Today’s approach to “social commerce” places a premium on monitoring and analytics and Israeli-based Comverse Technologies is about to cash in on the trend. An article in today’s Wall Street Journal by Anupreeta Das and Gina Chon (summarized in TheStreet.com here) asserts that Comverse is on course to sell Verint Systems in a deal that could fetch $2 billion. Verint, which reported over $700 million in revenue in 2010, shares a market that approaches $2 billion in revenue with the likes of Nice, Autonomy (eTalk) and a few others.

The highly visible mandate for companies to do a better job of listening and responding to their customers and prospects have attracted a number of non-traditional competitors to the monitoring and analytics market, most notably Cisco Systems, with its “Socialminer” product has elevated the visibility of some specialty firms like Nexidia, Calabrio, Utopy and a handful of others addressing the challenge of capturing and analyzing input from a number of sources (IM, Chat, Text, Web, phone), encompassing a number of modalities (speech and text).

Comverse’s sale of Verint is complicated by a number of factors. Verint already trades on the NASDAQ and has a market cap of $1.3 billion. Before Comverse can divest its share of the company, it has to get up-to-date on long-delayed SEC filings – a process that is expected to be completed in March. That should be good timing because interest in faster, more comprehensive capture and analysis of user generated metadata is building.

Categories: Articles

Tags: speech analytics, Contact Center, Analytics, Verint