Zoom Phone. Image: Zoom
Zoom will expand its enterprise offering with Five9’s cloud-based contact centre services.
Californian companies Zoom and Five9 have entered into a definitive acquisition agreement.
Pending the approval of Five9’s stockholders and regulators, Zoom will buy Five9 in an all-stock transaction valued at about $14.7bn.
Zoom famously became part of the vernacular of 2020’s global pandemic, with swift adoption of the video calling software sending the company’s revenues up 369pc one year on.
Five9 offers cloud-based contact centre services, including tools aimed at improving the customer experience as well as optimisations for operators, supervisors and workflow management.
The two NASDAQ-listed companies intend to combine their services to build “the customer engagement platform of the future”, according to a statement from Zoom.
Following the close of the transaction, Five9 will become an operating unit of Zoom. Rowan Trollope will continue his role as CEO of Five9 and also become a president at Zoom. He will report directly to Zoom CEO and founder Eric Yuan.
“Enterprises communicate with their customers primarily through the contact centre, and we believe this acquisition creates a leading customer engagement platform that will help redefine how companies of all sizes connect with their customers,” said Yuan.
The merger with Five9 is expected to complement acquiring company’s Zoom Phone offering, a cloud-based phone system.
“Joining forces with Zoom will provide Five9’s business customers access to best-of-breed solutions, particularly Zoom Phone,” said Trollope.
“This, combined with Zoom’s ‘ease-of use’ philosophy and broad communication portfolio, will truly enable customers to engage via their preferred channel of choice.”
Zoom anticipates that the merger will enhance the company’s offering for enterprise customers and add the $24bn contact centre market to its growth opportunities. Both companies are also expected to benefit from cross-selling to each other’s respective customer bases.
Five9 currently serves more than 2,000 customers worldwide. Zoom had 470,000 business customers as of December 2020.
The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2022.
This announcement comes just weeks after Zoom announced an earlier agreement to acquire German start-up Kites.
Research spin-out Kites specialises in machine translation solutions and poses potential for live language translation within video calls.
The financial terms of this deal were not disclosed but Kites team of 12 researchers were revealed to be joining Zoom’s engineering team from their base in Karlsruhe, Germany.
