Mitel has acquired Oaisys, a call center recording and quality management solutions provider. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The move underscores Mitel's intent to become a leading player in the contact center space, with the addition of call recording and quality management solutions offered by Oaisys, a 17-year OEM Mitel partner.
"Oaisys has the best technical integration into Mitel solutions," says Chris Courneya, vice president and general manager of Mitel Contact Centers. "In North America, they have a strong footprint and are the number-one selling quality monitoring solution for Mitel. It's a very logical fit from a channel model. They have in-house capabilities and expertise in the [workforce optimization] world that we don't have."
Brian Spencer, CEO of Oaisys, says the acquisition will give Oaisys resources to accelerate its position in the market and reach larger customers that it previously could not. "We're thrilled about the acquisition," he says. "We now bring our technology to them and have vast fertile markets to grow together."
Industry analysts also view the merger as a good fit.
"As Mitel tries to expand its contact center offerings, it does make sense to have a recording solution with other WFO capabilities," says Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting.
Fluss points to recent moves in the contact center space with companies adding voice solutions, such as the purchase of speech analytics company Utopy by Genesys. "This is a competitive move by Mitel by acquiring someone they know very well. It should allow them to quickly come to market," she says.
Courneya says the Oaisys acquisition strengthens Mitel's portfolio "as it goes head to head against our competition and allows Mitel and our partners to compete against some of these other activities that are going on in a consolidating market.
"What those guys are trying to do is sometimes a land grab to get market share and other times it's to remove competitors from the scene and other times it's to get the technology that those guys have," Courneya says. "What we're trying to do is build a high-value portfolio with the technology partners that we've acquired and have a very nice single software bundle that we can offer to our channel partners."
The Oaisys buy follows a flurry of acquisitions Mitel has made in the past year as it looks to bolster its presence in the contact center arena. The company acquired contact center solutions provider prairieFyre, where Courneya was CEO, for roughly $20 million in 2013.
Following that move, Mitel announced a $550 million merger with UC solutions provider Aastra Technologies, which just closed in January. Mitel said that with $1.1 billion in combined annual revenue and 60 million customers worldwide, the combination of Mitel and Aastra has "one of the largest global footprints" in the $18 billion business communications market.
Courneya says there is a possibility of expanding the Oaisys product to other platforms. "We've also got some key initiatives to expand in the Microsoft ecosystem," he says. "There are certainly not a lot of players in there doing a good job of quality recording and quality management, so this will be an opportunity in Lync. This can round our Lync offering."
Prior to the closing of the merger in January, Aastra acquired Swedish firm Telepo to further its cloud offerings with a multitenant enterprise communication solution.
"It is a consolidating market, and it's Mitel's intention to consolidate that market, not to be consolidated," says Amy MacLeod, director of corporate communications at Mitel.