Less than a year after acquiring Edify and its speech-recognition technology for $33 million, Intervoice Inc. is reaching into the call center market with the purchase of Nuasis.
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The Dallas-based company announced this week that it has acquired the assets of Mountain View, Calif.-based Nuasis, a provider of Internet-enabled customer contact software. Under the agreement, Intervoice has purchased Nuasis' products, intellectual property, customer and channel contracts, and other assets. Intervoice hired a group of Nuasis employees effective Sept. 1.
"This is a strategic buy for Intervoice," said Daniel Hong, analyst with London-based Datamonitor plc. "It positions Intervoice more strongly in the market. What we've been noticing over the last couple of years is, in order to compete in the large enterprise market for IVR, you have to have a comprehensive portfolio of contact center products. This acquisition fills that gap for Intervoice."
The Nuasis products will allow Intervoice to bring IP-based contact center applications to the agent desktop, including Web chat, and email response together with its own speech-enabled interactive voice response (IVR) and voice portal tools.
"Several years ago, we began to transition Intervoice to a new direction, one based on open standards and converged voice and data networks," Bob Ritchey, president and CEO of Intervoice, said in a statement. "The objective behind this asset purchase is to accelerate our multi-channel automation and IP contact center product strategy. Intervoice is enhancing the value we bring to our customers by providing a solution that expands our reach into the contact center."
The Nuasis application can be deployed independently of a PBX switch on standard IT infrastructure without the need for computer telephony integration, according to Intervoice.
"Culturally, there's definitely a fit," Hong said, "and architecturally, because Nuasis is pure IT, there shouldn't be any issues of integration."