Penn Mutual Life Insurance said Thursday that it had hit an important milestone in its work with Hearsay Social, a provider of social-media platforms, which could serve as a case study in how financial firms can rapidly and comprehensively embrace new technology.
“We have a roughly 50% adoption rate of Hearsay Social among our registered reps, and that is great for us,” said Robert Bonsall, assistant vice president of interactive marketing at Penn Mutual, in an interview. “We’ve been really pushing it.”
That’s not necessarily what some might expect would be the case for a 167-year-old insurance firm.
“It’s interesting. Companies with a long legacy of building businesses and client relations, like us, are embracing technology. We are being very progressive in how we enable advisors with tools like Hearsay Social,” Bonsall explained.
Penn Mutual worked with another social media vendor but switched to Hearsay to move “from the defensive aspect of being compliant by monitoring social media to being both compliant and engaging with consumers – playing defense and offense,” he said.
Hot China Companies To Watch In Right Now: Shenandoah Telecommunications Co(SHEN)
Shenandoah Telecommunications Company, a diversified telecommunications company, provides regulated and unregulated telecommunications services to end-user customers and other communications providers in the southeastern United States. It offers a suite of voice, video, and data communications services; and sells telecommunications equipment. The company?s Wireless segment provides digital wireless service to a portion of a four-state area covering the region from Harrisburg, York, and Altoona, Pennsylvania to Harrisonburg, Virginia. It owns 149 towers and leases tower space to other wireless communications providers in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. This segment also offers personal communications services through a digital wireless telephone and data network. Its Wireline segment provides regulated and unregulated telephone services and leases fiber optic facilities primarily in the northern Shenandoah Valley. This segment also offers information s ervices and Internet access to customers in the northern Shenandoah Valley and surrounding areas. In addition, it is involved in the resale of long distance service for calls placed to locations outside the regulated telephone service area by telephone customers. As of December 31, 2011, this segment had approximately 1,410 dial-up customers and 12,351 digital subscriber line customers, as well as served approximately 10,483 long distance customers. The company?s Cable Television segment provides coaxial cable-based television service in the portions of Shenandoah County, Virginia, as well as in communities in West Virginia, southern and southwestern Virginia, and western Maryland. It had approximately 137,238 cable revenue generating units. The company was founded in 1902 and is headquartered in Edinburg, Virginia.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Jake L'Ecuyer]
Leading and Lagging Sectors
Wednesday morning, the healthcare sector proved to be a source of strength for the market. Leading the sector was strength from Horizon Pharma (NASDAQ: HZNP) and Pernix Therapeutics Holdings (NASDAQ: PTX). In trading on Wednesday, telecommunications services shares were relative laggards, down on the day by about 0.39 percent. Top decliners in the sector included Shenandoah Telecommunications Co (NASDAQ: SHEN), off 3.3 percent, and CalAmp (NASDAQ: CAMP), down around 2.4 percent.
Top Defensive Companies To Invest In 2014: Rally Software Development Corp (RALY)
Rally Software Development Corp., incorporated on July 12, 2001, is a global provider of cloud-based solutions for managing Agile software development. The Company's platform transforms the way organizations manage the software development lifecycle by enabling close alignment of software development and strategic business objectives, facilitating collaboration, increasing transparency, and automating manual processes. Organizations use its solutions to accelerate the pace of innovation, improve productivity and more effectively adapt to rapidly-changing customer needs and competitive dynamics. Its enterprise-class platform is extensible, cost-effective and designed to be easy to use. Agile is a software development methodology characterized by short, iterative and adaptable development cycles.
The Company provides a common platform on which organizations can collaborate across globally-distributed software development teams, solicit ideas and feedback from customers, and gain transparency into Agile software development projects. Its solutions automate and optimize activities such as project planning and scheduling, resource allocation and reporting on progress and cost, enabling users to manage the entire Agile software development lifecycle. Its cloud-based platform of management solutions is designed to address the application lifecycle market, which IDC defines as comprising the software configuration management, information technology (IT) project and portfolio management, and automated software markets.
