Verint has secured a $21MN megadeal with a prominent US-based financial services company.
Dan Bodner, CEO of Verint, shared the news during an earnings call, where he also laid out the vendor’s generative AI approach and discussed its continued cloud momentum.
Unfortunately, Bodner didn’t reveal much more about the megadeal aside from noting that it stems from an existing customer that chose to expand its partnership with the stalwart CX vendor.
In doing so, the business will add new applications to its Verint ecosystem.
Luckily, Bodner did delve deeper into some of its other significant seven-figure wins that helped the vendor achieve Q1 earnings of $217MN, up 24 percent YoY.
While this is down slightly on the previous quarter, Verint creeps closer to profitability, which is the aim of many CX vendors in the space.
Major Customer Wins
Last quarter, Verint received orders from the likes of Macquarie, Toyota, and Deutsche Telekom. The business also added 100 new logos, including the Bank of England and Casey’s General Stores.
Yet, Bodner chose to focus on two particular examples, stating:
These wins were all driven by our open platform and our CX automation innovation resulting in significant ROI for our customers.
The first is a $6MN win with a leading European telecom. Having recently merged with another large company, the business adopted Verint across the combined entity.
Verint’s WFO platform will likely play a significant role here. Indeed, as it is vendor-agnostic, it can combine data from various contact center providers and centralize staff management.
Yet, that is only one possibility. There are many others, as the price tag suggests.
Next is a $3MN deal from a large international bank. That customer expanded its use of Verint to address additional automation opportunities.
Indeed, Verint has a robotic process automation (RPA) platform alongside conversational AI, auto-QA, automated workforce management (WFM), and more.
These new contracts help to top up Verint’s customer base, brimming with 85 percent of the Fortune 100 businesses.
It also includes ten of the top ten banks, nine of the top nine insurers, and eight of the top ten healthcare companies.
Keeping that business – as contact centers shift to the cloud, where the competition is fierce – will remain critical to Verint’s future success.
Managing the SaaS Transition
Much of Verint’s business comes from its work with many of the globe’s biggest enterprises. Yet, CX tech stack within many of these businesses remains largely on-premise.
Verint has worked with these businesses and their legacy contact centers for decades, supporting their WFO strategies and then moving into other parts of their service operations. These include VoC, analytics, and conversational AI.
Yet, as more enterprises turn to the cloud, Verint must battle new competitors across each space to preserve these relationships and – ultimately – increase its earnings through subscriptions.
Wary of this, the vendor has long planned for a SaaS-led future, offering the Verint Platform across public, private, and hybrid clouds to support complex enterprise integrations.
“The way we designed the SaaS transition was because we have large customers,” adds Bodner. “We wanted to make sure that they could move to SaaS, regardless of which cloud they run, and that was the first part of our SaaS transition.”
Nevertheless, Verint places emphasis on its public cloud option. Bodner says:
Running in the Verint (public cloud) allows us to introduce innovation faster than when they run in different clouds just because we put new software in our cloud every two weeks.
Nevertheless, its multi-cloud strategy has enabled the business to grow its SaaS revenue, which now accounts for 87 percent of its overall earnings.
Much of that will come up for renewal shortly, three years after the COVID software boom. Yet, Verint remains confident of proving its ROI, serving up more applications, and expanding those partnerships.
A ChatGPT Announcement Seems Nigh
Part of the motivation for contact centers to shift to the public cloud is the rapid speed of innovation that is happening there, particularly in regard to AI.
However, Verint is one of the few prominent CX vendors yet to make any announcements around generative AI.
Although, that seems only a matter of time, with Verint seeming set to augment its Da Vinci AI with new capabilities.
“Da Vinci is completely open and takes advantage of the latest AI models available commercially, such as GPT and others,” says Bodner.
“This unique design enables Verint to remain flexible and future-proof by quickly embracing the latest generative AI innovations for Verint or any other vendor.”
That statement suggests that Verint does not plan on limiting itself to using ChatGPT, and will instead experiment with multiple models to fit specific use cases.
Nonetheless, as Bodner states:
We have GPT 4.0 in our research labs, and we will be introducing new use cases because there are some additional capabilities for that specifically around leveraging visual imports and significantly larger prompts that will create new use cases that Verint will commercialize.
That prospect is exciting, and attendees of Verint Engage 2023 – which takes place next week – may find out more then.
Bodner and his team may also dig deeper into Verint’s recent Qudini acquisition, Google partnership, Teams integration, and more.
Also, for those attendees, if you see someone wearing a CX Today t-shirt, come and say hello. Whether you’re a Verint employee, partner, or end-user, we’d love to chat with you 😊
