As discussed in Part I, the transformation of Genesys can be seen to be taking place on both organizational and product levels. Future combination of the architectures of the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise and Genesys portfolios remains in the planning stages, with only a very preliminary look offered at the meeting last week. The product transformation that I refer to is Genesys' slow move beyond the contact center into the enterprise. This transformation began several years ago, was the impetus for the Conseros acquisition about a year ago and is for me the proof point that a Genesys/ALU Enterprise combination makes sense.The product at the center of this transformation is intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD), until 2009 branded Business Process Routing. Based on how it is marketed and the value customers place in it, one could easily categorize iWD as Communications Enabled-Business Processes (CEBP). The one difference between this CEBP solution and many that the industry have been discussing for years is iWD/BPR started bearing real revenue fruit in the past two years. While I can't disagree with Zeus Kerravala's No Jitter post, where he labels CEBP as one of the Not Hot technologies for 2010, there are exceptions to every rule and iWD would seem to be an exception.
Why am I focusing so much discussion on one solution? Because as I listened to over 12 hours of analyst meeting content, it was to me a repeated, and unifying, theme. It started with the CFO's comment that iWD has a dramatic pull-through effect in licenses for additional Genesys applications. Then the CMO remarked that 75% of iWD sales combine front and back office and one third of the contracts in 2009 were to accounts new to Genesys. And discussion of an iWD deployment of thousands of licenses to a "North American Big Box Retailer" that reportedly had "nothing to do with contact center."
All of this was capped off by the very last presentation of the meeting, a presentation by Bill Boga, Sr. Technology Architect of Kaplan, the education arm of the Washington Post. Boga could not have been more glowing in his praise of iWD, which he said is used to automate the prioritization and distribution of tasks to the most suitable advisor. Today, those are leads that are uploaded to iWD from the CRM system using web services between the two solutions. This allows Kaplan to automate adherence to a communication plan and end-to-end process. Though the iWD deployment is limited to certain departments today, Boga sees the applications for iWD in Admissions, Financial Aid, Student Accounts, Academic Advising, Help Desk, and Provisioning--none of which are traditional "contact center" applications.
In the broader scheme of communications-enabling applications at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Applications, Genesys' iWD may eventually play a minor role. But for now, it's helping generate the customer excitement and revenue in enterprise--versus contact center--applications that is certainly one of the goals of the Alcatel-Lucent/Genesys reorganization.
