While the past four-and-a-half months were technically a “quiet period,” Genesys does not appear to have lost any ground in the contact center marketplace and its product development staff and efforts appear to remain intact. In the coming months, we expect to see greater visibility assigned to multi-channel initiatives around Conversation Manager and intelligent workload distribution. These are two formidable elements to a platform that supports mobile customer care, while recognizing that the same individual may use a mobile device to conduct a search, browse a vendor Web site, start making a transaction, consult with “friends” on a social network and then decide to contact an agent in a contact center.

Making sure that a customer gets in touch with “the right agent” at the right time was never a first order concern of Alcatel-Lucent. The fact that one of ALU’s most impressive demos revolved around teleconferences conducted in virtual reality (which ALU calls “Immersive Communications“) shows that the parent put “gee whiz” gimmickry ahead of supporting enterprise customers’ efforts to help their prospects or customers complete desired tasks or transactions.

Without the burden of being immersed in Alcatel-Lucent, Genesys can now pursue completion of its own desired tasks and transactions.

As a long-time follower of Genesys Labs, I regard it as good news both for employees of Genesys and their enterprise customers as a period of uncertainty approaches its end. Alcatel bought Genesys back in 1999, for the same $1.5 billion (not adjusted for inflation). Permira is a private equity firm, founded in London in 1985. It has built a portfolio of companies in a diverse set of businesses, including in chemicals, consumers, industrial products and services, technology, media, and telecommunications. It has a decidedly European focus and its average deal size is in the $650 million range, making the acquisition of Genesys (if it is at the $1.5 billion price) more than twice the size of its average purchase.

Based on reports, it looks like Permira succeeded in convincing ALU to keep the enterprise networking and equipment part of its Enterprise Division, meaning that the object of its purchase purely Genesys Labs. This makes sense because Genesys’ strength in the marketplace has been based on its software’s ability to support customer care operations in through its core contact center and customer interaction software and its interactive voice response systems (Genesys Voice Platform or GVP). Its innovative work in this area was never bolstered by the inclusion of enterprise wide area networks or wireless LAN technologies. Ironically, it would have benefitted more from tighter links with “core” ALU technology in public network infrastructure as key components of customer interaction moved into “The Cloud.”

The transaction, when completed, marks the end of uncertainty for Genesys and its customers. It brings much needed cash into ALU’s coffers so it can pursue its “high leverage network” approach to inspiring network operators to get more innovative. More importantly, we got the sense that enterprise customers were hesitating to commit to some of Genesys’ most forward-looking solutions to support, multi-channel, social and mobile engagements.

Genesys should be one of the top contenders for enterprise software and infrastructure to support conversational commerce and, for 9 of the 11+ years under Alcatel (then Alcatel-Lucent) it was able to stay at arm’s length from the parent company. Then, about two years ago, it was ceremoniously glommed into the Enterprise Software Division and its crown jewels were inlaid into a substratum of enterprise telecom gear. It wasn’t pretty (any longer).

Permira has successfully separated the wheat from the chaff here and has the grist that can be the basis for a tasty brew for social, mobile customer care. The question now is whether it is too late.

This simple tactic seems almost self-evident as people discover how to use mobile apps or Web sites to get information from airlines, insurance companies, hotel chains, retailers and others. Indeed, there is not a business of any size that has not started to pursue a “mobile strategy” or at least put out their first app for the iPhone.

But the product planners at Genesys have observed that most mobile efforts are only beginning to incorporate all the knowledge and resources baked into the company’s customer service and contact center fabric. What’s more, only a handful have made it easier for customers to use their smartphones to “escalate” their issues by initiating or transferring their conversation to the right resource (be it an IVR, Web site or customer service agent) without leaving their app or having to re-establish their identity and the general purpose of context of the call.

