REDWOOD CITY, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 10/11/12 --

Core News Facts:

• Bunchball, the pioneer and market leader in gamification, today welcomed three leading talent management and technology executives to a new Bunchball Advisory Board created to expedite the company's entry into new markets and expansion within existing ones.
• Oracle's Jason Blessing, Atlassian's Jeffrey Diana, and Heidrick & Struggles' Kelly Kay all joined the Bunchball Advisory Board.
  • The Bunchball Advisory Board will meet regularly to explore strategies aimed at extending Bunchball's leadership as a provider of gamification solutions for enterprises, media and entertainment companies, and consumer products companies.
  • Their efforts augment Bunchball's existing Customer Advisory Board (CAB), whose members help shape product strategy by ensuring future releases of Bunchball solutions meet the ever-changing gamification needs of enterprises and tie into trends in how people work, consume entertainment, and engage with companies.
• Jason Blessing recently joined Oracle when it acquired Taleo. As senior vice president of product development, Blessing oversees the product strategy and development of Oracle's cloud-based talent management applications. At Taleo, Blessing was executive vice president of products and technology, and in that role he managed the company's entire product strategy, development and production. Prior to this position, he was group vice president and general manager of Taleo's small and medium business unit with global responsibility for sales, marketing, services and products. During his tenure, Taleo Business Edition™ became the most widely adopted talent management platform in the world for SMBs with more than 5,000 customers. Before joining Taleo, Blessing held senior management roles at Price Waterhouse, PeopleSoft, and Oracle. He holds a degree from the University of Michigan.
• Jeffrey Diana is a builder of world class HR organizations. He recently was named chief people officer of development software provider Atlassian. Diana's focus is to enable the Australia-based company to scale its workforce globally. For the past two years, Diana was chief people officer at SuccessFactors, which was acquired by SAP in February. There he built an HR organization from scratch, helping the company triple in size and establish a global footprint. He previously was chief HR officer at online travel giant Expedia and at Safeco Insurance, a $6.5 billion market leader. From 1997 to 2005, he held senior HR management roles at General Electric and Bellsouth. Diana has master's degrees in HR management and sociology from the University of South Carolina and a bachelor's in American studies from Tufts.
• Kelly O. Kay is the global managing partner of the Software Practice at Heidrick & Struggles, the world's first leadership advisory firm. He conducts worldwide searches for technology companies, focusing on board, CEO and sales and marketing officers. Kay also leads the firm's Marketing, Sales & Strategy Officers Practice for technology companies on the West Coast. Previously, Kay was a managing partner with a leading boutique retained executive search firm in Silicon Valley, and was a partner at the Center for Corporate Innovation (CCI), a nationwide CEO and CFO development, strategy and networking organization sponsored by McKinsey & Co. His career has also included successful stints as a senior executive at a variety of management consulting firms, in addition to sales and management roles at IBM. He has a bachelor's degree in marketing from the University of San Francisco and a MBA from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.

QUOTES:

Attributable to Jason Blessing
"We are finally seeing the consumerization of enterprise software after years and years of talking about it. This is having a dramatic impact on the usability of enterprise software, and on the corresponding value that customers are getting from their investments. If anything exemplifies the trend of the consumerization of enterprise software, it's gamification, and it's a privilege for me to be involved with the pioneer of gamification and the market leader."

Attributable to Jeffrey Diana
"Throughout my career, I've focused on building the most productive and engaged workforces in the world. Achieving that requires an understanding of what really drives people to be their best. At its core, this is what gamification is all about, and that's why I'm pleased to serve with Jason and Kelly on the Bunchball Advisory Board. This is an exciting opportunity to reshape how companies in all kinds of industries inspire and motivate people."

Attributable to Kelly Kay
"Bunchball is the clear market leader in gamification, and in this role, Bunchball is changing the art and science of enterprise loyalty and customer engagement. I'm privileged to be associated with Bunchball's community of investors, its Board of Directors, and its management team -- all of whom are highly regarded in their respective fields. I look forward to helping Bunchball explore ways to apply its game-changing best practices to more markets."

Attributable to Jim Scullion, CEO, Bunchball
"In the next two years, 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will gamify at least one application, according to Gartner.(1) We're delighted to have Jason, Jeff and Kelly serve as strategic advisors as we work to penetrate that 70 percent. Together, these three proven executives have the insights we need to understand how to capture new markets and to drill deeper into those we're already pursuing."

ABOUT BUNCHBALL:
Bunchball is the market leader and visionary in gamification. Powering the Engaged Enterprise, Bunchball enables organizations to improve business performance throughout their ecosystem by creating highly active and loyal customers, employees, and partners. Bunchball's comprehensive suite of innovative cloud-based solutions empowers companies to engage and motivate, leading to improved employee productivity, customer loyalty and ROI. Bunchball's world-class customers include Adobe, HP, Cisco, Warner Bros., Comcast, LiveOps, VMware and Hasbro. Based in Silicon Valley, Bunchball's investors include Granite Ventures, Triangle Peak Partners, Northport Investments, and Correlation Ventures. For more information, visit www.bunchball.com, our blog at www.gamification.com, or follow @bunchball.

Sources
(1) Gartner research finding from 2011

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