CRM software space tightens
The knowledge-based customer relationship management market recently saw consolidation in the form of ServiceWare's acquisition of sometimes partner, sometimes rival the Molloy Group. ServiceWare adds approximately 60 employees and will continue Molloy's Knowledge Bridge product as part of its product family. Financial details of the all-stock deal between the two privately held companies were not disclosed.
ServiceWare, which recently received new venture capital, built its product lineup around buildable customer knowledge bases called Knowledge-Paks. Molloy's product line is similar, but is built around cognitive processing technology.
From a business perspective, the move seems to make sense by forming a single, formidable company to go head-to-head with competitors including Primus, Inference and ServiceSoft.
Leveraging customer knowledge across the enterprise played a significant role in the acquisition, according to ServiceWare's CEO Rajiv Enand.
"Molloy Group's unique and advanced approach to problem resolution and knowledge management complements ServiceWare's own strategy," said Enand. "Molloy has been uniquely successful at creating solutions that work across an entire enterprise, which is an imperative in today's global economy."
Skip Grover, IT customer support manager at the State of Washington, and a ServiceWare user said that the combined tools of Molloy and ServiceWare seem likely to continue to offer his organization the solutions it needs. He added that he expects the ServiceWare/Molloy combination to be "a real positive for the Customer Support industry in general," he added.
That kind of "need" for CRM is something that the Delphi Group is seeing a lot. "Knowledge-based customer support continues to be cited by Delphi's end-user research base as one of the top picks for the initial application of knowledge management tools and practices," said the Delphi Group.
"ServiceWare's product line is substantially enhanced with the addition of Molloy's cognitive processing technology, and the result may well be a force that will cause other vendors...to re-evaluate and/or accelerate their acquisition strategies," Delphi added.
Speaking of competitors, Primus VP of marketing Norman Guadagno said that he thinks that the market is evolving, and that the move shows "two of the smaller players" joining together to compete more efficiently. Primus, which recently went public, plans to leverage partnerships such as those with Siebel and Clarify in order to grow its business, according to Guadagno.
<>