This acquisition strengthens Avaya’s presence in the customer relationship management market by enabling the world’s leading provider of solutions for call centers to provide a broad, multi-vendor, multi-platform portfolio of software solutions.

Avaya also announced that it will now focus its CRM Solutions portfolio in three areas:

Interaction Management: Providing solutions for real time customer interactions, self-service options, and outbound contact management.

Commitment Management: Providing solutions for implementing dynamic, measurable business processes throughout the enterprise, enabling improved customer experience and resource effectiveness.

Business Intelligence: Providing customer experience analysis solutions for channel-based operations, customer transactions and enterprise value-based decision making.

Under terms of the agreement, which was announced by Quintus on February 22, 2001, Avaya acquired substantially all of Quintus’ assets for approximately $29 million in cash and has assumed certain of Quintus’ liabilities up to additional $30 million.

This acquisition enables Avaya to accelerate its presence in the CRM market by enhancing its internally developed award-winning CRM Solutions portfolio with Quintus’ line of market-leading solutions. According to Avaya, it will immediately begin to offer its expanded Avaya CRM Solutions offerings to customers worldwide, while rapidly integrating the technologies of both companies, which will allow it to provide a broader range of integrated products in the near future.

The addition of Quintus’ solutions and assets into the Avaya CRM Solutions portfolio enables Avaya to establish a new standard in the market for integrated multi-channel customer relationship management, said Keith Larson, Avaya’s vice president, CRM Solutions Group. By acquiring Quintus’ products and people, Avaya is able to accelerate its strategy to provide enterprises of all sizes best-in-class CRM solutions to effectively manage their critical business relationships in today’s customer-centric economy.

Among the Quintus assets acquired by Avaya is a comprehensive software suite that unites traditional call center technology with Internet communications. These solutions, which are now part of the Avaya CRM Interaction Management offerings, enable businesses to build long-term customer relationships consistently and cost-effectively across all forms of electronic media including the Web, e-mail, fax and advanced telephony systems. These technologies make it possible for businesses to provide outstanding sales, service and customer relationship management, while tracking and reporting on every single transaction, regardless of which communications channel a customer selects.

According to our analysis, the Quintus portfolio offers one of the broadest and best suites of eCRM applications available, said Brian Stachman, senior analyst, Cahners In-Stat Group. In addition, Avaya’s market penetration in the customer care market will provide an expanded distribution channel for the combined solution set. These strengths and technologies offer an opportunity to create enhanced solutions and fuel Avaya’s capabilities in the CRM marketplace.

Interaction management is important because businesses today are communicating with customers across more channels than ever before. Providing consistent, personalized customer experiences across all of them requires an integration of channel technologies around a single customer view with common business decision making, routing, management and interaction delivery.

Avaya’s internally developed CRM Commitment Management offerings enable the creation and measurement of dynamic business processes across the enterprise. Building customer satisfaction and loyalty in today’s customer economy requires the cooperation of many different people across an organization, with no information lost.

Avaya CRM Business Intelligence offerings are critical tools in helping businesses succeed in the customer-focused economy because an enterprise can improve more rapidly on what it measures more effectively. The combined technologies of Avaya and Quintus will be integrated to provide real-time and historical analysis solutions.

Avaya’s greatly enhanced CRM Solutions portfolio clearly demonstrates the synergies that drove its acquisition of Quintus’ assets, said Lawrence Byrd, formerly chief strategy officer at Quintus. Avaya is shipping these expanded CRM Solutions immediately, and has a clear direction on integrating existing and acquired technologies to better serve its customers. The addition of Quintus employees’ expertise will further accelerate Avaya’s position in this strategic marketplace.