Many Gloucestershire businesses have embraced videoconferencing and now popular platform Zoom has bought Five9, a leading cloud-based call centre software company, in a multibillion-pound deal, signalling a future direction.

Zoom, founded in 2011, has become a household name in the last 18 months, during lockdowns, as more business moved online.

The deal, valued at approximately £10.7 billion ($14.7 billion), is expected to expand Zoom's market among business customers and indicates a bet on home-working being here to stay.

The company announced first quarter income of £698 million, up a staggering 191% over the year. It had 497,000 customers worldwide with more than ten employees.

Five9 is a pioneer of cloud-based contact centre software, founded in 2001. Its highly scalable and secure cloud contact centre delivers a suite of easy-to-use applications that allows management and optimisation of customer interactions across different channels.

Eric Yuan, chief executive officer and founder of Zoom said: "We are continuously looking for ways to enhance our platform, and the addition of Five9 is a natural fit that will deliver even more happiness and value to our customers.

"Zoom is built on a core belief that robust and reliable communications technology enables interactions that build greater empathy and trust, and we believe that holds particularly true for customer engagement.

"Enterprises communicate with their customers primarily through the contact centre, and we believe this acquisition creates a leading customer engagement platform that will help redefine how companies of all sizes connect with their customers.

"We are thrilled to join forces with the Five9 team, and I look forward to welcoming them to the Zoom family."

Rowan Trollope, chief executive officer of American-based Five9 said: "Businesses spend significant resources annually on their contact centres, but still struggle to deliver a seamless experience for their customers.

"It has always been Five9's mission to make it easy for businesses to fix that problem and engage with their customers in a more meaningful and efficient way.

"Joining forces with Zoom will provide Five9's business customers access to best-of-breed solutions, particularly Zoom Phone, that will enable them to realize more value and deliver real results for their business. This, combined with Zoom's 'ease-of use' philosophy and broad communication portfolio, will truly enable customers to engage via their preferred channel of choice."

Zoom's acquisition of Five9 complements the growing popularity of its Zoom Phone. This is a cloud phone system that offers a digital alternative to legacy phone offerings.

The combination also offers both companies significant cross-selling opportunities to each other's respective customer bases. As a result of the acquisition, Zoom hopes to play an even greater role in driving the digital future and linking companies with their customers.

Following the close of the transaction, Five9 will be an operating unit of Zoom and Rowan Trollope will become a President of Zoom and continue as CEO of Five9, reporting to Eric Yuan.

The Boards of Directors of Zoom and Five9 have approved the transaction. Goldman Sachs is serving as exclusive financial advisor to Zoom.

Last month, Zoom acquired German firm Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions (Kites), a start-up founded in 2015 with academic roots with Karlsruhe Institute of Technology dedicated to developing real-time Machine Translation solutions.