Contact: Scott Denne
Genesys’ $1.4bn purchase of fellow contact-center software vendor Interactive Intelligence wraps up a busy August for private equity (PE). This month, PE firms and the companies they own, like Genesys, have racked up $14.5bn in deal value – almost half of August’s total tech M&A, according to 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase.
Today’s transaction values Interactive at 3.3x trailing revenue. That’s a bit lower than the 4x multiple in both NICE’s acquisition of Interactive’s SaaS rival inContact earlier this summer and Genesys’ own $3.8bn post-money valuation on a minority investment from Hellman & Friedman last month. (That deal left a majority stake in the hands of Genesys’ earlier owners, Permira and Technology Crossover Ventures.) Interactive’s 14% revenue growth, compared with inContact’s 25%, accounts for much of the difference.
Genesys has recently set its sights on expanding beyond call-center software into broader customer experience applications to increase its single-digit annual growth. Yet today’s move is more of a consolidation play. It does, however, bring Genesys an asset whose SaaS business is growing – that product grew its revenue 43% year over year to $31m last quarter, accounting for about one-third of Interactive’s sales. Genesys also obtains a team that can help it target smaller customers – Interactive’s average revenue per customer is less than half of what Genesys takes in.
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