Genesys to Acquire Angel

Fresh off a deal last month to acquire customer interaction analytics company Utopy, Genesys today announced plans to acquire Angel, a provider of cloud-based contact center solutions, for $110 million.

The Angel platform allows companies to deploy self-service interactive voice response (IVR), SMS, chat, and mobile applications to support their customers' self-service needs.

Angel focuses on consumer facing businesses with pre-packaged applications for target industries, including banking, healthcare, retail, pharmaceutical, media, travel, technology, higher education, and government. The range of applications is extensive and includes collecting survey responses, tracking support tickets and notifying customers of order statuses and refills. These applications include embedded best-in-class drillable business intelligence dashboards for improved real-time decision-making.

Angel maintains a customer base of more than 800 business accounts, which Sheila McGee-Smith, president and principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics, says puts Genesys in good standing. "This immediately gives Genesys additional cloud credibility," she says.

But the acquisition extends far beyond the two companies. "From an industry perspective, this acquisition, combined with Genesys' creation of a Cloud Division in September, reinforces the perceived opportunity in cloud-based customer care," McGee-Smith says.

Genesys president and CEO Paul Segre agrees. "We think this as tremendously complementary of our products, a strategic direction for hidden capital, and we think that this is really game-changing for the industry," he says.

Operations of Angel Labs, and its Lexee speech-based virtual assistant will be ongoing, the company said.

"The concept of Angel Labs and creating spikes of innovative mashups of our technology, and potentially accessing pieces of Genesys technology that we haven't had access to, and other third-party technologies like we've had with SalesForce and Facebook will continue," says David Rennyson, president of Angel. "We want to continue to look at things that will allow us to continue to change the future of customer experience management. I don't know that the name will continue but the innovation will."

Rennyson says the acquisition was welcomed by Angel employees. "Everyone understands what an industry leader Genesys is. They're providing a broad global channel to a SaaS offering that's grown up quite a bit over the years. Nothing could take us as far as this partnership will, and when you combine the strength of the Genesys technology, its channel, and the success we've had with SaaS, I think that we have a real successful combination, he says."

Genesys, which was sold off by Alcatel-Lucent in late 2011, posted double-digit growth in 2012. The Angel deal is expected to bring Genesys's overall annual recurring cloud-based revenue to more than $85 million.

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