IBM announced the closing of its acquisition of Kenexa. Kenexa bolsters IBM's leadership in helping clients embrace social business capabilities while gaining actionable insights from the enormous streams of information generated from social networks every day. The net purchase price is approximately $1.3 billion.

Kenexa, a leading provider of recruiting and talent management solutions, brings a unique combination of Cloud-based technology and consulting services that integrates both people and processes, providing solutions to engage a smarter, more effective workforce across their most critical business functions.

Kenexa complements IBM's strategy of bringing relevant data and expertise into the hands of business leaders within every functional department, from sales and marketing to product development and human resources.

The adoption of social business technology is further accelerating the growth of big data and the need for analytics in the enterprise. A recent global IBM study revealed that 57 percent of surveyed CEOs identified becoming a social business as a top priority and more than 73 percent are making significant investments to capture and draw insights from available data.

The survey also reveals that 70 percent of CEOs cite human capital as the single biggest contributor to sustained economic value. The combined strengths of IBM and Kenexa provide organizations with unique capabilities that allow them to increase workforce efficiencies and gain insight from their business information.

"By creating a smarter workforce, employees can drive innovation to bring products and services to market faster, resolve problems before they arise to improve customer service, and increase sales by building new skills -- linking the right experts to the right clients," said Alistair Rennie, general manager, social business, IBM. "The combination of Kenexa's world-class human capital management solutions and IBM's social business and analytics leadership uniquely positions IBM to help clients generate real returns from their social business investments, while helping them to be more competitive in their markets."

Today, Kenexa is an industry leader in cloud-based software and recruiting process outsourcing (RPO.) Kenexa supports more than 8,900 customers across a variety of industries, including financial services, pharmaceuticals, retail and consumer, including more than half of the Fortune 500.

Since IBM announced its intent to acquire Kenexa in August, Kenexa has seen continued momentum with customers around the globe. Kenexa has signed sizeable, multiyear contracts with several major companies, and recently announced that Cargill, an international producer and marketer of food, agricultural, financial and industrial products and services, has signed a three-year agreement to use Kenexa to implement, develop and oversee an employee engagement survey to its entire workforce of 140,000 employees around the world.

The Kenexa acquisition complements IBM's social business and HR business services leadership. For three consecutive years, IDC ranked IBM number one in enterprise social software. Today, more than 60 percent of Fortune 100 companies have licensed IBM's solutions for social business.

Through its combination of social software, analytics, content management, IBM’s maturity and strength in business process services and deep industry expertise, IBM is uniquely positioned to help organizations capture information, create insights and generate interactions that translate into real business value.

At IBM's Connect conference, the premier social business client event in January 2013, IBM will detail how it will help clients use social technology, analytics, talent management, and human insights to attract and retain the right talent, to enable employee skills for the greatest impact, and to align activities to improve company performance – leading to real, positive business outcomes and competitive advantage. Register to attend Connect 2013 at www.ibm.com/connect.

With the closing of this acquisition approximately 2,800 Kenexa employees in 21 countries join IBM. Consistent with its strategy, IBM will continue to support Kenexa clients and enhance Kenexa technologies while allowing these organizations to take advantage of the broader IBM portfolio.