September 2, 2005

IN THE NEWS Verint Systems has acquired privately held Opus Group, a provider of performance analytics solutions for contact centers and back-office operations. The deal includes the purchase of certain assets and liabilities of Opus Group for $12 million in cash at closing and additional earn-out payments over two years based on select profitability targets. "Opus has demonstrated strong ROI for customers deploying their solutions and we believe that the synergy with Verint's actionable intelligence solutions will greatly benefit our customer base," said Dan Bodner, president and CEO of Verint Systems, in a written statement. Experian has acquired Baker Hill, a provider of relationship management, credit origination, and risk management tools for the financial services and banking industry. Key initiatives of the combined company will include deepening the coverage of Experian's Small Business Credit Share program and the continued investment in Baker Hill Advisor, the new generation of the organization's one-point solution. Baker Hill will operate as a business unit within Experian's Business Information Solutions division and will be known as Baker Hill, an Experian company, according to Experian. BMC Software has acquired KMXperts, a provider of knowledge management solutions for IT service and customer support centers. The technology from KMXperts will enable BMC Software customers to quickly improve staff efficiency, customer service and satisfaction, faster time to resolution, higher first-call resolution, and shorter incident duration, according to the company. Equifax has acquired BeNow, a provider of multichannel marketing tools. It will become part of Equifax Marketing Services. ON THE MOVE Onyx Software named Todd Chambers CMO. Chambers will be responsible for running Onyx's global marketing operations, which include the company's brand awareness, lead generation, industry solutions, and product marketing programs. NEW PRODUCTS 3Com is expanding its Convergence Applications Suite with the new 3Com Internet Protocol Contact Center module, which routes customer contacts to agents located anywhere on the enterprise network. It is an IP-based application geared for medium and large enterprise customers, and is designed to improve customer service, increase agent productivity, and lower contact center operating costs. The module consolidates multiple contact center systems, such as legacy automatic call distributors, interactive voice response units, and computer telephony integration components, on a single software platform. It is open architecture and standards based. 3Com will license the product from Nuasis. IBM revealed a new data transformation software meant to simplify complex integration task in a service-oriented environment, IBM WebSphere DataStage TX Version 8.0. The software is built on a service-oriented architecture and allows the data integration environment to be deployed in an open architecture supporting e-business standards regardless of data volumes. CUSTOMER WINS Parature has announced that ATI Technologies, a provider of PC graphics, has successfully deployed Parature's Enterprise Edition to service its six million global customer base. By using Parature's support portal and knowledge base, ATI has achieved a 99.6 percent customer support self-service rate and average response time decreased from two days to a few hours, according to the company. iCode, a provider of business application suite solutions for SMBs, announced continued penetration into the wholesale distribution sector by signing two new customers, BCI Acrylic and Diamond Designs. Both customers selected the company's Everest software to decrease operational costs, increase productivity, and improve customer service. They plan to automate their business operations, including inventory management, e-commerce, purchasing, accounting, CRM, POS, and sales operations. Related articles: Experian Pays For Having Misled Consumers Will Onyx's Enterprise Challenge Corner Siebel?