Twilio acquires contact center software maker Ytica

Twilio on Tuesday said it has acquired contact center company Ytica in a effort to expand its position in the estimated $20 billion contact center industry. Based in the Czech Republic, Ytica specializes in customizable contact center reporting, speech analytics and workforce optimization software. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Twilio, a cloud communications player, plans to make Ytica's technology a part of Twilio Flex, the company's fully programmable application platform for the contact center, which launched in March. Twilio said Ytica's platform will still be offered as a standalone product to other contact center SaaS vendors.

"In working with Ytica over the past several years, it became clear they have both the most robust cloud architecture in the WFO space as well as the most similar perspective as Twilio on the value of customization for enterprise software," said Al Cook, general manager of Twilio Flex. "We've worked with many happy joint customers and knew that Ytica and Flex together could offer an enterprise-grade solution that is built for scale and far eclipses any other contact center solution currently in the market."

More broadly, the acquisition lines up with Twilio's push into the contact center market and efforts to unseat traditional legacy vendors like Cisco, Avaya, and Genesys. The aim for Twilio is to do battle with existing call center infrastructure players that deploy on-premise call center hardware and software. Twilio is betting that Flex can bring more APIs to the call center and help enterprises customize more.

The call center market features a number of players ranging from business process outsourcing companies to systems integrators to private branch exchange providers.

Source zdnet