Five9 will acquire Aceyus for $82MN in cash, subject to particular price adjustments.
The CCaaS stalwart expects to close the deal within the next three months.
Many big-name brands – including Expedia, T-Mobile, and Verizon – work with Aceyus, deploying its core VUE platform.
That platform includes analytics, real-time reporting, and dashboard solutions – which many Five9 customers already leverage, as Aceyus is a long-time Five9 partner.
After witnessing many of the platform’s benefits first-hand, Five9 swooped in to bring Aceyus’ technology to its broader customer base.
That said, Aceyus already enjoys close relationships with many Fortune 100 companies, one of three significant drivers behind the acquisition.
Why Did Five9 Go for Aceyus?
Mike Burkland, Chairman and CEO of Five9, outlined the vendor’s three principal drivers to snap up Aceyus during an earnings call.
Starting with its “sizable” install base, Burkland stated:
They are beloved by their large enterprise clients. In fact, we see RFPs fairly frequently where there’s a requirement… to integrate with Aceyus.
Next, the CEO highlighted how the move allows Five9 to streamline large enterprise CCaaS migrations – comparing the process to a heart transplant.
Continuing this analogy, Aceyus acts as the bypass machine, allowing businesses to run their business during the migration and ensuring that data flows endure.
According to Buckland, it offers “the ability to have continuity across the business throughout that migration time period and beyond.”
Finally, Burkland notes how critical Aceyus is to Five9’s go-forward strategy, thanks to its tight “data integrations across so many back-end systems.”
In addition, Aceyus offers Integration Manager and Routing Manager solutions within VUE. These help customers transport data across various contact center platforms and deliver that data where it matters most.
As a result, Five9 can support its customers in creating curated data sets that help to finetune AI models and enable more successful AI deployments. That is critical, as the old adage: “Garbage in, garbage out,” suggests.
A Move That Supports Five9’s AI Strategy
Aceyus allows customers to leverage contextual data through its data connectors. That brings many advantages, including the potential to deliver more personalized experiences, as Burkland highlights.
Indeed, Aceyus helps unify customer data, gives contact center agents more journey context, and funnels data into AI-fueled hyper-personalization tools.
Yet, the acquisition may also allow Five9 customers to utilize AI at a much deeper level by enabling the creation of curated data sets, as outlined above.
These are becoming crucial to contact centers, as AI – and generative AI in particular – promises to transform service operations.
Making this point during a recent UC Today interview, Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, stated:
“If I want to know whether the Red Sox won last night, I can ask Google. But, if I’m going to look for some sort of legal precedent – as a lawyer – I’m not using Google; I’m using LexisNexis. Or, if I’m a financial person, I’m going to use Bloomberg or Dow Jones.
Workers cannot rely on GPT and believe it’s the source of truth. The curated data set becomes important.
Indeed, companies will soon start to create AI strategies, considering: How much company data do I put in there? Do I trust it? Where is it stored? Is it localized?
That is a tricky conversation with lots of moving parts that organizations should closely consider before applying generative AI to corporate data.
“Also, think of the term “customer experience”,” continued Kerravala. “There is the contact center, CRM, web analytics tools, and all kinds of data that’s really not tied together well.”
“So if we start applying these AI tools to a limited data set, we’re only going to get limited insights.”
With Aceyus, Five9 can offer the glue that holds these solutions together, pipe data streams into curated sets, and kickstart those pressing AI conversations.
Elsewhere at Five9
News of the Aceyus acquisition comes shortly after Gartner released its 2023 Magic Quadrant report, in which Five9 earned “market leader” status – one of just four market leaders to do so.
It is the first year Five9 has achieved this recognition, and it comes after the vendor has doubled down on its growth strategy, expanding further into Europe.
Moreover, the vendor has just announced a series of massive global CCaaS wins.
One megadeal was with a Fortune 50 global healthcare insurance company, worth a whopping $20MN in annual recurring revenue.
Burkland suggested that Five9 won this deal partly because of its robust Aceyus integration and its potential to ease the contact center transformation process.
Finally, the vendor unveiled several product enhancements, leveling up its digital engagement, conversational AI, and self-service solutions.
