nGenera acquires Talisma Corp

Talisma Corporation, a company that owes its origin to Indian entrepreneur Pradeep Singh, has been acquired by nGenera - a Texas-based enterprise software company - for an undisclosed amount.

The acquisition of Talisma by nGenera sees the merger between two of the portfolio companies of venture capitalist firm Oak Investment Partners.

Talisma was formed in September 1999 when Pradeep Singh, an ex-Microsoft executive and CEO of Aditi Technologies decided to hive off the software product division as a different company.

Aditi still continues to work in the outsourced product development space, with its prime delivery centre located in Bangalore.

Based out of Bellevue in the US, Talisma, a provider of Customer Interaction Management (CIM) software solutions, employs over 300 people globally with majority of them located at its India development centre in Bangalore.

The major investors in the company include Oak Investment Partners and SeaPoint Ventures. Talisma has so far raised about $60 million.
In 2003, an attempt by Oak to merge Talisma with Vancouvour-based Pivotal Software fell through after CDC Software acquired Pivotal.
Talisma in the recent past has been adding up customers at a fast pace, with 200 customers coming in during last year alone. The company was expecting a revenue of $40 million in the current fiscal.

nGenera (the company was earlier known as BSG Alliance and had changed its names in April this year), which employs about 550 people globally, offers complimentary Web-based collaboration tools and applications. Since it was founded in 2007, the company has acquired five companies, armed with fundings of about $70 million. Apart from Oak, Foundation Capital and Hummer Winblad Ventures are the other two investors in the company.

Post the acquisition, nGenera aims to integrate Talisma's CIM suite of applications with its nGen Customer product offering - a composite of Web 2.0 collaboration tools and SaaS applications. The combined entity will become a $100 million in sales.

|"We are thrilled to put Talisma's CIM software suite onto nGenera's platform to create the market's most innovative Customer Experience offering. Together, we will lead the way in transforming businesses into next generation enterprises," Dan Vetras, CEO of Talisma said in a statement.