From a functional point of view, Genesys wants corporate customers and developers to recognize three sets of best practices. The first on the list is “Contact Me” addresses the way that phone calls can be integrated in a smartphone app, including call initiation (click-to-call), that uses the smartphone app’s intelligence to deliver the context of the call or, if it makes more sense, detect the availability of an agent and schedule a callback.

Second set of best practices, “Connect Me,” address is the result of the integration of smartphone-based processing to leverage Genesys IWD (intelligent Workload Distribution) and Conversation Manager. Its purpose is to put mobile customers in touch with the right resource over their choice of communications modes: voice, text or Chat.

Genesys’ third set of best practices surround “Know Me.” This is where Genesys will help its customers take advantage of the smartphone’s ability to authenticate its owner and create the sort of trusted communications link required to deliver highly personalized customer service. Under the “Integrated Mobile Customer Care Apps” umbrella expect to see deep integration of Genesys 8 (the company’s core call routing and customer interaction manager), IWD, Conversation Manager and UC Connect.

Given the level of interest and preliminary effort that Opus Research is observing as companies build their “mobile strategies,” adoption of the Genesys approach could be quite fast. We’ve already seen precursor products at Groupama, the French insurance company. Leading firms in banking, travel, insurance and telecommunications will not be far behind as they move past their first mobile apps to this, more integrated, more empowering approach.

Now the time to speculate has begun, with unnamed analysts placing a value of “greater than $1 billion but less than $2 billion” on the operations and assets for sale. Named candidates (once again, all speculation) include (with my rating on the likelihood) Microsoft (highly unlikely that it will add another line of hardware, especially phones), HP (unlikely, but could be a maneuver to tweak Cisco) and L.M. Ericsson (uncertain, I can’t really see the point except to grab market share).

In separate conversations (and on the Twitter stream) IBM’s name has been invoked. Like most major system integrators, Big Blue has generated significant revenues in recent years using its middleware (WebSphere) to meld its own software, hardware and systems with existing infrastructure and multi-vendor resources that make up today’s “unified communications” solutions. But IBM has “been-there-done-that” with PBXs and phones. It bought and then spun off Rolm (which is now Siemens Enterprise) back in the 1980s and 1990s when the functions and standards around CTI (Computer Telephone Integration) was being defined chiefly as IBM Callpath, Geotel (now part of Cisco’s Collaborative Contact Center Business Unit) and Genesys (now considered the gem of ALU Enterprise Division). IBM is highly unlikely to plunk down $1+ billion to get back in the game.

So let’s step back and think about what the impending sale might signal. From my perspective, it is the latest evidence that ALU has been unable to assimilate the porous nature of enterprise computing and communications. It’s a shame because it has some of the best marketing and positioning statements in the industry. The HLN (High Leverage Network) which I discussed last September is a powerful platform for innovation and application development and has the potential to destroy the “firewall” between enterprise and carrier networks.

In recent analysts’ meetings, the Enterprise Group was indicating that there were some real opportunities to get Genesys application software up and running over top of the HLN, especially noting that many of the sales of the core Customer Interaction Platform were being made to traditional carriers and being instantiated in their “Clouds.” The rebranding fo the entire Enterprise line as OpenTouch laid the foundation for more links over carrier networks.

The criticism logged in the WSJ article is that Enterprise accounted for “only 10%” of total revenue for ALU and that the $1 billion asking price would take a meaningful dent out of the company’s debt. But no holistic approach to selling gear and software to carriers can be independent of enterprise infrastructure. That is a meaningful 10% that has been a door opener and a key component for some major, profitable “wins” with modern service providers.

That said, you can’t forget that the Lucent side of ALU has been down this path before when it was forced to spin-off its Business Communications division in 2000. That entity, now known as Avaya, has been owned by private equity funds Silver Lake and TPG since 2007. In that time, rather than divesting assets, it has acquired the enterprise division of Nortel, expanded into Europe with the acquisition of Tenovis and paired up with Tata Telecom (now called Avaya Global Connect). By the way, Wikipedia lists several other acquisitions, including Vista, VPNet. Quintus, Routescience, Nimcat Networks, Spectel, Ubiquity Software and Traverse Network. And lest we forget Silver Lake is also a major investor in Skype, which is the prototype for the Next Generation Service Provider.

