Verint Names Ex-Calabrio Chief Dave Rhodes CEO After $2 Billion Take-Private Deal

Verint Systems Inc. has named former Calabrio Inc. chief executive Dave Rhodes as its new CEO, capping a months-long restructuring that turned the longtime public company into a private-equity-backed platform built around artificial intelligence and customer experience software.

The appointment, announced Feb. 24, comes three months after Calabrio, a smaller but fast-growing peer owned by private equity firm Thoma Bravo, completed its acquisition of Verint in a $2 billion take-private deal. The combined business is now operating under the Verint name, with Calabrio retained as a product line, but it is Rhodes — until recently Calabrio’s chief executive — who will lead the unified organization.

“Brands are under enormous pressure to harness AI to drive tangible business value, immediately,” Rhodes said in the announcement. “Verint is uniquely positioned to transform this industry and drive CX Automation to unprecedented levels.”

From public company to PE-backed platform

The leadership change formalizes a broader shift in power and strategy at Verint, a New York-based company that for decades has sold analytics and workforce tools to large call centers. The deal that put Rhodes in charge also removed Verint from public markets, replaced its long-serving board and chief executive, and folded it into a Thoma Bravo-controlled structure designed to compete in a rapidly consolidating customer experience technology market.

In August 2025, Verint agreed to be acquired in an all-cash transaction that valued the company at about $2 billion, or $20.50 per share, an 18% premium to its prior trading price. The buyer of record was Calabrio, a Minneapolis-based provider of cloud-based workforce engagement software that Thoma Bravo had purchased several years earlier.

The transaction closed Nov. 26, 2025, through a reverse triangular merger in which a Thoma Bravo merger subsidiary was combined with Verint, leaving Verint as a wholly owned subsidiary of Calabrio’s parent corporation. Verint’s common stock was delisted from the Nasdaq Global Select Market, and the company moved to terminate registration of its securities and end periodic reporting with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

At closing, Verint’s entire pre-deal board of directors, including founder and longtime chairman and CEO Dan Bodner, resigned. Bodner, who led Verint for more than two decades and oversaw its evolution from a surveillance and analytics firm into a large customer experience vendor, shifted into an advisory role. Thoma Bravo operating partner Mike Lipps became chairman of the board of the combined companies and interim chief executive of Verint.

In a statement last December announcing completion of the acquisition, Thoma Bravo said Verint would be combined with Calabrio “to form the industry’s most comprehensive AI-powered customer experience (CX) platform.” Lipps said at the time that uniting the two would “bring together complementary capabilities in CX automation and workforce engagement.”

Integration under the Verint name

On Feb. 18, the company took another step toward integration, announcing that the combined organization would operate under a single corporate name: Verint. The Calabrio brand will continue as a product line within Verint’s broader portfolio. Chief marketing officer Anna Convery said the change was meant to reflect “one business, one platform and one unified vision for transforming customer experience.”

Verint brings to that platform its CX Automation Platform, built around the Verint Da Vinci AI engine and a suite of bots and analytics designed to automate and analyze customer interactions across channels. The company says it serves more than 10,000 customers in over 175 countries, including more than 80 of the Fortune 100.

Calabrio contributes its cloud-native Calabrio ONE suite, which includes tools for workforce forecasting and scheduling, quality management, performance analytics and agent coaching. Those capabilities are central to how large contact centers plan staffing, monitor calls and digital interactions, and evaluate employee performance.

Verint and Thoma Bravo say that, together, the businesses now hold one of the largest customer experience data sets in the world — data drawn from voice calls, chat transcripts, emails and other interactions that can be analyzed to optimize staffing, train AI models or feed automated “copilot” tools that assist human agents.

Competitive landscape and strategy

The combined company is positioning itself in a market that has been reshaped in recent years by the rise of cloud contact center platforms and generative AI. It will compete against larger, established rivals such as NICE Ltd., Genesys, Five9 Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and Salesforce Inc.’s Service Cloud, as well as newer vendors that build AI-native bots and agent assistance software.

Where some competitors offer integrated call center infrastructure and applications in a single bundle, Verint is emphasizing an “open platform” approach. Its strategy is to sell AI, analytics and workforce tools that sit on top of a customer’s existing telephony or cloud contact center systems rather than forcing a complete rip-and-replace.

For Thoma Bravo, which manages more than $180 billion in assets and has stakes in other customer experience and AI companies including Medallia and Aisera, the Verint–Calabrio deal is part of a broader push to assemble software platforms around specific functions. The firm arranged debt financing for the Verint acquisition through Banco Santander and other lenders; people familiar with the matter have said banks later sold parts of the loan package at a discount amid growing caution about leveraged buyouts of software companies exposed to rapid AI-driven change.

Leadership and the stakes of AI-driven change

The strategic bet hinges in part on Rhodes’ ability to integrate the two businesses and accelerate growth. Before joining Calabrio, Rhodes led testing firm Sauce Labs and held senior roles at game engine maker Unity Technologies, where he was part of a leadership team credited with significantly expanding revenue. He has also held executive positions at industrial software company Paradigm, later acquired by Emerson.

“Dave is exactly the right leader for this moment. He brings a proven track record of scaling high-growth software businesses,” Lipps said in announcing Rhodes’ appointment as CEO.

The integration comes as contact centers — which employ millions of people worldwide — face rising pressure to cut costs and handle more complex digital interactions. Vendors including Verint and Calabrio market their tools as a way to augment human agents with AI, arguing that automation will take over routine tasks so employees can focus on higher-value work.

At the same time, these systems enable fine-grained monitoring of worker activity and performance, raising questions about the balance between productivity gains and workplace surveillance. The use of massive interaction data sets to train AI models also places the combined company squarely within regulatory frameworks such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and state privacy laws in the United States, which govern how personal data can be collected, stored and processed.

For large corporate buyers, the new Verint promises a single provider that can span workforce management, analytics and AI automation across multiple channels. That consolidation may streamline procurement and integration but could also reduce the number of independent vendors in a sector that has already seen significant merger activity.

Rhodes, for his part, has framed the moment as an inflection point for customer service technology. “Brands are being asked to do more with less, while expectations for effortless, personalized experiences keep rising,” he said. “By bringing together our AI, automation and workforce engagement capabilities under one roof, we have a unique opportunity to help our customers meet those demands.”

Whether the strategy succeeds will depend on how effectively the company can combine its product lines, manage its new balance sheet under private ownership and keep pace with rapid advances in AI. The appointment of a CEO from the acquired Calabrio to lead the larger Verint-branded entity underscores how much of that future now rests on a new playbook — and on a different set of hands.