Campus Management has announced an agreement with nGenera Corporation to acquire assets of its subsidiary, Talisma Corporation (News - Alert).

 

The assets include nGenera's Talisma CRM software, the Talisma Higher Education business division based in Bellevue, Washington, and Talisma Corporation Pvt. Ltd., an operating unit in Bangalore. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

 

Talisma CRM sells software for enrollment management, student retention, student services, education finance, alumni relations and IT Helpdesks. Customers include Bisk Education, Duke University Fuqua School of Business, eCollege, Johnson & Wales University, Strayer University, University of Alabama, and University of Nebraska.

 

It wasn’t all that long ago that nGenera bought Talisma, actually, had to be within the past year, let’s see – here we go: In May nGenera Corporation announced its acquisition of Talisma, described at the time as “a provider of Customer Interaction Management software products.”

 

"We're taking content and processes from customer interaction software and mashing that with Web 2.0 collaboration tools," said Steve Papermaster at the time, nGenera Chairman and CEO.

 

"The manufacturer-centric model of product innovation is dead," said Don Tapscott, Chairman of the nGenera Innovation Network and author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. "In Wikinomics I describe how Best Buy's customer service arm, Geek Squad, designs an award-winning flash drive after seeing how customers really use the product."

 

NGenera officials said nGenera would incorporate the full Talisma CIM suite of applications "as a set of composite on-demand apps into the nGen Customer offering."

 

Talisma's feature set was to be extended with nGenera's Web 2.0 collaboration tools -- blogs, discussion threads, wikis, interest groups, organizational structures like tag (News - Alert) clouds, polling, Web monitoring, and analytics. 

 

As far as the current acquisition goes, Campus Management and nGenera officials announced agreements that will enable Campus Management to sell, integrate and support nGenera's Knowledgebase software, used by customers deploying the Talisma CRM product. Campus Management will own the Talisma brand, and nGenera will retain ownership of Talisma's CIM (Customer Interaction Management) software product and business.

 

So basically, the way it all shakes out is that customers using Talisma CRM software will now be served by Campus Management, while nGenera gets the CIM line of business.

 

Nicole Engelbert, Lead Analyst of Vertical Markets Technology for Datamonitor, said the boundary between CRM and the Student Information System “will need to blur in order to provide a truly complete view of the student experience."