NICE is one of three major companies that make/made core systems for call recording and monitoring circa 2000. (There are of course other important companies, but the marketplace centered around three: NICE, Witness and Verint.)

If you go way back in time, call recording technology was relatively simple stuff - you added an analog device to a switch, used the switch's intelligence to decide what calls to tape, and that was it. Recorders were niche players. Some, though, realized that there were two ways to grow your business out of the niche. One way was to put the deciding intelligence into the recording system instead of the switch. And the other was to branch out into the human resources software that recording leads to - the assessment, quality control, job management stuff that impacts agents. Call recording and monitoring are just the beginning of a process that leads call center operations into all sorts of directions. Once you record calls you have to analyze them for content and quality. You have to ensure fairness - who are you listening to, and how often, and with what yardsticks? You have to take what you learn about the calls (and the underlying processes and skills that they represent) and turn it into actual decisions about what to do.

So there was an opportunity for companies with a niche focus to broaden and provide a fuller panoply of action-choices to call centers. I like to think of the whole "agent development" movement as an example of this. AD is the trend towards bundling all the agent-facing applications and processes in a call center toward an end goal a smarter, more dedicated and cost-effective workforce.

In the process, lots of niche software vendors gravitate towards each other, partnering and complementing each other, melding things like training tools and the aforementioned quality assurance and performance analysis. And of course, workforce management tools like scheduling and volume forecasting.

Witness struck the first big blow toward a consolidated industry just a few years ago when they bought Blue Pumpkin. The mix of features between the two companies was inspired - as a combined offering, workforce management makes a lot of sense tied to intelligent call recording.

The change in outlook forces you to think about what you're doing in a call center from a more natural point of view based on your actual goals. You don't sit around in a center asking how many calls should you monitor. Actually a lot of people do - but it's still the wrong question. The right question is how do I make sure I have the right number of agents, and that they have the right training/knowledge to do what I want them to do, and that they are staying on the job long enough to justify my investment in them. And so on. The Witness/Blue Pumpkin combo solidified in my mind the idea that the it's the outcome that matters, the end result - not the isolated niche processes that go on in the center. It's the niche processes that we're used to talking about and measuring, but times are changing and the infrastructure that's available to managers is letting them ask the more sophisticated questions. And it's letting them get at the more nuanced answers.

NICE does a double trick today with IEX and Performix. With IEX takes the last major independent WFM vendor out of play. This was to be expected at some point; workforce management has been creeping into tighter integration with the rest of the software suite since Aspect bought TCS in 1993 or 1994.

To me, the real surprise is that they struck so quickly to acquire Performix. I haven't talked to any of the execs at these companies yet, so I am relying on my own suppositions for their motivations, but I was actually surprised that IEX didn't buy Merced Systems, a Performix competitor. IEX and Merced have had a very close partnership relationship for a while now. But regardless of the company-to-company politics it's clear that the integration of all the tools - the workforce management, the reporting and analysis, the training and assessment of agent achievement - are converging into suites. Those suites will be administered through a single vendor interface, that's clear now more than ever.