Reading through the two press releases that were sent this morning by Genesys, I was reminded of Zeus Kerravala's post from earlier this week, Lotusphere 2009 Foreshadows the Death of Telephony. In it he said it is "becoming abundantly clear is that the expertise required to win in this market long term is in software integration and not in telephony expertise." Genesys, while not an IBM or Microsoft, has been waving that banner for over ten years.Genesys is now poised to be an important part of getting the rest of Alcatel-Lucent onboard, thanks to some interesting organizational changes announced by ALU at the end of 2008. The CEO and President of Genesys, Paul Segre, has been elevated within the Alcatel-Lucent ranks to Executive Vice President of the newly formed Applications Software Group (ASG.) ASG is an interesting new part of Alcatel-Lucent's organizational structure, on the same level as the Enterprise, Carrier and Services Product Groups.
Segre describes ASG's mission as "creating great communications experiences for people on any device and in any environment, working with a rich ecosystem of customers and partners." Perhaps more than anywhere else it is in working with partners, particularly systems integrators and carriers, that ALU can best learn from the success Genesys has enjoyed over the years. Bringing Genesys organizationally closer to ALU can only aid in the cross-pollination.
The acquisition announcements today reinforce that ALU CEO Ben Verwaayen is ready to spend money to continue to build the Applications Software Group. Of the two, most intriguing to me is the Conseros acquisition. Conseros developed and markets a solution called Global Task List that captures tasks, calculates task values, and distributes tasks. The press release points out that, "Conseros' application is complementary to and uniquely integrated with the Genesys Business Process Routing solution, and is already in use by several joint customers." One of the benefits of the Conseros application is that it decreases the amount of custom professional services investment and time necessary to move from concept to implementation.
The hype behind communications enabled business processes (CEBP) may have waned but the opportunity to use the core assets of the contact center to enable the queuing, routing and reporting of a broad array of customer service activities is alive and well. And Genesys, aided by this new Conseros technology, is forging ahead.
