More than once this year when a contact center company made an acquisition they said at some point during the discussion, "We're not done yet," meaning they expected to make additional acquisitions. By my recollection that includes Aspect, Avaya, and Genesys, each of whom has made acquisitions in 2013 specifically to bolster their cloud contact center offers.
Today it was Genesys announcing what may be their last such deal for a while, the planned acquisition of longtime partner EchoPass. (Terms of the deal were not included in the company announcement.) Established in 2000, Echopass started with Genesys technology and over the years has added both proprietary applications and non-Genesys components to build a solution that has been selected by Fortune 500 companies with impressively large contact centers.
Who are these customers? Echopass's most public reference has been Overstock.com, conveniently located in the same city as the initial EchoPass data center, Salt Lake City. Overstock.com has publicly stated, "Over the first five years of deployment, Overstock.com has saved a combined $26 million dollars with Echopass." Other customer names, while offered to analysts and prospects under signed NDA, remain designated by vertical only. One example is Large Insurance Company, described as having been an Echopass customer for four years with 8,000 agents that recently re-signed for three more years.
What are Genesys' plans for incorporating Echopass into the business? While CEO Paul Segre said on today's industry analyst call that it was premature to discuss the details of the integration that will take place, he offered some high level guidance:
* Echopass's sales/marketing staff will be merged into the corresponding groups in the Genesys Cloud organization headed by David Rennyson, former EVP of earlier Genesys acquisition Angel.
* Over time, the Angel, Soundbite and EchoPass brands will disappear in favor of one single Genesys brand.
* From a software perspective, the Genesys vision is to provide choice (cloud, CPE or hybrid) based on a common set of solutions, loosely described by Genesys CEO Segre as "Genesys 8 skinned for the customer." That "skinning" might entail ease of use for SMB customers or advanced customization and services options for sophisticated ones.
Segre believes that with Echopass and the existing Genesys assets, the company can support the needs of the majority of contact center customers. They will lead with cloud offers based on Soundbite's solutions for SMB, offer cloud and premises solutions to the mid-market--based on Genesys One--and provide both cloud and CPE alternatives to the larger and very large customer, based on Genesys 8 and Echopass.
There's a good bit of execution and channel management ahead, but if one compares where the company is today with a year ago, significant progress has been made toward their goal of establishing Genesys as the leading contact center solution provider--not just for those needing large, sophisticated solutions but for small and mid-sized customers needing simpler ones as well.
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