Verint parent company moves toward spinoff, with new exec hire

The parent company of Melville-based Verint Systems Inc. has taken another step toward spinning off its other primary asset, Comverse Inc., by bringing in an outside hire as Comverse Inc.'s new chief executive.

The new leader of Comverse Inc. is Phillipe Tartavull, who comes to the job from his previous position as president and chief executive of Hypercom Corp. Tartavull starts May 21.

Comverse Inc. makes software for telecom service providers, enabling them to merge billing and customer management operations.

Comverse Inc., based in Manhattan, is expected to be spun off in September or October into an independent publicly traded company, paving the way for an expected change in status for Verint, which has been far more successful in sales and earnings than Comverse Inc.

Both Verint and Comverse Inc. -- referred to in corporate communications as CNS -- are controlled by the Manhattan-based holding company Comverse Technology Inc., known as CTI, which owns 53 percent of Verint's outstanding shares.

CTI has a total of 5,900 employees, 3,100 of whom work for Verint.

CTI's chairman and chief executive, Charles Burdick, said he will work with Tartavull "as he takes on his new role, providing continuity to customers, employees and other stakeholders of CNS as needed while focusing on dissolving the holding company, including managing the spinoff of CNS and resolution of CTI's controlling ownership interest in Verint."

Tartavull's hiring takes place in the context of CTI's announcement in March that it had begun taking steps to streamline its corporate structure, enabling it to focus its business model on Verint alone, while spinning off CNS.  In that spinoff, CTI said, its shareholders will receive distributions of stock of the resulting independent company CNS.

The corporate changes also take place in a larger context for CTI, which has made major steps in emerging from a years-long scandal centered on alleged options backdating by a former chief executive, Jacob "Kobi" Alexander, who fled to Africa as a fugitive from federal charges and is reported have appeared in a Windhoek courtroom this month fighting extradition from Namibia.

Verint's software allows businesses and government agencies to sift through vast amounts of data from telephone calls and surveillance cameras and provide insight on potential problems.

Among Verint's clients is the Port Authority, which in September said it would install Verint's audio and video surveillance system, as an anti-crime and antiterrorism tool, at its planned World Trade Center transportation hub. Verint's software will analyze massive streams of sound and images from doorways, platforms and key offices such as the electrical and telecommunications rooms.

Photo shows a screengrab of a Verint video analytics console.
 

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