Lame competitors contribute to Genesys’ success

Rewind to the beginning of April 2003. As
coalition troops were moving into the outskirts
of Baghdad, the then Iraqi deputy prime
minister Tariq Aziz was claiming that Iraqi
forces were routing (that rhymes with doubting)
coalition forces and were about to be driven out
of the country. After coalition forces took
control of the whole of the country within a
fortnight, US president George Bush claimed an
end to hostilities. Political leaders may
sometimes be unaware of what is happening on
the ground but at other times they are blatantly
lying.

At a glance, it might appear that the worlds of
politics and IT are a long way apart but, on
closer inspection, some interesting parallels
can be discerned. In IT, resellers are the
closest equivalent of troops on the ground and,
although a head office may sometimes be
unaware of what’s happening in the field, the
lying is rarely that blatant. But the parallels
don’t end there. In democratic countries,
there’s a saying that oppositions don’t win
elections, governments lose them. Although
this isn’t as often paralleled in business, in the
CTI software market, there are some signs of
just this phenomena occurring.

The leader of the CTI software market is widely
recognised to be Genesys, whose Customer
Interaction Management CTI software product
has the largest share of the world CTI software
market with about 34% in 2005 as measured by
the author. [Note: this research measured
market share in the CTI software market, not
the CTI software plus CTI-capable telephone
systems plus IVR systems plus outsourcing
contracts plus consulting plus circuit cards plus
who knows what else that other companies
have been known to report.] The product itself
has most of the optional modules such as
predictive dialling, routing of emails etc. and
off-switch ACD that the more featured of such
products offer tend to offer. However, as there
are a number of other products in the market
with comparable capabilities, Genesys’s
success is clearly due to more than these
capabilities alone. And unless my experiences
on some recent consulting engagements are
atypical, they provide some valuable insight on
what they are.

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