Observing the success of the Avaya roll-up, makes me think that this might be a good time for the Gores Group (half owner of Siemens Enterprise Communications) to look into melding ALU’s Enterprise Communications line-up with its own. The OpenTouch brand for Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise products (announced in January of this year) seemed like an homage to Siemens’ OpenScape line of Unified Communications software. Maybe there is a stronger connection than the mere naming convention indicates.

One customer like Kaplan is all it takes to showcase Genesys’ broad line of software. Deployments span the “core” call routing resource, SIP server, voice processing (Genesys Voice Platform), task distribution (called intelligent Work Distribution, based on the Conseros acquisition) and multiple flavors of knowledge management and analytics. The entire fabric of software “resides behind”, “augments” or simply “extends the life of an installed base of Avaya or Nortel ACDs or PBXs.

That said, from my point of view, the main issue that both Genesys and Alcatel-Lucent addressed at the Analyst Relations meeting (which had the Twitter hashtag #genesysAR) was how the combined company plans to support efforts by third-parties that expect to benefit from development, marketing, sales and channel development by both Genesys and Alcatel-Lucent’s Enterprise Software Group (ESG). Merging the two organizations has been a complex process, under the auspices of ALU Executive VP of Enterprise Products Tom Burns in conjunction en Paul Segre (serving simultaneously as CEO of Genesys and president of Alcatel-Lucent’s Applications Software Group (ASG).

But the other B-I-G deal for ALU revolves around efforts to build a community of partners and application developers to leverage its considerable repertoire of platforms, tools and other resources that promote enhanced network services. As this link demonstrates ALU has invested a considerable amount of money and energy into promoting the emerging architectural and business models that leverage ALU’s intellectual property into “open” environments and APIs. And it tried to drive its point home with this video, which describes how Alcatel intends to support service providers’ (that means telco’s) efforts to support open business models and multivendor environments. The effort has already enlisted participation by tens of thousands of developers and integration partners.

Meanwhile, on the enterprise side, the combined Genesys/Alcatel-Lucent entity need a name for its enterprise-oriented developer network. In the coming months, we expect Alcatel-Lucent, and Genesys, to extend their efforts to support third-party developers and integrators. At the highest levels, it involves HP, Accenture, IBM and the like, but Genesys (with ALU) has an opportunity to expand into the middle markets in order to grow.

Genesys and ALU execs noted that their near term rivals are Avaya and Cisco, with Oracle looming in the future along with global rivals like Huawei. If they are going to compete, they must highlight their efforts to support Recombinant Communications and an active and involved developer community.

On the back-end, we’ve already noted how Salesforce.com’s electronic commerce cloud (EC2) has been integrated with Twitter, Cisco and even Google Wave to support better tracking of activity over multiple channels.

Yesterday, the list of “social CRM” offerings got longer with newly assembled alliances bringing Kana together with Baynote and Lithium Technologies stepping up promotion of the term “social CRM” with a Virtual Seminar that includes sponsors like Genesys Labs, LivePerson and Cognizant, as well as Lithium.

But “Social CRM” is but a link in an evolutionary step away from one-sided vendor- or brand-driven management of customer activities. “Sessions” often start with a call to an interactive voice response (IVR) system which gives a limited set of options for routing a call or retrieving information. It’s like a voting machine where the candidates or propositions are all pre-defined and all one can do is choose among little-known candidates or indicate “yes” or “no” on an unclear proposition.

Adding Baynote, Lithium, HiveLive or other peer-to-peer resources adds multiple dimensions to a traditionally one-sided, one-to-one interaction. It may start with monitoring multiple social networks, but quickly supports cultivation of networks of customers who ideally serve as sources of collective intelligence and feedback. In the best cases they can emerge as product or brand advocates, but at a minimum they can respond to customer queries or complaints in real time.

