[quote]I know nothing about the Japanese market, Vic, could you give us some examples of which technologies Genesys is failing to integrate with, and is rather trying to replace?
[/quote]
What I am seeing here is Genesys is going head to head with some of the fastest growing services in Japan. While I still strongly believe that Genesys is a great company and has an excellent product, I think that it is not agile enough to adapt to Japanese market needs.
Let's take Carriers for example. Fusion is a carrier here that is snapping up clients left and right. It is mainly an Asterisk-based offering; however, Genesys pits its Genesys Cloud solution (I have yet to see it in real life) against it. Why not offer non-voice services on top of what Fusion offers? This applies to not just Fusion but most other carriers. Genesys is so intent on pushing its cloud capability, promoting it to multii-nationals in Japan, that somewhere along the way it forgot that it became what it is today due to its capability to enhance other products, not replace it.
Let's take private ASP call center providers: Bell24 - Japanese Call Center outsourcer with probably over 10K of seats. They are one of the leading call center outsourcers in Japan. They do not use Genesys in anything. Why? Because all the proposals were positioned in a way that pitted one platform (Avaya) against the other (Genesys). Result? Genesys is out. Needless to say, we are not talking about just voice or CTI. The same applies to GVP, Genesys Call Recording, WFE, and many other niches that were filled in with third-party products. Why? Because integrating Genesys with it would not be economically sound for end-user. On top of that, not only the licensing does not reflect the competitive nature of the market here, but the limited number of VARs capable of doing this, creates an opportunity for these VARs to drive their own agenda by adjusting their prices to make one platform more desirable than others. Genesys has little, if any control over that.
This brings me to my next point: VARs - Genesys offers very limited incentives to its VARs to invest into merging Genesys technology with others. Most, if not all, Genesys VARs in Japan are also Avaya / Cisco / NEC resellers, and that part of the business generates significantly larger revenue that Genesys. Bigger revenues command bigger resources. Why invest into developing new skillset and/or technology that would overlap with what is there already? If anything, you should focus on maximizing the return on what you have. Case in point: one of the largest Genesys VARs in Japan, MKI, continues to install its own "Adam Softphone" to the clients despite of family of softphone products starting from Genesys Agent Desktop all the way to Genesys Interaction Workspace over the years. We are talking about over 12 years and tens of thousands of seats that to this day use ... Genesys T-lib. Recently, they upgraded their phone to a more recent SDK. Now, you are required to use their "proxy server" to interface with CRM package. This is despite Genesys offering direct CRM connectivity! Is it better than Genesys offering? Absolutely not - not even close. Is it more profitable? Judging by its proliferation - clearly.
Global Genesys users who migrate to Avaya-only in Japan is not something I would expect to see. Imagine a global Genesys user, who asks for call center upgrade, and the finalists, all Genesys VARs, all three of them offer a non-Genesys solution! The kicker: all three of these VARs are the very SIers who support this Genesys end-user right now! Why offer Nice when you can offer Genesys Recording Solution? Why offer Avaya when you can offer Genesys SIP given that end-user is currently using Genesys Routing and Reporting? And most importantly, why offer to do away with all of Genesys that is being used right now and re-do all of it on a new platform? Both end-user and SIers saw this as a best way to achieve their goals. There is a clear disconnect between Genesys message and the actual perception on the ground. Genesys is seen as not an essential component of a platform, but rather a platform of its own.
And this is great, if it had support of the carriers, VARs, and end-users. But when you don't, when your sales are less than $30MM a year in Japan, demanding to be treated as equal to Cisco and NEC may fly in US. Here, people will just let you talk, make up their own mind on how to proceed, and will not even tell you that you are wrong. They will politely smile, meet and continue to do what they want without every correcting you. You would think Genesys would learn that by now.
[quote]I'm afraid that this is not really happening just in Japan, but across the world: Cisco IS a major contender of Genesys for several reasons, firstly not being that expensive. Frankly, Genesys has got great capabilities and brilliant flexibility, however, how many customer services do you think use Genesys most advanced features? How many really need fancy call flows? I reckon that simplicity and rapid deployment time are a winner here.[/quote]
True, and Genesys once again had a great product - G-Express. I thought it was perfect. Except ... once again, unless you lack VARs interested in investing into this product. I fear Genesys Cloud Connect is going to face a similar fate - why pay Genesys additional licenses, when we can develop it ourselves? The concept of TCO and ROI, while understood universally, these terms are not calculated similarly in Japan. Here, employee cost is not seen as an expense, thus making any internal development project more attractive over a package with recurring cost.
[quote]Are you referring to HPE or Connect? If you mean the latter, I disagree, the alliance with Salesforce will be opening a massive customer customer base to them and help them migrate towards SaaS solutions.
[/quote]
I agree with you about Cloud Connect - it is a win, but not in a way you think. I think, Genesys connectivity with Salesforce will not significantly contribute to their market share in Japan. If anything, it may give a reason to continue to use Genesys. At the same time, given Salesforce OpenCTI standard being supported by all major platforms, I fail to see a reason why a client would consider Genesys over say UCCE, Avaya or even CIC on Salesforce merit along. Unless the underlying issues with Genesys seen as a competing platform are addressed, I would expect Salesforce connectivity to actually expedite Genesys market share shrinkage in Japan, because now clients, who have been dragging their feet, actually have a reason to overhaul their call center. This reason being Salesforce. And I fear Genesys will not fare well.