Agile Management Solutions
It offers Agile management solutions that its customers use for planning, collaborating, tracking and reporting on the creation of new software products and applications. Its solutions support the full software development lifecycle with key capabilities that include Idea Management, Agile Portfolio Management, Time and Cost Management, Agile Project Management, Requirements Management and Quality Management. Its Idea Management c! apability, Rally Idea Manager, is used by its customers to engage with their end users to solicit ideas for products and manage feedback on proposed features and enhancements. This capability establishes a communication channel between its customers and their end-users. Teams and organizations use this capability to engage directly with end-users in an online community, collect information to assess customer needs and automatically communicate development status to end-users.
Its Agile Portfolio Management capability, Rally Portfolio Manager, bridges the gap between business leaders and development teams. Business leaders are provided up-to-date and accurate information on the status of key projects while development teams are provided clear visibility into the priorities of the business in order to better align their feature backlogs. Our Time and Cost Management capability, Rally Time Tracker, enables key financial functions related to software development, such as software capitalization, cost tracking, budget management and billing. This capability reduces double entry in other systems and ensures data is captured and aggregated into reports. Teams and organizations use this capability to reduce daily overhead of tracking time by integrating into the daily process, design and generate aggregate timesheets to meet accounting, budgeting or billing requirements , ensure that time entries meet audit and compliance requirements and integrate time tracking information into existing back office and time and attendance applications.
Its Agile Project Management capability allows cross-functional teams to efficiently plan and manage software releases. Teams and organizations use this capability to manage product and release backlogs that reflect the priorities of the business, schedule all or parts of requirements from backlogs into releases based on capacity and real-time visibility into the status of features, priorities, roadblocks and risks. Its Requirements Management capabil! ity enabl! es business leaders and analysts to centrally manage and prioritize features for development. Users can elaborate requirements with needed details, break them up into smaller units and organize them to match the changing structures of their teams or technology components. Its Quality Management capability, Rally Quality Manager, enables testing engineers to integrate testing into the development process from the beginning of a project. This capability provides a full enterprise solution to plan and track the execution of test activities.
Platform Capabilities
Its platform employs a analytics and reporting engine. In addition to over 25 pre-built standard reports, its platform includes a custom reporting engine that allows customers to create reports to meet their needs. Its platform also includes dashboard technology to present personalized content and then share that content for consistent use across a team or organization. Its platform provides enterprise-class security capabilities simplifying the administration of thousands of users. It can integrate its platform with its customers' existing security infrastructure to provide end-users with the ability to have single-sign-on (SSO) and provide advanced security measures to reduce risk and meet the needs of enterprises. This adaptability also ensures its solutions can be configured to meet the changing needs of an organization. It offers an open Web services application programming interface (WSAPI) providing full read-write access to all of the data within its platform. The WSAPI is versioned so that integrations or customizations are insulated from changes in the WSAPI, thereby preserving a customer's investment in custom functionality.
It provides customization services that produce Apps for specific customer needs. Examples of Apps that are available in its catalog include Dependency Status Dashboard enables organizations to view dependencies between teams and forecast potential impediments and stoppages in ! a project! ; System Requirement Validation Document generates a document for signature and archival typically used by customers in regulated industries to validate that the requirements of a system or application have been met; Agile Earned-Value Management provides a report based on traditional project management practices that provides what-if scenarios for planning scope, schedule and budget, and There are over 40 integrations available for its platform. It has 25 pre-built integrations with complementary products that synchronize their data with its platform. Additionally, there are over 20 integrations that third parties have created with its platform that they offer to their customers. It also integrates with open-source development tools, including Subversion, Jenkins and Eclipse, as well as commercial products, including Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Visual Studio and HP QualityCenter.
