Intermedia, backed by private equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners, has acquired Telax, a Toronto-based cloud contact center as a service (CCaaS) software provider, the companies confirmed this morning. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Roughly 40 Telax employees, based in Toronto, have joined Intermedia. The Telax and Intermedia development teams are striving to update Intermedia’s customer and partner control panels to support the Telax CCaaS services, the companies say.
The deal highlights private equity's continued influence over MSP-friendly technology companies, particularly those that offer cloud-based, recurring revenue opportunities.
Intermedia, acquired by MDP in February 2017, has aggressively expanded beyond its hosted Microsoft Exchange heritage, and now offers a range of UCaaS (unified communications as a service) capabilities to MSPs and channel partners.
Intermedia's annual revenue, including Telax, is roughly $250 million. That's up from a $200 million annual run rate at the time of the MDP acquisition. EBITDA-related profit figures are undisclosed.
Intermedia Acquires Telax: Product and Service Strategy
The Telax deal empowers Intermedia partners with new revenue opportunities, the companies assert. In a prepared statement, Intermedia said:
"For partners, it means access to additional, significant recurring revenue streams through an integrated UCaaS/CCaaS solution or CCaaS standalone; solutions that share the same intuitive administrative point of control, 99.999% uptime SLA, full sales, marketing, training, billing, and taxation support, and J.D. Power-certified 24/7 technical assistance that Intermedia’s partners value today."
The Telax cloud contact center solution supports:
- interactive voice response (IVR);
- real-time dashboards and reporting; and
- call routing, agent scheduling, support quality assurance and more.
All of those services are delivered through an omni-channel solution that improves contact center productivity and customer outcomes, Telax asserts.
Intermedia Acquires Telax: Executive Perspectives
In a prepared statement, Intermedia CEO Michael Gold said:
“We are extremely pleased to welcome Telax into the Intermedia family. As Intermedia continues to accelerate its intent of being a single provider of highly-reliable, highly-supported, and exceptional cloud-based Unified Communications, Collaboration, and Contact Center solutions, Telax is a natural next step to advance that service model. Customers and partners will now have all of their business communication needs provided through one common, highly-reliable UCaaS and CCaaS platform. That means one provider, one intuitive point of control, one bill, and one support team…but not the unnecessary high cost and performance hassle that frequently comes from having two separate cloud solutions.”
Added Telax CEO Koray Parmaks:
“As our contact center solution has become a strategic asset at the heart of so many businesses, the thought of joining Intermedia to bring world-class customer engagement solutions to business customers and the partners that serve them is thrilling."
Private Equity Firms Influence CSPs, MSPs
Much like MDP's ownership of Intermedia, private equity firms have greatly influenced, shaped and grown a range of CSPs in recent years.
Among the deals ChannelE2E has tracked:
- April 2018: MDP acquired Remote DBA Experts (RDX), an MSP that provides remote database administration (DBA) and cloud managed services.
- May 2016: Great Hill Partners acquired Evolve IP, a CSP in Wayne, Pa.
- Multiple Deals: Private equity firms have also acquired multiple IT consulting firms in the cloud services market.
