Last week's ALU Enterprise analyst event was both the ninth consecutive and the very first gathering of its kind. It was the ninth from the perspective of the contact center analyst community, who has gathered in Northern California in January since 2003 to spend 2 days hearing the latest on product, marketing and sales from the Genesys team. It was the first meeting that combined content from the ALU enterprise contact center, communications and network infrastructure businesses.
Some things were comfortingly the same. VP of Marketing Strategy Joe Heinen has been the host of each of the previous sessions and added a strong sense of continuity. The tradition of Breakfast with the Field, a favorite session among analysts, opened the second day of the conference as it had in years past. Executives representing each of ALU's geographic sales regions (Americas, EMEA and Asia Pac) spoke candidly about the high and lows of 2010*, providing color on successes and disappointments at a country and product level.
Continued success with Genesys intelligence Workload Distribution (iWD) across all three regions was not surprising. But activity in all three regions with Genesys Social Engagement solutions was new news. Ahead of a formal launch of the Genesys productized solution for social media in the contact center (due for February), Genesys made the solution available in December in order to capitalize on some specific sales opportunities. One such reference, outsourcer Entel of Chile, was the first Americas sale. Look forward to hearing more about Entel and other references when Genesys' Lisa Abbot joins me for an Enterprise Connect session, Socialize Your Contact Center for Greater Customer Engagement.
What was different at this meeting? There were twice as many analysts, as ALU added those covering enterprise telephony and data solutions to the legacy contact center group. This also meant breakout sessions for those with different interests, while in the past there was just one session at any given time.
I'll admit to missing the intimacy of just 15-20 contact center colleagues. But with the 2010 organizational merging of Genesys and ALU Enterprise, as well as several Genesys technology components finding their way into the ALU Converged Architecture, e.g., SIP Server and Conversation Manager, one meeting is certainly the right answer.
I'll leave it to others to take the first stabs at evaluating ALU's OpenTouch announcement. As was true with Avaya Aura in 2009, I believe it will take several briefings for me to feel completely comfortable being able to articulate ALU's OpenTouch strategy.
* ALU Enterprise's CFO Remi Thomas was present to ensure that any performance statistics referred only to results for the first 3 quarters, as ALU is in its quiet period before the 2010 earnings announcement February 10.
