What does Facebook cost? How many Apple iPhone OS users are there? Who is big in Apple Apps? What types of advertising are being used? What are advertising pricing levels? Regulatory compliance? Who got $4.4 million proceeds from a sale? What’s happening with healthcare payers and brokers? How many wearable wireless sensors will there be?
For the answers to these and other questions, turn to US Market Statistics.
Sprint and ValleyCrest Landscape Companies have signed an agreement for Sprint to add GPS services to ValleyCrest’s communications toolkit at select branch locations. The location-based services (LBS) will help ValleyCrest better track employee job location and company assets for these field branches. The tool also helps the landscape and lawn maintenance giant handle payroll and route job assignments. With headquarters in Calabasas, Calif., ValleyCrest Landscape Companies is the nation’s largest integrated landscape services company with annual revenue exceeding $1 billion. It employs more than 10,000 people, operates more than 100 locations nationwide and is included on Forbes’ list of America’s largest private companies. (Gary King, manager of Telecom, ValleyCrest.)
Luck Stone Corporation, the largest family owned and operated aggregates company in the United States, has deployed the Softscape Apex platform to help execute its workforce initiatives and manage the entire employee lifecycle from hire to retire. From performance, compensation, and learning management, to recruiting, hiring, and core HR management, Luck Stone is leveraging Softscape’s talent-based system of record to achieve a true and complete picture of its workforce and effectively execute business strategies.
From its beginnings as Sunnyside Granite Company in 1923 to the multi-division corporation of today, Luck Stone has become an industry leader through sound planning, innovative thinking, and hard work. The company has grown over the years but has never lost sight of its founder’s commitment to honesty, integrity, quality, and people. The values-based company’s mission is to provide innovative products and services that enhance the lives of its customers, associates, and community. “At Luck Stone, our focus on meeting our customers’ needs and ensuring quality service and an exceptional buying experience differentiates us from our competitors,” said Michelle Trudeau, Compensation and Benefits Manager at Luck Stone. www.softscape.com www.luckstone.com
Fabric.com, the online fabric store, has increased conversions and average order size by implementing a lifecycle email marketing program through Silverpop, the provider of both email marketing and marketing automation solutions specifically tailored to the unique needs of B2C and B2B marketers. The retailer utilized the Silverpop Engage platform to initiate an email lifecycle campaign and a shopping cart abandonment program. Both strategies were designed to create a more relevant dialogue with customers. The lifecycle campaign more than doubled open and click-through rates, and conversions increased by 43 percent. Additionally, the cart abandonment emails resulted in a 20 percent increase in average order size. (Melanie Coombs, e-mail marketing manager, Fabric.com.)
inContact has signed an agreement with U-Store-It Trust, a national self-storage company. inContact will provide its contact center platform and network connectivity products in U-Store-It’s national sales center. U-Store-It selected inContact for its on-demand contact center platform and ability to integrate with U-Store-It’s existing customer relationship management (CRM) technology from Salesforce.com. The inContact platform includes a Automated Call Distributor (ACD) with skills-based routing, Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) with speech recognition. "Our sales center is vital to provide first-class service to our customers," said U-Store-It Chief Executive Officer Dean Jernigan.
Nexus Technologies Group, a security integrator for the corporate and governmental security markets, has been awarded two contracts totaling approximately $300,000 for services and equipment to facilitate the upgrade and expansion of the security system at a large east coast nuclear power generating facility. www.nexusna.com
Qwest International has plans to roll out VDSL2 technology across its networks in 14 states; doubling its connection speeds for qualifying residential and small business customers. The new service offers peak download speeds of 40Mbps and upload speeds of up to 20Mbps. Qwest intends to expand the service over the coming months to 23 markets covered by the company’s fibre-optic backbone network.
Natus Medical has been awarded a contract to provide its Newborn Hearing Screening Data Management Service to the California Department of Health Care Services. Natus will provide web-based software designed by its Neometrics division to all birthing hospitals in California and the state’s Hearing Coordination Centers. The contracted service will assist users in managing hearing screening data and provide training, tracking, and monitoring capabilities to ensure infants with hearing loss are linked with appropriate treatment and services. www.natus.com.
