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Jeff Henning, COO at Perseus Development Corp.

... pollsters who desperately want to pick their brains. "After doctors, IT guys are the most surveyed guys in the country," observes Jeff Henning, chief operating officer at Perseus Development Corp. in Braintree, Mass. Your popularity among researchers often
makes you reluctant to answer their endless queries, he says. The longtime market research expert claims that it's even worse in England, where he recalls having to bribe IT managers "with 40-year-old bottles of scotch" to get them to complete research studies. While dusty jugs of pricey booze may get your attention, handing them out isn't cost-effective for the researchers. Still, question you they must, argues Henning, "because [businesses] don't have the deep relationships with individual customers that [they] once did." To help companies survey customers about satisfaction levels or future needs without abusing their precious time, Perseus sells Web-based software that centrally manages the entire research process. The company's SurveySolutions/EFM 1.4 upgrade ships next week with improved trend-data reporting, added question libraries and a host of other updated features. Pricing starts at $40,000.
Dump road warriors' docking stations ...
... and replace them with USB port replicators. Matthew Chang, marketing manager at Addlogix Inc. in Irvine, Calif., boasts that his company's UniXpress device needs only a single USB connection to a laptop PC to handle signals from your monitor, keyboard, mouse, LAN, printer, speakers and more. And you can attach a second monitor to the $179 unit and use it with your laptop's screen to create a single display. Chang says Addlogix is working on so-called IP-KVM technology that lets you use a PC across the Internet as if it were local. That should be ready in September, he says.

Rosie Hausler, vice president of marketing at Nsite Inc.

Free is good, especially if ...
... it's for something useful. And Rosie Hausler, vice president of marketing at Nsite Inc. in Pleasanton, Calif., believes you'll think her company's offer of free access for 100 users to its Nsite Starter Edition is very practical, indeed. The online service gives you tools to manage IT service requests, workers' time off, employee status changes, travel authorization and staff performance reviews. Hauser contends that once you get hooked on the Starter Edition, you'll be back for more, including Nsite's flagship CRM tools, which cost $20 per user on a monthly basis. This fall, she says, the company will add self-service tools for creating business process automation applications using Nsite's predictive routing engine. The idea is to help automate enterprise-to-enterprise activities, using business rules defined by your business analysts. The best news is that users of the service won't have to bother IT, Hausler claims. "There's no coding," she says. "It's all drag-and-drop."
Sharpen security on the edge of ...