Voice-based Internet communications provider iBasis will bulk up its offerings and its customer base by acquiring PriceInteractive for about $100 million.

The acquisition gives iBasis access to PriceInteractive's speech-enabled Internet solutions and allows iBasis to expand those to a more global market, said Offer Gneezy, iBasis' president/CEO.

"With the acquisition, iBasis becomes the only company that can design, implement, host and deliver business-critical speech-enabled applications on the global scale," Gneezy said. "PriceInteractive's products and services give enterprises and service providers the ability to speech-enable business-critical customer-facing solutions such as e-commerce, call center, product and service information and customer care and other interactive applications."

The companies' technologies are synergistic, as is their combined vision, Gneezy continued. The merger, he added, expands that vision to a global marketplace.

"We aim to recreate the experience of the Web on the phone," he said, expanding it from 250 million PCs to 1.3 billion phones, he said. "We see a Web of corporate sites with e-commerce Web links and specialized services which can be offered over the phone on a global scale."

iBasis already has over 100 global carriers as customers, including Cable &Wireless, NTT, China Unicom and Telstra, he said. PriceInteractive adds such names as AT&T, WorldCom, Sprint, Verizon, Exxon/Mobile and Western Union to that base.

"PriceInteractive is an important component to the global spoken Web, speech-enabled service creation platform and the installed base of Fortune 500 and service providers," he concluded.