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ASP - Monday, November 22, 2004

Contactual - Profile

HQ: San Mateo, CA

Founded: 2000 as White Pajamas. Contactual is an uninspired corporate drone name, but White Pajamas is just awful. Here's the silly story of how the name came into being.

Management: CEO is Mansour Salame, who previously ran NextAge Technologies, a company that he sold to Alcatel. Salame also has experience at Genesis Telecommunications - a fairly large company similar to Contactual.

Investors: Initially raised $40M from well-known Mayfield and Norwest Venture Partners. Investors forced out Salame and his co-founder in 2001. When the company foundered, Salame bought back the company's assets for a mere $100K. The new, new company is being backed by angel investors.

Business Model: Company sells a call-center ASP to small and medium-size businesses. Customers get up and running faster than doing it themselves. Product is integrated with Salesforce.com. Because the interface is Web-based, call center staffers can be both in-house and contractors working from their home or India or wherever.

Competitors: Five9

Dirt: Although we like the concept, this is going to take a while. We would like it better if Contactual had more real competitors as we don't think that enough people know that doing their call center as an ASP is an option and there are few poster-children for call center ASP success.