Many small companies dream of being acquired, but acquisitions can be tough. They are generally more complex than expected and often fail. At Enterprise Connect 2022, Google launched an end-to-end, modular CX solution featuring CCAI, GCP, ChromeOS, and the new UJET-powered Contact Center AI Platform (CCAIP), a full omnichannel CCaaS.
This partnership, where the search giant made the UJET offering the centerpiece of its CX strategy, has been a success for both companies. In this post, I want to focus on how UJET reaps the benefits of being acquired even though (so far) it hasn’t been.
Mergers and acquisitions are common in enterprise comms. Every December, I post thoughts on the most significant deals of the year (2023 version). This post isn’t about an acquisition, and that’s the point. There are other options, and not being acquired has some benefits to both companies.
Partnerships seem more difficult in enterprise communications. As communications technologies evolve, especially in cloud-delivered services, partners tend to become competitors. However, this Google-UJET partnership seems solid and highly complementary. CCaaS is very specialized, and Google benefits from a highly focused and capable engineering team, while UJET benefits from Google’s global brand recognition and broad portfolio.
UJET was created in 2015 and set out to modernize customer service. Its hook was a mobile SDK that would enable contextual, multimodal interactions. The CX industry was largely created decades earlier and designed around toll-free, analog services. UJET wanted to build a contact center that assumed mobile devices, which unlocks many (device, network, and channel) capabilities.
While many CCaaS providers offer mobile and web SDKs, UJET makes them central to its strategy. Mobile phones can pass richer information than analog lines. We should know who the customer is, simplify caller verification, better leverage contextual clues as to why they are calling (or where in the app or web page they initiate the interaction), and more.
This approach caught Google’s attention. In 2018, Google Ventures led a Series B funding round for UJET. Google was actively complementing contact centers with its CCAI offering and cloud compute services. Later, it launched its Chrome Recommended program that positioned ChromeOS and Chromebooks for agent desktops. But these were all complementary plays to a contact center core, which Google didn’t have.
Then came the pandemic. The world went remote, and the contact center became critical to many businesses. Contact centers allowed customers to interact with businesses remotely and could be staffed with remote agents. The pandemic accelerated the progression of doing more commerce and service remotely.
Digitalization spread like a virus [sic]. Shopping, banking, healthcare, and so much more became digital experiences, and more importantly, these online experiences became normal — even expected. I just renewed my driver's license online, deprived of the wait-in-line routine at the DMV for the first time.
The pandemic created significant growth for some companies. UJET helped Instacart scale to 28K users in 3 weeks. It was a great confirmation of the strategy as Instacart is a mobile-first company.
At Enterprise Connect 2022, UJET was the first vendor to be selected for Best of Show and the Innovation Showcase. It has never happened before because Best of Show tends to go to established exhibitors, and Innovation Showcase is limited to new exhibitors. This is the same year that Google announced CCAIP on the keynote stage as a unified, AI-first, CCaaS solution.
In 2023, a perfect storm was created as generative AI joined mobile, cloud, and omnichannel as drivers for contact center upgrades. The UJET-Google partnership brought together legacy AI and generative AI (see this post), strong enterprise demand for upgrades and modernization, and Google Cloud compute infrastructure. To simplify the go-to-market, about 200 UJET employees became members of Google’s extended team, including a Google.com email address.
There is no question that the hyperscalers are coming for CCaaS. AWS built its own solution for CCaaS, which has transitioned into Amazon Connect, an AWS service. Like Google, it can offer customers a combination of cloud compute and CCaaS services. However, AWS doesn’t have an office productivity suite, its own desktops, or UCaaS.
This year Microsoft launched its own CCaaS. This will likely become a strong contender in the CCaaS space, but for now it’s a first-generation CCaaS solution. UJET and Google have a ten-year head start. Also this year, Google approved the use of CCAIP for its internal contact centers — previously, like Amazon, internal contact centers were limited to a home-grown CCaaS application.
Many now consider the contact center as the gateway for enterprises to embrace generative AI, and generative AI is a big priority at Google. Google is the only generative AI leader with its own, direct CCaaS offering.
The results of two years of nonacquisition have been impressive. UJET claims it saw 40% growth in 2023. That’s well above the average for CCaaS, where layoffs were common, and some providers discontinued products. UJET and Google claim the pair have won multiple 10K+ agent deals.
Google has also provided UJET faster exposure to customer requirements and co-develops product enhancements with UJET. These enhancements are available to UJET too as the CCaaS solution has a common codebase. Both products offer multi-region failover. The Google version can be packaged to support failover across Google Cloud regions. The UJET offer can be configured to failover between Google and AWS regions.
This is a great example of a nonacquisitive partnership that worked. Google has benefited from UJET’s industry knowledge and mobile first CX technology, and UJET benefited from their Google’s leadership in AI and brand power.
UJET has two sales motions: its own direct sales, and Google has been building its teams of sales and support specialists. UJET remains nimble, small, and agile – and happy to work with customers of any size through their preferred channel.
Nonacquisition is a difficult strategy to implement as it inherently requires two committed firms, but these companies deserve recognition for their success. The best part for UJET is that nonacquisition didn’t close the door to acquisition. Be it Google or a different firm, UJET is still single.
Dave Michels is a contributing editor and Analyst at TalkingPointz.
