Verint and NICE Resolve Patent Disputes

Speech analytics solutions vendors NICE Systems and Verint Systems have agreed to settle and dismiss all remaining patent disputes related to their technologies. Financial and other terms of the agreements, announced August 4, were not disclosed.

The out-of-court settlement puts to rest two of the four patent disputes the companies have been waging against one another since 2004, when NICE first filed suit against Witness Systems (acquired by Verint in 2007). The courts ruled in May and early June in favor of Verint in two other court cases. In the first, the court awarded Verint $3.3 million as payment for NICE infringing on a patent that Witness has held since 1996 related to emotion detection, keyword spotting, and talk-over detection. In the second, the court determined that Verint had not infringed on a patent filed by NICE related to an IP recording solution.

Officials at NICE originally planned to appeal those rulings and both companies planned to aggressively defend their patents in the other two cases, but this latest announcement nullifies those plans.

?"This agreement will enable Verint to focus on delivering innovative solutions to the market and will benefit our customers and partners," Dan Bodner, CEO and president of Verint Systems, said in a statement.

"We are pleased to have resolved these long-standing disputes in the best interests of our partners and customers," Haim Shani, CEO of NICE Systems, said in a similar statement.