Cisco is acquiring customer experience management [CEM] provider CloudCherry in a deal to bolster its Contact Center portfolio.

CloudCherry is focused on predictive analytics that allows contact center workers to have additional insight into dealing with customers. It uses an open API platform that can ingest customer data, including records and transaction data, to provide a contact center with real-time recommendations on how it should interact with that customer.

“By applying predictive analytics, our customers can improve their customers’ journey, boost agent productivity, and improve customer experiences that create tangible business outcomes that can help drive true return on investment,” Vasili Triant, VP and GM for Cisco’s Contact Center Solutions, explained in a blog post.

The deal is expected to close during Cisco’s first fiscal quarter of 2020, which ends at the end of October. CloudCherry’s team will join Cisco’s Contact Center Solutions business.

Cisco has been an investor in CloudCherry, which has amassed $16 million in venture capital funding since its founding in 2014. That investment included two members of Cisco and its investment arm sitting on CloudCherry’s board of directors.

CloudCherry competes against firms like Qualtrics and Satmetrix. SAP acquired Qualtrics last November on the cusp of the latter moving toward a public offering. SAP is using that acquisition to power its Experience Management platform.

Cisco earlier this year infused cloud analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) into its contact center customer experience platform. This included access to its cloud analytics reporting service for on-premises contact centers; a cloud-based intelligent agent that listens to customer calls and can provide agents with contextual information; and an automated omni-channel customer self-service platform.

The company also spent $1.9 billion to acquire BroadSoft in 2017. That deal provided Cisco with a software-as-a-service [SaaS] portfolio of cloud-based unified communications, collaboration, and contact center software solutions and services. It also advanced Cisco’s push to move customers from perpetual to subscription software licenses and fit the company’s goal to transition from a hardware to a software company.

That initiative continues to gain traction as CEO Chuck Robbins noted during the company’s most recent earnings call that software subscriptions accounted for 70% of the its total software revenue, which was up 12 points year over year.