Misys Open Source Solutions has reached an agreement with Allscripts and Hartford HealthCare to provide governance consulting services and development for the technology infrastructure that will provide the newly formed Transforming Healthcare in Connecticut Communities (THICC) -- a coalition of Connecticut’s major hospitals, healthcare facilities and physician practices – with interconnected, on-demand access to patient information. Scheduled for production release in early 2010, Misys will deliver the nation’s largest open source health exchange and the state’s first health information exchange. THICC will improve healthcare delivery through secure, authorized and electronic patient information sharing. Using an open source, standards-based approach is expected to help promote interoperability between THICC, participating healthcare facilities and physicians who may be using disparate electronic health record systems, so that documents may be shared between THICC members and others participating in the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) – a technology architecture that is part of President Obama’s goal to create a system of digital medical records by 2014 or earlier. (Stephan O’Neill, Vice President, Information Services, Hartford HealthCare.)
Affiliated Computer Services, Inc. has been awarded a five-year contract extension to provide information technology (IT) services for the City of Irvine, California. The agreement, with a total value of $18 million, began July 1 and continues through June 30, 2014. (Jan Stinger, information technology administrator for the City of Irvine.)
State Government owned Maryland Public Television (“MPT”) has awarded Statmon Technologies their transmission systems monitoring and control project valued at approximately $250,000. The project encompasses seven transmission sites and one uplink facility at various locations across the State of Maryland as well as a Network Operations Center located in the Maryland Public Television facilities.
AssetWorks, a provider of fleet Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) software and Automated Fuel Systems, has signed a contract and commenced implementation services with the City of Houston, Texas. The City of Houston operates forty-three fleet maintenance facilities located throughout a 600 square mile area, which are responsible for maintaining and repairing over 12,000 vehicles and pieces of heavy-duty equipment. The total fleet is owned and maintained by the Police, Fire, Public Works and Engineering, Parks & Recreation, Solid Waste Management, and Aviation Departments. (James Tillman, City of Houston Finance Department.) www.assetworks.com.
The City of Chicago has deployed SpringSource Hyperic HQ Enterprise to monitor and manage its large and complex web operations environment to guarantee satisfaction for residents and tourists making use of government-run services. Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) is the central IT organization for the city, providing telecommunications services to more than 40 government departments as well as residents, businesses and tourists. It is also in charge of the city’s official website, www.cityofchicago.org. With 38,000 employees and a large, heterogeneous IT environment with thousands of PC’s and more than 500 servers (running on Linux, Windows and UNIX), deep visibility into all systems is a tall order. (Jason DeHaan, Chicago’s first deputy CIO.)
Black & Veatch was selected by the state of Oregon to provide architectural and engineering services for the Oregon Wireless Interoperability Network (OWIN) project that is designed to enhance public safety. The OWIN project consolidates the Department of Oregon State Police, Department of Corrections, Department of Forestry and Department of Transportation radio systems into an up-to-date wireless public safety network. The system will replace outdated and aging infrastructure while complying with new Federal Communications Commission regulations requiring users of wideband radio to convert to narrowband technology before Jan. 1, 2013. (OWIN Director, Lindsay Ball.)
The Municipal Association of South Carolina (MASC), which provides self-funded insurance programs to South Carolina local governments, has selected DAVID’s NavRisk Claims as the technology platform on which it will process claims for SCMIRF, their property and liability pool. (Jeff Thompson, Assistant Director of Risk Management Services for the Municipal Association of SC.)
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s has selected ISYS Anywhere to provide its staff with secure mobile access to vital departmental content. ISYS Anywhere is a universal mobile enterprise search solution to provide secure access across all major enterprise repositories, from individual PCs and workgroup file shares to large corporate portals and business applications.
Nestlé Waters is to leverage M-Factor’s software to provide actionable insights to allow them to optimize their trade spend across North America. “Fluctuating commodity prices impacting the cost of packaging, the impact of private label and the economic climate in general have made it more important than ever that we regularly assess our overall trade strategies,” said Dan Friedrich, VP of Customer Development at Nestlé Waters. “We need a strategic corporate level view across our brands and SKUs and need these insights to be available quickly to respond to market dynamics. M-Factor’s Software-as-a-Service solution offers the right level of planning and short implementation time that we need to improve top line growth in the near term.”
