Thoma Bravo acquires Verint - a Snap Analysis

The news

Today, on August 25, 2025 the news that VC company Thoma Bravo will buy CCaaS vendor Verint for $2 billion. The plan is to combine Verint and Calabrio, a Thoma Bravo portfolio company that specializes in workforce engagement systems for call centers with the goal of shaping a leading vendor of CX automation solutions. Together, they shall offer a wide portfolio to advance the critical priorities of customer service organizations across the size and complexity spectrum. The combination is supposed to create more opportunities for companies to quickly achieve business outcomes in their interactions with customers. Calabrio is fully committed to maintaining and investing in the products that support its installed base and customers’ workflows.

"Together Calabrio and Verint will bring a powerful set of products to accelerate a shared vision: delivering an AI-powered, open CX-platform to customers who are focused on driving strong business outcomes in their operations. As a combined company we are well positioned to lead the industry forward," said Dave Rhodes, Calabrio CEO.

The bigger picture

Verint is positioned at the intersection of the rapidly converging CCaaS, UCaaS, and conversational AI markets, which are collectively reshaping enterprise communications.

Vendors are increasingly bundling unified communications and contact center capabilities into single platforms, enabling both internal collaboration and customer engagement with integrated AI-powered tools.

The rise of agentic AI — autonomous systems that strive to resolve customer issues autonomously and collaborate with human agents in real time — is further accelerating this industry transformation, as these solutions are capable of automating routine queries, personalizing experiences, and driving improvements in efficiency. Once more mature, this will lead to increased customer experience and satisfaction, with corresponding downstream effects on balance sheets.

Major market events, such as Thoma Bravo’s acquisition of Verint or other recent acquisitions and partnerships, reflect a broader consolidation trend where cloud and AI capabilities are prioritized to gain a competitive advantage. As businesses demand greater scalability, flexibility, and intelligent automation, Verint, alongside leaders like NICE, Genesys, and RingCentral, is evolving its platform to harness the potential of agentic AI, unified CX, and the convergence of communication channels. This can very well create a new era for enterprise communications.

My point of view and analysis

Verint has suffered from stagnant growth in the past years which is caused by some reasons that I do not want to elaborate here. The bottom line is that Verint was slow in adapting to the strong shifts in the enterprise software and customer engagement markets, in particular the demand to move into the cloud. With the advent of generative and agentic AI this became even more of a problem, in spite of Verint's reputation of delivering a solid enterprise-grade platform with leading analytics and compliance features.

Still, Verint’s core market — contact center, WEM, and conversational AI — has shifted toward AI, bots, and streamlined cloud platforms. Verint rivals and new entrants that moved faster have taken market share, as the company has struggled to convincingly reposition itself as a leader in AI-powered CX, although Verint showed progress in AI bot deployments and improved SaaS metrics

Therefore, the company significantly lags in growth versus peers like NICE or Genesys. Additionally, it faces competition from WEM vendors, including Calabrio but also customer service companies like Zendesk that provide analytics and Workforce Management capabilities.

In short, Verint found itself between a rock and a hard place.

Thoma Bravo acquiring Verint and merging it with Calabrio creates a more powerful and flexible platform for customers while providing Verint with the backing to speed up its cloud transformation. In addition, there are possible further synergies with Thoma Bravo portfolio companies including USU (ITSM), Medallia (VoC, journey management) and also some cybersecurity focused companies.

While Verint remains a global leader and is trusted for depth and reliability, it is key for the success of this merger to speed up Verint's cloud and AI transformation and to push more frequent innovation to counter the increasing pressure by faster-moving AI/cloud players who challenge its market share.

All in all, I'd say that this acquisition reshuffles the cards and makes the CCaaS and UCaaS markets more interesting, also in the light of the hype around agentic AI. Verint now has the backing to achieve this.