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Thunderhead Upgrades Enterprise Communications Platform with the Release of Thunderhead NOW 4.0

New version drives customer engagement by empowering organizations to create and deliver personalized communications

Costa Mesa, CA - April 28, 2008

Thunderhead, the enterprise communications company, has announced the release of Thunderhead NOW 4.0, the next version of its award-winning enterprise communications platform. NOW 4.0 extends the functionality of the NOW platform to the edge of the enterprise, integrating communications with customer-facing business processes and enabling organizations to dramatically improve customer service and end-user experience.

Thunderhead NOW, based on the company’s one-platform-for-all-communications paradigm, provides a complete solution for the creation and delivery of personalized, multi-channel business communications. Web-based NOW 4.0 manages high-volume batch and real-time interactive communications and documents, ensuring context and consistency for successful customer engagement.

NOW 4.0 offers role-based functionality, designed to be easily integrated with key business processes and applications. This integration is facilitated by NOW’s service-oriented architecture, enabling NOW to easily combine with CRM and customer service applications as well as leading BPM and ECM products to extend the business value of an organization’s existing infrastructure technology.

The Thunderhead NOW platform is built on the XML stack. XML-based protocols have become essential to businesses needing to manage all aspects of the user experience, including the user interface, multi-channel devices and integration with business processes and information sources. Thunderhead’s XML foundation enables it to lead through innovation. NOW 4.0 sets a new benchmark for enterprise technology, facilitating context, personalization and multi-channel delivery, empowering organizations to realize customer engagement strategies in today’s complex business environment.

A recent Forrester report on Document Output Management highlighted Thunderhead’s innovation, identifying the company as a fast-growing driver of innovation in the interactive segment. Another recent report by Celent , on Document Automation for the Insurance sector, named Thunderhead as a leading vendor based on its advanced technology.

Executive quote

“Customer engagement is a key strategic issue and organizations need to think beyond just producing output for customers,” said Thunderhead CEO Glen Manchester. “Forward-thinking organizations understand that communications must be delivered in the context of business processes. Each communication should deliver value to the customer and produce outcomes that enhance customer retention and acquisition.”

Technical specifications

The latest version of Thunderhead NOW introduces two innovative new modules:

• Interview NOW – based on X-Forms standards, Interview NOW enables users to provide data in real-time, via an interview-style process to power highly personalized, one-off communications.

Interview NOW uniquely interacts directly with the underlying NOW Production Engine, only querying users for the data necessary to complete the intended communication. Further, Interview NOW fully leverages Thunderhead’s rules-based architecture and can modify subsequent inquiries based on information provided by a user’s previous responses.

Interview NOW combines seamlessly with existing Thunderhead functionality, including Correspond NOW for interactive ad hoc correspondence creation and Review NOW for exception and review case management.

• Approve NOW – enables increased management oversight and control over content - especially regulated content. This feature enables parallel review and approval processes, enhancing Thunderhead’s collaborative template creation and management capabilities.

About the company

About Thunderhead
Thunderhead is the leading provider of enterprise solutions for the production of multi-channel business communications.

Thunderhead delivers the only enterprise platform that enables business users to manage the end-to-end process of creating intelligent personalised communications across multiple channels.

Due to its unique combination of Business User control, genuine open standards-based core, and enterprise capabilities, Thunderhead has quickly established itself as the clear market leader for financial services organisations and the standard for Investment Banking Trade Confirmations. Thunderhead's customer base includes many of the world’s leading organisations, including Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Prudential and UBS, and is serviced from offices located in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. Thunderhead is one of the world’s fastest growing software companies, as recognised by Software 500 in the US and the Sunday Times in the UK.

For further information please visit www.thunderhead.com.

Contact details

LEWIS PR

Katie Eakins / Patrick Wallace

thunderhead@lewispr.com

619-677-2700

Supporting materials

Forrester – “Market Overview: Document Output Management - Using Software To Help Improve Multichannel Customer Experiences” February 8, 2008
Celent - “Document Automation Solution Vendors for Insurers 2007”, December 2007

Technorati tags: Thunderhead | document automation | Thunderhead NOW | CRM | BPM | SOA | XML |

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