Top Contact Center Stories of 2017: Page 11 of 12

Executive Changes

When two contact center market leaders assessed new executive talent in 2017, they chose executives with AI experience:

• In July, Genesys brought in Olivier Jouve as EVP at Genesys PureCloud. Given that former Interactive Intelligence CEO Don Brown was also essentially the CTO that drove PureCloud development, Genesys needed to find an executive that could not only pick up where Brown left off but create a vision for PureCloud's future that mapped with the broader Genesys strategy.

  Prior to Genesys, Jouve spend 18 months as VP, Watson IoT Connected Operations, at IBM. Before that, at IBM Analytics, he was a director for product management and strategy. Analytics, IoT, and Watson are three areas of strength for Jouve that map well to Genesys' AI plans. In November, Genesys announced integration of PureCloud with Amazon Lex.

• As the year closed, Avaya hired Mercer Rowe in the new role of SVP and GM, cloud. The level of the title signals Avaya's intention to come out of the gate in 2018 with an expanded focus on cloud.

  Like Jouve, Rowe's last position was with IBM Watson, as VP, strategic partners, Watson, and cloud platform. With IBM just two years, Rowe spent seven years before that with VMware, most recently as CEO of VMware vCloud Service G.K., a joint venture between VMware and SoftBank formed to bring VMware vCloud Air into the Japanese market.