Knoa Announces Product and Service Line up for Risk-Proof CRM in 2010

Expanded portfolio supports latest versions of leading ISV packages
for on-premise and SaaS deployments

NEW YORK, March 17, 2010- In 2009, many CRM projects were deferred or
cancelled due to the difficult and uncertain economy, but this trend is
being reversed in 2010. While at the same time, the willingness to take on
risk is low, there is little room for failure in organizations that are
already stressed. Forrester Research, Inc. notes, “Battered by two years of
recession, buyers of customer management solutions have become extremely
value conscious. With vendors like Oracle and SAP touting new releases of
their CRM products, enterprises running older versions of CRM apps are
mulling whether to take the upgrade plunge. In a continuing weak economy,
business process professionals are wondering if the benefits of upgrading
their CRM solution will outweigh the costs.”[1]

Knoa , the market leader in End-User Experience
Management software, today
announced capabilities that will support both sides of the CRM
value coin, for companies who
are planning to upgrade their CRM applications or looking to drive more
return from current investments.

Knoa Experience and Performance Manager (EPM
) provides total
monitoring coverage of end-user behavior and experience across enterprise
applications, like CRM. Knoa EPM monitors application execution at the
end-user level, and provides precise metrics about the end-user experience
as well as measurements on
how effectively people execute when working with enterprise applications.
Knoa EPM also captures metrics on end-user error rates, utilization and
compliance as well as user behavior and the workflow that the user
experienced before, during and after transaction execution. A hallmark of
Knoa’s end-user monitoring
solutions is the
unique ability to monitor 100% of application transactions executed by 100%
of the end-user population with a low cost-of-ownership model.

In a recent research report, Forrester Research surveyed business and IT
professionals to pinpoint the real-world pitfalls that can trip up CRM
initiatives. “Thirty-three percent of the problems reported were related to
technology, 27% to business processes, 22% to people, and 18% to CRM
strategy and deployment.”2 Knoa’s end-user management solutions help
optimize the technology execution and minimize end-user challenges that
account for nearly half of the reported challenges with CRM deployments.

Lower cost, improve success rates and shorten hyper-care of CRM upgrades
For companies looking to upgrade their existing CRM systems, Knoa is
announcing full monitoring coverage for SAP CRM 7.0 and SAP CRM 2007. Knoa
also currently offers ‘out-of-box’ monitoring of other market-leading CRM
solutions including previous versions of SAP CRM
solutions, Oracle Siebel
CRM, Oracle E-Business
CRM, Oracle Peoplesoft CRM, BMC Remedy, Amdocs and others.

Knoa is also announcing a new End-User Upgrade Planning Service, delivered
in conjunction with a deployment of Knoa EPM, which will help companies
lower the cost of upgrading, improve upgrade success and shorten the overall
upgrade project cycle by enabling the following:

* Benchmark application performance
and quality prior
to an upgrade to establish a baseline for comparison after the upgrade.
* Profile utilization patterns to target areas for optimization.
* Shorten hyper-care period after the application upgrade
go-live.

Ensuring end-user experience with SaaS CRM

According to multiple research reports and industry experts, SaaS adoption
continues to be on the rise and many of the enterprises engaged with or
deploying SaaS are focused on CRM. For those looking to migrate to SaaS,
Knoa offers Knoa Virtual/Cloud Experience Manager (VCEM
), the first truly
off-the-shelf product designed to monitor and manage real end-user
experience for enterprise applications that are running in virtualized
environments, delivered via SaaS, or provisioned via Cloud Computing.

Extending the useful life of current investments

Gartner recently noted, “Fewer than 5% of CRM projects in 2009 were
transformational and cross-departmental, involving deploying a broad variety
of functions in a CRM suite.”3 Because of this many organizations are
looking for ways to demonstrate the business value these technologies offer
rather than investing more resources toward a siloed, ineffective approach.

Knoa EPM helps IT and the
business perform better together by providing functionality which correlates
IT transactions with business tasks and processes. Knoa EPM presents an
analysis of system performance in business contexts, such as “create new
account,” or “search opportunities.” EPM also delivers the ability to
associate application components with end-to-end business processes (such as
Opportunity-to-Cash) so that all Knoa performance metrics can be reported
within the context of the relevant business process. In addition to
providing a meaningful business context for identifying and analyzing user
and application performance, this greatly increases transparency into IT
operations for business stakeholders.

“CRM systems are one of the most challenging of all enterprise software
deployments because so much of the end-user behavior necessary to drive
results is essentially voluntary. All too often, adoption and effective use
of CRM functionality is hampered by a below par end-user experience,” said
Lori Wizdo, vice president, Marketing, Knoa Software. “Knoa’s end-user
experience monitoring gives the IT organization access to real-time metrics
to proactively address response time issues while end-user support
professionals have immediate visibility into actual user workflow when
problems happen. Further, the training organization can pinpoint specific
application users that require additional training while process engineering
can spot cumbersome workflows and errors that are affecting end-user
satisfaction. Finally, the business stakeholders can determine usage
concerns, such as who is using which transactions, how long are they active
and how long are they idle. All-in-all, Knoa truly offers a 360 degree view
of any enterprise’s CRM usage.”

For more information about Knoa’s solutions for CRM, go to
http://www.knoa.com/main/solutions-CRM.jsp.

About Knoa

Knoa Software is leading the
transformation of IT Management with end-user management solutions that
monitor, measure and manage how end-users are utilizing corporate software
applications to optimize business process execution. Knoa customers
not only know if core
enterprise applications are delivering an acceptable user experience, but
also, if application users are executing key processes effectively and
efficiently – the key to achieving business value and ROI. Knoa is
headquartered in New York, NY. For more information about Knoa, please visit
www.knoa.com .