The $1 billion deal was announced at the beginning of the month.  James Foy told Service Management 365 that he recognised that customers are always concerned when there are mergers that management will cut resource and spend too much time merging businesses than serving customers.   ‘Everything we do is about delivering value to customers, he said – several times - during in the interview.  ‘This acquisition is another incremental step in our announced strategy of providing the most complete, unified, contact centre solution in the market.    We do not have a consolidation plan to shake down the industry and be the last one standing.’

He said the company had undertaken a number of takeovers over the last three years and that the management had ‘met its financial objectives while digesting acquisitions.’  Recent deals include CenterForce, Melita, Positive Software and Rockwell FirstPoint. Aspect brings call centre workforce management application and performance analytics to the party as well as duplicating some automatic call distribution technology.   Privately-owned Concerto was created by the merger of outbound call centre solutions developer Davox and contact centre suite provider Cellit in 2002.

Foy said: ‘We will continue to support and develop these platforms including Aspect.’  He acknowledged there was always some product and resource duplication ‘when bringing theses sorts of companies together.’  He added: ‘But we will confront that head on and solve it but the support organisation is not one of those areas.  Our engineering support capability will not see any substantial changes.’  

That capability represents about half of the company’s employees and Foy estimates that 80% of the company’s revenue is from repeat business.

He added that the company will ‘increase substantially’ its current spend on research and development.  ‘We want to be at the leading edge,’ he said.