Editions
It offers four editions of its Agile management solution. Each edition is built on the same software code base. Rally Community Edition is designed for an individual team that operates independently, even if it is part of a larger organization. Community Edition includes a basic version of Agile Project Management and Requirements Management capabilities and is available for free for 10 users and one project.
Rally eXpress Edition is designed for both and small organizations and scales from a single team to multiple, independent teams and projects. eXpress Edition includes a basic version of Agile Project Management and Requirements Management capabilities. eXpress Edition supports unlimited users and projects.
Rally Enterprise Edition is targeted at medium to organizations focused on coordinating projects across multiple teams. Enterprise Edition includes Agile Project Management, Requirements Management and basic Quality Management capabilities. Enterprise Edition supports unlimited users and projects.
Rally Unlimited Edition is built for organizations and ! offers it! s full set of capabilities for managing the entire software lifecycle, including Idea Management, Agile Portfolio Management, Time and Cost Management, Agile Project Management, Requirements Management and Quality Management. Unlimited Edition supports unlimited users and projects.
On-Premise Deployment Option
A small percentage of its customers deploy its solutions on-premise. When its software is installed at the customer site, it specifies the hardware requirements and deliver its solutions on a virtual software appliance.
Professional Services
It offers a broad array of professional services to its customers to assist them in the implementation of its platform and adoption of Agile techniques.It offers its services globally. It offer public and private courses educating customers on Agile practices. A number of its training courses are certified by the independent organization Scrum Alliance. Through its Agile University brand, it offers Agile-related education and coursework taught by its consultants and a network of instructors. It offers a broad set of services that help customers implement Agile practices across their organization. It aims to make organizations self-sufficient so they can continue expanding their usage of Agile after it concludes its services engagement. Its implementation services combine workshops and training to help organizations incorporate its platform into their development process. These services include process training and product customization to help organizations take advantage of the full breadth of capabilities its platform offers. Customers can elect to leverage its platform extension services to customize its platform to meet the specific needs of their organization. It creates custom Apps and customized integrations to ensure that its solutions fit a customer's infrastructure and practices, and it offers data migration services to migrate data from a customer's legacy application into its platform.
The ! Company competes with Atlassian, CollabNet, VersionOne, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Microsoft.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Evan Niu, CFA]
What: Shares of Rally Software (NYSE: RALY ) rallied today by as much as 20% after the company announced fiscal first quarter results.
- [By John Udovich]
Small cap cloud and enterprise services stock Rally Software Development Corp (NYSE: RALY) just had a reversal ��meaning its worth taking a closer look at the stock along with potential performance benchmarks like Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL), iShares North American Tech-Software (NYSEARCA: IGV) and First Trust ISE Cloud Computing Index (NASDAQ: SKYY).
Top Defensive Companies To Invest In 2014: Accretive Health Inc. (AH)
Accretive Health, Inc. provides revenue cycle management services for hospitals and healthcare providers in the United States. It offers integrated revenue cycle management services that help healthcare providers to manage their revenue cycles, which encompass patient registration, insurance and benefit verification, medical treatment documentation and coding, bill preparation, and collections; quality and total cost of care services, which enable healthcare providers to manage the health of a defined patient population by identifying those individuals who are most likely to experience an adverse health event; and physician advisory services. Accretive Health, Inc. serves multi-hospital systems, including faith-based or community healthcare systems, academic medical centers, independent ambulatory clinics, and physician practice groups. The company was formerly known as Healthcare Services, Inc. and changed its name to Accretive Health, Inc. in August 2009. Accretive Healt h, Inc. was founded in 2003 and is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Laura Brodbeck]
Wednesday
Earnings Expected From: Accretive Health, Inc (NYSE: AH), Monsanto Company (NYSE: MON), UniTek Global Services, Inc. (NASDAQ: UNTK) Economic Releases Expected: Eurozone interest rate decision and PPI data, US National Employment Report, British construction PMIThursday
- [By Jon C. Ogg]
Accretive Health Inc. (NYSE: AH) was downgraded to Perform from Outperform at Oppenheimer.
