TLDR: If you ignore the slogans and look at what Verint actually highlighted at Engage 2025 (who it rewarded, which partners it elevated, and the language it repeated), a coherent direction emerges: open-platform CX automation that delivers measurable outcomes in quarters, not years. Thoma Bravo’s acquisition – plus its simultaneous Dayforce deal – reinforces a portfolio thesis around recurring-revenue, AI-infused enterprise platforms. Put together, the near-term Verint roadmap looks less like “one cloud to rule them all” and more like an automation + WEM brain that rides across many clouds.
What the awards and partners actually reveal
At Engage, Verint’s own award taxonomy was outcome-fluent: Accelerated Insights with AI, Increased Agent Capacity, Supercharged Self-Service, Elevating CX/EX. That isn’t generic marketing – it’s a KPI map. The winners list spanned sectors (insurance, retail, utilities, travel, public sector), suggesting breadth of fit where the platform is already producing gains customers can measure.
“We’ve spent twenty years measuring CX. Now the question is how you turn that measurement into motion. Insights have to flow automatically into action – that’s what the platform is built for.”
— Daniel Ziv
The partner slate told a second story: openness. Verint celebrated Five9, Avaya, Cisco, TTEC Digital, and more – an ecosystem that spans multiple CCaaS and telephony cores. That’s a concrete signal Verint intends to overlay and interoperate, not force rip-and-replace. For buyers living with heterogenous estates, “open platform” here reads as practical, not aspirational.
The Open Platform play (in practice)
Verint calls itself “The CX Automation Company,” emphasizing an AI-powered Open Platform and “AI business outcomes, now.” Engage’s official recap and site positioning reinforced that theme. The operational translation is straightforward: pre-built bots, analytics, and WEM capabilities that slot into many contact center cores so you can add capacity, deflect intelligently, and compress time-to-insight without re-platforming your entire stack.
“Open isn’t a slogan for us – it’s an architecture decision. Our customers already run Avaya, Five9, Cisco, Genesys… and they’re not about to rip those out. What we’ve done is make Verint the connective tissue – you can drop our automation layer in without rewriting your core.”
— Dave Singer
For enterprises under pressure to show payback fast, this “overlay” stance is strategically different from vendors pushing a monolithic suite migration. The pattern (awards tied to hard outcomes + multi-core partner ecosystem) makes the claim credible.
“Most enterprises can’t just push everything to the cloud. Eighty percent of our customers are still on-prem, not because they want to be but because they have to be. So we built a hybrid AI approach – encrypting on both sides, working with what they already have. It’s not a feature; it’s our ethos.”
— Raj Balasundaram
The Thoma Bravo lens: capital, consolidation, and AI surface area
On August 25, 2025, Verint agreed to be acquired by Thoma Bravo in an all-cash deal valuing the company at ~$2B(shareholders to receive $20.50 per share). Thoma Bravo’s release framed the tie-up explicitly alongside Calabrio, indicating an intent to join forces and create an “AI-driven customer experience powerhouse,” pending customary approvals. Expected close: before the end of Verint’s current fiscal year (early 2026).
Just days earlier, Thoma Bravo also announced a $12.3B definitive agreement to take Dayforce privateat $70/share – another recurring-revenue enterprise platform bet, with AI as a central growth lever. (Notably, there’s already shareholder debate about price and timing, underscoring how dynamic PE-led consolidation can be.)
Analyst read: Thoma Bravo’s Verint + Calabrio logic widens Verint’s WEM/analytics + automation footprint and increases the AI “surface area” across contact center operations. If executed well, the combination should accelerate product integration, packaging, and channel motions especially with partners that Verint already spotlit at Engage.
What this means for buyers (next 2–3 quarters)
- Overlay first, migrate later. Expect more pre-built automation and WEM bundles that layer onto Avaya, Five9, Cisco, and others, thus shortening payback windows without forcing a core switch.
- Outcome packaging. Look for offers tied to clear metrics (agent capacity uplift, self-service success, time-to-insight compression) because that’s how Engage framed value and how PE-owned platforms typically sell.
- Ecosystem GTM. Deeper co-sell with SIs and CCaaS partners is likely. The award roster reads like a channel blueprint.
- Faster integration cycles. If/when the Verint–Calabrio alignment closes, watch for roadmap acceleration around unified WEM + automation with connectors, data models, and bot orchestration packaged to reduce services friction.
What to watch (signals, not promises)
- Product cadence: Are there quarterly drops of ready-to-run bots, cross-CCaaS connectors, or EX/quality features that reduce manual effort?
- Metric commitments: Do new offers name specific KPI ranges (e.g., X% capacity increase or Y% deflection in Z weeks)?
- Pricing/packaging: PE-backed platforms often streamline SKUs. Watch for outcome-based bundles that remove procurement friction.
- Channel posture: Are Five9/Avaya/Cisco/TTEC motions formalized into reference architectures and playbooks?
- Regulatory/closing milestones: Track the Verint deal close timeline and any official steps toward a Verint–Calabrio combination.
Bottom line
Verint’s direction is visible where it matters: in the pattern of outcomes it elevates and the openness of the company it keeps. Engage 2025 emphasized AI-driven capacity, self-service, insights, and EX (and celebrated partners across multiple cores) painting a picture of automation that augments what you’ve already got.
Thoma Bravo’s deal adds capital and consolidation logic that, if realized, should amplify Verint’s role as the automation/WEM brain across CCaaS estates – a pragmatic path for enterprises that need results now, not after a multi-year migration.
Special thanks for their candor and contributions to:
Raj Balasundaram, GVP – AI Innovations at Verint
Dave Singer – GVP, Go-To-Market Strategy, Workforce Engagement at Verint
Daniel Ziv – GVP, AI and Analytics, Product Management and GTM Strategy at Verint
