The Week in Review: December 5, 2003

In the news... Oak Investment Partners and Talisma announced yesterday they do not plan to counter the CDC Software offer to acquire Pivotal Corporation. Fredric Harman, an Oak Investment Partners general partner, said in a statement, "After reviewing the current situation, including issues related to the extended process, Oak has concluded that there is no financial justification for increasing the price of its proposed acquisition of Pivotal at this time." Oak's original offer for Pivotal was valued at $47 million, while the CDC offer is valued at between $53 and $57 million. Though Oak planned to merge Pivotal with Talisma, it says it will still support Talisma's solution going forward. Siebel Systems has made an agreement with British Telecom (BT) to offer Siebel's hosted CRM OnDemand model to the UK. The service will be fully available in the first quarter of 2004, and will be marketed, sold, hosted, and supported by BT. Customers will be able to access the service either as an integrated part of BT's existing Siebel-based Contact Central CRM portfolio, or as a stand-alone CRM application, Siebel says. As with other hosted CRM models, companies will be able to sign up for any number of licenses they need, all at a fixed price per user, per month. Market intelligence and advisory firm IDC says the analytics market enjoyed robust growth of 15.4 percent in 2002, and projects the market to grow to $417.9 million by the end of 2007. In addition, IDC has ranked WebSideStory the number one ASP in the Web-analytics space in terms of revenue. The IDC report was the second report this year to cite WebSideStory as the largest pure ASP Web-analytics vendor. In Forrester Research's spring 2003 report, "Why Web Site Analytics Matter," WebSideStory was also shown as the top pure-ASP vendor by revenue. Amcat, a provider of contact center solutions, has formed a customer care division to better focus on its customers and to bring new innovations to this critical area. This newly created division, led by Les Reed, is the central point of contact for all customers from the moment that they begin a project with Amcat. Azerity, a sales execution and channel automation-solutions provider, announced that in addition to its existing European headquarters, it has expanded sales operations by opening offices in France, Germany, and the UK. Deals of the week... Kanisa, a provider of knowledge-empowered customer support applications, has announced that Novell has licensed two applications from the recently launched Kanisa5 Suite: Kanisa Support Center and Kanisa Support Site. FurnitureFind.com, an online furniture retailer, has selected WebSideStory's outsourced Web-analytics service to ensure that its Web site and its marketing programs are fully optimized. Executive changes... Alcatel has announced that Ad Nederlof has been promoted to chairman of its wholly owned subsidiary, Genesys. The company also appointed COO Laurent Philonenko as president and CEO of Genesys. BeVocal named former Genesys executive Robert Huxley as BeVocal's vice president of sales. Connextions, a fulfillment, contact center and eBusiness outsourcing partner, announced that Stephanie Jones has been promoted to senior vice president of contact center operations. The company has also appointed Terry Fine to senior vice president of sales. Fine previously served as vice president of sales for StarTek, a Colorado-based business process outsourcing company.