Paramus NJ-based NICE Systems has announced it will acquire Nexidia, a provider of interaction analytics for $135 million.
Based in Atlanta, Nexidia is more than a "provider" of this technology, though. It was a part of the field back when researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology began experimenting with phonetic indexing and related search — now the core underpinning of Nexidia's analytics products.
Along the way it has secured a sophisticated portfolio of patents ranging from phonetic information compression to applying phonetic search to very large sets of data.
NICE, of course, known best for its suite of products powering contact centers, has its own array of analytical tools. Indeed, these established contact center vendors were among the first to deploy them to better manage their call pipelines and agents.
But Nexidia approaches customer analytics from a different angle and it has different strengths in the market — strengths that are very complementary to NICE's, Aviad Abiri, NICE's vice president of Portfolio Sales Enablement, told CMSWire.
Strong Cloud, Managed Services Presence
Nexidia has a strong presence in the cloud, for starters. It also has a strong managed services footprint. Finally, its products are geared to a wider range of use cases that range from general business insights to compliance management to customer retention.
NICE offers all that as well, Abiri said — but not at the scale and activity level that it would like to.
"We do have customers running on the cloud, but the majority of our customers are on premise," he said. "We also offer managed services, but not in the same way that Nexidia offers it."
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"That is the kind of DNA we want to add to NICE," he said.
A Broader Use Case
Perhaps the most interesting reason for the acquisition is NICE's eagerness to expand into a broader user base.
Some of the analytics and business intelligence apps that will come out of the acquisition when it has closed and a product roadmap defined include churn reduction, campaign effectiveness and sales optimization; compliance solutions for complaint management; and e-discovery and compliance adherence.
Presumably more will be in the offing.
Nexidia offers a slew of industry specific analytics solutions ranging from collections to travel to media and entertainment to the government. And yes, it also has a contact center package but this is one area that NICE doesn’t need much back up.
