India as a market holds great potential for Genesys

Keith Budge, Senior Vice President and General Manager, APAC & Japan, Genesys and Raja Lakshmipathy, Managing Director, Genesys India in an interview with VARINDIA gives a broad overview of the business landscape and highlights the key developments from an India perspective – R&D, workforce growth, new developments in India, etc.

Genesys is a global leader in omnichannel customer experience and contact centre solutions. It is an enterprise software company that and specializes in providing software that supports customer experience management. Customers like financial institutions, telcos, public sector, ecommerce companies use Genesys platform to serve their customers. 

“Both big enterprises and mid-sized organizations are its customers,” says Keith Budge, Senior Vice President and General Manager, APAC & Japan, Genesys. “We deliver our software either on premise traditional software or on cloud, the latter becoming the more popular option. More than 50% of our business now is on cloud.” 

In India, Genesys has sales and customer service teams both in Delhi and Mumbai. It has its R&D centres in Bangalore, while also in Chennai and Hyderabad. 
“So India is a very important global center for Genesys as a company,” says Raja Lakshmipathy, Managing Director, Genesys India. “We have several hundred employees and capacity in our centers in both Chennai and Hyderabad and we are looking for further expansion.” 

Around the world, Genesys works with partners very regularly; they are a very important part of its business. It works with a niche mix of value added resellers and value added distributors. It also works with a lot of systems integration companies, because a lot of its customers need support in terms of complex site requirements and while implementing Genesys software or integrating it with CRM platform, the desktop and other platforms. So it works with organizations like Dimension Data that brings SI capabilities for the largest, most complex customers that it addresses.

Genesys has a number of resellers in India, who resell the company’s software. “In India, 100% of our business is transacted through partners. They help our customers understand how they can take advantage of and leverage Genesys. We also have a Genesys professional services team, which is our own consulting team. They can either work directly with the end customer or work with the partners, for supporting a delivery or to engage with the end customer,” says Raja. n
He adds further, “Our strategy or the model is a direct model (through system integration partners) and not a distribution model. So we don't do multi tier distribution in India. We transact 100% of our India business through our resellers. Our resellers have collectively a lot of resources and more people on the ground to serve the customer than Genesys alone. So it gives us a greater capacity to serve the customer. Many of our resellers and SI partners also have existing relationships with the end customer and so they understand the customer business well.”

Genesys sees great growth opportunities in India. The first is, there is a lot of legacy infrastructure and a lot of it is not well integrated. So it sees a great opportunity in replacing the legacy infrastructure with a new modern CX platform. The second opportunity is that it sees a big need in India in the commercial and mid market sector, which is in the mid sized enterprises. As their customers need the same good service from them as the big guys, they need to have a platform that can help them do that. “We are actually going to announce a cloud delivered Genesys platform, specifically designed for mid market customers in India, which is going to be delivered with one of our India partners. This is going to really help us serve that need, and therefore grow our business in that sector,” explains Keith.

He further adds, “The other opportunity in India that I see is around public sector services. One of our biggest markets globally, is in the public sector. So in places like Western Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, the government is really a big user of technology, as they need to provide good services to citizens cost effectively. And our technology enables that. So our single biggest customer, for example in Australia, is the National Department of Human Services. And I see an opportunity to grow our business in the public sector in India. We are making investments in our capability to work with the government in India, both directly and also with partners in India.”

The financial services sector in India (the banking & insurance sector) as also the new start-ups that are looking to leverage digital technology are the target verticals of Genesys. “Telecommunications and ecommerce are also a big sector for us; with many of the world's largest e commerce companies using Genesys because we provide a really cost effective digital platform. Media is another interesting sector,” Raja comments. 

And so...
Genesys has been investing (and continue) to invest very heavily on cloud. It recently announced that it is moving to a cloud first research and development strategy, which means all of its new capability will be released on cloud first, and then be deployed on premise. Genesys also believes that its research and development spend is bigger than the combined R&D spend of its next three competitors in this space. “So we are definitely research and development leader in customer engagement, and customer interaction management,” sums up a proud Keith.