Five9 Inc., a publicly traded provider of cloud services for running enterprise contact centers, today announced its first acquisition since 2013. 

The company is buying SpiderMonkey LLC, a small startup based out of the San Francisco Bay Area that does business as Whendu. It offers a tool that makes it easier to integrate an organization’s contact center systems with other internal infrastructure such as analytics tools. 

Enabling a collection of disjointed back-office applications to exchange data with one another could historically only be achieved by coding custom integrations. Whendu’s tool enables users to create integrations with considerably less effort in a point-and-click interface. The startup offers more than 50 pre-packaged connectors for cloud services such as Gmail, popular databases and other applications.

Whendu’s tool has a lot of potential uses. A company could, for instance, create an integration that exports support tickets from the help desk system to the data warehouse it uses to analyze customer satisfaction levels. Information technology departments, in turn, can connect to internal communications services such as PagerDuty to notify administrators when an urgent issue comes down the pipe. 

Five9 has high hopes for the Whendu acquisition. In the startup’s technology, the company sees a means of  tackling two technical challenges that are making it difficult for potential customers to switch to its cloud-based services from their legacy on-premises systems. 

“As enterprises transition from [on-]premises contact centers to the cloud, we’ve seen two problems arise,” said Five9 Chief Executive Officer Rowan Trollope (pictured). “First, difficulty migrating due to custom integrations and complex workflows tying contact centers to business systems. Second, as enterprises look to improve customer service, the resulting workflows are often complex and require custom development work. The acquisition of Whendu’s iPaaS platform solves both of these problems.”

Five9 didn’t announce the purchase price but said the deal will close this week. The acquisition represents something of a return to roots for Whendu CEO Ray Soto,  who was a member of the original founding team that established Five9 in 2001. His Whendu co-founders Gus Laredo and James Southworth were early employees at the company.

Trollope spoked appeared on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Enterprise Connect conference in March in Kissimmee, Florida, to talk about the company’s plans to add more personalization and data mining features to its contact center offerings:

Photo: SiliconANGLE