After the stock market closed today, Five9 announced the acquisition of intelligent virtual agent (IVA) company Inference Solutions. The purchase price is $172 million, $148 million in cash and $24 million when certain bookings targets are met. Inference brings 550 customers, among them several joint Five9 customers -- including Chick-fil-A and Wyndham Hotels. Inference was founded in 2005, spun out from Telstra Research Labs -- think of it as the Australian version of Bell Labs. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company has additional offices in Austin, TX and Melbourne, Australia.

Enterprises using Cisco's UC and CC offerings can upgrade their IVRs to Intelligent Virtual Agents without "ripping and replacing" existing software and equipment SAN FRANCISCO, CA – (September 17, 2019) – Inference Solutions, a global provider of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) for sales and service organizations, today launched new solutions that extend the self-service capabilities of Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM), Unified Contact Center Enterprise and Unified Contact Center Express (UCCE/X). Enterprises using these on-premise solutions can now easily upgrade their existing IVRs with cloud-based virtual agents powered by conversational AI. With Inference, IT organizations do not need to "rip and replace" their existing Cisco platforms to move their IVRs to the cloud. They can continue using UCM and UCCE/X while deploying cloud-based virtual agents managed by Inference, enjoying the benefits of an advanced self-service solution without installing the software, hardware or equipment required to run it. When organizations are ready to move their on-premise Cisco users to a cloud-based solution, their virtual agents will easily make that transition.