In planning its latest acquisition internally, Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories’ President and CEO Wes Hayden amusingly code-named the project “Aladdin.” And with the recent announcement that the Alcatel company will acquire VoiceGenie, Aladdin may have gotten his wish. But “a Whole New World” comes at what price? Since the advent of VoiceXML as an industry standard, the voice portal market has remained in a state of flux with customers increasingly opting to swap their legacy IT systems out of costly proprietary solutions and into an open architecture that helps simplify new applications development and deployment. As a result, vendors such as VoiceGenie have been helping big customers take advantage of VoiceXML to roll out self-service solutions in enterprise contact centers or services like directory assistance and virtual receptionists for telecom services providers.
Genesys, meanwhile, has been organically growing its own voice portals practice since it bought its way into VoiceXML in 2002 when it scooped up Telera for $136 million, which until recently represented the only other time that technology served as the primary impetus for its acquisition strategy. “This gives us the path to really accelerate the market going forward,” Hayden told analysts on a recent conference call. “That’s clearly an area on which we have the intentions to provide great focus and maintain a leadership position.”
Together, Genesys and VoiceGenie will be the undisputed leader of the voice portal segment with almost 25 percent market share — almost two-and-a-half times the size of its closest competitor. Additionally, the companies’ customer bases are both very complementary, meaning there will be very little “cannibalizing” of sales. Whereas a bulk of Genesys’ voice business has been “call-center-centric,” (as Hayden described it), focused on the enterprise market in particular, VoiceGenie has been very successful in the service provider space. In fact, VoiceGenie’s growing success in attracting enterprise customers is what contributed to Genesys taking notice of the company in the first place, he explained.
“It gets them to an incredible level of critical mass,” said Sheila McGee-Smith, president and principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics. “VoiceGenie has strong carrier customers. VoiceGenie’s history is they started the whole VXML movement with AT&T about 10 years ago. They come from a very strong carrier legacy.” But Genesys’ magic wish comes at a relatively high price. While terms of the transaction remain undisclosed (except to say that it was financed with cash; Hayden declined to disclose how much cash his company had on its year-end balance sheet), he did confirm that Genesys paid a multiple equivalent to one-and-a-half times their projected yearly revenue for VoiceGenie.
If that’s the case, then VoiceGenie was able to command a multiple at the high end of the range. For example, when Intervoice acquired Edify for $33.5 million in cash from S1 Corporation, that deal was valued at only 0.9 times revenue. That was the valuation that Genesys used in evaluating the assets of GMK of Brazil earlier this year. During the Q&A portion of the conference call pertaining to the announcement, Hayden also confirmed that Genesys wasn’t the only suitor courting VoiceGenie, which may explain the premium paid to the Toronto-based VoiceXML innovator.
“I don’t think they needed it. The technology they have is very similar,” McGee-Smith told TMCnet during a brief telephone interview. In rebuttal, Hayden claims that Genesys is getting more from the VoiceGenie acquisition than it has in its previous buyouts: GMK, Telera and CallPath, the latter having been acquired in May 2001 from IBM. “Each of those acquisitions offered a different dimension,” Hayden said. “With Telera, we wanted the technology and we wanted the people,” he said. But with CallPath and GMK (affectionately known locally as “Gimme-Ka”), the acquisitions were more about adding customers and skilled workers than intellectual property.
“What makes this [VoiceGenie] deal so exciting is they’ve got all three,” Hayden added, referring to its vanguard technological developments, marquee customers and talent pool of 90 employees. In fact, upon completion, Genesys will have a combined workforce of 130 to 150 engineers dedicated solely to VoiceXML development. Upon completion of the transaction, the two enterprise voice portal companies plan to forge ahead with integrating their two VoiceXML-based platforms into a single offering to serve enterprises, service providers and carriers. The public strategy of the integration project will also be known as Aladdin.
Project Aladdin is expected to yield an integrated, universal voice platform by the middle of 2007. No word yet on whether the combined company will re-brand that solution under the Aladdin name.
Robert Liu is executive editor at TMCnet. He may be contacted at [email protected].
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