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NICE Systems has announced that, subject to final approvals, it will acquire Actimize. Takeovers and alliances in the contact center market are not new, as vendors race to build product portfolios more capable than their competition’s. However, at first glance there doesn’t seem to be much synergy between NICE and Actimize. NICE is best known for its contact center product SmartCenter, which it created by combining its own voice recording and quality monitoring systems and software from its acquisitions of IEX (for workforce management) and Performix (for performance management). Actimize, on the other hand, is best known in the financial services industry for governance, risk and compliance (GRC), which is used for applications like fraud management built on its core transaction analysis products. A second look, though, suggests that these transaction analysis products afford an opportunity for development of innovative solutions for contact center managers.

Actimize’s Analytics Intelligence Server (IAS) is a scalable product that combines data and events from repositories and transactional systems and uses rules-based algorithms to detect transactions that fail to obey defined business rules. It can flag any such occurrence in real time and alert users to take action. IAS operates in the area that Ventana Research refers to as operational intelligence, which wraps together events, rules, workflow and analytics into a business- focused application. In the contact center, this feature could be used to alert an agent that a caller is attempting an action that is not allowed; in response, the agent could take appropriate action, such as asking for additional authorization. Although initially Actimize will be a stand-alone subsidiary of NICE and continue to concentrate on the financial services market, NICE plans, once the merger is complete, to create an integrated product for the contact center. This product could combine voice recordings and other customer interaction transactions to deliver a fuller picture of how customers are interacting with a company across all its channels of business and help it determine whether the pattern of interactions is contributing to increased customer satisfaction and, as a result, new business.