PHOTO:
Aleksey 159
Zoom Video Communications, or “Zoom” to the rest of the world, has announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Five9, a provider of cloud contact center software, for $14.7 billion.
Company officials envision the combined workplace video and collaboration platform from Zoom with the Five9 contact center forming the “customer engagement platform of the future.” Five9’s cloud contact center includes a suite of applications that allows management and optimization of customer interactions across many different channels.
Zoom’s acquisition of Five9 is complementary to its Zoom Phone offering. Zoom Phone is a cloud phone system that enables organizations to connect and interact. The combination of the companies also offers both companies cross-selling opportunities to each other’s respective customer bases, company officials said.
Following the close of the transaction, Five9 will be an operating unit of Zoom, and Rowan Trollope will become a president of Zoom and continue as CEO of Five9, reporting to Eric Yuan.
In other customer experience software news…
Qualtrics Acquires Usermind
Qualtrics, a customer and employee experience management software provider, has acquired Usermind, an experience orchestration platform.
Usermind captures and analyzes contextual data in the customer journey, from website visits and support calls to purchase history and communications preferences. Usermind will strengthen the Qualtrics XM Directory, a human sentiment database with over four billion customer and employee profiles, by bringing in contextual data to create customer profiles that include interactions a customer has with a brand and all of the feedback they’ve provided over time, according to company officials.
Demand Science Acquires Airborne App
Demand Science, a revenue intelligence platform, has announced the acquisition of Airborne App, Inc. Founded by Lee Gladish and Michael Morckos, Airborne is a Toronto-based sales engagement and enablement software platform. The acquisition is Demand Science’s sixth since August 2020.
Demand Science provides data, demand generation, intelligence, content and analytics solutions. The acquisition of Airborne brings a sales software solution that enables sellers to run their day-to-day business through a single centralized platform with unified reporting, administration and AI-powered decision making, according to company officials.
OpenText Debuts CDP
OpenText has announced the release of OpenText Cloud Editions (CE) 21.3, including a Customer Data Platform (CDP).
CE 21.3 features a number of new products, solutions and integrations, including:
- OpenText Experience CDP, a new customer data platform, and a feature of the OpenText Digital Experience Platform. Experience CDP unifies customer data from first- and third-party data sources, including Google Marketing Platform.
- OpenText Magellan Risk Guard, a new AI solution that helps organizations ensure compliance and mitigate risk by uncovering and remediating potentially sensitive, inappropriate or detrimental text, images, or video content within business systems. Risk Guard includes 20 prebuilt AI models that identify risk across 50 pre-defined categories such as personally identifiable information (PII), drugs, alcohol and violence.
- Update to OpenText Extended ECM for Office 365, which provides deeper integrations with Microsoft Teams.
Redpoint Global Announces In Situ
Redpoint Global has announced In Situ, a cloud-native, data quality-as-a-service (DQaaS) that delivers data and resolved identities in real time, using exclusively first-party data. It provides unified customer data in place and transparency into the quality, reliability and trust of all customer data.
Redpoint Global In Situ, named for the Latin phrase “in situ” meaning in the original place, operates within an organization’s existing cloud subscription. Data quality, identity resolution and governance are contained within existing Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
Contentstack, EPAM and Uniform Create Personalization Proof of Concept
Contentstack, a Content Experience Platform (CXP), EPAM Systems, a provider of a digital platform engineering and software development services, and Uniform, a personalization platform, have announced the creation of a complete personalization proof of concept in less than 90 days.
This project used microservices, API-first, cloud-native SaaS and headless (MACH) technologies to create a full personalized travel customer journey. It includes an API-first, headless personalization engine combined with an API-first content management system (CMS).
