Contact center crossover?

MELVILLE, N.Y.--On the face of it, Verint's $35 million acquisition in mid July of Mercom Systems will largely affect Verint's contact center business, as Mercom is primarily concerned with the recording and analyzing of phone calls for small to mid-sized enterprises. However, said Mariann McDonagh, Verint's vice president of global marketing, with Verint's security business focused on "actionable intelligence," "as we look at our overall portfolio, and get more into IT, there will be more connectivity between those two businesses." Of course, it doesn't hurt, either, that Mercom will bring in roughly $16 million in revenues in 2007, and is a "profitable organization." The synergies will most likely come from two areas, McDonagh said. First, as Mercom is the standard for 911 recording and communications for security minded organizations like the New Jersey Port Authority, they bring with them clients and relationships that might be leveraged by the security salespeople. Second, Mercom brings "hundreds of global resellers, so that's another channel avenue that we don't have today," McDonagh said. "It's a great added benefit for us," she said, "and we need to find how we can leverage it across the board. There are more synergies, and we are working with the same customers, and we think that actionable intelligence just needs to be delivered in different packages ... It's not as if I'm going say that we're going to integrate their public safety sales force into our security sales force, but we're going to leverage every bit of value we can from the acquisition." Based upon future sales and revenues, Mercom could receive another $17.5 million from Verint over the next two years.