Verint Systems is buying Kana Software, a portfolio company of Accel-KKR, for $450 million. The private equity firm paid $48.9 million cash for Kana in 2009 so investors have done well. Kana specializes in customer service products, including self-service tools such as chat and web self-service, along with social media monitoring. Verint markets what it calls Actionable Intelligence solutions to capture and analyze customer transactions.

There will be no issue of the Bob Scott's Insights newsletter on Friday, December 27. May all your holidays be filled with joy, goodies in your stockings and orders in your pipeline. Regular publication of the newsletter will resume on Friday, January 2014, and oh, yech, another year is over. "Another day older and deeper in ...." News will be posted on www.bobscottsinsights.com as events dictate over the next two weeks.

For those waiting with bated breath - and even for those waiting with unbated breath - the 2013 edition of Bob Scott's VAR Stars will be published on Friday, December 20. We're not superstitious, but why take chances with Friday the 13th? It's always an interesting issue regarding the mid-market VAR community and people will be surprised at its contents. So will I. This year, the always delicate matter of making estimates of revenue for companies that do not disclose it got more difficult with the spread of cloud products having an impact on average revenue.