This article was first published following rumors that the acquisition was close. CX Today has now updated it to reflect that the deal has been formally agreed.
Thoma Bravo has agreed to acquire Verint in a deal that values the tech provider at $2BN, including debt.
Upon the deal’s completion, Verint will merge with Calabrio, its workforce engagement management (WEM) rival, which Thoma Bravo owns.
Also under the private equity firm’s ownership are Aisera and Medallia, which compete with Verint in the conversational AI and voice of the customer (VoC) markets, respectively.
However, there is no suggestion that these CX stalwarts will also be brought into the fold.
A Verint press release announcing the move contains a quote by an anonymous spokesperson, stating:
Together, Calabrio and Verint will bring a powerful set of products to accelerate a shared vision: delivering an AI-powered, open CX platform to customers who are focused on driving strong business outcomes in their operations.
In bringing these companies together, Thoma Bravo merges two of the “big three” WEM providers, with NiCE being the other.
Yet, the roll-up could have significant consequences, beyond market consolidation.
Big Consequences for the Customer Experience Space
Many businesses have implemented CX solutions that include Verint modules and integrations on the back-end, whether they know about it or not.
Third-party vendors selling such solutions should rethink these products, their roadmap, and other conflicts of interest, especially if Thoma Bravo decides to jack up prices.
Meanwhile, the brand emerging after the Verint-Calabrio merger won’t carry the former’s debt burden. Yet, it will still work with Verint’s install base that includes 85 of the Fortune 100. If it can successfully leverage that, a new competitive force may make its mark on the customer experience space.
Verint picked up this market share after spending decades as the vendor enterprises turn to when their contact center platform lacks advanced functionality in specific areas, like conversational AI and WEM. With its reinvention, the new brand will undoubtedly aim to deepen its ties to these enterprises.
That objective is a no-brainer as businesses aim for slimmer tech stacks while CCaaS players try to close the gap on Verint’s feature advantage.
When speculating on an acquisition earlier this month, Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, urged Thoma Bravo to commit to this reinvention. He said:
A private equity takeover would make sense, because this company really needs to reinvent itself before it’s too late. And you can’t easily do that as a publicly traded company.
To Kerravala’s point, a private company can plan for longer-term objectives, not quarterly results. As such the new Verint-Calabrio business can build toward a strategy that establishes more meaningful enterprise partnerships.
Third Time Lucky for Verint?
The new Verint-Calabrio marks the third major transformation for Verint over the past three years.
First, it launched an Open CCaaS platform in 2023. Via this platform, contact centers can lay out their service journeys and workflows with Verint before determining their best-placed CCaaS provider.
The approach leveraged the breadth of Verint’s offering and the expertise of its people. Nevertheless, most buyers still start with CCaaS and pull Verint in.
As such, Verint struggled to position itself early enough with core contact center decision makers. It remained the vendor in other brands’ ecosystems, not vice versa.
Since then, Verint has doubled down on its legion of specialized bots and started referring to itself as a “CX automation” company.
However, that hasn’t helped Verint become the core decision-making point within the customer experience ecosystem.
Amid this difficulty, Verint’s stock price continued to stutter, down by over 37 percent year-to-date.
The acquisition and rebrand will mark attempt number three at reinvention. However, unless the new Verint-Calabrio can create tighter enterprise bonds, it will likely face the same old struggles.
