The story of nGenera could’ve been similar to Divine, Consona, ChinaDotCom, and many others who bought enterprise software applications to put them together and patch a “winning” solution only to find themselves later in life without vision or direction. However, they made two smart decisions and ended up with three interesting offerings: a Social Platform, the nGenera Collaboration Server and nGenera Customer Interaction Management (CIM) Suite.
To power CIM nGenera acquired Talisma, who had in turn acquired both Knowledgebase.net (KB.net) and eAssist — all great complementary tools in the Customer Service world. Later they focused on the most important modules: the eAssist original engine and the KB.net original engine as the core for the new product, and later integrated social and community components from their Collaboration Server and Social Platform offerings, updated the eAssist components, and integrated it all with KB.net (yes, even the community-generated knowledge).
The end result? they announced today version 9 of their CIM Suite – a product that is a raring-to-go competitor in the Customer Interaction Management space.
I saw a demo last week and I like the complete set of features and functions in this release. It is a finished product with power and flexibility to allow their customers to span all the different channels and to seamlessly deliver comparable experiences across all of them. It has the ability to integrate well with other CRM systems, legacy systems, and even to power processes that span multiple applications. Brings with it a feedback management module that is good enough to collect customer service feedback although it certainly needs work to become an EFM tool.
The suite looks like it is a brand new release, even thought it is based on proven components. That is good, we needed some “fresh blood” in the market to provide an alternative to the established players and propel the market further. I have only seen the demo, so I am not sure how it works in the real world, and have not talked to their clients about their experiences (working on that). I like the way it shows, and am excited about what it says it can do.
However this would not be news without the second very smart move from nGenera: they put the right people (the experienced eAssist and Talisma team) to manage the life of the product (updated: John Ragsdale thinks likewise). Very smart move, and cannot wait for the future releases to see where they take the product.
