REDWOOD SHORES, California and LONDON, June 5 /PRNewswire/ --

- Merced Systems Assumes Leadership Position in the Sales and Service Performance Management Market, Providing Analytic Applications to Critical Customer-Facing Operations

Merced Systems, the leader in sales and service performance management software, today announced that it has acquired Practique Associates, a privately held, UK-based company, and European market leader in incentive compensation management (ICM) solutions. Practique Associates will operate in Europe as a wholly owned subsidiary of Merced Systems, allowing the company to continue its impressive track record of growth and profitability. Combined, the two companies offer the only performance management solution on the market today that serves both sales and service organizations in a unified fashion. These sales and service organizations include contact centers, field sales, retail sales, partner operations, back office functions, and field service groups, and carry the critical responsibility to acquire, support, and ensure the loyalty of customers.

Sales and service performance management enables organizations to drive performance across all customer-facing functions and dramatically improves customer lifetime economic value. Sales and service performance management capabilities including incentive compensation management, consolidated reporting, dashboarding, analytics, coaching and other applications that drive behavior change among customer-facing and servicing staff. Sales and service performance management is one of the least penetrated and fastest growing sectors in the performance management market.

"Merced Systems is at the forefront of a growing movement to help companies achieve true customer centricity," said Joshua Greenbaum, principal of Enterprise Applications Consulting. "Companies recognize that acquiring, successfully servicing, and ultimately retaining customers is essential to their continued growth. With the acquisition of Practique, Merced has added a critical component, incentive compensation management, to their innovative service performance management platform, and is now the first organization in the market to offer sales and service performance management applications targeted at making companies more successful by making them more customer centric."

"Merced is uniquely positioned to help sales forces and service organizations drive improvement," said Merced Systems CEO, Matt Glickman. "With the acquisition of Practique, Merced provides a combined and integrated performance offering that encompasses all customer-serving operations within a single family of applications. Our broad portfolio of products drives core behavior change at the front line of sales and service organizations which boosts customer experience, operational efficiency, revenue generation, and employee engagement."

The marriage of these two sector leaders will result in an unparalleled Performance Management company. Bringing together two critical product categories and two expert teams, strength in multiple geographies, and a common vision, the acquisition uniquely positions Merced Systems in the market. The company can now provide greater business impact by adding new capabilities to the traditional sales performance management category, including coaching, and advanced analytics. Additionally Merced Systems' category leading service performance management offering is strengthened by the addition of world-class incentive compensation management. The result is a powerful and comprehensive performance management portfolio.

"Bringing Practique's experience and innovation into the Merced product family will create an unrivaled depth of sales and service domain expertise," said Merced Systems' President, Mark Selcow. "Each company has individually driven significant business impact for its customers, including sales increases, improvements to customer satisfaction and lifetime value, and cost reduction. This combination, and our unified sales and service performance management offering, will allow us to go even further in helping our customers acquire and serve their end customers more successfully."

"Both Practique and Merced have a reputation for quality, strong leadership, and forward-looking visions in their respective markets," said Managing Director of Practique, Jo Walker. "The marriage of Merced Systems and Practique is powerful. It quickly became apparent that we share certain core values about how to grow our business and how to treat our customers and employees. The acquisition makes sense not just because there is a growing market need for a dual sales and service performance management solution, but because the companies share a similar heritage and have each developed their respective businesses with similar values and goals."

More detailed information about the acquisition can be viewed here: http://www.mercedsystems.com.

About Merced

Merced Systems is the leading provider of Sales and Service Performance Management applications focused on improving operational effectiveness of sales forces and service organizations across a range of vertical industries. Merced Systems' award winning products serve Global 2000 customers, and include advanced analytics and reporting, incentive compensation management, coaching and other performance execution applications, With a strong track record of growth and delivering business impact to its customers, Merced Systems has been profitable for the past 5 years. Merced Systems is a privately held venture capital-based company headquartered in Redwood City, CA., with major operations in the UK. For more information on Merced Systems, please visit http://www.mercedsystems.com.

Web site: http://www.mercedsystems.com

Leigh Anne Varney of Varney Business Communication, +1-415-387-7250, la@varneybusiness.com, for Merced Systems, Inc.; or Victoria McQuade of Chatterbox PR, +44-(0)20-8996-1755, victoria.mcquade@chatterboxpr.co.uk, for Practique Associates