Power launch

Pending shareholder approval, Kana Communications and Broadbase will merge to form a new company.

Kana Software will combine Kana’s service solutions, contact center offerings and scalable e-business platform analytics with Broadbase’s knowledgebase, analytics e-marketing technologies in a new enterprise relationship management (ERM) solution.

Kana and Broadbase define ERM as the next generation of client-server cutomer relationship management, which they say is traditionally focused on processing transactions and automating the sales process. ERM is Web-architected and focused on focus on relationships with customers, partners and the enterprise.

The companies will integrate their products in several ways. First, the Broadbase knowledgebase will be blended with Kana's service applications to guide customers, partners, suppliers, employees and customer service agents to information. Broadbase's analytic applications will extract information from the Kana applications to perform analysis of customers, partners, employees and suppliers and their service interactions across the enterprise.

This customer intelligence will be then automatically fed back into the Kana applications for smarter customer interactions each time a transaction occurs, they claim. Information about a customer's service history can then be sourced to the Broadbase marketing application.

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