Aspect and Concerto tie the knot

Contact centre vendors Aspect and Concerto have agreed to merge

Contact centre vendors Aspect and Concerto have agreed to merge, with Concerto’s two main investors, Golden Gate Capital and Oak Investment Partners, to buy out Aspect’s shareholders for $1bn.

Brian Gentile, senior vice-president and chief marketing officer at Aspect Communications, said the deal would give the new company more global scope and bring the two firms’ applications to new customers.

“Global presence really matters when it comes to call centre products and services,” Gentile said. He also admitted that there were a few ‘minimal’ overlaps between the two vendor’s product ranges.

Concerto sells predictive dialers and unified contact centre systems, while Aspect sells workforce management applications and performance analytics. Both firms offer voice over IP-based automatic call distributors (ACDs).

Senior Datamonitor analyst Robin Goad said: “This makes the combined firm the second largest contact centre vendor after Avaya. They have a problem on their hands however, in that there is a lot of technology replication. The firms have three outbound dialers and two hardware ACDs, for example.”