Priya Padmanabhan BANGALORE: Customer Relationship Management software vendor Talisma Corporation plans to go public late this year or early 2007, to fund its inorganic growth. Dan Vetras, the company's president and CEO, said that the company would go public on an exchange like the Bombay Stock Exchange, London (AIM) market or on the Toronto Stock Exchange. He ruled out the NASDAQ option since Talisma's current revenues of $30 million would not make it eligible for a NASDAQ listing which is limited to companies with revenues of $60 million and above. Vetras said that the company intends to acquire companies in the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) area or Customer Interaction Management (CIM) companies based in North America or Europe. “We are interested in deals in the $5-$10 million category that can provide us with technologies like VoIP or provide us with market share in a particular geography,” said Vetras. Talisma, which is gunning for revenues of over $30 million this year, hopes to expand its presence in new markets like Europe, China, Middle East, Hong Kong, Australia, Japan and New Zealand. Vetras is pleased at the way the KnowledgeBase acquisition has helped the company strengthen its Customer Interaction Management offerings. “Our CRM-CIM revenue split is around 50:50 right now. We plan to increase the CIM share further over the next couple of years,” he said. Vetras claims to have created the CIM product category and being more successful in the space compared to others. CIM enables contact centers, customer service, sales and marketing enterprises to provide support through multiple channels like Self-service, e-mail, chat, VoIP and phone. Talisma plans to offer SMS as an additional channel this year. The company's competitors in the CIM space include Kana, eGain, LivePerson and RightNow. Talisma attained 68 new customers in the fiscal quarter ending March 31, 2006 and has over 700 customers globally.
