Attensity, Empolis, Living-e Merge To Deliver Combined Customer Analytics

Attensity, Empolis and Living-e announced on Monday that have merged into a single company that will offer software for analyzing customer feedback and comments across internal and external channels, including the Web.

The new company, called the Attensity Group, will offer products that integrate technology from each of the three companies. The Attensity Group, which will be headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., will employ about 300 people in offices in the United States, Germany and London.

The combined company has 250 of the Global 1000 companies as customers, along with a number of governmental agencies, according to the vendors. The company is expected to generate about $50 million in revenues this year. The primary investor inAttensity Group is Aeris Capital AG, an investment firm based in Switzerland and owned by Klaus Tschira, a founder of SAP.

Attensity offers text analytics software for helping companies read the "voice of the customer" buried in surveys, e-mail messages, call-center exchanges, Web forum comments, blog posts and other high-volume interactions. The company was named as a Attensity's technology will be integrated with Empolis' information management applications and Living-e's text-analysis software for incoming customer communications, whether from e-mails, Web forms, SMS messages, letters, faxes and call logs. Attensity Group's application portfolio will include self-service customer portals and automated response management and text analysis of customer feedback and online customer conversations. In addition, the company plans to offer software for searching and classifying internal and external data for early detection of issues in corporate, risk and legal processes. Finally, the group plans to offer analytics for content, context and connections among individuals, events and places. The suite of applications will sit on top of a unified semantic engine layer that will be accessible through Web services. The applications are meant to provide customer analytics to knowledge workers, business executives and customer representatives. Ian Bonner, formerly an executive with Inxight and IBM, has been named president and chief executive of the Attensity Group. CEOs of Attensity Corp., Empolis and Living-e will also have executive roles within the new company. "The three companies have been working together on development, technology and business initiatives since late last year," Bonner said in a statement. "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." Competitors of the Attensity Group include Autonomy, which this year bought content-management company Interwoven.