Enterprise

Tony Bates hears the call: Cisco, Skype veteran looks to remake Genesys for the cloud

Running a contact center company isn't as sexy as his previous gigs. But this company could be the best chance for him to make a lasting mark.

Tony Bates hears the call: Cisco, Skype veteran looks to remake Genesys for the cloud

Tony Bates arrived at Genesys as CEO after hopscotching through various parts of the tech industry.

Photo: Genesys

Be careful what you wish for. For Tony Bates, that's been running a big tech company.

He rose to Cisco's top ranks but didn't get the No. 1 job. His big CEO break was at Skype when it was poised to go public — but months into that gig, Bates' venture backers sold it to Microsoft instead. After a stint at Microsoft, where some eyed Bates for the CEO job that went to Satya Nadella, he took over GoPro. There, he got cut in a round of layoffs as the camera company struggled. He joined Social Capital, which helped fund Slack and Box, for a gig that lasted a year before tech investor Chamath Palihapitiya blew up the venture capital firm he started.

Bates is now about two years into his run at Genesys, a company that, for the last 31 years, predominantly served as an on-premise provider of contact center software but is now fighting to move clients to the cloud and infuse AI across its product suite. And Bates is hoping the experience gained by hopscotching through the tech industry will help Genesys emerge victorious in one of the more ferocious IT battlegrounds in corporate America — one that could be worth $91 billion by 2028, per Grand View Research, if you generously wrap in all the ways businesses spend money to manage their dealings with customers.

"I sold to the largest telephone companies in the world. I built infrastructure products that have very long life cycles. That perspective grounds me," Bates told Protocol. "But if you don't have a sense of the level of disruption and the innovation that consumers are not just asking for, but frankly driving … they're fickle, they move very quickly."

The industry is littered with decades-old providers like Genesys that are all trying to move from on-premise to the cloud. But new entrants including Amazon and Microsoft are putting pressure on the incumbents. And fresh rivals are still likely: Zoom is reportedly considering the call center market. Bates is banking on clients seeing past the latest shiny object, instead relying on the company's legacy in voice services as a difference that matters.

"There are some players out there who say it is all about digital-only, but really the world isn't like that today," he said. "You lead with digital, but you are still going to need voice technology."

Bates has work to do. For one, many competitors are already out there touting new AI offerings, which promise to offload more work to bots. And Genesys is a bit tardy to that party. In December, Bates started an AI unit, Genesys Digital, led by industry veteran Barry O'Sullivan. It's a big step, but organizational alignment around digital is a pivot that some competitors, namely the non-legacy vendors, are already way ahead on — or were even built around.

Take ASAPP, the AI-based customer service software startup valued at $800 million, which has customers including JetBlue. Since inception, the New York company has operated its own research center to advance the underlying tech it offers to clients. It gives ASAPP a potential advantage over rivals like Genesys that are only now trying to rework their operations to make AI a core focus.

The call center market "is a mature space, but one that is ripe for change, with a lot of incumbents, but calcified incumbents," ASAPP CTO Will Robinson told Protocol.

Still, Genesys is working quickly to make up for lost ground; it currently offers products like predictive routing and chatbots, which are largely standard in the industry now, at least based on marketing materials. And Bates sees efforts by rivals to date as little more than hype and thinks Genesys is on track to meet customers where they are in their digital journey.

"It's still very early on for many businesses," he said. "They used to talk a lot about [AI], but I don't think they were really as committed in the way that they are now."

Industry analysts like Gartner's Drew Kraus agree. While he says Genesys has out-paced other long-standing rivals like Five9, Kraus believes the company may need to look outside its own business to stay competitive with AWS and other new entrants on digital offerings.

Vendors like Genesys "are watching this space, going to do some development on their own, but very well may make some acquisitions to help bridge the gap," he told Protocol. "There will be a combination of buy, build and partner. But there is a gap today."

Legacy as a selling point

While some may view Genesys' history as an on-premise software provider as a disadvantage in today's environment, Bates eagerly touts it.

And for good reason. When most people think of a call center, their last argument with an airline rep over change fees might come to mind. But the function serves as much more than that. It's the lifeblood for organizations like UnitedHealth Group that rely on human agents to field pressing questions about coverage from its 141 million members. So any IT mishap can be a huge headache and PR nightmare for an organization, which is why providers like Genesys that have a long history of reliable service can be an attractive choice.

At the same time, the call center has emerged as a hotspot for digitization, which in the context of contact centers means moving beyond just switching voice calls to an available representative to more sophisticated customer flows. Most corporations, for example, employ some sort of machine learning to automate customer inquiries. It extends far beyond robot operators, however. Genesys is part of a new push among businesses to turn their customers from a faceless army of consumers to millions of unique data points that can be analyzed, processed, moved around and dissected for monetary gain. The company is primed to ride that wave and it's banking on Bates to help.

"It isn't just about moving from on-premise to cloud," he told Protocol. It's also about "making use of all that data we're collecting to really give these empathetic experiences."

Genesys, which Alcatel acquired in late 1999 and sold to Permira and other investors in 2012, is a bit of a hidden gem. Some 11,000 companies, including the bulk of the Fortune 100, use its technology to handle roughly 70 billion customer interactions annually, per Bates. (Verizon just added Genesys tech to its call center.) Gartner lists it as a leader in the field and the company said it spends more than $250 million a year on R&D.

"Genesys has led many of the innovations that we now take for granted," said Bates. But even he admits that it's got a bit lost in the shuffle.

"The time has come, the technology is there [and] the consumer demand is there," he said. "You'll hear a lot more about us."

Bates may be right on that, at least, based on last year's results. Bookings for Genesys Cloud, for example, rose a record 130% in the last fiscal year. And cloud accounted for 75% of all new bookings, up from 53% in 2019.

The partnership conundrum

Those results reflect the shift away from on-premise. To help with that transition, Bates quickly formed partnerships with some key allies: namely, Adobe, Azure, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services.

AWS and the other hyperscalers are serving a crucial function that, quite frankly, Genesys can't live without: allowing it to serve a wide spectrum of customers whose data storage strategies vary. The deals also give Genesys more visibility among potential clients, leading to an "immediate lift in the incremental pipeline in our business," per Bates.

But that comes with a risk of aligning with future competitors. AWS, for example, is charging into the contact center space, with sales of Amazon Connect reportedly growing 150% in 2020.

"There's so much opportunity all-around that it's less of an issue today," Bates said. "Ultimately, it probably comes down to alignment and making sure that we still feel there is enough there to drive" mutual benefit.

Genesys isn't alone in navigating what Bates called "a complex chess board." It's a conundrum that many executives face as cloud giants expand their reach into more industry segments. But one of Genesys' financial backers agrees with Bates that Amazon presents as much of an opportunity as it does a threat.

"The continued elevation of what type of competitors we get in this space in a way is some of the best validation of how big and exciting of a category it has gotten to be," said Permira partner Brian Ruder. "Most of those guys don't target small markets."

To help execute his strategy, Bates has made several key hires: CFO Brian Swartz, CMO Joyce Kim, HR head Eva Majercsik, head of multicloud solutions John Hernandez and executive vice president of sales Marylou Maco.

And while the pandemic, which forced traditional call centers to empty out their rows of tightly-packed cubicles and shift to the cloud, likely juiced Genesys' sales, Bates feels plenty of opportunity remains. Nearly every company of a certain size runs some version of a call center. That gets Bates excited. All those operations need digitizing.

"This is the new agenda" when he talks to top executives, Bates said. "We don't really see that momentum changing."

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins