Knoa Software Raises $7.5 Million in Venture Funding
Knoa Software, a provider of on-premises and cloud-based solutions designed to analyze at a process level how end users are using enterprise applications, has raised $7.5 million in funding from previous investors Ascent Ventures and FA Tech, along with new sources including Gefinor Ventures, Advantage Capital Partners, and Rand Capital.
The growth round will go toward broadening the software company's solutions; the latest version of the Knoa Experience and Performance Manager (EPM) 7.0 was released this summer and the next major release of the product is scheduled to come out in April 2013.
"In this environment, where data processing capabilities and the quality of analytics are expanding [and improving] at such a rapid rate, it makes sense to really begin to knit these systems together into a higher level of understanding, and that's where we're headed with our next release," comments Thad Eidman, chief executive officer of Knoa Software.
In the 7.0 release, Knoa added support for SAP enterprise solutions such as SAP NetWeaver Portal, SAP CRM, and SAP BusinessObjects, and is resold as the SAP User Experience Management application by Knoa. According to Eidman, customers want embedded business intelligence (BI) out of the box and would prefer to forgo creating a custom BI layer to sit on top of its products. For its future release, Knoa is working with platforms like SAP HANA, which provides real-time, in-memory data analytics and processing.
As for Knoa's position in the CRM ecosystem, Eidman says the company falls under the agent performance area with a focus on execution rather than quality assurance monitoring. An EPM user in IT, for instance, can monitor screen-by-screen how users navigate an application with early warnings on inconsistencies in the system that could affect service or other outcomes. "There really have not been companies focused on managing the performance of the user, the agent, the salesperson, or the shared service center person at a process level," Eidman remarks.