ARLINGTON, Virginia. For M&A professionals in post-merger integration and corporate development, eknow inc today announced a major mid-cycle update of the eknow Integrator software, to version 11.5.

Developed since 1999, eknow Integrator is the most mature, easy-to-use web-based tool for executing M&A, corporate reorganizations and divestitures. With version 11.5, Integrator puts even more distance between itself and the alternatives. Version 11.5 is the largest Integrator update since 2009, adding significant new functionality and raw performance while incrementally improving ease of use for every category of Integrator user.

What's New in Integrator 11.5:

• Raw speed in large queries: Integrator 11.5 accelerates the most complex program office report queries by approximately 8X.
• More drill-down metrics: All applicable views now display "apples-to-apples" progress metrics, rolled up by activity type, sub-team, team, M&A phase, and acquisition. Instantly identify any deviation at the top level and drill down to its source in seconds.
• New financial impact views: Integrator 11.5 adds alternative new roll-up views of total synergy component costs and benefits by team, acquisition, and time period.
• New flexible dates feature: Many plan dates are crude estimates or simply unknowable until months into the effort. Users therefore enter bogus dates or none at all. Unique to Integrator 11.5 is a third, more flexible option that streamlines date entry, eliminates constant date revision, and improves date reliability.
• Dependent date features: Integrator 11.5 allows tasks to be dependent not only on other selected tasks, but on any relevant date field in Integrator (e.g., Acquisition Close Date).
• Redesigned activity timeline: Integrator's timeline view has been completely revised, reformatted and expanded. Timeline view also displays progress metrics rolled up by month, M&A phase, and acquisition.
• New Pre-Diligence Views: Built-in Pre-Diligence scoring of acquisition pipeline. Populate with any categories and criteria. Graphical results as well as summary / drill-down data of data.
• Universal Action menu saves time: The context sensitive "Action menu" button eliminates 85% of steps required to add most new tasks or upload documents. The Action menu also now consolidates several other commands from other locations, making them easier to find. And because Integrator users already depend on the Action menu button every day, they already know how to use it in 11.5.
• New multiple-window interface: Until 11.5, Integrator navigation opened every page in a single active dashboard page. With 11.5, users can open any number of independent Integrator pages by shift-clicking the page links in the navigation menu. This allows users to quickly switch back and forth between views without waiting to reload a web page.

"Obviously we are very pleased with Integrator 11.5," said Manuel Sanches, eknow President and CTO. "We improved top-down visibility for management. We saved rank and file users possibly hundreds of mouse-clicks per day. The new date and metrics features address more of the issues that have made traditional project software so unpopular with M&A teams. And yet these new features do not add to the learning curve for most new users. By careful design we have extended integrator's capabilities while actually reducing how much most new users have to learn on average."

"As with most Integrator revisions, 11.5 allows eknow clients to do even more, even more easily. With 11.5 we think it's even more clear that for M&A, Integrator is now to spreadsheets what spreadsheets were to graph paper and a pencil." eknow Integrator customers will be updated to 11.5 free of charge during the month of June.

About Integrator
Integrator's unique design and automation make it the easiest-to-use, lowest-risk, and most cost-effective platform to execute M&A, divestitures and reorganizations. Integrator's ease of use enables clients to begin using the system immediately, with no IT resources, little or no training for most users, and little or no consultant support. With Integrator, even the smallest program teams can now easily manage and track far more teams, plans, contributors, data, documents, and results – even across multiple simultaneous acquisitions – with vastly less effort. eknow Integrator is provided as securely hosted software-as-a-service.

About eknow inc
eknow inc is an Arlington, Virginia-based leader in mergers & acquisitions (M&A) automation software solutions. eknow solutions have been helping companies identify, execute, and increase returns from M&A, restructuring, and major corporate initiatives since 1999. 

For more information on eknow or our eknow Integrator service, or to schedule a demo, contact eknow's EVP of Sales & Marketing at: ken.balog@eknow.com or (703) 875-9191.

