LignUp and Selligent come together

Gosselies, Belgium-based CRM product vendor Selligent announced today its partnership with Silicon Valley, Calif.-based converged communication product vendor LignUp Corporation. The partnership is based in the goal to integrate Selligent web-based CRM products with Lignup’s communication platform in order to produce communications-enable business process products, the first of which will be available later in 2006. The promise from Selligent press material says that primary to the teaming up is that customers may “enjoy voice-enhanced CRM capabilities powered by the LignUp platform.” Selligent offers CRM products designed to assist in analytics, content management, customer care, document management, and marketing and web-based sales.

Selligent chose an intelligent time to jump in with LignUp, a company rapidly on the move. Last month saw the firm’s European introduction of FastLign, founded to assist in acceleration of IP telephony service adoption. Partners within the FastLign alliance will provide the architecture and turnkey-hosted applications in Selligent’s new system. The flexibility of LignUp’s communications application server platform was particularly touted by Selligent officials for its combination of session initiation and XML technologies. This reportedly massively reduces integration time and “easily [builds] specialized IP telephony applications or voice-enable existing applications and services.” Things are looking up in Gosselies, too: way up. Officials recently released first quarter results for the company, proclaiming results show no less than a 260% jump in license sales over 2005. Much of this improvement was attributed to big recent acquisitions of Heppner, Lufthansa and Natexis. Another mobile telephony operator has been captured by Selligent as well, but the company will tease the public with the revelation of its identity “until the project roll-out.”

Acquisitions in 2005 included Bouygues Construction and EuropCar. In fact, last year was the first in which Selligent turned a profit in this decade, due to a number of years in which profit making was foregone due to a policy of “intensive investment.” Most of the €15 million-plus devoted to research and development of the Selligent X@ web suite took place in the five-year period leading up to 2005. Recently released was Selligent X@ 7.10, which boasts interoperability of operational CRM, analytical CRM (Selligent AnalytiX) and web content management (Selligent Web Content). Describing his company’s success, Selligent CEO André Lejeune said that “Because of its strategy that focuses on the scalability and maintainability of its solutions, Selligent is currently benefiting from greater maturity among buyers of CRM solutions.”