Success is predicated on customers building confidence in their own power over Web based resources. The next evolutionary step will be awareness raising – no so much among vendors – but among customers themselves. For social CRM to work customers must build a sense of trust in the feedback and query results they get regarding the retailers, companies and service providers with whom they carry out business.

This particular integration, which uses OpenMethod’s adapter to connect RightNow and Genesys enables companies to support intelligent routing and deliver those calls to an agent desktop that includes a softphone for the voice channel along with relevant metadata, including purpose of call, open issues, transaction history, location and other contextual information. What’s more, the agent desktops display interactions across a multitude of communications channels, including Web-based, email and chat.

From risk-reduction point of view, this particular solution carriers the “GValidated” imprimatur, which indicates that Genesys Labs has put the solution through an extensive testing and certification process. In Genesys’ words, “Only applications that carry the Gvalidated logo can claim that the integration has been developed according to Genesys-approved methods and standards, designed using Genesys tools, documented through Genesys standards and methodology, and successfully tested in a lab environment.” The era of Recombinant Telephony is one in which solutions are increasingly constructed from code that is derived from a number of sources. This sort of certification gives air cover to IT department and a comfort level that it will work under the anticipated conditions, which is especially important for customer-facing tasks.

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The Business Together program brought Cisco more tightly into the mix of products and services positioning Communicator as a single point of entry for real-time, multi-modal communications including IM, email, and mobile telephony. The Cisco connection starts with Cisco branded IP-phones that facilitate both presence indicators and “click-to-call” call initiation among other employees or business partners with contact lists associated with Microsoft’s OCS, Outlook, Office suite or SharePoint software. I believe Microsoft’s Active Directory server must be involved as well.

Meanwhile, Aspect Software continues to chronicle advancements in OCS deployment both internally and externally. As part of the inside game Aspect continues to illustrate the adoption and use of OCS throughout its company on this site. [As a brief aside, it looks like "federated" IMing has a long way to go.] For outside consumption, Aspect announced general availability of a suite of software called UC for the Contact Center. This instance extends OCS-based IM into the contact center to facilitate functions like “Ask and Expert”. It also marks the marketing debut of Tellme (Microsoft’s IVR subsidiary) as the integrated speech application service provider (ASP) for “hybrid” voice self-service deployments.

Both approaches are designed to accelerate deployment of applications built on a decidedly Microsoft-flavored approach to Unified Communications. For Aspect, UC is a Microsoft-only proposition, with tight integration to Aspect’s suite of inbound and outbound customer care software suites and workforce management software. Orange Business has a number of other approaches, including an instance of Genesys Customer Interaction Management to support multivendor environments.

In addition, IBM immediately became first-among-equals by leveraging their long-standing partnership into a marketing channel for the combination of UC-Connect and the SameTime-based “UC-squared” (unified communications and collaboration) marketing initiative by Big Blue. For IBM, it marks the fruition of long-standing plans to extend contact center utilities to knowledge workers through-out a business enterprise through the SameTime interface. Thus their desktops can display “screen pops” that enable them to preview key information about a call and the caller and, in effect, “bid” on whether to accept or reject it. They will also be able to read or write notes or update customer records without exiting their SameTime-based “portal”.

I’ll be writing more about the capabilities and tools integrated into UC Connect in a forthcoming advisory. It is a suite of software that has evolved to accommodate both the productivity concerns of contact center managers, and the privacy concerns of resident knowledge workers. Agents in more formal contact center workstations are able to view the status and skill set of anonymous experts or branch office workers. They can then click a button to contact the most appropriate person via a pre-selected mode of communications (chat, IM or phone). Rather than displaying available by name, the Genesys CIM platform abstracts these resources’ identities into skill sets and and current status. This prevents agents from becoming overly dependent upon any particular expert.

UC-Connect will be featured at the Genesys G-Force gathering in Barcelona, June 9-11.