Genesys Debuts New Cloud Branding

After several months working with Genesys’ new CEO, Tony Bates, I thought we were on the same page. I thought I understood how he intended to accelerate the company’s success in the cloud. But a blog he wrote today, "Genesys Cloud: The Way Forward, It Is," has proved me wrong. Turns out Bates is a Star Wars devotee and used several analogies and references to explain significant strategic and branding changes at Genesys. Having never seen a single Star Wars film, the allusions whizzed right over my head.

 

Kidding aside, the good news is that at its annual industry analyst meeting in Galway, Ireland, in December 2019, the Genesys executive team previewed the changes announced today. What I heard at that meeting, and read in this morning’s press release, provide the basis for this post.

 

The big branding news is that the “Pure” moniker is largely disappearing from usage going forward. PureCloud (the microservices-based solution built on Amazon Web Services) becomes Genesys Cloud. PureEngage (the original Genesys solution, available on premises or in the cloud) is now Genesys Engage.

 

PureConnect, the original Interactive Intelligence CIC (premises) and single tenant cloud (CaaS) solution remains, with the “Pure” name, but is not a strategic product moving forward. I say that because on the Genesys website, if you click on products, Genesys Cloud and Genesys Engage are listed. Note, however, that Genesys has neither discontinued the product nor announced its end of life, and existing PureConnect customers can continue to enhance their solutions by adding Genesys Cloud-based features. (And if you happen to need information on PureConnect, you can find it through the search capability on the Genesys site.)

 

I reached out to Genesys to ask why the decision to drop “Pure.” Genesys CMO Merijn te Booij replied: “Genesys Cloud is the primary destination for all customers to adopt new Genesys technologies faster. We purposely replaced the PureCloud name with Genesys Cloud to reflect that Genesys Cloud is for everyone. By creating and delivering all our new innovations in Genesys Cloud we’re enabling all our customers to adopt new Genesys technologies faster.”

 

Until now, PureCloud has been primarily marketed as a mid-sized contact center-as-a-service solution. The approach by Genesys when it acquired Interactive Intelligence three or so years ago, was to target PureCloud to the under 250 contact center seat market. Over time, especially in 2019, it became clear that both the product and the market were ready to deploy what is now Genesys Cloud in much larger operations. Under NDA, Genesys has described one customer using Genesys Cloud for almost 20,000 licenses and another almost 6,000 – both multi-region, global deployments. The re-naming, and the announcement at a company event this week, can be viewed as the debutante ball for Genesys Cloud as an enterprise-grade CCaaS solution.

 

Genesys also announced today that during first quarter 2020, it will make new usage-based pricing available. While Amazon Connect prices its service by the minute, Genesys uses the word “hours” in its press release.

 

Asked for clarification, Olivier Jouve, executive vice president and general manager of Genesys Cloud, responded, “We will add all of the minutes across all of the agents for a given customer, like a concurrent agent model. It will not be per agent, per hour.” 

 

Simplification is certainly a goal of the Genesys Cloud branding announced today. CEO Bates admitted to analysts in December that, coming from the outside, the collection of solutions — with repeated use of “Pure” and “Cloud” — was confusing to him when he arrived. But that simplification applies to products as well as branding. All new innovations will now be delivered exclusively via the Genesys Cloud platform — to existing customers of Genesys Cloud, Genesys Engage, and PureConnect.