BANGALORE, INDIA: nGenera Corp. announced that it has acquired Talisma Corp., a Bellevue, Washington based provider of Customer Interaction Management (CIM) software solutions. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Steve Papermaster, Chairman and CEO, said: “The future of innovation is customer co-creation: talking directly to customers, listening to them, learning from them.  We’re taking content and processes from customer interaction software and mashing that with Web 2.0 collaboration tools to help companies discover brilliant new product ideas inspired by their own customers.”

“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.”

Last month, nGenera launched its nGen Customer product offering -- a composite of elegant Web 2.0 collaboration tools and SaaS applications plus integrated advisory programs. nGenera will incorporate the full Talisma CIM suite of applications as a set of composite on-demand apps into the nGen Customer offering, giving current and future enterprise customers powerful, ways to interact with customers, including new product co-creation and voice of the customer programs.

Talisma’s complete and industry-leading feature set will be extended with nGenera’s Web 2.0 collaboration tools: blogs, discussion threads, wikis, interest groups, organizational structures like tag clouds, polling, Web monitoring, and analytics. These combined capabilities will power and enable companies to create exceptional customer experiences and harvest new product ideas. nGen customer’s capabilities include: Continuous Sensing, Collaborative Innovation, Customer Experience Configuration, Customer Interaction Management, and Customer Experience Reinforcement.

Talisma customers include Aetna, AOL, Canon, Citibank, Comcast, Dell, Ford, University of Notre Dame, Microsoft, Pitney Bowes, Siemens, Sony, and Sprint.

“We are thrilled to put Talisma’s CIM software suite onto nGenera’s platform to create the market’s most innovative Customer Experience offering,” said Dan Vetras, CEO of Talisma.