Opera Solutions Acquires Commendo for Recommender Engine Capabilities

Opera Solutions, LLC has acquired Austria’s custom recommendation systems vendor Commendo Research & Consulting for an undisclosed price.

Opera has not disclosed the financial details of the deal, and analysts say Opera’s technologies complement with Commendo’s.

Opera has stated that it is now going to add Commendo’s recommender engine capabilities to its data analytics solutions.

The acquisition came barely a day after Opera named Andy W. Mattes, a former executive of Hewlett-Packard (News - Alert), to its advisory board. Andy has been told to focus on advising the company on expanding its market presence and visibility, particularly with the Fortune 1000.

Opera thought of acquiring Commendo while competing for Netflix Prize, a global competition organized by the movie rental company in 2009. Commendo ultimately won the prize, besting over 41,000 teams including Opera.

Koeflach, Austria-based Commendo serves clients with both its Recommendo recommendation engine and custom recommendation systems. It uses sophisticated analytics to serve up the "next purchase" offer for shoppers on the basis of their individual characteristics and shopping patterns.

“Integrating Commendo's advanced recommender engine with our existing offerings creates new ways for our clients to grow sales while improving customer loyalty and satisfaction," said Arnab Gupta, CEO and founder of Opera Solutions.

Georg Pressler, Managing Director, Marketing & Sales of Commendo, added, "As a science-driven company, we are delighted to join Opera Solutions. They are a true global center of machine learning prowess, and we look forward to learning from them as well as adding to their store of knowledge and expertise in recommendation systems."

Opera Solution specializes in creating signal hubs, which provide a new enterprise-wide capability to dynamically and continually extract valuable predictive and descriptive information from big data flows.

Opera’s caters to many a number of industry segments including financial services, healthcare, government, supply chain and marketing.