Genesys is working quickly to distance itself from its image as a solution for only the very large, sophisticated customer.

With its announcement today of mid-market-targeted Genesys One, Genesys continues to execute on its plan to have a portfolio that meets the needs of the broader contact center market. The company was sold to private equity in February 2012, and today's announcement marks the reborn Genesys's second product release targeted at the mid-market--the first being Genesys Connect for Service Cloud announced in September at DreamForce. Genesys is working--and working quickly--to distance itself from its image as a solution for only the very large, sophisticated customer.

Those that have followed Genesys and the contact center market for awhile may recall that Genesys announced a mid-market offer once before--Genesys Express in 2001. (One person who will certainly remember is John Hernandez, current GM for the contact center business at Cisco but at the time senior director for mid-market programs at Genesys.)

Genesys Express--and an IP version, Genesys Express IP Contact Center--was sold for several years, but was never as successful as Genesys had hoped. During a briefing, I asked CMO Nicolas de Kouchkovsky what makes Genesys One different. de Kouchkovsky ticked off several factors:

* Configurability: In the past 10-plus years, there have been significant changes to the Genesys application that allow Genesys One to be a configurable rather than customizable solution. Key to that is the Orchestration Server introduced with Genesys 8. While Genesys Express had elements of this, it may in fact have been too narrow, not allowing companies to tailor the solution well enough to their needs.

* Virtualization: For several contact center vendors, one of the benefits of application virtualization has been the ability to ease implementation complexity. Typically, contact center solutions include several different applications, some requiring separate servers. Virtualization allows these multiple applications to not only be delivered on a single appliance, but use common management tools.

* SIP: Genesys Express still required some heavy lifting (T-Servers) to connect to a customer's enterprise telephony infrastructure. Genesys One incorporates SIP Server in the same server as the contact center application.

* Fixed Price, 30 Day Installation: With Genesys One, a rapid software installer populates the foundation platform. Genesys estimates that this and other process improvements will reduce installation costs by two-thirds.

To these I will add one more difference--Genesys One is being released by a standalone Genesys. Genesys Express was released in the period when the company was owned by Alcatel-Lucent. Alcatel-Lucent had its own contact center portfolio, built to run on its PBX line, OmniPCX. Today's Genesys should be in a better position to dedicate the resources to Genesys One to make it succeed.