Cisco To Acquire SaaS Startup CloudCherry By 2020

Cisco has announced that it will acquire customer experience management (CEM) company CloudCherry. The acquisition is expected to close by the first quarter of FY2020.

After the completion of the transaction, the CloudCherry team will join Cisco’s Contact Center Solutions business, which is led by Cisco vice president Vasilli Triant. Until then both the firms will work as separate entities.

“We’re thrilled to add CloudCherry’s market-leading customer experience management technology to our collaboration portfolio,” said Triant.

“This is the next step in realizing our vision for cognitive collaboration in the contact centre, enabling the delivery of the best, most personalized customer experiences, ultimately improving customer loyalty and lifetime value,” he added.

Founded by Vinod Muthukrishnana, US and Bengaluru-based CloudCherry work with global enterprise clients offering SaaS tools to enhance customer interaction and experience on websites. Its software solution includes customer journey mapping, out-of-the-box integrations and predictive analytics, which it claims improves sales outcomes and directly impacts revenue.

Last September, Cloudcherry raised $9 Mn in an extended Series A funding round led by the US-based Pelion Venture Partners, an early stage venture capital firm. Prior to this funding round, CloudCherry raised $7 Mn in two rounds: $6 Mn (INR 40 Cr) from Vertex Ventures, IDG Ventures and Cisco Investments in September 2016; and  $1 Mn (INR 6 Cr) from The Chennai Angels (TCA) and IDG Ventures India in July 2015.

Cisco believes CloudCherry’s predictive analytics will help its contact center agents with upselling and cross selling of products, discounts, service modifications and improve retention and loyalty.

Cisco said its customers would get a better understanding and a “comprehensive view of customer touchpoints across disconnected departments, systems, and channels (voice, email, text, chat, and social media)”. This would be backed by real-time, actionable insights “across the full enterprise customer journey,” thanks to predictive analytics.

According to DataLabs by Inc42, between January 2014 and June 2018, Indian SaaS startups raised $2.79 Bn across 520 deals, and enterprise tech remains one of the key strengths in the Indian startup ecosystem. The market is expected to reach $1 Bn by 2020. The Indian SaaS/enterprise software market currently accounts for 9% of all software sales. It is expected to cross $50 Bn in the next 7 years, according to a report by Google and Accel Partners in 2016.