Zoom won’t buy call center software maker Five9 after all

Zoom is not going to acquire Call center software developer Five9 after all. The acquisition was announced in July, but not enough Five9 shareholders voted in favor of the acquisition. The two companies therefore decided to stop the acquisition.

Five9 and Zoom will continue to work together as they have already done, but Five9 remains an independent company. Zoom says it wanted to acquire Five9 so that the company could offer Zoom customers an “integrated call center service.” Five9 was not the only possibility to offer such a service, according to Zoom; Zoom therefore still wants to introduce a call center system with video calling at the beginning of 2022.

The acquisition should have been Zoom’s largest acquisition to date, at a cost of 14.7 billion euros. TechCrunch notes that Zoom announced last week that the US Department of Justice has launched an investigation into possible security risks due to the company’s alleged ties to China. Zoom founder Eric Yuan was born in China and migrated to the United States in 1997 when he was 27 years old. Partly because of that research, Zoom’s shares fell in price, while the company Five9 wanted to pay with shares. This probably played a role in the choice of Five9 shareholders to let the deal fall through.