As customer service solutions providers continue to seek ways to expand their footprint, many are doing so by way of strategic partnerships rather than mergers and acquisitions (though there were a couple we recently covered).

Two partnerships in the past week are of particular note, as one is centered around making waves in new business opportunities, while the other looks to deepen social CRM capabilities.

Workforce optimization (WFO) provider Verint Systems recently became an SAP-endorsed business solution (EBS), which is significant because it is the first company to have an EBS relationship with SAP’s CRM offering, according to John Bourne, senior vice president of global channels and alliances at Verint.  The other partners are related to SAP’s ERP business.

According to information provided by Verint, it worked with SAP to ensure out-of-the-box integration between its solutions and SAP’s CRM applications. The two companies will also share technology and product roadmaps.

This partnership marks a departure from business-as-usual for Verint, as it has largely forged partnerships with telephony vendors including Avaya, Nortel Networks, Genesys Telecommunications Labs, and Siemens Enterprise Communications. “We’re looking for ways to get into new accounts and take advantage of business opportunities,” Bourne says. “There’s a very good tie between the contact center and CRM, but there is also quite a lot of CRM installed in the back office.”

Verint provides workforce management and performance management offerings for the back office as well, but Bourne says it has been more difficult to convince companies there is more to WFO than just in the contact center. By teaming up with SAP, Bourne believes Verint will have more cache when it attempts to sell into these opportunities. “It’s easier to knock on doors when you have a partner like SAP who already has presence in those departments,” he says.

In a company-issued statement, Jujhar Singh, SAP’s senior vice president of CRM product management and global strategy, said this is another step forward in the ecosystem his company is seeking to create in order to provide more flexibility for SAP CRM users. “The use of the endorsed solution from Verint with SAP solutions will enable our interaction center customers to improve productivity and accelerate delivery of innovative products to market while lowering total cost of ownership,” he said in the statement.

This jibes with the conversation I had with Singh back in May when I attended SAPPHIRE, SAP’s annual user show. At that time, he told me SAP will continue to partner with companies innovating in many quickly evolving areas, including mobile CRM, so SAP can focus on its core competency: end-to-end business processes.

In a similar vein of innovation via partnership, customer service provider Kana Software also teamed up through an original equipment manufacturer agreement with Baynote, which provides on-demand recommendation technology and social search to bolster the social CRM component of its latest solution, Kana 10. “This is our first step into building a cloud-based ecosystem with the right CRM vendors going forward,” says Kate Leggett, director of product marketing at Kana.

Keith Goldberg, Kana’s vice president of marketing, explains that due to Kana 10 being built upon a Web-services architecture via IBM’s service oriented architecture framework, it can quickly integrate into other services from a company like Baynote. “We expect to quickly release our own or other third-party services into this framework as well,” he adds.

There are four specific capabilities Baynote can help enhance in Kana 10 right away, according to information provided by the company:

• assisting agents in “intelligently navigating complex processes”;
• optimizing cross-selling and upselling offers;
• enhancing search results ranking based on common search patterns; and
• building communities of customers with similar interests and orientations — the wisdom of crowds.

“We’re going to be able to use Baynote’s social search capabilities [via its Collective Intelligence Platform] to enhance our search results, and also add a community search layer,” Leggett says. “Kana allows for the definition and playing out of experience flows — repeatable business processes agents follow — which pushes contextual knowledge to agents at the right point when the agent needs the knowledge most. We’ll be able to get better search results and content recommendations pushed to the agents.”

While both of these partnerships are new and only time can tell if they work out, do you expect to see more partnerships of this kind, particularly ones like these two? Or, do you expect mergers and acquisitions to heat up as our economy continues to improve?