Alamos�Gold Inc. (NYSE: AGI) was reinstated as Buy with a target price of $21 in Canada, which would translate to closer to $20 in U.S. share prices (versus $16.33 current), at BofA/Merrill Lynch.
- [By Jon C. Ogg]
Accretive Health Inc. (NYSE: AH) was downgraded to Neutral from Outperform at Credit Suisse.
Beam Inc. (NYSE: BEAM) was downgraded to Hold from Buy based on valuation at Argus.
Top Defensive Companies To Invest In 2014: W.P. Carey & Co. LLC(WPC)
W. P. Carey & Co. LLC, together with its subsidiaries, provides long-term sale-leaseback and build-to-suit transactions for companies worldwide and manages a global investment portfolio. It invests primarily in commercial properties that are each triple-net leased to single corporate tenants, which requires each tenant to pay substantially all of the costs associated with operating and maintaining the property. The company also operates as an advisor to publicly owned, non-actively traded real estate investment trusts, which are sponsored by it under the Corporate Property Associates brand name, as well as invests in similar properties. As of March 31, 2010, its portfolio comprised full or partial ownership interest in 167 properties that totaled approximately 14 million square feet. W. P. Carey & Co. LLC was founded in 1973 and is based in New York, New York.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Dividends4Life]
W. P. Carey Inc. (WPC) is an independent equity real estate investment trust. The firm also provides long-term sale-leaseback and build-to-suit financing for companies. September 19th the company increased its quarterly dividend 2.4% to $0.86 per share. The dividend is payable October 15, 2013 to stockholders of record as of September 30, 2013. The yield based on the new payout is 5.2%.
Top Defensive Companies To Invest In 2014: Weatherford International Ltd(WFT)
Weatherford International Ltd. provides equipment and services used in the drilling, evaluation, completion, production, and intervention of oil and natural gas wells worldwide. It offers artificial lift systems, which include reciprocating rod lift systems, progressing cavity pumps, gas lift systems, hydraulic lift systems, plunger lift systems, hybrid lift systems, wellhead systems, and multiphase metering systems. The company also provides drilling services, including directional drilling, ?Secure Drilling? services, well testing, drilling-with-casing and drilling-with-liner systems, and surface logging systems; and well construction services, such as tubular running services, cementing products, liner systems, swellable products, solid tubular expandable technologies, and inflatable products and accessories. In addition, it designs and manufactures drilling jars, underreamers, rotating control devices, and other pressure-control equipment used in drilling oil and nat ural gas wells; and offers a selection of in-house or third-party manufactured equipment for the drilling, completion, and work over of oil and natural gas wells for operators and drilling contractors, as well as a line of completion tools and sand screens. Further, the company provides wireline and evaluation services; and re-entry, fishing, and thru-tubing services, as well as well abandonment and wellbore cleaning services; stimulation and chemicals, including fracturing and coiled tubing technologies, cement services, chemical systems, and drilling fluids; integrated drilling services; and pipeline and specialty services. It serves independent oil and natural gas producing companies. The company was founded in 1972 and is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By John Licata]
Weatherford International (NYSE: WFT ) is going through an identity crisis of sorts that I'm surprised hasn't raised some legal red flags or caused more concern on Wall Street. The company maintains its main operational office in Houston, was formerly legally based in Bermuda, moved to Switzerland in 2009, and now seeks the greener pastures of Ireland to operate at lower costs and further attract top talent. What's going on here? Is Weatherford gaming the system, or�is it�possibly hiding something? One thing's for sure, this is perfectly legal but something sure doesn't smell right since tax shelters are increasingly being vilified in political circles here in the�United States. Ireland has also been under pressure to make�its tax structures harder to abuse by multinational corporations.�
- [By Taylor Muckerman]
Improperly hunting for tax havens
