iExtensions Wins Big During IBM Award Season by Chris Alan Miller e-ProWire Industry Reporter February 16, 2005 — iExtensions is on a roll this year, picking up three key awards, all of which acknowledge the Murray Hill, New Jersey-based CRM company's solution excellence. Most recently, iEnterprise's iExtensions CRM won the 2005 IBM PartnerWorld Beacon Award for Best Lotus Software Solution. Previously, iEnterprises took home wins for the 2005 Best in Showcase Award and Best Real Time and Team Collaboration Solution Award at Lotusphere last month. The PartnerWorld Beacon award will be presented at the upcoming IBM PartnerWorld Conference in Las Vegas, which will run from February 27 - March 2. According to the multiple, independent panels of industry experts who were involved in judging the three awards, the common denominators for choosing iEnterprises’ iExtensions CRM solution are its product's dramatic ROI, outstanding client ratings across many industries, innovative use of wireless, effective collaborative capabilities, and broad use of IBM middleware. "We're using the latest technologies in great ways, and we actually have the ROI to prove that it all works," says John Carini, CEO of iExterprises. "I think the ROI piece of it really gets us there." One of the newest additions to iExtensions CRM is a module called CRM on the Go, which is also available separately. The module takes CRM data and puts it on a BlackBerry. iEnterprises wrote the product as a J2ME application, keeping it open so that you can connect it not only to the iExtensions CRM solution but to others like Seibel and SalesForce.com. It also uses WebSphere and DB2 to manage the synchronization (with the j2ME BlackBerry app). "We use Web Services to communicate across the board, all the way from the wireless device to the middleware, which is WebSphere, to the host CRM -- it's all Web services," Carini notes. "I think that was the cool neat thing that everybody loved about iExtensions." In case you're wondering, winning three awards is a lot harder than it seems -- most often the judges are aware of other award wins, particularly in small industries, and there's a natural bias from the organization granting these awards -- in this case, IBM -- to spread the recognition around a bit more. As far as we can tell, this appears to be the first time a single company has won three awards covering IBM Lotusphere and IBM PartnerWorld. More Awards In other award season news, the IBM Lotus CTO (Chief Technology Officer) Award winners have been announced. The judging for this award, led by Doug Wilson, CTO for Lotus Software Products, and a team that evaluated all qualified candidates, took place at Lotusphere. It recognizes one IBM PartnerWorld Business Partner firm from each geography that represents outstanding innovation that promotes IBM Workplace solutions. For the Americas, Interchange Solutions won for their new portalized application, Salesplace CRM for Lotus Notes. For Asia Pacific, Sobha Renaissance Information Technology Pvt. Ltd. took home the award, and for Europe, Middle East and Africa, iscoord ltd. won. Finalists for Europe Middle East and Africa are GEDYS Software and GroupWare AG, while finalists in the Americas are Instant Technologies and Avistar Communications Corporation. To view all of the awards and winners, check out http://lotus.com/partners/bp.nsf/wdocs/phon-5qbl8c.