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Wheelings & Dealings: ClickSoftware Acquisition of Xora Will Create Mobile Workforce Management Powerhouse

While workforce management solutions have been with us for decades, recent years have seen these solutions running to catch up with the modern workforce. One of the areas many workforce management solutions are lacking is in the increasing mobility of the global workforce.

Many solutions that maintain employee hours and schedules run on the premise that employees are reporting to a single location each day. Contact centers, one of the largest users of workforce management solutions, are increasingly not a single facility where all employees sit and work. Instead, contact centers today are often a blend of different sites, with workers plugging in from remote locations to make and take customer calls or pitch in with multimedia support. Even when employees are based in a single facility, increasingly, these workers want to be able to access their schedules from their mobile phones. Research from Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) has found that the market for mobile workforce management solutions will continue to grow, and estimates that annual North American revenues will grow at a CAGR of 40.5 percent to reach almost $3 billion by 2018.

There is also evidence that the workforce management solutions providers have heard and are listening. This week, mobile workforce management solutions provider ClickSoftware (News - Alert) Technologies announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Xora, a cloud-based market specialist in mobile workforce management. ClickSoftware’s Service Optimization Suite is a mobile field service solution that allows for planning and forecasting, scheduling and analytics.

Xora, which is based in Mountain View, California, offers a software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) solution designed to manage the productivity and efficiency of “always mobile” workers. The company’s product is used by more than 130,000 users and has been lauded by analyst group Frost & Sullivan with a Market Share Leadership Award for its StreetSmart application designed to manage the activities and performance of employees in the field. Xora counts among its customers Verizon, AT&T and Sprint (News - Alert).

The companies are calling the merger a synergistic one: the combination of Xora and ClickSoftware will create a company with breadth and depth for a much bigger market under one roof. ClickSoftware strengthens its leadership position by offering customers a broader range of cloud-based mobile workforce management apps as well as access to the small to medium-sized business market (SMBs). Xora will benefit from ClickSoftware’s international presence and access to service resource optimization products.

“The acquisition of Xora is an important and strategic addition to our mobile workforce management business and accelerates our cloud recurring revenues,” said Dr. Moshe BenBassat (News - Alert), ClickSoftware’s Founder and CEO, in a statement. “By combining ClickSoftware’s sophisticated, highly configurable offerings for the large and higher end of the mid-size enterprise market with Xora’s suite of configurable, ready-to-use solutions for the lower end of the mid-size and small business market, we achieve the strategic objective to offer a complete portfolio of best-in-class mobile apps for all business roles, in all size companies, in all industry verticals.”

The purchase price was pegged at approximately $14.7 million in cash, plus working capital and cash adjustments, and the transaction is expected to close in a few weeks.