Genesys Telecommunications said Wednesday it had agreed to acquire rival Interactive Intelligence Group for $1.4 billion, adding a fast-growing cloud solution to its portfolio of call center software products.
The $60.50 per share offer represents a 36% premium to Interactive’s close on July 28, a day before Reuters reported that the company was considering strategic alternatives. The stock was up 5.75%, at $59.93, in trading Wednesday.
Interactive CEO and co-founder Don Brown said the company’s PureCloud product, which is available to customers through cloud-based servers, helped drive the deal.
“We put a lot of R&D into this new PureCloud product line, and we just really hit the cloud in the right way,” he told the Indianapolis Business Journal. “And that was something really missing from the Genesys portfolio.”
The deal is the second this week involving call center software that helps companies improve their customer interactions. On Tuesday, private-equity giant KKR announced it would acquire Calabrio for a reported $200 million.
Interactive went public in 1999 and includes Coca-Cola and Sony among its customers. For its last fiscal year, revenues increased 15% to $390.9 million, as PureCloud made its debut. According to the IBJ, the software grabbed 322 customers in the first six months of 2016, compared to 24 in the last six months of 2015.
The company’s other offerings include Cloud Communications-as-a-Service and Customer Interaction Center.
“Our combined product portfolio will provide the broadest set of transformative customer experience solutions optimized for customers of all sizes and sophistication levels, available both in the cloud and on-premise,” Genesys CEO Paul Segre said in a news release. “We will significantly invest across the entire Interactive Intelligence product portfolio.”
Privately-held Genesys has $1.3 billion in annual sales and its software helps manage digital and voice interactions for customers including AT&T, Citigroup, and PayPal. The company spends about $200 million a year on research and development.
“I am confident that our agreement with Genesys … will deliver meaningful benefits to our customers, partners and employees,” Brown said.