Actuate Acquires legodo ag to Expand its Accessible Customer Communications Management Solution

Big-brand customers use legodo software to tap and utilize data embedded in ERP and CRM applications

SAN MATEO, Calif.--()--Actuate Corporation (NASDAQ: BIRT), The BIRT Company and the leader in personalized analytics and insights, today announced the acquisition of legodo ag. Based in Karlsruhe, Germany, legodo develops software for easy and rapid generation of personalized customer correspondence via any communication channel, including mobile touch devices. legodo is one of the first to allow organizations to tap the information embedded in their existing ERP, CRM, and other applications to create personalized customer communications. More than 40,000 users have realized the benefits of legodo, in prominent companies like Deutsche Bahn (Germany’s national rail transportation system), Deutsche Telekom, GEHE Pharmahandel, Lufthansa, Swisscom, Telenor, and Telefonica. Legodo products will significantly expand the Accessible Customer Communications Management solution offered by Actuate’s Content Services Group (formerly Xenos).

Both legodo and Actuate were included in the section entitled, “Other providers that may meet your needs” in Gartner’s “Gartner Magic Quadrant for Customer Communications Management Software” report, published on November 26, 2013. In the report, Gartner analysts Karen Shegda, Pete Basiliere and Kenneth Chin wrote, “Gartner's decision to publish a Magic Quadrant on this topic reflects the CCM software market's growth and crucial role in the creation of highly personalized multimedia communications. We estimate that this market represents approximately $800 million worldwide, as measured in total software provider revenue in 2013. We forecast that this figure will grow to more than $1 billion by 2016, with a compound annual growth rate of 11%.”

“The acquisition of legodo extends Actuate’s CCM offering into the interactive customer correspondence space, with tight integration to popular CRM applications including Salesforce, SAP, Siebel and Oracle Fusion,” said Steve Jones, Co-Vice President and Co-General Manager of the Content Services Group at Actuate. “We are very pleased to bring legodo into the Actuate family, and look forward to refining our products’ roadmap in the coming months.”

Marc Kresin, formerly legodo’s CTO and Chief Product Manager; and Marc Koch, formerly CEO at legodo, have joined Actuate as Director of Product Management, and as Director of Marketing, respectively, within the Content Services Group at Actuate.

“We are delighted to join forces with Actuate in the arena of CCM and CRM solutions,” said Koch. “The combined strengths of our two companies will greatly increase the value of our product suites, which complement each other perfectly. Legodo is already recognized as a uniquely valuable technology, and in concert with Actuate’s existing CCM software we can offer our customers even more effective solutions.

“Many companies have invested a great deal of effort and money in putting in place CRM systems to obtain detailed information about their customers,” Koch explained. “But when it comes to using that information in communications to customers, this knowledge is often not utilized to provide a customer with a personal experience. Ideally, in order to achieve a true 360 degree view of the customer, those communications should then be re-integrated into the underlying CRM applications and processes. Today, legodo enables this vision.”

In addition to the Actuate BIRT Content Services software solution, the legodo Customer Communications Suite will be immediately available for purchase from Actuate.

Benefits of legodo software

  • Savings in process costs for automated communications
  • More satisfied end-customers who now receive brand communications “their way”
  • ROI increase through the use of all collected CRM customer data for highly personal outreach
  • Better content control, dissemination, and faster change management
  • Ability to interface with any standard Microsoft Office or Java-based communications technology
  • Faster implementation and response times for customer communications programs

Achieving the “market of one” dream

The development mindset behind legodo endowed the software with a totally different, customer-centric philosophy that sets it apart from typical communications output management systems. The legodo Customer Communications Suite allows full access to customer data saved in an organization’s CRM or ERP systems. This integration enables truly personalized communication with individual customers on a one-to-one basis, rather than batch-style communication, and lets organizations fully realize the potential in the concept of the “market of one.”

The legodo Customer Communications Suite utilizes a certified technology for interfacing with the systems of Oracle/Siebel, SAP, Salesforce, Sugar CRM, and Oracle CRM On Demand. legodo accesses leading CRM and ERP systems via preconfigured interfaces that are part of the standard package, bypassing the need to program interfaces. Additional available connectors to SQL, text, and Web services enable easy, fast, and uncomplicated access to input data.

Mobilizing customer communications

Growth of mobile touch devices is at an all-time high, with iOS and Android choices fighting for market share. Customers today expect digital and mobile communications as often, if not more so, than they expect their financial statements and health care communique in printed form. Both the BIRT Content Services and the legodo Customer Communications suites ensure that customers receive brand communications in preferred format, anytime, anywhere, on any device.

About Actuate’s Content Services Group

Actuate’s Content Services Group (formerly Xenos) provides organizations with the power to develop, implement and manage intelligent customer communications management solutions. Our technology is used to design, process, store and deliver high volume content such as statements, policies and bills, for top-tier organizations in financial services, healthcare, insurance and telecommunications.

About Actuate (NASDAQ:BIRT) – The BIRT Company

Actuate provides software to more than three million BIRT developers and OEMs who build scalable, secure solutions that save time and improve brand experience by delivering personalized analytics and insights to over 200 million of their customers, partners and employees. Actuate founded and supports BIRT – the open source IDE – and develops BIRT iHub™ – the world-class deployment platform – to significantly improve productivity of developers working on customer facing applications. Actuate’s BIRT Analytics™ delivers self-service predictive analytics to enhance customer engagement using Big Data. BIRT Content Services™ empowers organizations to easily transform, process, personalize, archive and deliver high volume content. Actuate is headquartered in Silicon Valley with more than 5,000 enterprise customers in financial services, technology and government. Visit actuate.com and developer.actuate.com.

Disclaimer: Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Copyright © 2014 Actuate Corporation. All rights reserved. Actuate, legodo, BIRT iHub, BIRT Analytics, BIRT Content Services, BIRT onDemand, BIRT Viewer Toolkit, and the Actuate logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Actuate Corporation and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and certain other countries. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between Actuate and any other company. All other brands, names or trademarks mentioned may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Contacts

Actuate Corporation
Kate Lynch, +1-650-678-8658 (mobile)
klynch@actuate.com

Release Summary

Actuate acquires German tech firm Legodo Software. Legodo Customer Communications Suite will extend Actuate's CCM solution to tap CRM systems for more effective customer relationship management.

Contacts

Actuate Corporation
Kate Lynch, +1-650-678-8658 (mobile)
klynch@actuate.com