Chordiant and IBM announced an extended partnership to deliver Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based solutions to help global brands with high-volumes of customer interactions better meet consumer needs and improve customer relationships.

Chordiant and IBM have expanded their alliance for an additional five years with particular focus on global healthcare, communications, and insurance markets. To date, Chordiant and IBM have completed significant implementations with leading global brands across North America and Europe including:

• DAK - German health insurance provider DAK recently launched its ProDAK initiative to realign the organization around a stronger customer focus. ProDAK has optimized customer service and saved costs while improving the customer experience for its members.
• ING Bank Slaski (Poland) - The global financial institution needed to improve its front-office capabilities. The bank selected Chordiant Decision Management software to improve customer services, response and offers based on individual customer needs in real-time. IBM Global Business Services helped deploy the solution.

"Businesses globally are spending considerable time and resources on new customer experience initiatives to improve relationships and help drive organic growth," said Mark Hanny, vice president of global ISV alliances, IBM. "IBM's strength in hardware, software, and services combines perfectly with Chordiant's expertise in decision-based front-office solutions for our chosen verticals."

Chordiant and IBM's SOA solutions are based on Chordiant's advanced decision management solutions and multi-channel SOA platform, IBM WebSphere, DB2, Rational, and Lotus software, IBM hardware including System x and Power Systems servers, and systems integration expertise from IBM Global Business Services. These software offerings provide clients with:

• A single, comprehensive view of their customer interactions across any number of call center agents or channels
• Enterprise-scale case management that provides a consistent customer response and tracking across all channels in an organization
• Improved control over customer retention
• An improved ability to maximize sales opportunities with seamless cross-selling
• Reduced customer interface costs through real-time predictive and adaptive decisioning, providing consistent customer treatments in line with profitable, pre-defined business strategies

Under the agreement, Chordiant will also tap the worldwide network of nearly 40 IBM Innovation Centers in new and emerging markets such as Asia and Eastern Europe to work side by side with IBM sales, marketing, technical experts and engineers to fine-tune skills and solutions.

"Our partnership with IBM gives us the global reach and deployment resources we need to complete large-scale projects, such as ING Poland, successfully," said Steven R. Springsteel, chairman, president and CEO of Chordiant Software. "It's a partnership that complements our strengths perfectly. As global brands continue to seek out ways to upgrade the management of their complex, multi-channel customer interactions, we look forward to continuing to partner with IBM to solve these real-world problems together."

To learn more about IBM and Chordiant's innovative activities in the healthcare payer space, visit the webcast titled, "Deliver a superior customer experience to health plan members while improving your bottom line," at www.chordiant.com/health.