Ventana Research Analyst Perspectives

The first positive signs for the “the new Genesys” emerged just 100 days after its sale by Alcatel was completed last year, and those positive signs have continued. The company has not only maintained strong development of its core products but has also made an aggressive move into the contact center mid-market, the contact center in the cloud market, and the multichannel communications management market. It strengthens its position now with the announcement of its acquisition of Angel.com.

During a recent analysts briefing, Genesys CEO Paul Serge explained that the acquisition will not only add considerable revenues but will help drive growth in three areas:

• Angel.com is already an experienced vendor in the cloud, so it will give the company new expertise and skills (marketing, sales, delivery and support) to support more cloud-based services. It also has more experience of developing pre-packaged applications which will help Genesys move more into this market.
• The core product of Angel.com is its customer experience management platform, which primarily supports inbound and outbound IVR services. These will be added to the Genesys platform so between them they support more channels for customer engagement. It has also built various applications around these services to support business processes such as name and address capture and payment processing.
• Angel also has more experience in the mid-market.

Angel.com President Dave Rennyson says that he sees great synergy between the two organizations, and that their combined skills and technologies will help establish the company in the global market.

The key questions I always ask about mergers are what does it mean for current customers, how will the two organizations operate in the future, and how will the products be integrated. Serge said that all existing customers would continue to receive the same support going forward, and that there were already prospects for a combined offering; indeed some of these also include software from the recent acquisition of Utopy. When it came to the future, things were a little less clear. There will be a new division, headed by Rennyson, that will support the Angel.com offerings, and the recently announced Genesys Connect service will be rolled into this division. Its sales team will work closely with teams that will focus on the enterprise and mid-markets.

Technically the message was wait and see; it will take a month or so before a roadmap appears for the integrated offerings. Detailed questions on the table include combining the developments both companies have made in the mobile customer service apps market and integrating the Angel.com products on top of the core Genesys platform.

My recent research in the contact center in the cloud finds almost two thirds (63%) of organizations are adopting contact center applications in the cloud to improve customer interactions. We find that companies now see multichannel communications management as a key way of addressing what has become a major business imperative. Consumers now demand to engage with companies through an increasing number of channels, and become frustrated if they don’t receive consistent information and answers across every channel. My experience tells me the only practical way to meet these demands is for companies of all sizes to deploy multichannel contact systems in the cloud. Given that, this move by Genesys seems sensible, and will help the company establish itself in what has quickly become a competitive market. The acquisition also opens up the possibility of enhanced analytics solutions as the company utilizes its current analytics products, the Utopy speech analytics products and CX Analytics from Angel.com.  As the company rationalizes the mobile apps platforms, it will be interesting to see if it uses the combined speech recognition capabilities to produce a voice-activated mobile customer service app., My research shows that companies are crying out for an enhanced view of customers and speech activated services are likely to prove very attractive to consumers, so both developments I believe will show strong growth in the near future. The challenge, as Serge admitted, was execution – making it happen organizationally and technically.

Regards,

Richard J. Snow

VP & Research Director