Genesys
announced this morning the hiring of three new executives. The newly appointed Chief People Officer,
Eva Majercsik, comes with a strong enterprise software background after a career in human resources at HP, Microsoft, and IBM.
John Hernandez, most recently CEO of Selligent, joins as Genesys Engage senior vice president and general manager and
Raj Patel as senior vice president of cloud engineering and operations. Hernandez and Patel report to Barry O’Sullivan, executive vice president, and general manager for Genesys Multicloud Solutions.
To understand the portfolio implications of these hires, I spoke to O’Sullivan over Zoom. If you think the product story at Genesys is only about Genesys Cloud - the former PureCloud solution that runs on AWS that was initially built by Interactive Intelligence – keep reading.
Contact center industry followers will likely know that Hernandez spent 13 years at Cisco, running the contact center business unit for much of that time. But few will recall that it was O’Sullivan who brought Hernandez to Cisco in 2002 – from his position as a director of marketing for Genesys. During much of his tenure at Cisco, Hernandez reported to O’Sullivan in his role as general manager of the unified communications business unit.
What this divergence into career tracing tells me is that O’Sullivan has a very solid idea of the role that Hernandez can play at today’s Genesys. I asked him to share some of those thoughts. O’Sullivan began by saying that Genesys management is ambitious about the future expansion of the company. It, therefore, makes sense, he added, to bring talent in from the outside to grow the team.
Genesys CEO Tony Bates recently announced a vision around
Experience as a Service, which will enable organizations to achieve personalization at scale. Part of that vision is bringing together data from service, marketing, and sales. Since leaving Cisco, Hernandez has spent time at Salesforce as the chief operating officer of its Service Cloud business and most recently spent three years as CEO of marketing cloud company Selligent. It is that perspective that Hernandez brings to Genesys to inform the Experience as a Service initiative.
Patel will support another key 2020 Genesys initiative, multicloud, described in a
blog written by O’Sullivan in February. While Genesys Cloud remains an AWS offering, a Genesys Engage customer might prefer private cloud, different public clouds (e.g., Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud), or a hybrid approach. The path to that kind of flexibility is continuing to modernize and containerize the heritage Genesys Engage solution. O’Sullivan explained that Patel has, “a lot of experience, especially on Kubernetes and Azure, which is somewhat new for us. He'll be able to bring that expertise into the business.”
Like all businesses working in these uncertain pandemic-driven business conditions, O'Sullivan said that Genesys is prudent in its hiring. "But where we have opportunities to bring in top talent, we will." To me, that speaks to a business making long term decisions, not conceding to short term constraints.
