Genesys Acquires Informiam: Embedded Analytics Trend Continues

I’m working on my top trends for 2007/2008, to be published next week, and one of the trends is definitely embedded analytics.  Over the last decade, enterprise software has done a great job of capturing details about every customer interaction–information that previously was lost to the ether.  However, now companies are realizing they have this huge store of information and no way to leverage it.  I hear horror stories of support management having to keep a staff of 6-10 programmers on staff just to analyze the data and look for something meaningful.

This is quickly changing.  As I’ve written about previously, enterprise software vendors have been acquiring standalone analytics/business intelligence vendors to embed in their suites, offering business-user targeted real-time analytics reporting created for specific business roles and problems.  Outside of core CRM and ERP, this trend is also happening in contact center applications, with Verint acquiring Witness to bring together ‘best of breed’ workforce management (WFM) and quality monitoring (QM) on a core analytics platform.  And today another announcement that further proves this trend:  Genesys, with 4,000 customers for contact center software, has acquired Informiam, an Atlanta-based vendor of realtime “Business Performance Management” tools.

Advertisement

6 Months After Merger Closes, Verint/Witness Delivers New Converged Platform

When I launched this blog back in February, one of the first posts was about the merger of two leaders in quality monitoring, Verint and Witness Systems. Ten months later, after the initial announcement and subsequent merger close, that remains one of the most frequently read posts on my blog. So consider this an update, because clearly the SSPA community (and the support community at large) is interested in this market–technology that is so critical to improving the customer experience.

Heaven knows there have been many, many acquisitions this year, and frankly, the new combined entities are typically slow in delivering value. I’m happy to say that Verint is definitely not one of those, because this week they already launched the first new product combining the ‘best of breed’ components of Witness quality monitoring (QM) and workforce management (WFM) and Verint ULTRA analytics/business intelligence on a new platform. Having a unified suite this soon after a merger/acquisition not only shows that the transaction was well planned out as far as product roadmap, but it also proves that the work both vendors have done in previous years to move to standards-based architectures has paid off.