Unified Communications Featured Article

Firstcom Europe Buys Difference Corp.

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

Firstcom Europe is at it again.

The company – which previously bought six companies in Denmark, Germany, Poland, Sweden, and the U.K. – has snapped up Difference Corp. This deal, Firstcom Europe says, will catapult its revenues beyond €5.6 million.

Firstcom Europe offers cloud-based telecommunications solutions. That includes connectivity services, hosted telephony/unified communications as a service, and SIP trunking.

The company got its start selling SIP telephony services beginning in 2004. Among its other acquisitions were its purchase of Teleforte in 2014 and of

Connection A/S in 2015.

U.K.-based Difference Corp. provides cloud-based contact center offerings. That includes automation services, collaboration, dialer technology, email and SMS management, and inbound call handling.

Contact centers traditionally have been seen as unique and separate operations within enterprises that called for their own communications solutions. But today more and more unified communications and collaboration solution providers and their customers now see the value of support general enterprise communications and collaboration, and contact center-specific interactions, on the same platform. And some are actually bringing all that together.

This ties into the trends of eliminating departmental silos within enterprise organizations. And it enables contact centers to leverage the expertise of enterprise professionals who are not part of their department but can help improve business outcomes and customer experiences.

Bringing contact center functionality under the enterprise communications umbrella highlights the importance of customer service today. And it’s illustrative of the trend that the contact center is transitioning from a cost center to a revenue center.