IBM acquires Varicent Software

IBM has acquired Varicent Software- privately held company headquartered in Toronto, to boost its analytics resources and capabilities for finance, sales, and customer service operations. The acquisition accelerates IBM's Smarter Analytics capabilities across line of business operations in all industries, and will be combined with IBM's existing software offerings that are delivered to clients through on-premise or cloud computing models.

Varicent provides a single management system that relies on a sophisticated calculation engine to model and analyze the effectiveness of incentive spend.The software allows clients such as banks, insurance companies, retailers, information technology and telecommunications providers to more accurately determine compensation, streamline territory assignments, manage quotas, and report and analyze sales activities. It also strengthens audit and compliance readiness and provides transparency for all aspects of incentive compensation.

Les Rechan, general manager, business analytics, IBM said "The acquisition of Varicent advances IBM's efforts to drive analytics capabilities into the hands of front line employees to transform business operations and ultimately improve the bottom line".

"For the thousands of sales organizations still relying on silos of data, spreadsheets and e-mail to manage sales, there is an enormous opportunity to apply analytics to this vital area of business and uncover new, untapped growth opportunities," he added.