I recently had a chance to tour the facilities of a hosting company named Concurrent Technologies (www.concurrenttechnologies.com), which specializes in what they call "e-business solutions." The company has an impressive data center with redundant high-speed broadband connections, a battery backup and a generator. These precautions are not surprising, as many Fortune-class companies hire them to back up their data and even to host their Web sites and a variety of other applications.
In addition to these more general data center functions, the company has targeted products that are designed to help businesses in their sales and service. Although their offerings are broader than those of a company like Salesforce.com, many of their services overlap.
Their product, named CT.Connect, is a service that allows organizations to manage their customer interactions and workflow. Companies can use a combination of automated and manual processes to communicate with clients, track trouble tickets, see an audit trail and notes and, finally, assign the roles and responsibilities of both customer service representatives and managers. Users can also see executive-level graphs and charts to help in the decision-making process.
CT.SFA is a sales force automation package with built-in forecasting, a reportwriting wizard, integration with other applications and a nice-looking user interface.
CT.Touch allows companies to communicate with customers with tools such as a form that allows customers to subscribe to e-mail and indicate areas of interest. Summary screens allow companies to tally how many people were interested in the various options presented. There is a module that allows users to create professionallooking e-mail messages that can be sent to customers based on their specific interests. The e-mail messages are sent from Concurrent Technologies and use their bandwidth, not the client company's.
My take on all this is that Concurrent Technologies provides good services at reasonable prices. The SFA package, for example, costs $35 per seat, per month; less if you have a large number of seats. CT.Connect costs $300 per month for five e-mail campaigns of 10,000 e-mail messages each. This seems like a dynamic and hungry company that will give a tremendous amount of personalized service with a strong focus on programming. They have been around since 1986 - an eternity in this business - and they are profitable. You may want to give them a call if you are in the market for any of these services.
Copyright Technology Marketing Corporation Jul 2005
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