The News

On July 18, 2021, Zoom Video Communications, Inc. announced the acquisition of Five9, Inc. in an all-shares transaction. The transaction values Five9 at around $14.7 billion.

According to the press release “the acquisition is expected to help enhance Zoom’s presence with enterprise customers and allow it to accelerate its long-term growth opportunity by adding the $24 billion contact center market.”

According to Eric S. Yuan, CEO and founder of Zoom, the company is “continuously looking for ways to enhance our platform, and the addition of Five9 is a natural fit that will deliver even more happiness and value to our customers”. He continues with “enterprises communicate with their customers primarily through the contact center, and we believe this acquisition creates a leading customer engagement platform that will help redefine how companies of all sizes connect with their customers”.

Rowan Trollope, CEO of Five9 adds that “businesses spend significant resources annually on their contact centers, but still struggle to deliver a seamless experience for their customers”. Trollope will become a president of Zoom and continue as CEO of Five9.

Zoom expects the acquisition of Five9 to be “complementary to the growing popularity of its Zoom Phone offering The combination of both firms also offers both companies significant cross-selling opportunities to each other’s respective customer bases”.

As especially Rowan Trollope emphasizes upon repeatedly in the acquisition briefing, this acquisition is about accelerating growth by combining the respective assets, software as well as customers.

The bigger picture

The trend towards call centers in the cloud has been there before and it has been amplified with the Covid pandemic. Connecting phone lines from diverse and independent locations into one telephony system gets greatly simplified with a cloud-based infrastructure and the required upfront investments are far lower.

At the same time, the desire and need for unifying personal as well as corporate communication have increased tremendously, for the same reason.

Last, but not least, it can be assumed that workforces will stay in a hybrid mode, with people having the ability to work from anywhere.

Zoom profited from the Covid pandemic in a phenomenal way and was probably one of the biggest winners. However, since October 2020, its stock price went down from a peak of nearly $560 to around $360 (July 22, 2021). This can be largely attributed to businesses having invested into communications tools and strong competition. Especially Microsoft has upped the ante considerably and invested heavily into its Teams software.

From an economy point of view, we are looking at the conversion of some markets in the ongoing platform game. We have the call center software landscape and the communications and collaboration software landscape – usually referred to Call Center as a Service and Unified Communications as a Service.

My Analysis and PoV

Zoom itself has evolved a lot from its beginnings.

Looking at the Communications as a Service landscape, one can see that most of the major vendors have messaging, telephony, and meetings in their portfolio. A small number, e.g. Fuze or 8x8 also offer call center functionality. Microsoft Teams offers collaboration and Cisco’s Webex supports collaboration and call center.

Zoom, without Five9, offers neither of these functionalities, which makes it vulnerable, especially in direct competition with a software that is as ubiquitously available as Microsoft Teams. The vulnerability is the risk of being pushed into a niche instead of staying the top dog that Zoom still is at least in the videoconferencing/video meeting market. Zooms reduced, yet still impressive, growth, is indicating this vulnerability.

On the other hand, the company is awash in cash and can draw off its still high valuation, which it did to acquire Five9.

Zoom is a top dog when it comes to meeting solutions, with its additional solutions it plays pretty strong, but not decisively so, in the market of communications solutions. Five9 is a serious player in the cloud call center software space.

With these areas merging, both players have lots of parts that the respective other does not have. Think video call centers, or video assisted support and remote control. Combining this is a strong value proposition in the short- to midterm.

I do not fully buy in to the story of the proposed “omnichannel engagement platform” as I do think that some crucial aspects, like the ability to identify and profile a customer and her complete context, are missing. I rather see an omnichannel engagement execution platform. Add the profiling part, as Twilio did with acquiring Segment, and we have a really compelling story, especially if Zoom Phone takes off. Having access to the call center, consented customer profiles, and the access to the consumer customers’ devices via Zoom Phone could totally change the game.

Until this happens, I do not see much that hasn’t been done before, although the respective offerings of Zoom and Five9 may well be better than the ones offered by the companies I mentioned earlier.

Still, a good, yet expensive, move that raises the appetite for more.

