AT&T and Genesys: Changing the Hosted Contact Center ConversationAT&T and Genesys: Changing the Hosted Contact Center Conversation

This strategic partnership has the potential to be big. AT&T owns a lot of contact center account relationships.

At VoiceCon San Francisco in November 2008, Ross Daniels of Cisco Unified Communications marketing made a thought-provoking comment in response to a question about the future of hosted contact center solutions. He posited that none of the companies represented on the panel that day--Avaya, Genesys, Nortel, and Siemens in addition to Cisco--would provide the breakthrough solution for hosting, that something new and exciting was needed that wouldn't necessarily come from companies living inside the CPE box.I see the hosted offering created by AT&T, working with Genesys, as both support and contradiction for Daniels' remark. Support in that AT&T is not a typical contact center solution provider, or at least they haven't been for the past ten years or so. Back in the heyday of 800 service, AT&T--along with MCI and Sprint--were important players in the then call center market. The call management and routing solutions they offered to customers were the only way to meet the needs of companies with far-flung call centers, the likes of JC Penney or American Express. It went way beyond the simple supply of dial tone that carriers have been reduced to of late.

But AT&T is ready to change all that. I met with Shawn Conroy, Vice President of AT&T, and other members of AT&T's contact center team at the Genesys user group meeting, G-Force, this week and asked why this effort will be any different from the many hosted contact center announcements that have gone before it. The answer brought me back to CEO Ben Verwaayen's vision for Alcatel-Lucent, to help carriers build applications on top of their networks as the only way for both to survive.

AT&T over the past few years has re-architected their network from TDM to SIP. The first application that rides on that data center architecture is a natural--voice. The next big push is contact center (with apparently many more in development). Unlike the old Ma Bell days, when AT&T built its own applications, this time the company went to Genesys. Why? Because two years ago when they started this journey they felt that the Genesys suite, working with Genesys SIP Server, was the most scalable and flexible platform available.

Having started my career at AT&T, I may be a little biased. But I believe that this strategic partnership has the potential to be as big as Microsoft/Nortel. AT&T owns a lot of contact center account relationships, companies where hosted has always looked attractive but not quite delivered. To circle back, the contradiction in Daniels statement at VoiceCon is that one of the companies on the panel is part of the solution. The difference is that Genesys is not trying to supply their application as a hosted service--they are banking on the clout of their partners, in this case AT&T, to do it for them.This strategic partnership has the potential to be big. AT&T owns a lot of contact center account relationships.