BroadSoft Buys Cloud Contact Center Vendor Transera

BroadSoft is bolstering its cloud communications business with the acquisition of Transera, which makes cloud-based contact center software for large enterprises and smaller businesses.

BroadSoft officials announced the deal Feb. 8, saying that having Transera in the fold will position the company well in the growing contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) space. No details on the price of the deal were announced, though BroadSoft officials said the company expects it will add $7 million to $8 million in revenue during 2016.

“Today’s acquisition brings together the leading cloud unified communications provider with a pioneer redefining contact center performance through omni-channel and big data analytics,” BroadSoft CEO Michael Tessler said in a statement. “The multi-billion dollar contact center market is ripe for cloud disruption, and we now offer service providers a single stack solution with the flexibility to scale from SMB to large enterprise.”

The deal brings BroadSoft Transera’s omni-channel contact center and Customer Engagement Analyzer software—which includes analytics and dashboards—Call Center App for Salesforce, and cloud management and routing capabilities. For BroadSoft’s 700 or so service provider customers, it enables them to offer a single customer solution that uses existing BroadWorks and BroadCloud products with hosted PBX, unified communications (UC), omni-channel contact center and network transport features.

The current market for on-premises contact centers is about $3.3 billion, which opens up a large opportunity to migrate many of those customers to cloud-based offerings, BroadSoft officials said.

The UC market is migrating to cloud-based offerings. IDC analysts have said that the cloud communications market will grow from $123 million in 2013 to $7.5 billion in 2018, and Synergy Research Group said the UC-as-a-service (UCaaS) space is growing at 16 percent a year. A BroadSoft survey released last month indicated that between 2015 and 2020, the UCaaS space will grow almost six times, accounting for about 41 percent of the overall UC space by the end of the decade. It’s at 7 percent now.

“UCaaS continues to be a force for change within the business communications market,” Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and chief analyst, said in a statement last month. “There has been a rapid rise of some disruptive new vendors and I do not expect the pace of change to slacken.”