Genesys Acquires Angel.com
Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories in late February announced plans to acquire Angel.com, a provider of cloud-based contact center solutions, from parent company MicroStrategy, for $110 million.
The acquisition comes fresh off a deal in late January in which Genesys acquired Utopy, a workforce optimization, speech and text analytics, and voice of the customer applications provider.
Acquiring Angel.com, many industry insiders say, positions Genesys firmly in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space. "This immediately gives Genesys additional cloud credibility," says Sheila McGee-Smith, president and principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics. "From an industry perspective, this acquisition, combined with Genesys' creation of a cloud division in September, reinforces the perceived opportunity in cloud-based customer care."
The acquisition of Angel.com is expected to bring Genesys' overall annual recurring cloud-based revenue to more than $85 million.
After completing 2011 with 35 percent year-over-year revenue growth, Angel.com started off 2012 with more than 800 midmarket customers and an eye toward creating new products for them. Among those were Lexee, a self-service solution that voice-enables any mobile application, and CX Analytics, which enables companies to track the effectiveness of their voice applications and gain insight into customer patterns.
Angel.com focuses on consumer-facing businesses with prepackaged applications for target industries, including banking, healthcare, retail, pharmaceutical, media, travel, technology, higher education, and government. The company's offerings include applications for interactive voice response, text messaging, chat, mobile, collecting survey responses, tracking support tickets, notifying customers of order statuses and refills, and embedded business intelligence dashboards for real-time decision-making.
Genesys will continue to support those products as well as Angel Labs, the company said in a statement.
David Rennyson, president of Angel Labs, says that the Genesys acquisition creates innovative mashups of the companies' technologies. "Potentially accessing pieces of Genesys technology that we haven't had access to [as well as to] other third-party technologies like we've had with Salesforce.com and Facebook will continue. We want to continue to look at things that will allow us to continue to change the future of customer experience management. I don't know that the name will continue, but the innovation will."
Genesys president and CEO Paul Segre agrees. "We think this is tremendously complementary of our products, a strategic direction for hidden capital, and we think that this is really game-changing for the industry," he says.
Rennyson says Angel.com employees welcomed the acquisition. "Everyone understands what an industry leader Genesys is. They're providing a broad global channel to a SaaS offering that's grown up quite a bit over the years. Nothing could take us as far as this partnership will, and when you combine the strength of the Genesys technology, its channel, and the success we've had with SaaS, I think that we have a real successful combination," he says.
Genesys, which was sold off by Alcatel-Lucent in late 2011 to investment firm Permira, posted double-digit growth in 2012.
Prior to the Angel.com and Utopy acquisitions, Genesys in July 2012 also acquired LM Sistemas, a Brazilian firm with customer self-service offerings. That acquisition expanded not only Genesys' portfolio of customer self-service applications but also its presence in the emerging Latin American market.
Even prior to these acquisitions, Genesys already had more than 2,200 customers in 80 countries and was orchestrating more than 100 million customer interactions every day across the contact center and back office.
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