Cisco is buying Chicago-based Latigent LLC., a provider of Web-based business-intelligence and analytics-reporting solutions that focus on contact centers. Latigent’s CTO says its products «sit wonderfully on top of Cisco products.»
This will be acquisition No. 123 for Cisco; no financial details were disclosed.
Latigent was co-founded in 2002 by CEO Chris Crosby and CTO Jason Kolb, both of who will join Cisco after the deal closes along with Mark Surico, the small company’s director of business development. In a blog item posted late last week, Kolb said, «After many (sometimes very stressful) months of working on this, it’s finally a done deal. This is a huge win for our customers and for Cisco’s, and it’s been one of the most interesting and exciting processes I’ve ever been involved in. (It’s also been killing me that I haven’t been able to talk about it!) Now I’ll officially be a Cisco employee, and I’m getting ready to pack up the family and move to Massachusetts.»
He continued, «We didn’t build Latigent to sell it–that’s just kind of the way the cards fell. We targeted the call-center market primarily because that’s the world Chris and I both came from, and Cisco just happened to be one of the heavy hitters in that market. Our products sit wonderfully on top of Cisco products, their customers love our product– it’s a great marriage. And so when they decided to explore other reporting options for their call center products, they brought us in for a potential OEM relationship. Long story short, the whole process ended in Latigent being absorbed into Cisco, it worked out better for both parties.»
According to Latigent, its products are built «from the ground up to take advantage of Web 2.0 principles that help enable customers to create flexible, scalable, easily customizable, and intuitive historical and real-time reports for their contact centers.» Latigent’s products will be merged with Cisco’s Unified Customer Contact solutions designed «to evolve today’s call centers to the Customer Interaction Network,» Cisco’s single, integrated platform that integrates with legacy contact-center platforms and networks.
«By acquiring Latigent, Cisco is signaling a 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,» says Laurent Philonenko, vice president/general manager of Cisco’s Customer Contact Business Unit. «Cisco views reporting as a critical component for the management of a contact center. 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.»
The acquisition is subject to the usual standard closing conditions, and the last paperwork should be signed in the first quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2008.
Fuente: TelecomWeb
