ThinkingPhones Acquires Fuze to Enhance UCaaS Experiences
ThinkingPhones recently announced the acquisition of Fuze, a cloud-based video conferencing company. This acquisition marks the third for ThinkingPhones this year, as it expands platforms to enable a “mobile workforce to conduct business anytime, anywhere.”
“The acquisition of Fuze marks an important investment in our vision for unifying communication in the enterprise, as well as in the success of our customers who have come to expect unparalleled user experiences that drive engagement,” said Steve Kokinos, Co-Founder and CEO of ThinkingPhones. “These same customers need to have the ability to communicate seamlessly from any device or location, with reliable quality every time.”
ThinkingPhones began building an all-in-one application for business productivity through it 2014 acquisitions, starting with Contractive. Optimizing business communications, Contractive became more efficient with the addition of Whaleback, as ThinkingPhones made a second acquisition to provide managed cloud-based services for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Together, they built a suite of analytics-driven solutions that embrace real-time collaboration.
The combined company has respectively won industry recognition with ThinkingPhones winning awards for its “Leadership” and “Vision,” while being named a Frost & Sullivan (News – Alert) UCaaS “Company of the Year.” Fuze, for its part adds HD-quality and video conferencing options for consumption through multi-platform delivery and already has over 100K users globally.
“We are excited to scale our world class video conferencing experience as part of the ThinkingPhones suite of UCaaS services,” said Charlie Newark-French, President of Fuze. “ThinkingPhones has a proven track record of growth and innovation. With our combined resources, Fuze for ThinkingPhones will have the ability to deliver what distributed teams need most: a platform that allows them to collaborate however they want, from voice to text to meetings.”
Integrating acquired technologies into ThinkingPhones business solution will allow for a top-of-the-line business application that will unify technologies into one single platform. Because a new app design won’t launch until 2016, ThinkingPhones has enough time to outdo the recent integrations partnership between UberConference, HipChat and Slack, which ties similar features for a competitive atmosphere.
“The Fuze team has built a powerful video conferencing platform utilized by more than 6.5 million users,” states Derek Yoo, Co-Founder and CTO of ThinkingPhones. “Together, we share the goal of enabling today’s knowledge workers by reimagining and streamlining communications and collaboration, all with a focus on the end user experience.”
As noted in the announcement, having a comprehensive UCaaS portfolio is important for achieving success in a large and growing global market which Transparency Market Research has forecast will reach upwards of $37B in 2022, while the video conferencing arena reaches $6.5B in 2020 and web conferencing markets reach $2.88B by 2017.