G-Force Dallas: Customers, Partners and CloudsG-Force Dallas: Customers, Partners and Clouds

What I didn’t hear at the Genesys customer event? Concerns about recent news that ALU may be shopping ALU-Enterprise to buyers or private equity.

G-Force is the Genesys user group meeting, held each spring somewhere in the Americas and EMEA (this year Prague) and in August in Melbourne. The first thing of note about G-Force 2011 is that it still exists. Much as competitors love to throw FUD that Genesys has "disappeared" into Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, ALU-E understands the value of the brand to its multi-vendor customers. While ALU-E has the similar Dynamic Enterprise Tour for the entire communications, contact center and networking portfolio, G-Force continues as a contact center-focused event.

One of the key press releases issued during G-Force Dallas highlighted the company’s 1.000+ "cloud customers. Long a favorite of global carriers for network-based routing and voice portal services, over the years Genesys has fine-tuned its assisted service applications for hosting. Notably, in 2009 Genesys acquired the development team at an OEM firm that developed Genesys Customer Interaction Portal. The web-based thin client helps service providers deliver hosted contact center capabilities, both self-service and agent-assisted, to enterprise customers. Genesys reports more than twenty partners are delivering Genesys in a cloud-based model, including a combination of carriers, outsourcers and specialty hosted solution providers including: Deutsche Telecom, Echopass, Orange Business Services, Qwest, Teleperformance, Telstra, West, Working Solutions, and Verizon.

Look at the laundry list of cloud solutions providers above. It quickly becomes apparent that an enterprise wanting to choose a hosted deployment of Genesys has viable carrier and non-carrier choices around the globe. In a world where RFPs often ask for both CPE and hosted bids, this gives Genesys an edge over other contact center solution providers who are often scrambling to create ad hoc relationships to be compliant with such bids.

Customers are highlighted in my title because they make the trip to a user group meeting worth it to an analyst. Whether sitting in the audience seeing reactions to the keynote messages, eating meals in a casual setting, or participating in the customer "speed dating" lunch set up by Genesys analyst relations (as customers and analysts ate lunch, analysts moved from one customer table to another), user group meetings give you a pulse on customer hot buttons.

What I didn’t hear? Concerns about recent news that ALU may be shopping ALU-Enterprise to buyers or private equity. What I did hear? Companies with literally tens of thousands of agent seats trialing and installing Genesys SIP Server as a replacement for aging TDM infrastructure.

I close with a bow to the Genesys partners that help fund events like G-Force. The video below is from Toronto-based Sangoma, who offers customers a predictive dialing analysis engine alternative to the embedded Genesys solution.