I woke up to a press release on Convergys acquiring Intervoice. I have to say that I’m always somewhat surprised about these things, but not really, and when I look back on Intervoice for the past year the timing made great sense. There had been rumors of a small shedding of people over the last few months, but a lot of companies are doing that. That wasn’t a huge clue. The biggest change, that would make them an attractive acquisition target, but not a predictor of being acquired, was that they finally completed the roadmap they had set out do when they acquired Edify. That is, they finished merging the two product lines into a single software-only platform of solutions.
Whereas I always hate to see a company that I have known and worked with for so long be acquired, casting all sentiment aside, what do I like about this merger? It gives Convergys a strong multi-channel customer service platform for both CPE and service provider, and allows them to provide customers with a customer service solution that smoothly blends self service and live agent assistance. Convergys has a rich history of hosted offerings, this also gives them large and healthy installed base of CPE customers that are attuned to the Intervoice story of having choices of how to deploy customer service. This means that the Convergys base will now have premise-based as an option too.
Intervoice’s service provider product set, including outbound notification services, melds in nicely with Convergys’s service provider offerings. This also gives Intervoice customers access to some pretty good Convergys products too, such as their rating, charging and billing solutions.
Both companies are very service oriented and both understand the value of properly adding speech technologies to customer service solutions. In fact, both companies were earlier into the market with providing professional services for speech applications than many vendors in the market.
Lastly, with a $2 bump per share, this marriage certainly should make shareholders happy too.