On Tuesday July 27, Uniphore announced an agreement to acquire Israeli customer experience expert Jacada. The financial terms were not disclosed but Jacada’s stock, traded over-the-counter, pointed to a market cap of around $30 million when the deal was announced and remained relatively unchanged. Uniphore will bring on roughly 100 new employees and benefit from adding Jacada’s customer base, which spans well-known names in telecommunications, insurance, banking and retail around the world.

The two companies are a good match. Jacada was founded in 1990. During the ensuing 30 years it steadily built a global customer base by introducing self-service solutions for large enterprises, introducing such innovations as “Visual IVR” systems to provide customers with visual cues for speeding their way through task completion. In 2018, with the introduction of its Autonomous CX Suite on its updated Interact Platform, it turned its vision of “making contact centers smaller while making customer experience better” into a reality.

Uniphore, as described in this “Vendors That Matter” report, is one of the originators of Conversational Service Automation (CSA). It has made a specialty of bringing solutions to the market that combine Conversational AI, RPA, and front-office automation tools and capabilities.

Supplying CSA’s  Missing Link: Simplicity

More recently, Jacada has showcased its No Code/Low Code tools that rise to the challenges posed when enterprise developers try to incorporate Conversational AI into the workflows that support both self-service and assisted service activities. Uniphore expects this simplicity to be a key competitive differentiator. In the wake of its acquisition of Emotion Research Lab and an ideal way to apply Conversational AI to interpret the rich signals that come with the growing use of video in both contact centers and conferencing platforms.

For Umesh Sachdev, Uniphore co-founder, the two recent acquisitions “bring the Best of Breed and a simple way to put it together.” Combined with steady refinement of the rest of its portfolio of CSA resources, Uniphore expects to use the no code/low code development resources from Jacada to appeal to the community of power developers that are taking key roles in bringing RPA and CSA into the CX mainstream.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants