Unified Communications Featured Article

Smart Communications is Now an Independent Company

By Frank Griffin
Contributing Writer

While many businesses come together through mergers or acquisitions to form a stronger organization, sometimes it also becomes necessary to spinoff and form an independent company. This independence gives the new entity increased agility, and the ability to focus on its core competencies instead of having to be part of a much larger organization with multiple strategies. Smart Communications, a provider of enterprise customer and business communications, has made such a move by completing its spinoff from Thunderhead.

The move is being backed by Accel-KKR, a leading technology focused private equity firm, and its management team. This will give the company the funding and human capital it needs to continue delivering the next generation of cloud-enabled customer communications management (CCM (News - Alert)) services it provides. According to the company, it will now be able to focus on scaling its growth not only in existing markets but by also seeking new opportunities while increasing its place in the industry with innovative products and services.

George Wright, the CEO of Smart Communications, said, “With Accel-KKR, Smart Communications will benefit from rapid growth into new markets and continued investment in its unique cloud offering. The Smart Communications team is looking forward to this new phase where we will focus on broadening the solution reach and further scaling our business to the benefit of our customers and partners.”

The Smart Communications suite of solutions is used by a range of industries including insurance, retail and telecoms, as well as the G15 investment banks and the U.S. Federal Government in three continents around the world.

The suite has a set of tools to personalize communications so businesses can become more efficient internally and comply with regulators, while reducing IT costs and being more relevant to customers. This is made possible with better business user control so communication designers can experience greater agility, responsiveness to deliver new products and services with faster time to market.

The platform also provides deployment flexibility to deliver advanced customer communications capability using pure cloud multi-tenant SaaS (News - Alert) or as a hybrid cloud solution with the goal of lowering the total cost of ownership to meet the needs of the business. Once the necessary infrastructure and systems are in place, personalized, on-brand customer communications can be delivered to the preferred channel of each user to increase customer satisfaction. This can be traditional print-based communications as well as web, email, SMS, and mobile applications. The granular level of personalization can be designed with an interactive, meet one-time, on-demand scenarios while generating large batch communications to meet peak processing needs.

The ability to effectively communicate without the limitations of geography and scalability is essential for today's global enterprises. As Smart Communications moves forward independently, it will have to deliver solutions that allow enterprises to engage with their customers and employees using the latest modern architecture and cloud capabilities for real-time interaction, no matter where everyone is located.