The Financial Times is reporting that Alcatel-Lucent has reached terms to sell Genesys, the contact center business that Alcatel bought in 1999. The buyer for Genesys is said to be Permira, the private equity firm that has been widely believed to be the leading contender to acquire some or all of ALU Enterprise.
FT is reporting that Permira may pay up to $1.5 billion for Genesys. Ironically, that's exactly the sum that Alcatel spent 12 years ago to buy the company, which at that time was a standalone firm.
It was initially reported that the ALU parent company would attempt to spin off the entire Enterprise unit, which includes PBX and other systems. But it now looks like that part of the business will remain with the parent company.
However, in what looks like an encouraging sign, FT's report states that, "Alcatel-Lucent is expected to invest further in this remaining part of the business, with hopes to extract higher margins from it." If true, that could actually provide ALU Enterprise's UC business with more stability than it would have had if it had languished on the acquisition block, its future uncertain.
However, there will be uncertainty about how the shearing off of the Genesys portfolio will affect ALU Enterprise's strategy for winning customers for next-gen Unified Communications. Most of the main competitors in this space--Avaya, Cisco, Siemens (but notably not Microsoft--have their own in-house contact center portfolios.
In fact, splitting off Genesys and selling it separately could make the future of that business more uncertain than it would have been had ALU Enterprise been sold off whole. That's especially true considering that Cisco claims to be making major gains in market share in the contact center market; in this article, John Hernandez of Cisco claims his company now has a 25% market share in contact centers, second only to Avaya and now surpassing Genesys.
If that's true, Genesys needs something to stay competitive with Cisco. Maybe returning to its heritage as a standalone vendor without ties to any single platform player may actually improve its chances by increasing its addressable market.
In any event, things seem to be finally moving on a story that's been percolating for several months now. More as things develop.
