KANA Software and IBM report they have built upon their global alliance to jointly market, sell and support service-oriented architecture-based (SOA) customer service solutions built on open technologies from both companies.

KANA has also signed a new original equipment management (OEM) agreement to garner a larger piece of the growing customer service and support segment of the customer relationship management (CRM) market. KANA will embed IBM middleware including WebSphere and DB2 in its next-generation enterprise customer service solutions.

The companies say the agreement will enable clients to transform their service operations and resolve customer inquiries taking advantage of IBM’s SOA and information on demand (IOD) capabilities to share data across multiple applications and channels including call center, Web, e-mail, chat, kiosk, agent and branch. This is IBM’s first such CRM partnership.