SugarCRM Launches Data Center Edition

Customers and partners of open-source CRM (customer relationship management) vendor SugarCRM will be able to deploy and manage a number of instances of the software through a new management console, the company announced Wednesday.

The enterprise version of SugarCRM Data Center Edition will let customers tailor and manage instances for different business units, while partners will be able to more easily customize SugarCRM based on users' needs and resell it in on-demand form, SugarCRM said.

The console can create an instance with "the click of a button," and its reporting capabilities allow customers to track usage levels and performance across multiple instances, according to the company.

It is in beta now and will be generally available within a few months. Pricing is tentative while the product remains in beta, according to a spokesman. Under current plans, partners would pay on a tiered basis, depending on the number of end users. Enterprises would pay $100 per year for each user being managed with the tools.

SugarCRM's move is "quite interesting," said Ray Wang, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Its ramifications go beyond a customer's CRM needs or helping partners resell SugarCRM's product, by providing the basis for a broader open-source business software platform, Wang suggested.

"Here you have an open-source product that is already compatible with other open-source technologies, including PHP and ZEND, the open-source e-mail tool Thunderbird, mySQL, and Linux," he said in an e-mail. "If they are successful, this is quite powerful given the current adoption trends towards hosting, multi-instance virtualization, and SaaS."

The announcement is the latest in a steady stream as SugarCRM attempts to gain credibility with larger customers.

"They need more of an enterprise story, and the [data center] move will play to that," said China Martens, an analyst with the 451 Group. "Going hand in hand with that, they need some name customers-- they have BDO Seidman, their largest user by far, with 9,000 users-- more of that level of usage would be very handy as SugarCRM tries to engage more with Salesforce.com."

However, as SugarCRM courts big enterprises, "one challenge will be to ensure that in doing so, they keep all parties happy, particularly the bulk of their customers, who have 10 to 20 seats," she said.

SugarCRM, which recently garnered an additional US$20 million in venture funding, claims to have about 3,000 customers in all.

Microsoft says aids Office/open-source interaction

ST GALLEN, Switzerland (Reuters) - Microsoft said on Wednesday that starting some time next year it will make it easier for users of an open-source rival to work with Microsoft Office.

Without adding any special software to Office, users will be able to open documents sent to them in the open source Open Document Format (ODF), the company said. As well, users will be able to edit and save documents in that format.

"Microsoft is going to be providing support for three new file formats directly in the Office product," said Erich Anderson, vice president and general counsel for Europe, in a telephone interview.

In addition to ODF, Microsoft will also support Adobe's popular PDF fixed format and Microsoft's competitor to PDF, known as XPS.

Microsoft offers support for ODF in its current version of Office but only if additional software is downloaded separately and installed.

The company did not address concerns expressed earlier this month by a British government agency, BECTA, that Microsoft's existing ODF software does not work very well.

BECTA has complained to competition authorities in London and Brussels that the ODF "translator software" has limited functionality and is poorly integrated, compared with Microsoft's own products.

The European Commission responded cautiously to Microsoft's statement.

"The Commission would welcome any step that Microsoft took towards genuine interoperability, more consumer choice and less vendor lock-in," it said.

The Commission added that it will look into whether Microsoft's announcement "leads to better interoperability and allows consumers to process and exchange their documents with the software product of their choice."

The Commission has fined Microsoft 1.68 billion euros since 2004, in large part for the company's failure to provide proper interoperability between its dominant Windows operating system and other software.

Microsoft has appealed against part of that, an 899 million euro fine imposed in February for its failure to co-operate. The company has said it will now cooperate with the Commission.

Microsoft said it will add support for ODF version 1.1 when it updates its Office 2007 product some time next year with "service pack 2."

The company said it would also join a technical committee that is discussing a newer version of ODF. It did not say how long it would support ODF or whether it would support successive versions of ODF.

Thomas Vinje in Brussels, a lawyer who has represented clients opposed to Microsoft, said the announcement was meaningless unless Microsoft made ODF the default standard when people opened office.

If ODF is not the standard its presence "won't matter because the vast majority will not use it. That was the experience in the U.S. case," he said, referring to a case which found Microsoft in violation of the Sherman antitrust act.

