Urban Airship Acquires Accengage to Advance Digital Customer Engagement

As part of an effort to enable organizations to send notifications on a global basis, Urban Airship today announced it has acquired Accengage, a provider of a rival notification platform that operates mainly in Europe.

Urban Airship CEO Brett Caine says combining both platforms will make it simpler for organizations to manage digital customer engagement on a global basis at a time when customers are more mobile than ever. Regardless of where a customer may be physically located, organizations will be able to leverage the combined platform to not only potentially engage customers in new regions, but also as they travel across regions.

Caine notes that the combined companies expected to be able to unify their two platforms relatively quickly because they were both built using the same programming language and run on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

In addition, Accengage will advance the localization efforts of Urban Airship, while Urban Airship will make investments it’s been making in the realms of Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning available to Accengage customers, says Caine.

“We use machine learning to determine when the best time to send a message to a customer is,” says Caine.

Collectively, Caine says, the combined company will soon be sending over 90 billion messages per month worldwide via voice, email, text, mobile apps and social media. Accengage currently sends over 10 billion messages a month to over 900 million end users.

Given the fact that most organizations tend to start with digital notifications as they begin to embrace digital business transformation, it’s clear that most organizations will soon need to significantly increase the volumes of notifications they send. The art of sending those messages, however, is to make sure the content remains as relevant as possible because the line between what’s considered a useful alert and a new form of spam is very fine indeed.