Portrait Software Acquires Campaign Management Solution Provider, Million Handshakes

Portrait Software (PST.L), a leading provider of Customer Interaction Optimization software, today announced that it has agreed terms to acquire Million Handshakes AS, a Norway-based provider of outbound campaign management and dialog marketing software. The acquisition brings to Portrait powerful new marketing technology, around 100 new customers, and a proven software-as-a-service (SaaS) capability. The acquisition completes Portrait’s marketing application suite, which now delivers intelligent dialog for inbound and outbound communications across all customer channels. The integration with our best-of-breed customer analytics makes it the first complete marketing applications suite to be based on .NET, offering a compelling and fully integrated marketing solution for applications across all stages of the customer lifecycle. "Today’s announcement is great news for those more savvy marketers who seek a single solution for managing inbound and outbound marketing campaigns,” said Nick Randall, Portrait’s CEO. "We are delighted to formalize our relationship with Million Handshakes, bringing together the industry’s most powerful customer interaction and segmentation technology with proven Million Handshakes campaign management. This unique combination enables marketers to cut through the clutter and drive marketing programs that will increase sales, reduce churn and boost customer loyalty.” Multi-channel intelligent customer dialog – a new standard for marketing effectiveness The marketing automation market has seen considerable growth in recent years with B2C organizations seeking intelligent solutions to critical issues including customer acquisition, cross-sell, retention, risk, loyalty and profitability. Customers today engage with a company from multiple access points – online, branch/retail locations, ATM, kiosk, direct mail, call centers, and other new media such as SMS. "Each existing and new interaction channel presents an enormous opportunity for companies to conduct two-way intelligent dialog and deepen the trust between an organization and its customers,” said Lars Wilhelmsen, CEO, Million Handshakes. "The combined offering of campaign management with strong interaction management and analytics capabilities puts Portrait Software at the forefront of meeting this key business need – providing all the marketing intelligence and delivery technology from a single application suite. We’re very excited to be part of this joint organization supporting this new integrated offering.” Portrait is now very well positioned to capitalize on one of the largest growth markets for business software. In August 2007 in a report titled "Forecast: Global Enterprise Marketing Platforms: 2007-2013,” by Suresh Vittal, Forrester Research predicts the worldwide Enterprise Marketing Platform (EMP) market will grow from $1.7 billion in 2007 to close to $5.5 billion in 2013 – approximately a 20% annual growth. Customer interaction management is predicted to be the fastest-growing segment within EMP growing at 26% annually. According to the same Forrester report "Marketers are managing and executing more programs — across multiple channels — than ever before. But in an effort to be more relevant, they are applying finer segmentation to split the customer base into many smaller segments. As a result, marketers have to manage more offers and are turning to automation and optimization applications that simplify the process of developing campaigns and promote content, segment, and offer reuse.” Million Handshakes campaign management provides a flexible delivery mechanism to match the segmentation and optimization technology in Portrait Customer Analytics – together they provide an automated, powerful, yet easy-to-use solution for solving these core marketing challenges. Proven integrated solution delivers unique value to customers Million Handshakes’ products have already been successfully integrated with Portrait’s analytics and other marketing applications to deliver a marketing platform that allows organizations to manage the complete lifecycle of a customer – from acquisition to win-back – addressing issues such as cross-selling, retention, risk, loyalty and profitability. John Macaluso, SVP & CTO – Strategy and Marketing, Fiserv CBS Worldwide, commented, "Portrait and Million Handshakes combined automated marketing suite of applications are powerful tools, which we believe will be of great value to our customers. We have begun marketing the combined suite within our Aperio product, and are receiving positive market feedback.” The integrated product offering empowers marketers to drive 1:1 personalization and maximize the value of existing and future customer relations across all marketing channels. New and existing customers will be able to: Drive intelligent inbound and outbound communications to all channels Manage multi-channel, multi-tracked campaigns in one place Define and automate customer lifecycle best practices Achieve mass personalization yet retain one-to-one relevance Respond faster to customer-initiated contact with event-trigger marketing Connect to all customer data, without the need for data duplication Both Portrait and Million Handshakes are Microsoft Gold Certified Partners and represent the highest level of competence and expertise with Microsoft technologies. About Portrait Software Portrait Software provides Customer Interaction Optimization software that helps best-of-breed companies deliver great customer experiences, increase sales, drive down costs and manage risk. We do this by helping organizations with millions of customers do some important things: Quickly understand their customers. See who’s profitable, who’s loyal and who’s most likely to buy, defect or default. Design intelligent interaction strategies. Know what to sell, when and to whom; know when to talk, when to listen and when to reach out. Make every interaction count. Hold intelligent conversations, make relevant suggestions and surprise customers by showing an understanding of their needs. Respond to change. Implement new campaigns and customer management strategies and ideas quickly and consistently; respond in minutes to changes in the market, the competition, the product line and the customer. Combined with Million Handshakes, our shared 300 + customers are organizations that lead the world’s most demanding customer-intensive sectors. They include Nationwide Building Society, Bank of Ireland, Telenor, Merrill Lynch, T-Mobile, Fiserv CBS Worldwide, Bank of Tokyo, Bank of New Zealand, China Automobile Association, and IAG. For more information on Portrait Software, please visit: www.portraitsoftware.com © 2008 Portrait Software. Portrait Software is a trademark of Portrait Software plc and its group of companies. All other names are trademarks of their respective owners.