While in the midst of reconciling tax-accounting issues, Weatherford International� (NYSE: WFT ) came under SEC investigation for potentially selling goods to sanctioned Iran and Syria back in March 2012. The stock has yet to recover and has traded down 20.6% since March 16, 2012, while the S&P 500 is up 15% and rival Halliburton is up 23.9% over the same time frame. - [By Holly LaFon]
Weatherford International Ltd. (0.4%) (WFT)(WFT - $17.36 - NYSE), based in Houston, Texas, finally resolved its tax accounting problems and various government investigations, which had been on-going for several years. It is now focused on growing its core businesses, enhancing profitability, reducing leverage and improving capital efficiency. The company is targeting total segment operating profit margin to reach 20% by 2016 from 11.3% in 2013 and reducing debt to capitalization from 52% to 25%. It aims to realize $500 million in annualized cost savings and sell four non-core businesses. Also, Weatherford plans to spin-off a portion of its international drilling rig business by the end of 2014 or early 2015. All available free cash flow generated and proceeds from asset sales will be used to reduce debt.From Mario Gabelli (Trades, Portfolio)'s Value 25 Fund first quarter 2014 shareholder commentary. Also check out: Mario Gabelli Undervalued Stocks Mario Gabelli Top Growth Companies Mario Gabelli High Yield stocks, and Stocks that Mario Gabelli keeps buying Currently 0.00/512345
Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes)
- [By Anna Prior]
Weatherford International (WFT) PLC agreed to sell its land rig operations in Russia and Venezuela to Russia’s state-controlled oil giant Rosneft for $500 million in cash, as the oil-field services company continues to slim down and focus on its core businesses.
Top Defensive Companies To Invest In 2014: Con-way Inc (CNW)
Con-way Inc. (Con-way), incorporated in 1958, provides transportation, logistics and supply-chain management services for a wide range of manufacturing, industrial and retail customers. Con-way�� business units operate in regional and transcontinental less-than-truckload and full-truckload freight transportation, contract logistics and supply-chain management, multimodal freight brokerage, and trailer manufacturing. Con-way is divided into four segments: Freight, Logistics, Truckload, and Other. At December 31, 2011, Con-way Freight operated 286 freight service centers, of which 144 were owned and 142 were leased. At December 31, 2011, Con-way Freight owned and operated approximately 9,200 tractors and 26,400 trailers, including tractors held under capital lease agreements.
Freight
The Freight segment consists of the operating results of the Con-way Freight business unit. Con-way Freight is a less-than-truckload (LTL) motor carrier that utilizes a network of freight service centers to provide day-definite regional, inter-regional and transcontinental less-than-truckload freight services throughout North America. LTL carriers transport shipments from multiple shippers utilizing a network of freight service centers combined with a fleet of line-haul and pickup-and-delivery tractors and trailers. Freight is picked up from customers and consolidated for shipment at the originating service center. Freight is consolidated for transportation to the destination service centers or freight assembly centers. At Freight assembly centers, freight from various service centers can be reconsolidated for transportation to other freight assembly centers or destination service centers. From the destination service center, the freight is delivered to the customer. Typically, LTL shipments weigh between 100 and 15,000 pounds. In 2011, Con-way Freight�� average weight per shipment was 1,305 pounds.
Logistics
The Logistics segment consists of the operating results o! f the Menlo Worldwide Logistics business unit. Menlo Worldwide Logistics develops contract-logistics solutions, which can include managing complex distribution networks, and providing supply-chain engineering and consulting, and multimodal freight brokerage services. Menlo Worldwide Logistics��supply-chain management offerings are primarily related to transportation-management and contract-warehousing services. Transportation management refers to the management of asset-based carriers and third-party transportation providers for customers��inbound and outbound supply-chain needs through the use of logistics management systems to consolidate, book and track shipments. Contract warehousing refers to the optimization and operation of warehouses for customers using technology and warehouse-management systems to reduce inventory carrying costs and supply-chain cycle times. For several customers, contract-warehousing operations include light assembly or kitting operations.
