PR - Cisco Buys Call Center Analytics Firm Latigent

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) yesterday announced a definitive agreement to purchase Chicago-based Latigent, LLC, a leading provider of web-based business intelligence and analytics reporting solutions, focused on contact centers. Latigent’s 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 complement and enhance Cisco’s Unified Customer Contact solutions that are designed to evolve today’s call centers to the Customer Interaction Network, a single, integrated platform that easily integrates with legacy contact center platforms and networks, providing multi-channel services and integration with customer relationship management applications.

"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," said Laurent Philonenko, vice president and general manager of the Customer Contact Business Unit, Cisco. "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."

Latigent was co-founded in 2002 by CEO Chris Crosby and CTO Jason Kolb, who will both join Cisco after the close of the acquisition. The acquisition is subject to various standard closing conditions and is expected to close in the first quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2008. Upon the close of the transaction, Cisco plans to integrate Latigent’s team and technologies into its Customer Contact Business Unit.