Exporting Recordings From Verint

What changed after the Verint and Calabrio merger

On November 26, 2025, private equity firm Thoma Bravo completed its acquisition of Verint, taking the company private and combining it with Calabrio, another company in its portfolio. On product strategy, the stated position is that Verint serves the enterprise segment while Calabrio serves the midmarket, with no forced migrations and no end-of-life announced for existing product lines. For current customers that means there is no reason to act in a hurry, and no reason to replace a recording platform because of an ownership change.

One thing worth doing now anyway

The merger itself is not the risk. The real risk has always been there: recording data that only one vendor software stack can read. Compliance retention periods routinely outlive the service life of any recording system. Finance, insurance and public sector requirements run to five years, ten years or longer, while a recording platform rarely stays in service that long. When the system is replaced, when vendor support strategy shifts, or when the organization reorganizes, whether you can pull your own historical recordings out, and still play and search them afterwards, depends entirely on whether format lock-in was addressed earlier. This has nothing to do with who acquired whom. The merger simply makes it a good moment to put the question on the agenda.

Three points of lock-in

First, the container. Recordings are usually stored in a proprietary wrapper that ordinary players cannot open, and the audio inside is typically a narrowband telephony codec such as G.729, A-law/µ-law or ADPCM. Renaming the extension or force-converting with a generic tool usually produces noise. Second, separated metadata. Call time, agent ID, calling and called party, call direction: the fields you actually search on often do not live in the audio file at all, but in the platform database. Exporting audio alone yields a pile of files nobody can locate, and a compliance request still cannot be answered. Third, encryption and keys. Many deployments encrypt recordings at rest for compliance reasons, with keys held on the platform side. Once separated from the original system, the audio files cannot be opened even when you physically hold them.

A checklist: are you actually unlocked?

1. Take a random sample of historical recordings. Away from the original platform, can open tools play them directly?
2. Are the two channels still separated (agent and customer each on their own channel), or already mixed down to mono?
3. Can call time, agent and party metadata be obtained outside the platform, and mapped one to one onto the audio files?
4. Who holds the keys for encrypted recordings, and does the export path work without depending on the original vendor?
5. How many years of retention does your industry require, and does that already exceed the support window of the current platform?
6. Has a full-volume export ever been rehearsed for real, rather than a handful of sample files?

Opening one file is not the same as delivering millions

This is the most underestimated part. Proving a format can be decoded by opening a single recording, and moving hundreds of thousands or millions of calls into a new archive completely and verifiably, differ by orders of magnitude. The real cost of bulk work sits elsewhere: codec detection has to adapt per file rather than assume one codec globally; bad files have to be isolated and retried instead of stopping the batch; and the output has to be reconciled record by record against the source platform database, ending in a report that states how many recordings should have been exported, how many actually were, how many are missing, and which periods the gaps fall in. Without that report, saying the export is done is a claim nobody can defend internally.

A sensible sequence

Treat data portability and platform selection as two separate decisions. Keep using the platform if it works; an ownership change alone should not drive that call. But start building an open-format copy of the historical recordings now: decode to standard WAV, preserve channel separation, export the metadata into a searchable structure alongside it, and keep the result in an archive you control. Then whatever happens to the platform or the vendor roadmap, sovereignty over the historical data stays with you. This is also the cheapest moment to do it, while the system is still in service, vendor support still exists, and people who know the deployment are still around. Exporting later, after a system has been retired, is considerably harder.

How Shanghai Wanchun approaches it

We work on parsing and migrating historical call center recordings, covering the proprietary formats of major platforms including NICE and Verint: detecting the real codec inside the container, preserving channel separation, exporting metadata mapped one to one onto the audio, and delivering a verification report reconciled record by record against the source platform database. For systems already retired or about to be, we also support bulk extraction from offline media such as LTO tape. The goal is always the same: historical recordings freed from any single vendor, permanently online, retrievable on demand, and ready for analysis.