1. Verint has recently acquired Mercom, a quality and recording solutions provider. Since Verint also a provider quality and recording solutions, what is the rational for the acquisition?
Verint acquired Mercom in order to accelerate its growth, capacity and commitment to the dynamic small-to-midsize enterprise market segment. Since its founding in 1991, Mercom has gained significant experience developing, packaging and delivering solutions tailored to meet the specific requirements of the small-to-midsize enterprise contact center market. This acquisition will enhance our competitive edge and help us extend our actionable intelligence vision into new markets, including public safety.
2. Please explain how the Mercom sales, R&D, and customer service groups are will be integrated into the Verint organization.
Over time, Mercom's Audiolog solutions will evolve to incorporate Verint technologies. In mid-to-late 2007, there will an available software-only release that combines the best of Audiolog with the best of Verint ULTRA solutions.
The combination of Mercom's strong channels, technology and deep expertise combined with Verint's strength, vision and award-winning portfolio will help us to bring actionable intelligence solutions to new markets around the world, delivering strong value for our partners and our customers.
3. In September 2005 Verint announced the acquisition of The Opus Group. How does Opus compliment your current offerings? How would you evaluate the acquisition so far?
Through the acquisition of Opus, Verint has been able to extend the foot print of our ULTRA Suite within the enterprise and beyond the traditional contact center. The combination of ULTRA and Opus has enabled Verint to deliver the most comprehensive portfolio of enterprise actionable intelligence solutions for enhancing quality and optimizing performance of customer-focused operations.
Recently, Verint launched Customer Interaction (CI) Analytics, a solution that combines our powerful speech analytics technology with Opus' proven, high-ROI performance optimization methodology to help organizations develop a more thorough understanding of customer wants, needs and problems, optimize customer interactions, and promote more lasting and profitable customer relationships.
4. Verint has been the prime proponent of providing actionable intelligence for several years now. What has been some of the prime applications of actionable intelligence?
Verint defines Actionable Intelligence as mission-critical information that you can readily understand and use to improve business performance -- timely information that you can act upon for better business outcomes. Verint's ULTRA solution with its suite of speech, data and screen analytics provides actionable intelligence in the contact center to address critical aspects of company performance, from workforce optimization to risk and compliance for developing effective and profitable customer strategies.
For a contact center supervisor, actionable intelligence is the right contacts for evaluation delivered automatically to his desktop. For a customer retention specialist, actionable intelligence is an alert about a valued customer threatening to close his account received within minutes of the call. For a marketing executive, actionable intelligence is calls that indicate why a new product campaign is generating more questions than sales.
5.What has been the market acceptance level for actionable intelligence? Has it become part of the selection criteria for users when they are going through the selection process?
The market acceptance for our actionable intelligence solutions has been strong, especially given the recent enterprise quality trend that's causing our customers to view their processes and programs differently. These new quality-focused business dynamics require vendors to provide solutions that deliver significant business impact. Our ULTRA analytics solutions are helping to drive the transformation of the contact center and its meaningful connection to the rest of the enterprise. This ability is certainly something that our customers are looking for when investing in a contact center solution.
6.With so many companies in the monitoring business today, how does Verint differentiate themselves from their competitors?
Our key differentiator is our ability to provide a comprehensive, enterprise-class recording platform, ULTRA, and a suite of powerful analytics solutions to deliver the actionable intelligence our customers require to enhance enterprise performance and provide a superior customer experience.
7. Have user requirements changed over the past year? If so, how?
User requirements haven't changed over the last year, so much as they've evolved. Our customers continue to collect massive amounts of valuable data in the contact center, but without powerful analytics solutions, they cannot harness the enterprise value it contains. Over the past year, we've seen an increased focus on solutions that improve access to important customer data and provide the visibility required for quality improvement, enterprise wide. The insights provided by more efficient data analysis in the contact center are being leveraged throughout the enterprise to enhance business processes, improve the customer experience and positively impact the bottom line.
8. What will be Verint's focus and direction be for remainder of 2006 and 2007? What new products and services can we expect from Verint?
For the remainder of 2006 and early 2007, Verint will continue our focus on driving quality beyond the contact center and on delivering storing business value through our analytics-driven QM approach. Our Operational Performance Management solutions will continue to generate measurable increases in both operational productivity and service levels. And, with Customer Interaction Analytics, we will show our customers how to leverage customer insights to improve the customer experience and solve key business problems such as customer retention, first contact resolution and more.
9. What do you consider your greatest challenges to be in the next twelve months?
Our challenge continues to be educating the market on the importance of leveraging customer interactions throughout the enterprise as critical sources of business intelligence. We will show our customers how to yield actionable business insights from the entire universe of customer interactions and to use this information to optimize customer relationships and address business challenges.