by Jim Lundy
The demand for collaboration and contact center technologies is only growing. Last week, on August 12th, 2019, unified communications as a service and business cloud email provider Intermedia announced the acquisition of Telax, a cloud contact center provider based out of Toronto.
Why did Intermedia acquire Telax?
It’s important to understand why Intermedia decided to invest in purchasing Telax. Telax provides a contact center as a service (CCaaS) platform to its customers. This aligns well with Intermedia’s unified communications as a service (UCaaS) offering to now provide customers with both communications, collaboration, and contact center solutions all from the cloud.
What’s The Opportunity?
Aragon predicts the Unified Communications market will grow to $65.7 Billion by 2023, which means Intermedia and other providers already have plenty of customers to offer their products to. Aragon also sees the need for cloud contact center solutions growing faster than on-premise counterparts.
Acquiring and partnering are two common strategies we see from both UCaaS and CCaaS providers to integrate and help their customers in a more complete way. We see other providers take similar approaches in order to offer a full product suite to businesses.
What is the Challenge?
The challenge for providers diving into contact center is the cost of maintaining and keeping a contact center platform current and modern. There is a shift occurring where AI is being infused into the contact center and this is causing disruption in the market. UCC providers are attracted to the higher price points that a contact center offering can command. That said, Aragon feels that they need to balance that with the cost of updating a contact center offering to be fully AI enabled (to learn more, read The Aragon Research Globe for Intelligent Contact Centers, 2019).
Intermedia Is Ramping Up
While the terms of the acquisition are undisclosed, Intermedia announced it now has annual revenues of $250 million. Intermedia has shown solid growth in recent years, and with Telax the trend upwards should only continue. Intermedia has a stable group of partners to distribute its integrated offering and current customers that can now benefit from both unified communications as a service and contact center as a service technologies.