Last week, Genesys hosted an informative, entertaining and just plain comfortable gathering for industry analysts at the Rosewood Sand Hill Resort in Menlo Park. They provided us, the self-styled pundits, with access to such an effective mix of product planners, salespeople and customers who are putting their technologies into practice. The culmination was a presentation by Bill Boga, the principle enterprise contact center strategist at Kaplan, Inc., the $2.3 billion education subsidiary of The Washington Post Co.

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.

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Tags: Genesys, Alcatel-Lucent, Contact Center, Recombinant Communications