Software pioneer Ciboodle is bought by US company Kana

Business Correspondent/Personal Finance Editor

Wednesday 11 July 2012

Scottish call centre software pioneer Ciboodle, the former Graham Technology, has changed hands for the second time in four years, moving from French to US ownership.

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Headed by Mike Hughes, who was the first employee and the former managing director of Graham Technology, Ciboodle has been acquired by California-based Kana Software from Sword Group, which bought out the Scottish firm for around £30 million back in March 2008.

Mr Hughes told The Herald that it was "great news" for the business, which employs 300 including 200 in Scotland, as he had approached Sword with the proposal to seek a new owner in the US software industry. "Joining up is important, because it gives us one of the most comprehensive customer service platforms in the industry."Our competitors are Oracle, Microsoft and the giants, and I wanted us to get some scale," he said.Mr Hughes said he expected to see the Scottish operations expand, with potential new opportunity for its research and development team.He said: "I am going to talk to the Scottish Government about how we can attract more people to see that Scotland has got very good engineers, and an attractive cost base ... the gap with India has closed quite a bit."Kana was founded in 1996, a decade after Graham, it went public three years later and has since made nine acquisitions, though was itself acquired in 2010 by a private equity technology fund Accel-KKR.Mr Hughes said he could not disclose many figures, but Ciboodle grew its revenues by 20% last year driven by growth in the US, Australia and New Zealand, and the Kana group would now have a combined turnover of $140m (£87m).The Scottish firm, which famously in 2005 said it was targeting a £100m turnover by 2008, said the following year that its revenue target was £25m. Kana chief executive Mark Duffell said: "With the acquisition of Ciboodle, we are bringing together two significant enterprise players in the customer experience management arena with strengths in depth for both the contact center and for web customer service."The combination of KANA and Ciboodle effectively accelerates each company's product roadmap by an estimated 12 to 18 months – allowing the new company to focus on our customers' more strategic initiatives in emerging areas such as cloud computing, mobility, and big data analytics."

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Software pioneer Ciboodle is bought by US company Kana

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