Cisco Buying Latigent

Patrick Barnard
Group Managing Editor, TMCnet

Cisco Buying Latigent

Network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc. has reportedly agreed to buy privately-held call center and business intelligence software company Latigent. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
 
Chicago-based Latigent specializes in Web-based business intelligence and analytics reporting solutions, with a focus on contact centers. The company last made news on TMCnet in June, when it announced version 3.0 of its BlueVue X-Ray Edition business intelligence software, which is said to give managers and executives an “X-ray view” into their contact center operations. The new version of the software offers Real Time Performance Manager (RPM) and “cradle-to-grave” reporting for Cisco ICM & IPCC, plus expanded support for Cisco IPCC Express.
 
Some no doubt saw Cisco’s acquisition of Latigent coming, since the two have been working closely together for years. Latigent's products will add nicely to Cisco's suite of Unified Customer Contact solutions. These solutions, which run on a single, integrated platform, enable multi-channel services and integration with customer relationship management applications. In addition they readily integrate with other existing contact center systems.
 
Laurent Philonenko, vice president and general manager of the Customer Contact Business Unit, Cisco, said the acquisition shows Cisco’s “commitment to increase the value of customer investments in our customer interaction solutions by providing appealing, robust and dynamic tools to enable increased visibility and efficiency, resulting in improved customer experiences."
 
"Cisco views reporting as a critical component for the management of a contact center,” Philonenko said in a statement. “We believe Latigent offers an excellent combination of talent and technologies that will further position Cisco Unified Customer Contact solutions to help enable customer-centric relationship management with unprecedented flexibility. Marketing, sales and support communities that are increasingly tied to contact center technologies will benefit from this new dimension in our offer."
 
As per the deal, Latigent’s CEO Chris Crosby and CTO Jason Kolb will both join Cisco after the close of the acquisition, which is still subject to the usual closing conditions.
 
Cisco hopes to close the deal in the first quarter of Cisco's fiscal year 2008.
 
As the call center increasingly becomes the “business intelligence center” of the enterprise, it has become critical for high level decision makers to have the tools they need to get a detailed view of all of the center’s operations - from agent performance to customer intelligence to call history. That’s where Latigent’s BlueVue 3.0 X-Ray Edition comes in. The company’s BlueVue software suite represents the convergence of business intelligence, performance management, reporting and analytics for the call center in a single product. The BlueVue Supervisor Portal with RPM lets front line managers monitor agent performance in real time on metrics such as schedule adherence, sales conversion and quality.
 
BlueVue supports all major workforce management tools and ACDs and thus eliminates the need to rely on proprietary real time adherence applications from individual vendors. Offering tremendous ease of use, flexibility and a wide range of capabilities, it lets supervisors create their own exception-based reports and dashboards via their web browser; thus eliminating the need to use IT resources in order to make changes. With RPM integrated into BlueVue’s product suite, managers can measure current call center performance and measure it against historical performance. Also among its capabilities, BlueVue offers Avaya to Cisco IPCC data migration tools; support for enterprise class scalability and flexible deployment architecture; and real-time data warehouse and operational dashboards.

Cisco should have an easy time integrating Latigent’s products into its existing product line. For more information about Latigent’s products, visit www.latigent.com.

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Patrick Barnard is associate editor for Customer Interaction Solutions magazine and assignment editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit Patrick Barnard’s columnist page.

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