The drive to improve the presentation of business information to executive-level employees continued last week with the release of dashboard offerings from UpShot Corp. and CXO Systems Inc., both of which are delivering dashboards as Web services.
UpShot, which sells hosted CRM (customer relationship management) services, unveiled UpShot Dashboard, which gives CEOs, sales vice presidents and other executives a snapshot of sales forecasts by territory, their companys top 10 deals, pipeline analysis and sales activity by representative.
Separately, CXO Systems, of Waltham, Mass., released CXO 3.0, a Web services dashboard that can pull information from analytical and operational systems and integrate it without requiring data warehousing or enterprise application integration technologies, according to company officials.
This release features CXO Studio, which enables users to customize dashboard views to their job descriptions. It also has a back-end data aggregating and assimilating layer technology called Network Builder that can be used to extract XML-based data and speed its export using Web Services Description Language and Simple Object Access Protocol.
UpShot Dashboard is likewise configurable to users requirements. Users can drill down to get more detailed information regardless of whether they are online or offline.
UpShot Dashboard requires Microsoft Corp.s Excel on the desktop for manipulation, although dashboards can be viewed with only a Web browser. CXO 3.0 works with Excel but does not require it.
“We did with the Dashboard what weve always done: taken a simple-is-better approach,” said Keith Raffel, CEO of UpShot. “So we just used Excel rather than build it from scratch.”
In October, UpShot, of Mountain View, Calif., plans to add support for IBMs Lotus Software divisions Notes client integration to its hosted offering. Users will be able to synchronize their Notes address book, calendar and to-do list with the address book, calendar and to-do list in UpShots hosted CRM software with a single mouse click, officials said.
Notes support will let users associate any e-mail and attachment they send or receive with the appropriate UpShot account or contact, they said. There will be an added charge for companies using the Notes integration; the charge has yet to be determined.