NewVoiceMedia acquisition adds contact center to Vonage cloud

Vonage will add a contact-center-as-a-service platform to its Vonage cloud portfolio with the acquisition of NewVoiceMedia. The $350 million deal, announced Thursday, is Vonage's largest acquisition to date, as the company continues to expand beyond its roots as a cloud telephony provider.

More than 700 businesses -- primarily in the midmarket and enterprise segments -- use NewVoiceMedia's omnichannel CCaaS platform, which has go-to-market integrations with Salesforce and other customer relationship management vendors.

NewVoiceMedia generated $55 million in revenue last year and is on pace to bring in more than $70 million in 2018. Gartner identified the company as a leader in Western Europe in its latest annual ranking of cloud contact center vendors. It was too small to make the global list, but earned an honorable mention.

Vonage started as a residential voice-over-IP provider in 2001, but it's now more focused on selling cloud telephony services to businesses. It reported revenue of $1 billion last year and, as of the second quarter of 2018, was the fifth-largest provider of unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) plans worldwide, according to Synergy Research Group, based in Reno, Nev.

Vonage plans to integrate NewVoiceMedia's CCaaS platform with its own UCaaS platform. Businesses are increasingly looking to buy UC and contact centers from a single cloud vendor to save money and to make it easier for customer service agents to get in touch with engineers, marketers and other knowledge workers within the organization.

Vonage's current contact center offering, Vonage CX Cloud, relies on Nice inContact's CXone platform as part of a partnership that began in 2013.

The Vonage cloud portfolio also includes a communications platform as a service (CPaaS), which helps companies embed real-time communications into their apps and software platforms. Vonage added that product with its acquisition of Nexmo in 2016.

The NewVoiceMedia deal is Vonage's second acquisition in less than two months. In August, Vonage announced it would buy WebRTC vendor TokBox Inc. for $35 million, enhancing its Vonage cloud CPaaS offering with new video programming tools.

Most leading cloud communications vendors have sought to expand their portfolios to include both UCaaS and CCaaS offerings in recent years. Some have developed or acquired their technology, while others have opted to license products from cloud contact center specialists, like Nice inContact or Five9.