On the first day of Dreamforce 2012, Genesys announced a new cloud-based contact center solution, Genesys Connect. Genesys is highlighting two attributes of the solution that it believes differentiates Genesys Connect from other contact center solutions that have created integrations with salesforce.com:
* Native integration with the Salesforce Service Cloud user interface and administrative environment. The combined solution provides an integrated user interface for agents and supervisors across the voice, social, web and mobile customer channels. Genesys Connect also leverages the Salesforce-built reporting capabilities, populating these reports with Genesys data and allowing the creation of reports that contain both case and call data.
* Genesys itself has long had CTI connectors for customers to use to integrate with Salesforce. Genesys Connect, while built on the full Genesys suite, introduces productized pre-defined templates for customer interaction routing. Genesys says that this moves the solution from being one that must be customized for each environment to one which only need be configured.
As part of the Genesys Connect announcement, the company revealed that it has established a Genesys Cloud Connect business unit, tasked with taking the solution to market. In the video interview below, I posed two questions to Genesys CMO Nicolas de Kouchkovsky about the new solution and the new business unit:
* Genesys has only been an independent entity for 7 or 8 months. This is a very full-featured tightly integrated solution that has been accomplished with salesforce.com. Had this work begun BEFORE 2012 and/or were many of the elements used to create the solution already part of the portfolio?
* This is the first offer of a new Genesys Cloud business unit. Why did Genesys decide to create a separate business unit to build and deploy cloud solutions?
In the past few years, we've seen several private equity plays in the communications and collaboration space. This announcement, and others that Genesys has on the short-term roadmap, help make the case that the carve-out from ALU has fulfilled the private equity promise--creating a more nimble, innovative and competitive Genesys.
