CoreDial Nets Voice4Net

So far, 2018 has been the “Year of Acquisitions” in the business communications arena, with the latest being CoreDial’s acquisition of contact center vendor Voice4Net.

There are many reasons why a company might make an acquisition – to gain market share and the acquiree’s installed base, to remove a competitor from the market, to add technology or functionality that is missing, or to address a different market segment. In the case of UCaaS provider CoreDial, it acquired Voice4Net to add contact center functionality to its portfolio to provide a more complete cloud offering for its customers, while enabling its channel partners to pursue larger deployments. 

CoreDial offers a variety of cloud services, including hosted PBX solutions, VoIP, SIP Trunking and UCaaS, targeted at SMBs with 25-500 employees. The company has an installed base of 290,000 seats, with 20,000 end customers served by more than 800 channel partners. CoreDial sells exclusively through the channel, working with Managed Service Providers (MSPs), VARs, and ITSPs. The company touts its private label program that lets partners resell the service under their own brand.

The Voice4Net acquisition is intended to help its channel partners deliver a more complete solution. As Ken Lienemann, CoreDial Chief Revenue Officer, told a group of industry analysts, “Our channel partners have pent up demand for a contact center solution,” adding that having contact center functionality creates stickiness for the channel, as well as upsell opportunities, and an expanded addressable market.

CoreDial notes that 40% of its partners sell contact center solutions from competitors or third parties as agents and resellers, making 15-20 points of margin, adding, “We want to flip this and provide a total solution for partners and customers. Instead of being an agent for a cloud vendor, our partners can be more profitable by selling a complete CoreDial solution and make up to 40 or 50 margin points on the contact center piece.” In addition, CoreDial can now control its contact center roadmap instead of relying on a third party.

For those of you not familiar with Voice4Net, it was established in 1996 and offers omnichannel customer engagement technology that can be deployed on prem, in the cloud, or in a hybrid model. The company was an early adopter of WebRTC-based solutions, and has integrations with Mitel, Avaya, ShoreTel, Cisco, Genband, and Salesforce. Rick McFarland, chief executive officer of Voice4Net, is now the VP Contact Center Solutions at CoreDial. Many of us following the contact center space have known Rick for several years and think very highly of him, and know that he’s a very forward thinker and will be a great asset to CoreDial.

Voice4Net’s omnichannel offerings feature SMS, speech recognition, mobile engagement, and include:

• CCHD - Contact Center HD to manage multimedia environments
• SPPS - Screen Pop Pro Server 
• IVR and IVR Survey System
• EBS - Event Broadcasting Systems
• PDS – Dialing Solutions
• CBIQ – Call Back in Queue
• PVR – Professional Voice Recording

Voice4Net also has horizontal and vertical solutions, which CoreDial plans to leverage.

The Voice4Net acquisition is part of a complete UC strategy under a new, yet-to-be-announced brand. Voice4Net’s offerings will be pre-integrated with the CoreDial solution, and will also be available as a standalone product to work with third-party PBXs and cloud services.

As UCaaS providers continue to compete in a challenging market, and as businesses look for total solutions from a single provider, it becomes more and more important that vendors have a complete solution, which increasingly includes contact center capabilities. With the acquisition of Voice4Net, CoreDial now has a fully-featured contact center offering that will appeal to both customers and partners.