TOP Food & Drug, a grocery store chain in Washington State that is operated by Haggen, Inc., has extended its customer relationship program, TOP Connection, to all 18 locations. TOP Connection, launched in September 2008 at four stores, is a customer relationship program that improves customer retention and store profitability by enhancing the shopping experience and providing unique value-added services. The TOP Connection program pairs Accelitec| interact, an on-demand customer acquisition and retention platform deployed as software as a service (SaaS) solution that is provided by Accelitec, Inc., with RFID readers mounted on top of payment terminals and RFID-enabled key tags containing unique customer identifiers.
Accelitec|interact is compatible with the legacy software used by many grocery retailers. “We’ve had an incredible response from our guests because they see the value and benefits we offer are not available anywhere else in the grocery industry,” said Becky Skaggs, Vice President of Strategy & Consumer Insights of Haggen, Inc. “This program has made it easier for guests to shop in our stores and for us to build relationships not based on discounts. It has made a difference to our business.”
The City of Santa Clarita, located in Los Angeles County, has selected Avolve Software’s ProjectDox electronic plan submission, review and tracking. ProjectDox ePlan solution allows jurisdictions like Santa Clarita to offer web-based file submission and review to citizens, architects and developers who work with Building, Planning and Public Works departments reviewing site, building and engineering plans. Key benefits include reducing paper, printing costs, storage costs, deforestation, drive time, gasoline consumption and greenhouse gas emissions – while improving customer service and enabling greater efficiency between multiple departments. www.avolvesoftware.com
Oracle has selected Guidance Software’s EnCase eDiscovery, an “eDiscovery” solution for the search, collection, preservation, and processing of electronically stored information (ESI). It performs automated search, collection, and preservation of ESI residing in unstructured and semi-structured data stores such as: desktops, laptops, file servers, email servers, content management systems, and removable storage media, all without any business disruption. Additionally, it offers optional litigation hold notification and tracking functionality, and its extensive processing capabilities enable post-collection culling and de-duplication of data, as well as load file creation for the most popular attorney review platforms, allowing customers to drastically cut processing costs.
Beacon Enterprise Solutions Group is to provide VOIP solutions for a major new casino in St. Louis, MO. Beacon will be providing the VOIP system design and phone system installation throughout the entire facility in two stages. The new casino is located approximately ten miles south of downtown St. Louis in the community of Lemay. The $380 million multi-use complex will be modeled after the look of a Missouri riverboat town at the peak of the steamboat trade on the famed Mississippi River. The first phase of the project will include a 90,000-square-foot casino, with more than 2,000 slot machines and more than 50 table games, several restaurants, an entertainment venue and other amenities.
Online investment firm Scottrade (http://www.scottrade.com/) has expanded the nationwide data and national network services it uses from Qwest Communications International Inc. with a new five-year agreement. St Louis-based Scottrade recently selected Qwest’s dedicated GeoMax and QWave data networking solutions to provide ultra secure, high-bandwidth data circuits connecting its new Phoenix-area data center to Scottrade headquarters in St. Louis. The company has more than 400 branch offices nationwide that use Qwest iQ Networking services based on MPLS technology for wide-area networking. (Ian Patterson, chief information officer, Scottrade.)
Hazelwood School District, near St. Louis, Missouri, has purchased Carnegie Learning Bridge to Algebra textbooks and software for 900 ninth grade students in the District’s three high schools. “Our goal is to graduate each of our students prepared to compete professionally or in continuing education,” said Cathy French, Math Coordinator for Hazelwood School District.
Savvis, Inc., provider of outsourced internet infrastructure services for the enterprise, has an agreement to provide a range of services to Merial, a leading, innovation-driven animal health company. Under the terms of the three year, multimillion dollar agreement, Savvis will develop and deploy colocation and managed hosting, network and professional services, and managed security services for Merial’s global operations. (Mark Worrel, executive director, global infrastructure, Merial.)
Deutsche Post DHL has announced the signing of a five-year agreement with AT&T to provide telecommunications services. The agreement is part of a worldwide Deutsche Post DHL group initiative to realize opportunities for service enhancement and cost optimization in the provision of telephony and networking services.
