Published on the 07/03/2016 | Written by Newsdesk
The new acquisition is one of three in the last couple of years and will help Sugar users be more emotionally intelligent…
SugarCRM has announced that it has acquired the intellectual property rights and other assets of Contastic, a natural language processing (NLP) platform that analyses communications between sales people and their clients then automatically recommends the best content to send them. Contastic uses “deep NLP” to “mine” topics of interest from conversations in email and CRM. These topics are then used to recommend content that is relevant to the most salient points of conversations between users and their contacts. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but if the technology is all it promises, then it sounds like a sweet deal.
Contastic had previously raised an undisclosed sum of money from investors such as IDG-Accel and Lightspeed. As part of the terms of the new deal, Cy Khormaee, Contastic’s CEO, will join SugarCRM as the director of product management for predictive analytics. SugarCRM says his expertise will be used to help build technology that turns customer data into actionable recommendations for Sugar users, making the Sugar platform even more intelligent in recommending the next best actions derived from customer data.
“SugarCRM is making strategic investments in leading technologies to make Sugar an indispensable tool that helps customer-facing individuals be more successful,” said Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM. “SugarCRM will use Contastic’s NLP technology to analyse data within the Sugar platform so users can automatically send personalised content.”
The strategic investments that Augustin is referring to include the acquisition of Stitch in March 2015. Stitch is a leading developer of personal assistant technologies that enhance productivity for mobile users. SugarCRM says that incorporating Stitch Hot House Labs technology made Sugar an even smarter, better-informed CRM system, and put information at mobile users’ fingertips no matter their location.
In 2014, SugarCRM acquired business process management and workflow technology from ProcessMaker with which it built Advanced Workflow into Sugar. Users are now able to automate complex business processes like case routing and escalation, contract approval, customer and employee onboarding, and payment workflow.
