ThinkingPhones, Arkadin Make Key Acquisitions

**Editor’s Note: Please click here for a recap of the biggest channel-impacting mergers in Q4 2014.**

Two acquisitions with a potential channel impact were announced on Wednesday.

The first involves ThinkingPhones, the UC-as-a-service company, which said it’s buying Contactive, which uses big data to connect online social profiles and identities with a telephone number. Think of it as caller ID on a grand scale.

Klink, Contactive’s enterprise offering, provides in-depth customer profiles in real-time before and during calls. It indexes and consolidates billions of data points, automating the process of using search engines to connect phone numbers and names, scanning public directories and sifting through multiple social network updates. Users get to see details such as photo, name, email address, location, occupation and tweets associated with a single phone number. Klink integrates with CRM software, company databases and more with the goal of increasing productivity.

Combined, Contactive and Klink have more than 1.5 million users, enhancing more than 600 million telephone numbers.

The companies say the deal will close the gap between big data and telephone communications.

“By joining ThinkingPhones, we will be incorporating our big­ data know­-how into ThinkingPhones’ unified communications platform to offer a combined product that delivers on the promise of making enterprise communications more intelligent and effective,” said Iñaki Berenguer, CEO of Contactive and Klink. “Delivering contextual communication is going to truly move the needle for business communications as a whole, and we are thrilled to be a part of the movement.”

ThinkingPhones didn’t reveal the purchase price, but some of the financing came from its recent $57 million funding round that closed in December.

Calling its relationship with partners a “match made in the cloud,” ThinkingPhones offers its partners a cloud-based solution that they can sell to midsize businesses and large enterprises.

Meantime, Arkadin, the UC and collaboration provider owned by NTT Communications, is making a play in Latin America. The company is acquiring T-Uno, a conferencing and collaboration vendor in Colombia that sells to governments, businesses and educational markets.

Why Colombia? Wainhouse Research predicts a 31 percent increase in demand for collaboration services in the South American country over the next five years. Arkadin and T-Uno – which is No. 1 in that market – share a similar set of cloud-based collaboration services, making the two a good fit for a merger.

“This is a highly strategic acquisition that will pave the way to do business in Colombia and accelerate our Latin American expansion overall,” says Thomas Valantin, Arkadin managing director, Latin America. “T-Uno has an excellent reputation as one of the only pure collaboration service providers in the region. Our mutual vision for product and service excellence in this fast growing market, which is increasingly attracting global companies, provides unlimited potential.”

Arkadin already had Latin American operations in Brazil and Mexico. Financial terms of this deal also were not disclosed.

Arkadin sells it complete line of video, audio, Web and UC services through its channel, promising its partners a dedicated management team, competitive commissions and quick implementations.

Follow senior online managing editor @Craig_Galbraith on Twitter.