Unified Communications Featured Article

UC Market Shaken Up With Acquisitions, Funding, Product Releases

By Steve Anderson
Contributing Writer

When mergers and acquisitions take place, that's usually some interesting news. The end result is a company that can better address a market's needs, take on the competition, or sometimes it's just a big chimera of a firm and no one really knows why the merger took place at all. In the case of a recent acquisition of enterprise collaboration company Jive by a private equity firm, the end result will likely help make a major new force in unified communications (UC).

ESW Capital will be the company acquiring Jive, which received a hefty $462 million in the acquisition. Jive will subsequently be folded into Aurea, Inc., a company that handles customer relationship management (CRM) software. Under the new arrangement, according to word from Aurea CEO Scott Brighton, the end result would be a company that can not only handle customer relationships, but also provide direct communications and collaboration toward that end, making for a more complete UC experience and better outcomes for those who use Aurea services.

That wasn't all the UC outcome, though; further reports suggested that UC provider Fuze was set to land new investment, bringing in an additional $30 million last week. That elevated the company's most recent funding round to $134 million, while elevating Fuze's total funding to a hefty $334 million. The new capital will be used to augment Fuze's enterprise customer operation, as well as driving an international expansion.

Further, PanTerra (News - Alert) Networks recently brought out a new UC cloud service known as Streams. Streams offers users access to a replacement for private branch exchange (PBX) systems. With Streams, users get access to real-time communications, persistent team messaging, and other useful tools.

The end result is quite a few major moves in the UC space. It proves that this is a dynamic, highly-competitive market that's constantly changing, and represents frequent new opportunities to deliver value. We've seen here how new services are coming out and delivering more value in the market, which will hopefully prompt customer change and moves to new products. We've seen new investment go into current companies to drive international expansion efforts. We've even seen how new mergers and acquisitions stand to make improved offerings.

There's a lot of change in the UC market, and with all this going on, it's easy to lose track. Those who follow closely, meanwhile, may well see whole new opportunities emerge in this rapidly-shifting market.