Since 1999, eknow Integrator has been the most mature, easy-to-use web-based tool for M&A, corporate reorganizations and divestitures. Version 11.0.4 adds several new features for Integrator users in executive, program, and project roles:

• New and revised real-time progress charts and scorecard summaries for each M&A phase and activity
• Instant access to Issue & Risk Mitigation plans
• New Decision Log with dedicated, easy-to-use management tool
• One-click export of multiple charts and reports from any Integrator page
• New tool for quickly organizing international regions, countries, sites, synergies and deliverables in multinational acquisitions
• Instantly preview, send or re-send any Integrator "iMemo" to any user in just one or two clicks
• Extensive new Glossary and Integrator FAQs built into Integrator
• New built-in reports to monitor usage by user, timeline, or Integrator page

Manuel Sanches, eknow President, Founder and CTO said, "The priorities for this release were ease of use and more direct access to what M&A managers and team members need. We are extremely happy with how many tangible enhancements we were able to squeeze into this point release. Now our challenge is to make our next release, v. 11.0.5, just as great." Mr. Sanches confirmed that 11.0.5 is on track for release later this quarter.

Integrator's unique design and automation make it the easiest-to-use, lowest-risk, and most cost-effective means to execute M&A, divestitures and reorganizations. Integrator's ease of use enables clients to begin using the system immediately, with no IT resources, little or no training for most users, and little or no consultant support. With Integrator, even the smallest program teams can now easily manage and track far more teams, plans, contributors, data, documents, and results – even across multiple simultaneous acquisitions – with vastly less effort.

For more information on eknow or our eknow Integrator service or to schedule an online demo, contact eknow's EVP of Sales & Marketing at: ken.balog@eknow.com or via phone at 1 (703) 875-9191.

About eknow inc
eknow inc is an Arlington, Virginia-based leader in mergers & acquisitions (M&A) automation software solutions. eknow solutions have been helping companies identify, execute, and increase returns from M&A, restructuring, and major corporate initiatives since 1999. For more information, visit www.eknow.com.

eknow Integrator, initially developed in 1999, is the most mature, easy-to-use web-based tool for powering the M&A process from corporate development, through due diligence to post-merger integration.

eknow Integrator's built-in access control ensures that the proper visibility of any document, project, task, synergy, head count, or financial details is easily set and automatically restricted to the right individuals, with virtually no administrative overhead required. This simplicity and automation is the key to avoiding human error and increasing the productivity of all parties involved in the M&A process.

With one menu selection, client program offices or team leads can make items public, or securely restrict them to appropriate individuals. For example, access can be restricted to the named owners of an item, to all members of the associated team, to only team leads of that team, to all team leads on all teams, and other options. And for each of these options, one additional menu selection will further restrict visibility to only team members from one organization (i.e., the buyer, seller, law firm, or investment bank).

Integrator’s unique design and automation make it the easiest-to-use, lowest-risk, and most cost-effective means to execute M&A and restructuring. Integrator’s ease of use enables clients to begin using the system immediately, with no IT resources, little or no training for most users, and little or no consulting support. With Integrator, even the smallest program teams can now easily manage and track far more teams, plans, contributors, data, documents, and results — even across multiple simultaneous acquisitions — with vastly less effort.

For more information on eknow or our eknow Integrator service or to schedule an online demo, contact eknow’s EVP of Sales & Marketing, Ken Balog at ken.balog@eknow.com or 703-875-9191.

eknow.com has a new look, more content and, and additional useful features — including an RSS feed of these articles! We have been making a lot of improvements to our Integrator product over the past year that we're excited to share with both existing and future customers.

As this new year starts the economy is starting to turn the corner, and with it the M&A market is heating back up. Throughout 2010, we will be continuing to add the Integrator features and capabilities most requested by our customers, along with a few innovative ideas of our own. If you want to stay up to date on the improvements we're adding to Integrator, just click the RSS link at the top of this Recent News page and subscribe to our feed.

