As Genesys held its 16th-annual industry analyst meeting last week, I couldn’t help but recall the first of these meetings back in 2003. By that time, the company had already moved from start-up to IPO to a purchase by Alcatel (which subsequently became Alcatel-Lucent), where it would stay until being sold in 2011 to private equity firm Permira.
While that sounds like a lot of change, as I perused the slide decks from that 2003 meeting, I was struck by the consistency of approach, message, and even leadership team between then and now. Paul Segre, who as CEO opened and closed this year’s meeting, was CTO back then. Here’s his closing slide from 2003:
The one phrase in the 2003 value proposition that doesn’t stand the test of time is “migration to an IP based infrastructure” -- since migration is now about moving to the cloud. However, the importance of a smooth transition remains.
We can use the slide below to quantify the status and opportunity of Genesys’ migration task. The company publicly states that it has more than 10,000 customers and shows here that roughly 1,900 of those are in the cloud. At approximately 19% cloud customers, Genesys’s figure dovetails with
MZA’s estimate of the portion and pace of the contact center embedded base that has moved to the cloud.
The subject of cloud brings me back to CEO Segre, who in his closing remarks at the 2018 event reiterated the key themes of Genesys’s approach to helping customers create great business outcomes.
Customer Journey Management
Customer journey management is an important Genesys direction, evidenced most recently by its
acquisition of Altocloud. This emphasis on the entire journey helps explain not only Genesys’s focus on marketing and sales uses case (in addition to customer service), but also why the company works with its customers to create contact centers that span business units, Segre said.
One of the key challenges of companies, particularly big companies, is managing -- and trying to unite -- the various silos of marketing, sales support, digital and voice channels, business units, and geographies that just don’t communicate well with one another, said Segre, noting that Genesys helps customers break down the silos. “We don't necessarily do it in a big bang, but we help them break those down.”
Cloud Mandate
One key piece of Genesys’s ability to help customers deliver great business outcomes is a strong belief that the best way to do that is in the cloud, Segre said. While he went on to say that he wouldn’t have made that statement a year ago, he said it can today with strong conviction. “The direction to our sales teams, and of our company is, number one, optimize the best business outcome. But we are cloud believers.”
Segre reinforced statements made earlier during the conference, specifically by
Peter Graf, chief product officer, that Genesys has invested a tremendous amount over the past five or six years to optimize its product line around cloud. The effort highlighted at this year’s conference is shown in the slide above as “Genesys Common Microservices.” This microservices approach homogenizes technology across the entire Genesys portfolio. New development is done in the form of common microservices and made available to the PureEngage, PureCloud, and PureConnect platforms. Artificial intelligence-powered automated forecasting and scheduling, delivered in Genesys’s Winter 2018 release, is an example of common microservices-delivered functionality -- across all three platforms.
Commitment to Premises Customers
As a final point, Segre said, “We are totally committed to our premises customers. We have customers that want to move quickly, and we have customers that aren't ready to move (to the cloud). We respect and will support all of them.”
Genesys has cloud-ready products that allow customers to migrate to the cloud when doing so is right for them, he said, telling the analysts that this commitment is something that Genesys customers truly value.
