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Avaya officials are looking to bolster the company’s cloud and contact center capabilities with the acquisition of ITNavigator, an Israeli firm that offers a range of social media monitoring, reporting and management tools.
According to Avaya officials, who announced the deal Oct. 1, the ITNavigator will be run as a wholly owned subsidiary, contributing further to such Avaya solutions as its Collaborative Cloud portfolio, which was unveiled last year. No financial details of the deal were released.
ITNavigator’s products will support a number of Avaya efforts, not only in the cloud and contact center, but also in unified communications (UC), according to company officials. Contact centers are growing in importance to businesses, which are viewing them as key parts of a customer’s overall experience.
Avaya has been partnering with ITNavigator for much of the Israeli company’s 12 years.
“IT and contact center executives and managers are in need of solutions that simplify day-to-day operations and enable them to quickly and easily bring on new capabilities,” Gary Barnett, senior vice president and president of collaboration at Avaya, said in a statement. “Our experience with ITNavigator—and perhaps more importantly—our customers’ experience with ITNavigator, has indicated that they bring a differentiated, easy-to-use set of solutions that makes the promise of ‘next generation’ contact center, unified communications and cloud-based applications a reality.”
Avaya’s Contact Center Control Manager is actually ITNavigator’s NAV360 solution. According to Avaya officials, it has been expanded into their Avaya Collaborative Cloud offering, and their acquisition of ITNavigator will enable them to even more tightly integrate the management and administration solution across Avaya’s cloud, UC and contact center solutions.
ITNavigator’s cloud-based social media monitoring and response software, Social Media Gateway, will complement Avaya’s existing social media management portfolio, helping people connect to such social networks as Facebook and Twitter, according to Avaya officials. It can be deployed as a stand-alone cloud or a hybrid solution that is integrated with a company’s contact center.
ITNavigator also offers a range of management and performance monitoring tools that can bring together real-time updates from contact center data and performance indicators, including billing, customer-relationship management (CRM) and other systems, the company said. It can used either on-premises or via a public, private or hybrid cloud.
“Our relationship with Avaya has grown in mutual respect, and in recent times, the boundaries between the two companies have narrowed as we drove to a common goal of simplifying sophisticated technologies,” Arik Shtilman, vice president of business development and business unit manager at ITNavigator, said in a statement.
Avaya’s acquisition of ITNavigator makes sense, according to Sheila McGee-Smith, principal analyst with McGee-Smith Analytics.
“While a relatively small acquisition, the purchase of ITNavigator is also a very strategic one,” McGee-Smith wrote in a post on the NoJitter blog site. “It lets Avaya bring in-house some software components that have become increasingly important to the vendor’s strategy: expanding into the cloud and maintaining its leadership in the contact center market. The social media gateway and analytics products are the cherry on top.”