Carlo Piana, a lawyer in Milan who represents clients who make open source software, called Microsoft's approach "too little, too late."

He said that Microsoft should meld its own standards with ODF. Microsoft's own standards were recently adopted by the International Standards Organisation (ISO) as an alternative to ODF. The Microsoft standard is called OOXML.

(Reporting by David Lawsky, editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Richard Chang)

Mobile ads years away from breakthrough: execs

PARIS (Reuters) - Advertising on mobile phones has enormous potential to become a significant platform for marketers, but any breakthrough is years away and major operators must work together to succeed, executives said.

Mobile operators increasingly see advertising as a powerful offering, given falling traditional voice revenue, as it allows brands to target consumers based on their location and at times of the day when they are otherwise hard to reach.

Executives from advertising and telecoms groups told the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecoms summit mobile advertising was inevitable and would become hard to resist.

But it was still at the experimental stage, and many brands and mobile operators were wary of alienating customers.

"It will be slow, it will take time but it will be there," Maurice Levy, chairman and chief executive of advertising group Publicis, told the summit in Paris.

"Why? Because it will be in the interest of the phone companies, consumers and advertisers. So it will be very difficult to resist."

Forecasts suggest the mobile ad market will generate revenue of $1 billion to $24 billion within the next 4 years.

Many operators are experimenting with plans and one service, Blyk, has signed 100,000 clients in the UK with its offer of some free calls and text messages in return for accepting ads.

"If you look at the long horizon, I think that advertising on mobile phones is going to be very, very significant, simply because there are going to be 5 billion mobile phones and they are always with you," Hamid Akhavan, the head of Germany's T-Mobile, said.

STUMBLING BLOCKS

"There are people on this earth who in their life will never have a TV or a laptop but they will have a mobile phone. (So) thinking logically, there is no reason why mobile phones should not be the most powerful tool for advertisers."

All participants agreed there were many stumbling blocks.

Virgin Mobile USA told the Reuters summit in New York that it would use AOL's mobile advertising system exclusively to deliver banner ads to its customers who surf the Web on their phones. But they intended to approach the offering carefully.

"A cell phone is an intimate device," Chief Executive Dan Schulman said. "We pay a service provider to have that service and we don't want to be spammed, quite frankly."

French mobile operator SFR said there would be a market for mobile advertising and it had established a team to work on a business model, but said its customers would have to opt in.

"People will have to agree to take this service," Chief Executive Frank Esser said.

T-Mobile's Akhavan saw mobile advertising being held back by the large number of different phones and their capabilities, meaning the inventory space for advertising was very fragmented.

"By the time you say how many countries you cover and what your share of the market is, how many people have that kind of phone and how many of them are interested in Nike, you end up with an inventory of 6,000," he said.

"And are you going to go to Nike and waste their time over 6,000 potential customers?"

A cooperative model was likely the only way to succeed.

"So in Europe for instance all the big names have to work together, look at the inventory and try and figure out a way for us to share it in a very cooperative way and together go and pitch. That's the only way it is going to work," he said.

Akhavan said operators were starting to discuss this but that it was not a top priority.

Calif. quake scientists detail impact of 'Big One'

LOS ANGELES - The "Big One," as earthquake scientists imagine it in a detailed, first-of-its-kind script, unzips California's mighty San Andreas Fault north of the Mexican border. In less than two minutes, Los Angeles and its sprawling suburbs are shaking like a bowl of jelly.

The jolt from the 7.8-magnitude temblor lasts for three minutes — 15 times longer than the disastrous 1994 Northridge quake.

Water and sewer pipes crack. Power fails. Part of major highways break. Some high-rise steel frame buildings and older concrete and brick structures collapse.

Hospitals are swamped with 50,000 injured as all of Southern California reels from a blow on par with the Sept. 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina: $200 billion in damage to the economy, and 1,800 dead.

Only about 700 of those people are victims of building collapses. Many others are lost to the 1,600 fires burning across the region — too many for firefighters to tackle at once.

