10/25/2007 -- If you're like a lot of people, Cisco Systems Inc.'s recent acquistion of Latigent, a provider of Web-based business intelligence (BI) and reporting software, probably had you scratching your head. What could Cisco possibly want with BI capabilities? A lot, as it happens.

Latigent develops BI and analytic solutions for enterprise contact centers. In this respect, industry watchers predict, its reporting and analytic expertise will be a boon to Cisco's Unified Customer Voice Portal and Unified Contact Center offerings.

"[T]he acquisition will help improve reporting within Cisco's Unified Customer Voice Portal and Unified Contact Center solutions by adding simplicity, flexibility and data gathering tools," wrote Michael Barbagallo, an analyst with consultancy Current Analysis.

There's an important caveat, Barbagallo cautioned: Latigent's produts still lack integration with workforce management and training tools; both features typically offered in competitive reporting packages. All the same, Barbagallo is positive about Cisco's Latigent buy.

"[T]he acquisition of Latigent and its BlueVue and Archiver reporting solutions improves Cisco's contact center reporting capabilities," he said. "They provide a simple interface to create Web-based daily reports, scorecards and dashboards. The reports can be e-mailed to agents or, through the advanced features, provide permalinks to agents, managers and business partners."

BlueVue and Archiver are improvements over Cisco's existing WebView contact center reporting tool. That product provides a set of standard contact center support templates -- including agent talk time, time to answer and so on -- that are static and universal.

"The Latigent BlueVue report and chart wizards allow supervisors to create reports, without extensive training or use of a third-party reporting tool, such as Crystal Reports or Cognos, that contain only the information important to that specific agent, contact center or enterprise," Barbagallo said.

In this respect, he continued, Latigent will give Cisco a competitive leg up over Avaya, Aspect and Interactive Intelligence, all of which have report wizards.

"[T]hese tools limit the supervisor to creating only custom tabular reports, while BlueVue allows the contact center supervisor to create reports with graphs and charts," he said. "WebView and basic reporting tools from a number of Cisco's competitors use static, historical data tables that are difficult to modify. Latigent BlueVue allows the creation of summary tables from the Cisco data store, in the out-of-the-box version of Unified Contact Center and Unified Voice Portal, giving Cisco an edge over competitors [such as Genesys and Aspect], which require the purchase of add-on application."

Latigent's software already interfaces with Cisco's product databases, so integration should be relatively straightforward, according to Barbagallo.

Elsewhere, Barbagallo explained, Latigent Archiver is a data mart that interfaces with other data sources, such as CRM systems, IVR and ACD systems, and RSS feeds. According to Cisco officials, Archiver will be sold as an additional application license in the contact center application suite. --Stephen Swoyer