Twilio Beefs Up Contact Center Capabilities with Ytica Acquisition

Cloud communications platform Twilio is acquiring longtime partner Ytica, a small Czech software firm that sells tools for call centers.

Ytica provides contact-center reporting, speech analytics and workforce-optimization (WFO) software to enhance agent performance in the contact center, and offers businesses a unified view of the way they engage with their customers. The technology now will be available as a part of Twilio Flex, the company’s application platform for the contact center.

Financial terms of the transaction weren’t disclosed.

Twilio’s Patrick Kolencherry

Patrick Kolencherry, Twilio Flex’s senior product marketing manager, tells Channel Partners that Twilio’s ISV partners will be able to integrate Ytica’s WFO capabilities into their applications. In addition to integrating Ytica into Flex, Ytica will be available to customers and partners as a standalone product.

“For example, if one of our SaaS partners who has contact-center solutions built on Twilio wanted to add WFO capabilities to their solution, they could do that with Ytica,” he said. “Workforce optimization is critical to every company’s customer experience and, when executed effectively, can be a differentiator for savvy companies. By providing key insights into a business’ customer interactions, WFO has the potential to inform strategy for every function of the organization. Twilio now provides this opportunity to our customers and partners via Flex WFO, powered by Ytica.

“Those looking for a robust contact-center solution that works out of the box will find that with Flex and those that are looking to build from the ground up or add additional capabilities to existing applications are still able to do that with Twilio’s APIs,” Kolencherry said. “They will now have Ytica as one of those building blocks.”

“The Ytica team has been at the forefront of WFO for the last 20 years,” said Šimon Vostrý, Ytica’s CEO and co-founder. “We started Ytica to give contact centers complete visibility into their data, something unachieveable with prior solutions, allowing managers to make informed and actionable decisions. Our philosophy on the future of contact centers and the architecture to get there aligns perfectly with Flex.”

Twilio also announced a new office in Prague, the home of the Ytica team, and Twilio’s 17th global location.