The past 12 months or so have certainly seen some changes within the organization – no acquisition can occur without that – but I truly believe that this has been great for our customers. At the beginning of 2011, KANA’s CEO Mark Duffell personally met with some of Lagan’s customers in both the UK and North America to make a commitment that KANA would:

• Protect the Lagan products they’d invested in, with continued support and investment in maintenance releases, for example.
• Extend with the introduction of exciting new products, many of which would be based on the innovative KANA Service Experience Management (SEM) platform.
• Converge all the products to a future product “stack”.

And he was able to make these commitments because the Lagan business is hugely important to him and KANA’s investors as it has been to Lagan’s shareholders.

At the end of 2011, has he delivered on his commitments?  Well, aside from welcoming a significant number of new customers to the Lagan family, KANA have:

• Made a number of new feature releases on Lagan’s core product, the most recent of which was released in December 2011, Lagan Version 8.0.4 - Protect.
• Released a number of significant new products including Lagan Mobile and Lagan Open311 - Extend.
• Released the first of many new KANA SEM-based Lagan applications, Lagan Knowledge Management, which sets us well and truly on the road to convergence.

And let’s not forget, in addition to all of this, KANA brought to the table all of its existing mature products, including Response (email), Response Live (chat and co-browse) and Experience Analytics (amongst other things, sentiment analysis for direct feedback for social listening).

So, is Lagan dead? No! Far from it!  In actual fact, 2011 was one of the best year’s in Lagan’s history and 2012 is shaping up to be a similar year. I can’t wait to tell you what’s coming next, but that’s for another blog…

But don’t take my word for it. In releasing their 2011 Local Government Marketscope, Gartner looked even more closely at both our words and actions given the change in ownership and once again awarded us their highest rating of “Strong Positive”.

So whether you’re a Lagan customer or a prospective Lagan customer don’t believe the rumours. Look at what we’ve done in 2011 and what we will do in 2012.

P.S.  You might also want to read my  blog, “What’s in a name?“.