New Attensity Group Unites Three Software Companies to Form World's Leading Business Applications Vendor for Unstructured Data
Global Semantic Application Vendors Join Forces to Create Market Powerhouse
April 17, 2009
PALO ALTO, Calif., April 20, 2009 — Three business intelligence and information management companies, Attensity™ Corporation, Empolis GmbH, and Living-e AG, today announced they have united to form the Attensity Group to deliver business user applications that generate value from unstructured data. The company offers a comprehensive family of applications built upon deep expertise in semantic language technologies.
Empolis GmbH provides information management applications, while Living-e AG offers intelligent multi-channel communication and information management solutions. Attensity Corporation is known for its deep text analytics software for First Person Intelligence™. The new Attensity Group will unify these complementary technologies that analyze, interpret and manage an enterprise’s mass of unstructured data to generate value and deliver easy-to-use business applications. These applications enable knowledge management professionals, business leaders, customer support personnel and customers to get relevant and actionable answers — fast.
Capitalizing on the presence and customer equity earned in each company’s respective geographic region, Attensity Group’s go-to-market entities will be named (1) Attensity Americas, and (2) Empolis in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). In the markets in EMEA, the Living-e and Empolis teams will join forces. The companies have united their sales efforts to offer combined solutions, support and implementation services to the market.
Attensity Group will employ approximately 300 people worldwide and expects to generate revenues in 2009 of approximately $50M (USD). With global headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., the new enterprise software powerhouse has offices in several major cities in the U.S. and Germany, as well as London. Attensity Group’s head office for EMEA is in Gütersloh, Germany.
Offering more than 100 years of combined executive experience in research, sales and implementation of applications that leverage unstructured data, Attensity Group’s senior executives come from some of the world’s top technology companies, including SAP, Oracle, IBM and HP. Attensity Group will be led by newly appointed President and Chief Executive Officer Ian Bonner, formerly of Inxight and IBM. The chief executive officers of Attensity Corporation, Empolis and Living-e will all take on new executive roles within Attensity Group, further strengthening the company’s leadership. More information on Attensity Group’s new management team can be found on the company's management page.
“We could not be happier about forming this market powerhouse. The combination of Living-e, Attensity Corporation and Empolis, all leaders within their respective market segments, creates a significant wealth of complementary and synergistic technologies, market presence and customer experience across multiple geographies,” said Ian Bonner. “With the rich and expanded technology capabilities of Attensity Group, we will offer the market an integrated suite of user applications based on semantic technologies that enable companies to optimize and improve business processes. Attensity Group will continue to deliver world-class applications to meet the evolving needs of our enterprise and government customers.”
Bonner continued, “The three companies have been working together on development, technology and business initiatives since late last year. Teams across the world have been reselling each other’s products for some months now and will be selling the complete product suite going forward. It’s a classic example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.”
Attensity Group has broad, proven experience, with more than 500 installations at over 250 of the Global 1000 companies in addition to large government agencies. Further ensuring Attensity Group’s success is the fact that each company has an impressive pedigree. Empolis GmbH was formerly a part of Arvato-Bertelsmann, the international media conglomerate. Living-e AG, backed by a co-founder of SAP, is a publicly traded company with a strong presence in Germany and the U.S. Attensity Corporation was founded out of the University of Utah and has focused on text analytics solutions for over nine years.
Attensity Group’s Portfolio of Applications
Attensity Group’s product applications address the following areas:
- E-Service Suite: Self-Service and Agent Portal – provides companies with knowledge bases and workflows for rapid, efficient service support and self-service; Automated Response Management – allows timely and accurate responses to incoming communications.
- Voice of the Customer – enables the analysis of customer feedback to inform business decisions.
- Market Voice – allows for comprehensive analysis of online customer conversations to understand and act on market buzz.
- Research and Discovery – facilitates advanced search and classification of internal and external data, enabling early detection of issues in corporate, risk and legal processes.
- Intelligence Analysis – enables analysis of content, context and connections among individuals, events, places, etc.
Optimizing internal business processes for research and data discovery requires being able to accurately and easily access disparate unstructured information. According to Forrester Research, as much as 90 percent of a company’s data is unstructured. Attensity Group’s suite of easy-to-use business applications extracts meaningful insight and information from both structured and unstructured data, and enables more accurate research and analysis and optimized customer interactions by using this data. Not only will knowledge workers be able to use these solutions — Attensity Group’s applications are also designed to be used by business executives, customer representatives, and even customers themselves.
Keeping customers requires knowing what they’re really thinking and responding to them quickly and accurately when they reach out to you. Per Bain and Company research, just a ten percent improvement in customer retention results in a 30 percent increase in the value of the company.
“In the current recession, there is perhaps nothing more important than keeping your customers, and keeping them happy,” said Craig D. Norris, CEO of Attensity Corporation and new general manager of Attensity Americas. “I’m proud to continue to play a strategic role within the new Attensity Group, whose solutions will enable companies to better understand, and thus retain, customers, while helping them to grow their businesses.”
Attensity Group’s customer portfolio includes Travelocity, JetBlue Airways Corporation and Medicare, who have been using Attensity Corporation’s Voice of the Customer (VoC) solution to mine priceless unstructured customer feedback found in emails, call center notes, surveys, etc. Attensity VoC transforms the freeform text into structured, actionable First Person Intelligence, providing invaluable information that helps companies such as Nokia, The Charles Schwab Corporation, and The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) make timely, educated, business-critical decisions. As part of the Attensity VoC solution, Attensity Market Voice provides companies with better insight into the conversations their customers are having in blogs, web forums, product review comments, and other forms of online customer exchanges. Both Attensity VoC and Market Voice will be offered as part of Attensity Group’s larger product portfolio.