“The opportunities for reducing telecoms costs while improving service and network performance are significant,” said Stephen McGuckin, managing director of IT services at Deutsche Post DHL. “This initiative will help us pave the way for more cost efficiency throughout our U.S. operations and provide a next generation platform to transform and enhance our network services in the U.S. over the next five years.”
The new contract with AT&T covers Deutsche Post DHL’s Express, DHL Supply Chain, Global Forwarding, and Global Business Services divisions in the U.S. The service is expected to go live by late 2009. Through telecommunications agreements, Deutsche Post DHL is expected to save more than 170 million euros over five years.
Black Box Corporation, a provider of voice communications, data infrastructure, and product solutions, has been awarded a telecommunications and data infrastructure services and technology product agreement from Premier Purchasing Partners, LP., the group purchasing unit of Premier, Inc. The agreement is available to acute care and continuum of care members of the Premier healthcare alliance. The Premier healthcare alliance is comprised of more than 2,100 U.S. hospitals and 58,000 healthcare sites working together to improve healthcare quality and affordability.
The National Institutes of Health Clinical Center (NIH Clinical Center) has selected QuadraMed AcuityPlus productivity, benchmarking and outcomes system to optimize its nursing resources enterprise-wide. NIH's hospital purchased the AcuityPlus platform, which includes inpatient, ambulatory and mental health methodologies, outcomes module, and import and export features, to help ensure interoperability with existing ADT and staff scheduling systems. The solution suite provides data analysis and monitoring to determine efficient staffing and budget projection and management, as well as a reporting module for true acuity-adjusted benchmarking.
The Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the nation's largest hospital devoted entirely to clinical research. It is a national resource that makes it possible to rapidly translate scientific observations and laboratory discoveries into new approaches for diagnosing, treating, and preventing disease. Through clinical research, physician-investigators translate laboratory discoveries into better treatments, therapies and interventions to improve the nation's health. http://clinicalcenter.nih.gov.
Level 3 Communications has been selected by the United States Coast Guard (USCG) to provide voice and data communications services. Level 3 is delivering services under the Washington Interagency Telecommunications Services 3 (WITS3) contract that negotiates telecommunications service plans and rates on behalf of all local and federal agencies operating within the National Capital Region. Under the terms of the agreement, Level 3 will provide connectivity for data transmission between 10 metropolitan sites, including USCG headquarters in Washington, D.C. and their main Telecommunications and Information Systems Command location in Alexandria, Va. In addition, Level 3 will provide voice services at each site to support day-to-day operations, including priority voice services as part of the Department of Homeland Security First Responders program.
Contextware has been awarded a sole source contract from the U.S. Army Contracting Command, Joint Munitions & Lethality Contracting Center, Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey on behalf of the ARDEC Knowledge Management Office. The award is for the procurement of manufacturing process capture software provided by Contextware. Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC), the U.S. Army's principal researcher, developer and sustainer of current and future armament and munitions systems, will use Contextware’s technology to help capture emerging manufacturing process information and knowledge. This effort will help support the establishment of a methodology to manage manufacturing process information through the implementation of an Armament Manufacturing Integrated Data Environment (AMIDE). According to the U.S. Army, it will also “facilitate communication and collaboration to conduct prototype and manufacturing process development efforts.” http://www.contextware.com
NCI, Inc., a provider of information technology (IT), engineering, and professional services and solutions to U.S. Federal Government agencies, has been awarded a task order worth an estimated $3.6 million to support the Air Force’s Combat Information Transport System (CITS) Program Office. The primary place of performance will be at Hickam AFB, Hawaii, with performance expected to begin August 2009. This competitively awarded task order is new work for NCI and was awarded under the Network-Centric Solutions (NETCENTS) contract vehicle.
Under this task order, NCI will provide the CITS Program with an integrated, high-bandwidth, information transport capability to support the Warfighter’s current and future mission requirements at Hickam AFB and the local Hawaii Air National Guard sites. The Air Force is transforming its networks from MAJCOM-centered islands to secure, unified, consolidated enterprise-centric networks as part of the Air Force’s portion of the Global Information Grid. The CITS work will help the Air Force meet its goals by upgrading and establishing the communications infrastructure for a centralized Command and Control (C2) capability and core IT services.
