While many contact centers have moved to the cloud to boost quality and keep costs under control, the cloud-based contact center solutions market had remained rather segmented by customer size: enterprises turned one way for solutions, and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) turned another, and there was little cross-over between the two market segments. As the cloud call center industry matures, however, we have seen a number of mergers and acquisitions that appear to be leading to the rise of cloud-based solutions providers who have something to offer customers of all sizes.

Contact center solutions provider Genesys (News - Alert) this week announced its acquisition of cloud contact center Echopass Corporation, a player in the large enterprise market. This marks Genesys’ third contact center acquisition in nine months. The addition of Echopass customers and technology is expected to allow Genesys to bring increased scale to its cloud-based platform for large enterprises, and position the company as a force to be reckoned with in the cloud contact center space.

Among its offerings, Pleasanton, California-based Echopass counts virtual automatic call distributor (ACD) technology, a speech-enabled IVR solution, workforce management and agent performance optimization, outbound dialing, social media integration, customer surveying, and real-time reporting and dashboards. Echopass clients are among the largest cloud contact center enterprise deployments in the world with complex client environments that are deploying greater than 8,000 agents across multiple contact center locations, all served from a common platform with a virtualized and seamless solution.


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According to Genesys, the acquisition will add to the 1,250 existing Genesys cloud customers, officially establishing Genesys as the market leader in cloud-based contact centers. Large enterprise customers of Genesys will now have the choice between shifting entirely to the cloud—or extending their on-premises system—while preserving a full suite of enterprise-class solutions and security. Previous to the acquisition, the Genesys platform served as the Echopass cloud service for large enterprises.

“Working with Genesys, Echopass pioneered this flexible deployment model with companies who understand that customer engagement is the most critical aspect of their business,” said Paul Segre (News - Alert), CEO of Genesys said. “Genesys is now unmatched in its ability to deliver cloud-based contact center solutions to enterprises of all sizes.”

Companies are turning to cloud-based contact center solutions for a number of reasons, including increased flexibility and scalability, rich feature sets, remote administration and lower total cost of ownership. At the same time, cloud-based solutions allow them to step up their level of customer engagement, building a multichannel environment that services the customer through the entire lifecycle, rather than on a transaction-by-transaction basis.

In March of this year, Genesys acquired Angel, a provider of cloud-based interactive voice response (IVR) and self-service solutions.  Two months later, Genesys added to its portfolio with the purchase of SoundBite Communications (News - Alert), a cloud-based collections, payments and mobile marketing applications provider.  Ultimately, Genesys plans to consolidate the SoundBite, Angel and Echopass technology under the Genesys brand on a single platform.

The terms of the Echopass deal were not revealed. The acquisition is expected to be complete by the end of the year.