A team of about 300 scientists, governments, first responders and industries worked for more than a year to create a realistic crisis scenario that can be used for preparedness, including a statewide drill planned later this year. Published by the U.S. Geological Survey and California Geological Survey, it is to be released Thursday in Washington, D.C.

Researchers caution that it is not a prediction, but the possibility of a major California quake in the next few decades is very real.

Last month, the USGS reported that the Golden State has a 46 percent chance of a 7.5 or larger quake in the next 30 years, and that such a quake probably would hit Southern California. The Northridge quake, which killed 72 people and caused $25 billion in damage, was much smaller at magnitude 6.7.

"We cannot keep on planning for Northridge," said USGS seismologist Lucy Jones. "The science tells that it's not the worst we're going to face."

USGS geophysicist Kenneth Hudnut said scientists wanted to create a plausible narrative and avoided science fiction like the 2004 TV miniseries "10.5" about an Armageddon quake on the West Coast.

"We didn't want to stretch credibility," said Hudnut. "We didn't want to make it a worst-case scenario, but one that would have major consequences."

The figures are based on the assumption that the state takes no continued action to retrofit flimsy buildings or update emergency plans. The projected loss is far less than the magnitude-7.9 killer that caused more than 40,000 deaths last week in western China, in part because California has stricter building code enforcement and retrofit programs.

The scenario is focused on the San Andreas Fault, the 800-mile boundary where the Pacific and North American plates grind against each other. The fault is the source of some of the largest earthquakes in state history, including the monstrous magnitude-7.8 quake that reduced San Francisco to ashes and killed 3,000 people in 1906.

In imagining the next "Big One," scientists considered the section of the San Andreas loaded with the most stored energy and the most primed to break. Most agree it's the southernmost segment, which has not popped since 1690, when it unleashed an estimated 7.7 jolt.

Scientists chose the parameters of the fictional temblor such as its size and length of rupture and ran computer models to simulate ground movement. Engineers calculated the effects of shaking on freeways, buildings, pipelines and other infrastructure. Risk analysts used the data to estimate casualties and damages.

A real quake would yield different results from the scenario, which excludes possibilities such as fierce Santa Ana winds that could whip fires into infernos.

The scenario: The San Andreas Fault suddenly rumbles to life on Nov. 13, 2008, just after morning rush hour. The quake begins north of the U.S.-Mexican border near the Salton Sea and the fault ruptures for about 200 miles in a northwest direction ending near the high desert town of Palmdale about 40 miles north of downtown Los Angeles.

Scientists chose the scenario because it would create intense shaking in the Los Angeles Basin and neighboring counties — a region with nearly 22 million people.

The scenario will be released at a House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources meeting in Washington.

Here are the major elements:

_10 a.m.: The San Andreas Fault ruptures, sending shock waves racing at 2 miles per second.

_30 seconds later: The agricultural Coachella Valley shakes first. Older buildings crumble. Fires start. Sections of Interstate 10, one of the nation's major east-west corridors, break apart.

_1 minute later: Interstate 15, a key north-south route, is severed in places. Rail lines break; a train derails. Tremors hit burgeoning Riverside and San Bernardino counties east of Los Angeles.

_1 minute, 30 seconds later: Shock waves advance toward the Los Angeles Basin, shaking it violently for 55 seconds.

_2 minutes later: The rupture stops near Palmdale, but waves march north toward coastal Santa Barbara and into the Central Valley city of Bakersfield.

_30 minutes later: Emergency responders begin to fan across the region. A magnitude-7 aftershock hits, but sends its energy south into Mexico. Several more big aftershocks will hit in following days and months.

Major fires following the quake would cause the most damage, said Keith Porter, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studied physical damage for the scenario.

The quake would likely spark 1,600 fires that would destroy 200 million square feet of housing and residential properties worth between $40 billion and $100 billion, according to the scenario.

Once the shaking stops, emergency responders would do a "windshield survey" that involves rolling through neighborhoods to tally damage and identify areas of greatest need, said Larry Collins, captain of the Urban Search & Rescue Task Force at the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

Collins said the scale of the disaster means firefighters would not be able to put out every flame.

"We're going to have to think about out-of-the-box solutions," he said.