“The new data center not only supports eknow’s increased client demand, but it also improves redundancy, disaster recovery, security, and system performance,” said Manuel Sanches, eknow President, Founder, and CTO.

eknow is the developer of eknow Integrator, the first and most mature, easy-to-use web-based tool for post-M&A integration, corporate development, due diligence, restructuring, and reorganizations. eknow Integrator, now at version 11.0.3, has been developed with customer and industry input since 1999.

According to CNBC, Wall Street analysts and industry experts, 2010 is set to see a significant increase in M&A activity. Yet these same experts point out that historically 50% – 75% of all M&A transactions fail to return shareholder value, due to poor integration and/or planning.

eknow Integrator tilts the odds in favor of the eknow client. Integrator’s unique design and automation make it the easiest-to-use, lowest-risk, and most cost-effective means to execute M&A and restructuring. Integrator’s ease of use enables clients to begin using the system immediately, with little or no training for most users, and no IT resources. With Integrator, even the smallest program teams can now easily manage and track far more teams, plans, contributors, data, documents, and results — even across multiple simultaneous acquisitions — with vastly less effort.

Alan Croll, eknow Chief Executive Officer added, “The demand for secure, reliable, and affordable M&A automation tools continues to rise, and this additional data center adds growth capacity and business continuity protection for all of our clients."

eknow inc, the leading solution for pre-deal and merger integration automation, today announced that Kenneth E. Balog has been named its new Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, effective February 1, 2010.

In this role, Balog will lead the global sales and marketing teams targeting the top 2,500 global companies, and will report to Alan Croll, Chief Executive Officer.

“We are proud to welcome Ken Balog to eknow,” said Croll. “Ken’s background in M&A and strategic / corporate development coupled with his extensive sales and marketing experience make him the perfect choice to head eknow’s sales and marketing efforts. Based on his superior track record of customer-focused achievements and his understanding of the M&A marketplace, we believe he will be instrumental in leading eknow's growth.”

Balog most recently served as the Vice President of Product Management & Marketing at PrecisionIR Group, an investor communications company. Prior to PIR, he held various sales and executive leadership roles including Vice President of Sales at Vcall, COO at Communicast, and Vice President of Strategic Development at communications technology provider, Premiere Global Services.

Balog holds an undergraduate degree from The Ohio State University.

“Knitting together the phases of the M&A process helps companies successfully plot a path from merger opportunity to fully integrated business unit,” says eknow CEO Alan Croll. “Adding Due Diligence checklist tracking to Integrator’s impressive list of capabilities helps bring another piece of the M&A process into the automation flow. We expect this to be even more appealing to our customers, and to increase Integrator’s impact on increasing their synergy capture.”

Integrator is a web dashboard and communications toolset that automates the execution of merger integration and organizational restructuring. It helps companies plan, deploy, execute, track progress, and measure results from integration and restructuring initiatives. Integrator can incorporate a client company’s program management playbook, securely host sensitive deal documents, and capture institutional process knowledge. And Integrator’s automated communication features can dramatically reduce the management effort and cycle time, improve the timeliness and accuracy of business information, and contribute to greater synergy value capture.

ARLINGTON, VA. APRIL 8, 2009. Today eknow inc announced that a large, multinational chemical company, is using eknow Integrator to manage restructuring activities.

“Restructuring is a time-sensitive activity, and this company was able to begin managing the restructuring activities on Integrator immediately,” said eknow CEO Alan Croll. “Integrator is now a critical tool for their management teams responsible for executing on this company’s most important M&A and restructuring strategies.”

Integrator is a web-based tool that automates the execution of post-merger integration and organizational restructuring. It helps companies plan, deploy, execute, track progress, and measure results from integration and restructuring initiatives. Because of its built-in automation features, Integrator dramatically reduces the management effort and cycle time required, while increasing the value captured, and measurably improving ROI. Integrator has been continuously refined since 1999, and is the fastest, easiest to use, and most effective solution available today.