growth to $163 million. The company also reported record number of first quarter bookings, with 40 percent year-over-year growth, with book-to-bill ratio greater than one.

Another significant outcome, the company achieved a new backlog record. Also, earnings per fully diluted share increased to $0.38, up from $0.35 in the first quarter of 2009.

First quarter 2010 non-GAAP revenues reached $162.6 million, up 17 percent from $139.2 million in the first quarter of 2009. Non-GAAP Gross profit increased to $104.2 million, or 64.1 percent gross margin, up from $88.0 million, or 63.2 percent in the first quarter of 2009.

Non-GAAP operating income for the first quarter 2010 was increased to $27.1 million, or 16.6 percent operating margin, up from $23.3 million and compared to 16.8 percent in the first quarter of 2009. First quarter 2010 non-GAAP net income reached $24.2 million, up from $21.4 million, in the first quarter of 2009.

On Wednesday , Telinta, Inc., the trusted partner of service providers and switch partition systems worldwide, has upgraded to the most recent stable release of PortaSwitch. The core switch partition and billing services of Telinta didn't encounter any down time as the upgrade process went well. This latest release presents a lot of new features for the Hosted PortaSwitch of Telinta.

Several routing plans can now be linked by Telinta customers with one single product in PortaBilling. Each routing plan can be allocated one specific tariff, which will be utilized when a customer who has subscribed to a specific plan makes a call. When this happens, a customer can either pay more for premium routes, or pay less for discount routes. This functionality was already available before to the wholesale clients of Telinta but this latest release broadens support to all VoIP services offered.

Prior to this announcement, the available amount of funds was checked by PortaBilling's call authorization during the beginning of every call. This method has disadvantages from some wholesale billing modesl, like the lack of ability to respond to balance changes while a call is on-going, with a chance of an overdraft when several simultaneous calls are enabled.

Later in the week, in light of the current economy and the fact that many people are out of jobs, individuals are finding many unique and creative ways to gain employment. And, for companies in the call center industry, utilizing work at home agents is a way to minimize costs, while delivering successful results.

Keeping that in mind, many call centers deploy virtual software that allows agents to work outside of the office, through remotely connecting with in the cloud software.

On a recent radio show in Mendocino, hosted by Sharon Davis, who runs a 'work at home' blog as well, guest speaker MJ Willard, who runs the National Telecommuting Institute, discussed the benefits of virtual call centers and, specifically, why hosted contact center and call center on demand software provider Five9's Virtual Call Center Suite is such a great product.

'We came across a company in the last 6 months called Five9 and they don't hire people directly, but they produce this hosted app that allows any call center outside - small ones, large ones - and they can go virtual in a matter of a week or so,' Willard said. 'We actually use them ourselves for our own recruiters. It took us a week to go virtually with our workforce.'

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