Verint announced on Monday that it is acquiring VoC specialist, ForeSee. This adds to Verint’s growing portfolio of products. But it also adds to the growing list of CFM and VoC vendor acquisitions that we have already seen this year. In the latter part of 2018 alone, we saw Rant & Rave get acquired by Upland Software, Emolytics by Profacts, Convergys Analytics by Concentrix, and Qualtrics by SAP.

Like many acquisitions, this one does not come without questions, one of the big ones being around the fact that just a few years ago, Verint acquired another VoC specialist, OpinionLab. OpinionLab competed heavily with ForeSee before the acquisition. So what does this mean for the work that was done with OpinionLab to date? Will one of these acquisitions trump the other when it comes to digital experience?

While this news is still quite fresh, one thing I will be watching out for is how tightly integrated ForeSee becomes into Verint’s comprehensive offering. Will ForeSee better enable Verint customers to get to a holistic view of the customer? And will it help fill some of the Verint product gaps? A few benefits immediately come to mind, one of which is around predictive analytics being built into the platform. This was one of the gaps for Verint during “The Forrester Wave™: Customer Feedback Management Platforms, Q4 2018,” and it is something that Forrester clients regularly ask about.

I anticipate that 2019 is going to be an exciting year in the vendor space — and one with more acquisitions. A bright spot to this is that all of these acquisitions validate something that CX pros already know: CX is critical to business transformation and success.