Contact Center Consolidation

Rumor was that Genesys was trying to buy Avaya’s contact center business. Next thing you know, the announcement is that Genesys bought Interactive Intelligence for $1.4 Billion. The PR says that it will to Create the World’s Premier Omni-channel Customer Experience Company. Last time I heard that was when NICE bought Incontact.

Now, NICE has a new song: “As one company, the two leaders form the industry’s first end-to-end cloud contact center, complete with world-class WFO and Analytics Organizations of all sizes can now take their contact center into the new era of the Experience Center.”

Both ININ and Genesys were partnered with Microsoft for a layer on to Skype for Business. No one knows how that will shake out. Maybe MS buys Five9s or someone else in the cloud contact space to do it all under one roof. One roof isn’t really the MS way. But who knows.

Avaya is feeling a lot like MITEL, being left at the altar and all. Their PE firms – Silver Lake Partners and TPG Capital – must want their money back. They took Avaya private in 2007 for $8.2B! That is nine years. Long time. Maybe MITEL wants to get hitched. But then Shoretel will have no suitor. (Remember Mitel tried to buy Shoretel in 2014.)

It looks like going private is the new thing. Ask Dell, Rackspace et al. When money is cheap, private equity firms like to buy shiny objects. Then they make a mess of them but still want to sell it for more than they paid.

Tags: call center, mergers, vc
Related tags: contact center, cloud contact, contact, center, mitel, avaya