Five9 has confirmed that the company has finalized a deal to acquire orchestration specialist Acqueon.
Five9 CEO Mike Burkland officially confirmed the purchase on LinkedIn earlier today (August 29th, 2024), having revealed that an agreement was in place between the two companies earlier this month.
In his post, Burkland repeated the previous company line that the acquisition marks a significant step in Five9’s aim of becoming the “orchestration engine for every interaction across the entire customer journey.”
“I’d like to officially welcome the Acqueon team to Five9! Together, we will continue to enhance our technology to deliver impactful business outcomes for our customers and partners,” he wrote.
While neither side has mentioned a price, Burkland did speak extensively during the company’s Q2 2024 earnings call about the skills and infrastructure that Acqueon will bring to Five9.
He highlighted Acqueon’s prowess at delivering “best-in-class” proactive outbound omnichannel customer engagement across a range of customer experience scenarios.
These capabilities will be integrated into Five9’s Intelligent CX Platform to provide customers with a native solution that will move “beyond” the existing integration.
In a company blog post, Burkland also detailed how Acqueon’s tech stack will enable Five9 to enhance its AI offerings and expand its market reach:
Like a symphony conductor, Acqueon’s platform uses AI and contextual data to predict, personalize and orchestrate when and how to best reach customers.
“This acquisition expands our market reach, tapping into new markets for sales, proactive service, revenue management, and more.”
A New Five9?
Despite Acqueon being a smaller, “early stage” company, it is clear that Five9 is enthusiastic and optimistic about the impact the deal can have.
Having already partnered with the organization for the last two years, Five9 has a strong understanding of Acqueon’s capabilities, with Burkland believing that it “picked them up at the perfect time.”
Among the capabilities discussed by the CEO were Acqueon’s multimodal interactions, which have the capacity to generate additional data that strengthens AI capabilities.
In addition, the company has a proven history of helping top financial, retail, and healthcare businesses boost revenue by improving contact and conversion rates.
Moreover, Burkland believes that by integrating Acqueon’s solutions into Five9, the company will be able to speed up its collaboration with Epic, allowing healthcare companies to deliver smoother customer experiences.
This integration was also discussed by Acqueon CEO Anish Koul, who commented:
We’ve had an extremely successful partnership over the last two years, with deep product integrations between Acqueon’s Revenue Execution Platform and Five9’s Intelligent CX platform including a focused initiative around our Epic integration within the Five9 platform for the healthcare industry.
But what does the rest of the CX space think about the deal?
Analyzing the Acquisition
Earlier this month, following the original announcement, several notable CX analysts spoke to CX Today about what customers can expect from the acquisition.
For Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research, the acquisition made a lot of sense.
As an existing technology partner, Five9 was able to adopt something of a “try before you buy” strategy, enabling the company to ensure that Acqueon’s tech could coexist with its own before pulling the trigger on the purchase.
He also believes that Acqueon’s expertise in revenue execution will be highly beneficial:
They’re in the revenue execution segment, which is more on the sales side. I think this addreses the longer theses of CCaaS, it’s not just being a product for agents, but actually being a product for anyone that touches the customer, and that includes sales.
The enhancements to Five9’s AI offerings were also discussed by Kerravala, who provided insights from discussions he has had with the company’s CEO and CFO, who are “frustrated” with the idea touted by many within the industry that AI is going to “kill the entire CCaaS segment.”
Kerravala disagrees with this assessment, claiming that the enhanced AI brought about by the acquisition will actually enable Five9 to “expand their Total Addressable Market (TAM).”
“It [AI] lets you sell to a much broader audience. Not just agents, but also salespeople and customer success teams. Acqueon is a really important tool to address sales people,” he explained.
Martin Schneider, Vice President & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, agreed with Kerravala’s point on appealing to a wider market, but also believes that Acqueon’s revenue capabilities will allow Five9 to differentiate itself from some of its CCaaS competitors.
By integrating workflows across the customer journey, they can engage customers at the right time, in the right place, and through the right channel.
Schneider argues that this not only keeps them competitive against traditional CCaaS players like NICE and Avaya but also questions the need for other products in revenue optimization.
“I think it’s a really compelling and interesting move to position Five9 in a new and exciting way. When you look at their legacy competition right now, I don’t see anyone really doing that well,” he said.
It’s an interesting differentiation that I don’t think anyone else has right now, and Five9 has achieved it with one quick, already integrated product pick up. Pretty smart if you ask me.
Elsewhere, Five9 recently announced that it had exceeded a $1 billion annual revenue run rate – becoming just the third CCaaS company to publically hit that milestone.
However, the company – last week – confirmed that it is reducing its workforce by seven percent, affecting about 180 employees, as part of a broader strategy to enhance shareholder value.