Menlo Worldwide Logistics provides its services using a customer- or project-based approach when the supply-chain solution requires customer-specific transportation management, single-client warehouses, and/or single-customer technological solutions. However, Menlo Worldwide Logistics also utilizes a shared-resource, process-based approach that leverages a centralized transportation-management group, multi-client warehouses and technology to provide scalable solutions to multiple customers. Additionally, Menlo Worldwide Logistics segments its business based on customer type. At December 31, 2011, Menlo Worldwide Logistics operated 76 warehouses in North America, of which 55 were leased by Menlo Worldwide Logistics and 21 were leased or owned by clients of Menlo Worldwide Logistics. Outside of North America, Menlo Worldwide Logistics operated an additional 63 warehouses, of which 48 were leased by Menlo Worldwide Logistics and 15 were leased or owned by clients. Menlo Worldwide Logistics owns and operates a small fleet of tr! actors an! d trailers to support its operations, but primarily utilizes third-party transportation providers for the movement of customer shipments.
Truckload
The Truckload segment consists of the operating results of the Con-way Truckload business unit. Con-way Truckload is a full-truckload motor carrier that utilizes a fleet of tractors and trailers to provide short- and long-haul, asset-based transportation services throughout North America. Con-way Truckload provides dry-van transportation services to manufacturing, industrial and retail customers while using single drivers as well as two-person driver teams over long-haul routes, with each trailer containing only one customer�� goods. This origin-to-destination freight movement limits intermediate handling and is not dependent on the same network of locations utilized by LTL carriers. On average, Con-way Truckload transports shipments more than 800 miles from origin to destination. Under its regional service offering, Con-way Truckload transports truckload shipments of less than 600 miles, including local-area service for truckload shipments of less than 100 miles.
Con-way Truckload offers through-trailer service into and out of Mexico through all major gateways in Texas, Arizona and California. For a shipment with an origin or destination in Mexico, Con-way Truckload provides transportation for the domestic portion of the freight move, and a Mexican carrier provides the pick-up, linehaul and delivery services within Mexico. At December 31, 2011, Con-way Truckload operated five owned terminals with bulk fuel, tractor and trailer parking, and in some cases, equipment maintenance and washing facilities. In addition, Con-way Truckload also utilizes various drop yards for temporary trailer storage throughout the United States. At December 31, 2011, Con-way Truckload owned and operated approximately 2,700 tractors and 8,000 trailers, including tractors held under capital lease agreements.
Other
! The Other! reporting segment consists of the operating results of Road Systems, a trailer manufacturer, and certain corporate activities for which the related income or expense has not been allocated to other reporting segments, including results related to corporate re-insurance activities and corporate properties. Road Systems primarily manufactures and refurbishes trailers for Con-way Freight and Con-way Truckload.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Dan Caplinger]
Navistar hasn't been entirely locked out of the trucking market, though. The company won several contracts from the Defense Department in support of its military vehicles, including its MaxxPro mine-resistant, ambush-protected armored vehicle. On the commercial front, Navistar won part of an order in May from trucking company Con-Way (NYSE: CNW ) , which purchased 200 ProStar vehicles from the company. Still, the fact that rival Paccar (NASDAQ: PCAR ) got an even bigger portion of the Con-Way order is just one more sign of the ongoing struggles Navistar faces.
- [By Ben Levisohn]
Shares of Atlas Air have plunged 15% to $37.13 today at 1:48 p.m., on what has been a lousy day for shippers and those involved with shipping. Trucking company Con-Way (CNW) has fallen 2.5% to $40.38 after it said earnings would be unchanged from a year ago, well short of analyst forecasts. FedEx (FDX) has dropped 0.7% following UPS’s miss.
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