8x8 Boosts Cloud Portfolio, Acquires Call Center Expert Contactual
The marriage of the two companies was a no-brainer, said 8x8’s vice president of sales and marketing Huw Rees. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based 8x8 has been reselling Contactual’s call center solutions since 2007.
“The product ranges and services we have are absolutely complementary, [and] we have very similar types of customers, we sell and bill in a similar way,” Rees said. “It was just a perfect fit.”
Additionally, Rees said that 8x8 has seen growing demand for call center products both from small- to medium-sized businesses that are adding call center services for sales or support, and also enterprise clients looking to outsource their call centers to the cloud.
“It was clearly a growing a trend. We gradually saw that we were selling their solution more and more everywhere,” he said.
In Contactual, 8x8 gains a “world expert in the call center space,” as well as access to their network of enterprise clients, Rees said. Last year, Contactual reported $8.3 million in revenue, 10 percent of which came through its reseller relationship with 8x8. The all-stock transaction of 6.7 million shares of common stock of 8x8 is expected to close by the end of the month, according to the two companies.
Contactual’s call center service will pad out 8x8’s portfolio of over 20 cloud-based services, including VoIP, conferencing, video and cloud computing. The service will be offered to 8x8’s channel partners through its recently launched go-to-market channel program.
The deal with Contactual follows another recent move by 8x8 to affirm its position in the cloud-based services market; the company acquired Littleton, Colo.-based Zerigo, a specialist in virtual private services and managed DNS, in June.