On Monday, PGi announced their acquisition of TalkPoint. The terms of the acquisition were not stated in the press release, but since PGi is a public company, I would expect that they will have to disclose the terms in their regularly scheduled financial reports. According to the release, TalkPoint projects approximately $18 million (USD) in annual revenues this year.
I spoke with Sean O'Brien, the Executive Vice President of Strategy & Communications at PGi. As his biography puts it on the PGi site, "Mr. O'Brien is responsible for identifying, analyzing and completing corporate development opportunities, including strategic investments, mergers and acquisitions." So he was obviously a key player in making this deal happen.
According to Sean, there were some significant factors in choosing TalkPoint as the most attractive acquisition target. PGi was looking for a way to increase its reach into the enterprise webcasting market, and TalkPoint has a single-minded concentration on webcasting that is fairly unusual these days. Most web collaboration companies seem to split their efforts between peer-level small group conferencing, interactive webinars, and video webcasting. With TalkPoint, PGi gets an enterprise-ready webcasting solution that can scale to very large audience sizes.
PGi also wanted a company with a solid management and product team already in place. TalkPoint is going to continue operating as a self-contained, wholly-owned subsidiary. Existing TalkPoint customers will continue to work with the account manager, salesperson, or technical support people they are already familiar with. As Sean put it, "we don't want to introduce any new customer friction points for existing customers."
PGi plans to invest in the TalkPoint Convey technical platform, as well as adding to TalkPoint's headcount and expanding sales from TalkPoint's current heavy concentration on North America to PGi's much larger global audience of medium to large enterprise companies.
This acquisition makes sense to me. PGi already has solutions for small and mid-sized web meetings with its iMeet and GlobalMeet products. TalkPoint gives them a play in the substantially higher revenue potential of large enterprise webcasts. I wish both companies well.