“As these three companies unite, Attensity Group is poised to become a powerful market threat,” said Guido Polko, CEO of Living-e AG, and Attensity Group’s designated new senior vice president of operations and strategic projects. “We believe the result of Attensity Group’s expanded product offerings will be increased customer satisfaction, more powerful business insights, enhanced operational efficiency and reduced business risk. Living-e is excited to join with Empolis and Attensity Corporation in ensuring Attensity Group’s success.”
Living-e adds products to the Attensity Group that provide service-driven enterprises with intelligent multi-channel communication and information management solutions, based on cutting-edge artificial intelligence and patented text analysis technologies. These products offer self-learning software that optimizes and automates the processing of unstructured data, helping companies such as BASF, Lufthansa and Nortel respond quickly and accurately to customer inquiries across any channel.
“Attensity Corporation, Living-e and Empolis all bring key ingredients to the union and together we will hold a dominant position within the knowledge management industry,” said Dr. Stefan Wess, CEO of Empolis GmbH and the new managing director and general manager of Empolis, an Attensity Group Company. “Our broad family of solutions will help our customers create, maintain and grow a competitive edge. Moreover, Attensity Group’s global presence will enforce our position as a leading business applications vendor within the semantic market.”
Attensity Group’s installed base in Germany includes giants such as Bosch, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Bentley Motors, Nokia Siemens Networks and Telefónica O2. These customers rely on Empolis for enterprise content and knowledge management in order to deliver better customer service, engage in optimal research processes, manage and share content, and improve business processes. Designed for a range of business applications, Empolis solutions control the efficient and effective flow of information as well as the storage and visualization of information. Through semantic methods, information from various different formats, structured and unstructured, and from any source is processed to become valuable knowledge and actionable information, which is then delivered real-time to the decision maker.
Attensity Corporation, Empolis GmbH and Living-e AG have all supported the global open source initiative, SMILA (SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture), as semantic technology partners. Attensity Group will continue to partner with SMILA and other organizations that share its passion for innovation and revolutionizing the industry.
Additionally, the new Empolis will continue the existing commitment of Empolis GmbH to the “THESEUS” project, a research program initiated by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economy and Technology (BMWi). Empolis will also continue to play a leadership role in the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).
Industry Perspectives on the Formation of Attensity Group
The new Attensity Group has the enthusiastic support of industry thought-leaders, as well as its valued partners and customers.
Whirlpool
“We’ve experienced great success in using Attensity’s products for more than five years. They have enabled us to more efficiently use the voice of the consumer and service technician to resolve early warranty issues and to identify new opportunities for innovation, while helping us to improve our response to customers’ needs,” said Fred Roth, director of Cost Leadership and Business Growth at Whirlpool Corporation. “We look forward to understanding and leveraging the expanded product portfolio of business applications, tools and solutions that Attensity Group will offer.”
Teradata
“Attensity Corporation continues to be a strong Teradata partner with important capabilities to bring together structured and unstructured data into the enterprise data warehouse for business analytics,” said Miles Stephenson, vice president of Teradata Solutions and Alliances Marketing. “Teradata is excited to see Attensity expand its portfolio through this new business development and we look forward to the increasing value it will deliver to our joint customers.”
enherent
“The coming together of Attensity Group will fortify our existing partnership with Attensity Corporation,” said Pamela Fredette, chairman and CEO of enherent. “Attensity Group’s complete product portfolio will further complement enherent’s offerings, together allowing us to provide more effective management of brand reputation and the harnessing of new and innovative ideas. We look forward to working with Attensity Group to further build our relationship and continue to improve our offerings to joint customers.”
24/7
“Attensity Group gives us proven, intelligent solutions that enable us to deliver predictive innovative solutions, that can create strong business outcomes for our clients,” said PV Kannan, CEO of 24/7. “As a strategic partner, we look forward to continuing to work with the new organization to deliver additional value to our customers.”
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)
”We are excited to see Empolis join the Attensity Group and we look forward to the expanded portfolio the new company will offer,” said Professor Wolfgang Wahlster, chairman and CEO of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). “As a DFKI shareholder, Empolis – and from now on, Attensity Group – is the ideal partner, using intelligent and innovative solutions for improving the information infrastructure of its customers.”
IDC
“This is a significant move within the content technologies industry,” said Sue Feldman, research vice president for search and discovery technologies at IDC. “The next sea change in computing will come from combining information access with workflow, information management, and better interaction design. In providing more comprehensive business applications for unstructured data, Attensity Group recognizes companies’ increasing need for insight into customer feedback and interaction, as well as the ability to simply access relevant content and data.”
Alta Plana
“The union of the three companies under the Attensity Group banner is clearly more than the sum of the parts,” said Seth Grimes, principal consultant with Alta Plana Corporation and contributing editor of TechWeb's Intelligent Enterprise. “It's a union of strengths: experienced executive leadership, complementary industry-leading products, and solution sets that are well positioned to meet enterprise needs as businesses embrace semantic technologies.”
About Attensity Group
Attensity Group provides business user applications that generate value from unstructured data. Its comprehensive family of solutions leverages semantic analytics to enable knowledge management professionals, business leaders, customer support personnel and customers to interpret and manage an organization’s unstructured data to get relevant and actionable answers — fast. Attensity Group’s award-winning software is in use by more than 250 of the Global 1000 and by large government agencies to deliver powerful insights, enhance operational efficiency, reduce risk exposure, and ensure increased customer satisfaction. Attensity Group, with more than 500 installations worldwide, services customers from multiple offices in the U.S. and Europe. The company’s go-to-market entities are Attensity Americas and Empolis in the EMEA region. Attensity Group’s corporate headquarters are in Palo Alto, Calif. More information is at (www.attensitygroup.com).