Avaya Holdings, a leading global business communications company, has announced that it has acquired Spoken Communications, a leading innovator in contact center as a service (CCaaS) solutions for enterprise customers and a provider of transformative real-time customer experience management applications built on conversational artificial intelligence.

The transaction, which includes over 170 patents and patent applications, will be funded by cash on hand, said the company in a statement.
 
It follows a co-development partnership formed by Avaya and Spoken in 2017 to provide CCaaS solutions to Avaya's business process outsourcing customers.

"With this acquisition, Avaya's large contact center customer base around the world will have a clear migration path to the cloud," remarked Jim Chirico, the president and CEO of Avaya.

"Customers can retain all the functionality of their existing premises-based technology and seamlessly migrate that functionality, at their pace, to achieve all the benefits of cloud," he added.

Spoken's cloud-native, multitenant architecture is seamlessly integrated with Avaya Aura and Elite technologies. As a result, it also provides a robust architecture for both Avaya's omnichannel offerings, such as Oceana, and its Unified Communications as a Service solutions.

In addition, customers will gain access to Spoken's specialized agent quality software applications and services, as well as Spoken's IntelligentWire contact center automation solutions. IntelligentWire uses artificial intelligence and deep learning technologies on live voice conversations to reduce after-call work, drive more intelligent responses and gain deeper insight into customer sentiment and experience.

"This transaction is a critical step in positioning our customers, partners, and new Cloud business for increasing success," said Mercer Rowe, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud, for Avaya.

"We are now moving at cloud speed, capitalizing on Avaya's momentum to give our customers greater choice and flexibility in how they buy and consume our solutions, with the same outstanding experience whether it's on premises, in the public or private cloud, or a hybrid model," noted Rowe.
 
Upon completion of the transaction, Rowe will lead the combined Spoken and Avaya cloud teams to foster innovative growth and cloud differentiation in the marketplace.

Mohamad Afshar, president and CEO of Spoken, said this was an exciting time to join the Avaya family.
"Our successful partnership has demonstrated that working together, Avaya and Spoken can deliver a compelling cloud-native CCaaS portfolio for Avaya customers that offers every customer, from small and mid-market businesses to global enterprises, a seamless path to a modern cloud-based contact centre," he added.-TradeArabia News Service