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In its biggest acquisition yet, Vonage is scooping up NewVoiceMedia, a cloud contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) provider, for $350 million in cash.
The acquisition combines Vonage’s UCaaS and CPaaS offerings with NewVoiceMedia’s pure-play cloud contact center services, providing an “end-to-end communication experience for a company’s employees and customers.”
The acquisition should be complete in the fourth quarter, subject to standard regulatory review and customary closing conditions.
Vonage’s Alan Masarek
“We are thrilled to announce the acquisition of NewVoiceMedia, which represents a major step forward in the realization of our strategic vision to deliver a differentiated, fully-programmable communications solution that drives more meaningful customer interactions and better outcomes for businesses,” said Alan Masarek, Vonage’s CEO. “This acquisition accelerates Vonage’s growth strategy and leadership position in cloud communications, strengthens our presence with global midmarket and enterprise clients, and deepens our integrations and key go-to-market relationships with customer relationship management (CRM) providers, especially Salesforce.com.”
NewVoiceMedia is the largest privately owned, pure-play cloud contact center company globally, according to Vonage. More than 700 primarily midmarket and enterprise customers rely on NewVoiceMedia for a range of customer engagement use cases, from inbound customer support to outbound sales.
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“Vonage and NewVoiceMedia share a powerful vision to serve businesses with cloud communications that connect employees and enable personalized conversations with their customers and prospects,” said Dennis Fois, NewVoiceMedia’s CEO. “Together, we can help businesses create richer experiences through a state-of-the-art, global, programmable cloud communication platform.”
Channel Partners contributor Michael Finneran, of dBrn Associates, said Vonage Business has been “covering the waterfront” with its Essentials and Premier UCaaS offerings, and has augmented that with the Nexmo CPaaS, SMS integration, call recording and even an SD-WAN offering through VeloCloud.
“The company had been partnering with InContact for cloud-based contact center, but the NewVoiceMedia acquisition will give them their own contact center offering, which should round out an already broad set of cloud-based offerings,” he said.
NewVoiceMedia will continue to be led by Fois, who has more than 25 years of experience in international leadership, strategy, sales and marketing in the technology and financial-services markets. Upon closing, the senior leadership team and its more than 400 employees will join Vonage.
Together, Vonage and NewVoiceMedia will address a market that’s expected to grow 60 percent during the next four years to about $80 billion, according to IDC. Within this, contact center is a $9 billion market today.
“NewVoiceMedia is particularly well-positioned to address larger-scale deployments due to its global scale and strong partnership with Salesforce.com,” said Sheila McGee-Smith, president and principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics. “Additionally, the NewVoiceMedia team will be a big part of jump-starting Vonage’s attack on the huge CCaaS market opportunity.”
Last month, Vonage announced it is gaining video through the acquisition of TokBox, a Telefónica subsidiary, for $35 million. It also officially launched its Nexmo Connect Partner Program (Nexmo Connect).