FOSTER CITY, Calif. April 18, 2001 -- FaceTime
Communications, the premier provider of instant messaging for
businesses, and Ask Jeeves, Inc.(R) (Nasdaq:ASKJ), a leading
provider of natural language navigation and business intelligence
systems, today announced a strategic partnership to deliver instant
messaging-based customer service to its enterprise users. The
result will be a combination of self-service and live-assistance
capabilities for large enterprise customer care organizations. The
partnership aligns FaceTime's strength in resolving time-sensitive
business problems with instant messaging technology, and Ask
Jeeves' solid reputation for delivering powerful, natural language
and popularity-based search technology. Companies that choose the
combined offering from Ask Jeeves and FaceTime will benefit from an
advanced self-service/live-service solution that large enterprises
both need and require. "Ask Jeeves is partnering with FaceTime
because we believe our corporate customer base of companies such as
Dell, Ford, Nike and Nextel, may in the future want to complement
the self-service and customer intelligence capabilities we offer
with the live assistance that FaceTime provides," said Claudio
Pinkus, president of Ask Jeeves Business Solutions. "Both Ask
Jeeves and FaceTime have strong reputations for providing customers
with functional, scalable and reliable technology. This partnership
enables us to leverage each others' strengths and provide
complementary services to companies focused on the customer
experience." FaceTime's instant messaging solutions will work with
Ask Jeeves self-service question answering systems to escalate
customers to live, real-person assistance when they need it. By
offering users live help at critical moments in the e-commerce and
e-support cycles, the combined technologies will help corporations
improve look-to-book ratios, reduce support costs and improve
customer loyalty. "This new partnership is ideal for both
companies. Ask Jeeves is the leader in enterprise knowledge
management solutions, which FaceTime's customer base can easily add
to their business. And when time sensitivity in problem resolution
is critical to Ask Jeeves' customers, FaceTime's instant messaging
technology provides immediate escalation management to the right
human at the right time," said Glen Vondrick, CEO of FaceTime
Communications. "In this marketplace, the combination of offerings
from companies such as ours provides customers with true
best-of-breed technology and exceptional business value." Ask
Jeeves and FaceTime will work closely together to provide a
seamless transition for Ask Jeeves' corporate customers from Jeeves
Live, which the company has discontinued, to FaceTime's instant
messaging technology. Ask Jeeves' partnership with FaceTime is part
of its strategy to deliver best of breed natural language
navigation and business intelligence systems while continuing to
offer corporations customer escalation technologies. Instant
messaging is the fastest growing communications channel in history.
According to IDC, by 2004, over 400M clients will be using instant
messaging to generate 2 trillion instant messages between consumers
and businesses. Global 2000 contact center CRM budgets are
predicted to be over $12 billion. In addition, Forrester Research
estimates that the average cost of a phone call to a contact center
costs a business approximately $33 per call, whereas an instant
messaging session costs about $7.33 per session. Instant messaging
creates tremendous opportunities for Global 2000 businesses, and
FaceTime is positioned to help their partners and customers
capitalize on this opportunity.
About Actiance, Inc. (Formerly FaceTime Communications, Inc.)
FaceTime Communications became Actiance, Inc on January 11, 2011 following an agreement to
transfer the FaceTime trademark to Apple.
FaceTime Communications enables the safe and productive use of Unified Communications and Web 2.0,
including instant messaging, blogs and social networking. Ranked number one by IDC for five consecutive
years, FaceTime's award-winning solutions are used by more than 1,500 customers for the security,
management and compliance of real-time communications. FaceTime supports or has strategic partnerships
with all leading IM, unified communications providers and social networks including AOL, Google, Yahoo!,
Skype, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
FaceTime is headquartered in Belmont, California. For more information visit
http://www.facetime.com or call 888-349-3223.
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