Welltel snaps up contact centre comms specialist in latest deal

22 Apr 2021

From left: Ross Murray of Welltel; Fergus Kelly of Capstone Intelligent Solutions; and John Quinn of Welltel. Image: Welltel

The Dublin-headquartered company is acquiring Capstone as part of its ‘buy-and-build’ strategy for growth.

Irish comms provider Welltel is growing its business again, this time acquiring the Irish and UK operations of Capstone Intelligent Solutions.

Capstone provides cloud contact centre services and designs, implements and manages unified communications solutions using voice, video, data, recording and customer interaction tools.

It supports more than 250,000 people in 327 sites across 38 countries, and its customers in Ireland include Three Ireland, AA and An Post Insurance. The company had turnover of €8.5m in its last financial year.

Dublin-headquartered Welltel is a growing end-to-end communications provider. It said that the Capstone acquisition would enhance its offering and enable it to deliver its comms and IT services on a larger scale.

One of Welltel’s areas of focus is call centres. Earlier this month, it signed a €4m deal to deploy technology from Portuguese company Talkdesk, which develops cloud services for customer support and call centres.

Capstone is headquartered in Sandyford, Co Dublin, and its 30 employees in Dublin and London will now join Welltel’s teams in Ireland and the UK. This will bring Welltel’s workforce to 150 people.

“The merging of our two companies will enhance our cloud contact centre and unified communications capabilities, and enable us to provide these services on a wider scale for customers, while maintaining our customer service ethos,” said Ross Murray, chief executive of Welltel.

“Capstone brings a loyal customer base and a highly skilled, specialist workforce built over a 10-year period to Welltel, and we look forward to continued expansion as a combined entity.”

Fergus Kelly, managing director of Capstone Intelligent Solutions, added that the integration would be a “natural fit” as the companies have complementary services and skillsets.

This is Welltel’s latest acquisition. The company has been expanding its reach over the last year, acquiring communications and connectivity solutions business Intellicom for €5.5m and Kildare-based IT service provider Novi for €3m.

John Quinn, executive chair of the business, said Welltel has an ongoing “buy-and-build strategy”.

“We are continuing to seek out great companies aligned with our business so that we can accelerate the growth of our Irish and European communications and IT services business,” he said.

Quinn added that the company plans to make more acquisitions this year.

Sarah Harford was sub-editor of Silicon Republic

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