The News

Fastcall, a renowned developer of CTI solutions that are exclusively dedicated to Salesforce, recently announced the release of its Intercall solution. Intercall helps teams to communicate and interact internally from within Salesforce. The app allows phone and video communication. Using Intercall, an employee can call coworkers via their Salesforce user profile instead of using a particular phone number, making it unnecessary to know the current location of the coworker or to perform repeat calls due to unavailability.

It is a first-of-its-kind Salesforce app and offers video and screen sharing within an integrated Salesforce phone application by leveraging Salesforce and Twilio.

Intercall is the latest addition to Fastcall’s suite of applications and is designed to enhance work-from-home productivity for Salesforce users.

Phone applications found in the Salesforce AppExchange today, including Fastcall’s namesake application, enable companies to increase productivity by empowering sales and service team members to communicate quickly and effectively with clients and prospects via phone. Intercall allows companies to streamline their internal telephone and video conversations whether within or between departments, therefore complementing Fastcall’s capabilities.

Main benefits of Intercall include:

• Screen sharing and video conferencing in virtual meetings while working within Salesforce instead of an external application. Intercall also creates Salesforce activities for every Intercall call.
• Replacement of phone directories that are more often than not outdated while enabling a centralized phone directory with data that is already in Salesforce.
• Calling coworkers via multiple endpoints at the same time with ringing the softphone, mobile phone, and desk phone all at the same time, Intercall prevents wasting time by dialing multiple numbers until you connect to a teammate and the hassle of leaving, listening to, and deleting numerous voicemails.
• Building transparency and accountability via automated call logging within Salesforce. Just like an external dialer automatically records external communications with customers in Salesforce, Intercall enables greater accountability, tracking, and transparency in the work-at-home environment and empowers managers to get a comprehensive view of team interactions and collaboration.
• Call recording for future reference, training or to share directly with team members for easy information sharing.
• Easy and efficient one-click information distribution of voicemail messages to team members or the whole company via voicemail drop.

Richard Rosen, CEO of Fastcall says “Success doesn’t depend solely on interactions with clients. A business is only as strong as how its teammates interact with each other. Intercall makes it easier for colleagues to collaborate and communicate. Imagine a work environment where you could reach a teammate on the very first try, without having to dial their office and mobile phone, with the click of one button. I am excited about the efficiencies Intercall creates and what we have planned. Intercall transparently extends the range of products that are offered by Fastcall by offering an intra team facility in addition to the outbound and inbound services that are already available”.

The Bigger Picture

With growing office campuses and team members working more and more from home it becomes increasingly important to provide employees with an easy and efficient way to collaborate with each other and to communicate and share information with their customers. 

Businesses are looking for solutions that fix their problem fast. This can be seen by the revenues of Zoom nearly quadrupling or the usage of Microsoft Teams skyrocketing from 13 million daily active users in July 2019 to 75 million daily active users in April 2020. At the same time Slack grew its paying customers between February and July 2020 by more than 20 percent, too.

Because of this, vendors of CRM solutions have increasingly been strengthening their built-in collaboration suites or forming partnerships with these companies or specialists like Fastcall, which usually is the faster way of achieving this objective.

My Analysis and PoV

The Corona crisis has increased the demand for online meeting solutions, which has caused a growth spurt for companies like Zoom, Webex and co, but also for collaboration services like Slack or Microsoft Teams, or telephony solutions like simplii that integrate with various applications.

With the exception of Microsoft Teams, none of these solutions are services that are natively embedded into business applications, but are either standalone or integrated via APIs. At minimum, this causes some additional integration labor and often leads to double maintenance of valuable information, with the corresponding risk of information loss or ambiguity and a reduction of user satisfaction. In addition, the user interface of the collaboration solution normally differs, which further deteriorates the user experience as the communication software does not follow the UI style guidelines of the surrounding software.

Then there are a few solutions that are built directly into the application stack of the solution that hosts them. They specialize in optimally supporting this single platform and are built directly into the application stack of the solution that hosts them. One example for these is service providers is Fastcall.

Most businesses are already sold on one CRM solution or another, or have even committed to a platform. Especially for these businesses, solutions that integrate directly with them are the first consideration.

In the case of a business committed to using Salesforce, it should have a deep and hard look at what is available via AppExchange. 

Intercall certainly fits the bill here; although it is still a young product and might miss some sought-after features, like virtual backgrounds, or scrapbooks etc., the combination of features is already giving considerable value to corporate users.