Customer care management software house TeleTech Holdings Inc of Denver, Colorado, has acquired Reno, Nevada-based Intellisystems Inc, on undisclosed terms. Nine year-old Intellisystems uses expert systems technology for its call center product, SmartSite, aimed at customer support centers. The product is used by customers such as Canon Inc, Digital Equipment Corp, Netscape Communications Corp and SunSoft Inc. TeleTech has been managing inbound telephone and networking communications for customers since 1982, and has 17 call centers worldwide. It has 6,500 call center workstations. It will use the product for its own service as well as selling it on to customers. IBM Corp says it’s seen an explosion in demand for magnetoresitive heads for disk drives, head of a pin sized components that increase the amount of data that can be stored on a drive. Since it began shipping the heads to OEMs 17 months ago, IBM says it’s shipped 10m, and nine million of those have shipped in just the last five months. Its latest OEM customer is Maxtor Corp, which will take the heads for its desktop PC drives. Since 1996, IBM has spent $680m boosting its manufacturing capabilities for magnetoresistive heads, and this week began construction of a new $20m plant based near Shenzhen in China. The plant will be run by Shenzhen IBM Technology Products Co Ltd, a new company wholly owned by IBM, and set to employ 200 people by the end of this year. IBM is also now sampling GMR Giant Magnetoresistive heads, said to be the most sensitive sensors available for reading and writing data in a disk drive.
