This is the second of three No Jitter posts devoted to the contact center market in Japan. They are highlights of meetings held in Tokyo with contact center infrastructure leaders that have offices there. Last week, we discussed Interactive Intelligence; this post will address Genesys and the last post will cover Avaya.
Genesys has been active in the Japanese market since 1997. Similar to Genesys' presence in other countries, in Japan it boasts most of the major banks, insurance companies, as well as several carriers as customers. One carrier customer is described by Genesys as having the largest contact center in the country, with over 15,000 seats.
My meeting was with Hideki Wachi, President of Genesys Japan, who has been with the firm for five years. He came to the company with earlier contact center experience--several years at Witness (now Verint) and Nuance. Like many in our industry, Wachi started his career at a carrier, Japan's KDD (now part of KDDI). This background is helpful not just in working with carrier customers but in helping Genesys build its cloud services approach in the country.
Hideki reports that in Japan as in the U.S., with many new deals, customers are asking for two proposals--one for traditional on-premises deployment and one with SaaS. Hideki's opinion is that, "Large banks will stay on-premises; insurance companies are looking at SaaS." The difference, he believes, is that insurance companies are facing more competition (from multi-national firms coming into Japan) and they believe cloud-based models may be more cost effective. Hideki believes that Japanese electronics manufacturers, also facing stiff competition, are also interested in exploring cloud options.
In August 2012, Genesys announced a hosted managed service provider agreement with KDDI. Hideki reports that the first customer is up and running on the KDDI service. The customer has deployed 500 seats, using Genesys SIP Server, an installation that is expected to double or even triple over time.
The deployment of a sizable Genesys SIP Server implementation is a great proof-point for Genesys in Japan as it attempts to turn current joint Avaya/Genesys customers into Genesys-only ones. As is true world-wide, there are a number of customers in Japan using Genesys in conjunction with Avaya enterprise telephony. The Genesys solution to oust Avaya from these joint accounts is SIP Server.
In the last installment of this series, we'll discuss Avaya's presence and approach to the Japanese market.
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