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From its inception, Voxeo has offered its clients and application developers versions of its Prophecy platform that can be licensed an implemented “on premises” or sold on a “pre-minute” basis on a “Platform as as Service” (PaaS) basis. With its acquisition of Intervoice, Convergys has added premises-based solutions to a portfolio that includes hosted IVR, CRM and access to live agents. Microsoft is another major player in ‘private cloud/public cloud” arena, as it leverages a strategic equity investment in Aspect, along with its full-on purchase of Tellme Networks, to give its clients, prospects and go-to-market partners a lot pricing schemes and implementation strategies.

Holly Connects also brings West greater global presence. The company was founded almost ten years ago in Australia. Aussie telco Telstra s its largest and one of its longest-standing clients. In Australia, it has demonstrated the ability to scale rapidly and add new capabilities and applications built on IP-Telephony and Web-based standards (especially VoiceXML). In our briefing, West made it clear that it is retaining all of the Holly Connects employees and keeping offices open in Sydney and Melbourne, as well as offices in London (serving Western Europe), in addition to Holly’s headquarters in Boston, MA.

By our calculation, West is the largest hosted IVR provider in the world. It claims over 140,000 “ports” in service, across three different “platforms”, including its original, proprietary environment; and an Alcatel/Genesys environment (originally VoiceGenie, but moving to GVP 8), in addition to Holly Connects. The acquisition of Holly signals that West is ready to migrate many of the legacy apps that now run on its proprietary platform over to Holly’s standards-based environment. At the same time, it will be targeting Holly’s standards-based solutions to large enterprises that will benefit from flexible implementation options and adherence to Web standards.

West continues to run the GVP (Genesys Voice Platform) as well as the Genesys core CIM (Customer Interaction Management) software, for CTI-based call routing. Customers that come in through “leads” Alcatel/Genesys will be implemented in the Genesys environment, which is well-suited to support multi-location enterprises.

Thanks to long-standing work with Telstra, Holly Connects has been designed to support “multi-tenancy” from its inception. That’s an ace-in-the-hole for West as it offers multiple implementation options to both existing customers and new prospects. Indeed, West has a very competitive set of implementation options for large enterprises and carriers. The core is voice apps, but it has added conferencing (which some competitors call “collaboration”), outbound notifications and nascent efforts to support mobile and social applications.

In the RC (Recombinant Communications) world, West and its direct competitors are moving into areas with a number of non-traditional competitors. For instance, Telstra’s fellow incumbent carrier, BT, looks like it will lean on Ribbit and its innovators to bring new applications into the cloud. Likewise, Voxeo will use Tropo and the Voxeo Labs as a mechanism to reach out to a broader base of change agents in a world of more open, cloud-based telephony apps.

A tighter relationship with Holly gives it the opportunity to capitalize on the commitment to standards and baked in IP and SIP-based routing. But other competitors, most notably Voxeo (with Tropo and Voxeo Labs) has encouraged the participation of a broader community of developers. Even the venerable AT&T has stepped up its appeal for Web developers to apply themselves to new speech-enabled services.

West has work to do in both the mobile and social domains. The company will find that the likes of Nuance On Demand (formerly BeVocal) and other customer care specialists. Mobile customers will be the primary beneficiaries as investment steps up in multimodal and multi-channel care.

BT’s NGCC services are supported by data centers on three continents. Its OneVoice offering was launched in December 2009 in conjunction with Cisco as part of its global, cloud-based IP telephony portfolio. Now, two months on, BT’s applying some of the new age marketing methodologies to try to accelerate global acceptance. The granularity of the offers is impressive. Enterprise customers can choose among “per concurrent agent”, “per logged-in agent” or choose to pay per usage, based on “per effective hour or even per effective minute”, starting as low as 4 pence per minute.

Incumbent carriers, like BT and its western European peers like Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia and Telefonica are playing the important role of catalyst for enterprise customers that are making the transition to IP-Telephony. AT&T, Verizon Business and QWEST are in a similar position in North America. Thus far BT, with such a granular offer is the most aggressive in creating a package that lowers entry barriers posed by high prices and complexity.

The suite includes Web conferencing (powered by WebEx) integrated with a variety of network-based applications and functions, including shared contacts, calendar entries, documents, project plans, business applications and outbound alerts. All are under the control of a browser-based “dashboard” or portal that can run on PCs – via Internet Explorer (Versions 6 or 7) or Firefox 3 – or Mac’s running Firefox 3.

After the 30 day trial, the service is priced on a sliding scale from $24.99 for 5 users up to 225.95 for 50 users. Putting any price on this sort of service is always a challenge, given that industrious small businesspeople can find “free” versions of each of these features or functions. In addition the applications are definitely designed for intra-company deployments when the most visible developments in the collaboration domain extend beyond the enterprise firewalls to support inter-company communications and, perhaps more importantly business-to-customer interactions.

Rejiggering its sales channel and partnership model to reflect product changes has been a tougher nut to crack. Central to today’s announcement is the combination (or, in some cases, re-combination) of the Genesys and Alcatel Lucent Enterprise Software Division sales forces into a single entity offering a single set of solutions which are, in turn, constructed atop a “hybrid cloud” – acknowledging that real-time, B2B and B2C interactions are indifferent to whether resources are physically in an enterprise or carrier’s data center.

Bottom line: this is an important, evolutionary step for Alcatel-Lucent and Genesys as it sorts out its own presence in an “open”, cloud-based, multi-vendor world. Cisco and Avaya stand out as the direct competition ALU/Genesys. Avaya, especially in recent months, has been promoting a message of simplicity in a world where large-scale solutions are necessarily complex. The reorganization at ALU has the feel of a market-driven necessity as customers look to their vendors to provide simple solutions to their own transformational challenges.

In this case, the two companies give large, multi-site businesses an opportunity to contract for call handling, IVR and live agents on an “as needed” basis to support new campaigns, unforeseen capacity requirements or the general migration from ol’ school infrastructure to the new era.

This OnDemand offer is decidedly un-siloed. It covers a broad range services and support options. One is “Channel Synchronization”, which provides intelligent queing and routing across traditional telephony, IP Telephony, IVR and live agents. It can also provide estimated wait times and “virtual hold”- based callback options. “Process Optimization” supports Web and phone-based self-service as well as automated responses via email or outbound phone calls. And Teleperformance has built its reputation on agent management, contact center operations and uptime.

Teleperformance’s global footprint is huge. Established in 1978, it operates or manages almost 250 contact centers around the world, with over 82,000 workstations, 100,000 employees and revenues approaching $3 billion. While it is, by no means a Genesys-only shop, Its infrastructure includes about 15,000 instances of Genesys (primarily in North America). Yet, as I point out in this article, Teleperformance makes an excellent channel partner for Genesys, and vice versa.