Kana Communications Inc. today rolled out the latest version of its flagship Internet customer-relationship management suite, Kana 5.

The upgrade integrates technology gained from the company's acquisition last year of E-mail marketing campaign vendor Connectify Inc. The new technology debuts in Kana 5 as Kana Connect, which tailors E-mail messages for specific customers. Replies to those E-mails are handled by Kana Response, Kana's core E-mail management engine.

Analysts say Kana 5 shores up a number of holes in Kana's offering, which is ultimately intended to handle all customer interactions--whether they're related to sales, service, or marketing--traveling through electronic channels such as the Web, E-mail, or chat.

The release comes on the heels of--and is overshadowed by--Kana's $4.2 billion merger last week with Silknet Software Inc. "They're doing this [Kana 5] to round out their suite, but it's dwarfed by what they did with Silknet," says Chris Selland, an analyst with the Yankee Group.

Features in the new release include improved artificial intelligence, which is used to route incoming messages to the correct service representatives and suggest appropriate responses or even respond to them based on the text of a message. Kana 5 has a wizard interface that makes it simpler for companies to set up artificial intelligence classification models. Another new feature makes it possible for businesses to escalate their levels of service to customers based on the importance of the customer and a specific transaction.

Kana 5 will also make it easier to link to data warehouses and other front-office applications with Kana Conduits, integration interfaces to packages from companies such as Siebel Systems, Remedy, Lucent Technologies, and Blue Martini.