Alcatel-Lucent Sells 1,000th Hosted Contact Center Solution

Alcatel-Lucent today announced that its suite of hosted contact center solutions, including its Genesys 8 and intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD) products, have now reached more than 1,000 customers worldwide that have deployed them in hosted or software-as-a-service (SaaS) environments.

"What we're seeing in the hosted market is still a large appetite among businesses to leverage operating expenses versus capital expenses," explains Eric Tamblyn, vice president of product marketing at Alcatel-Lucent’s Enterprise Division.

The Genesys 8 suite of contact center solutions, which enable a single, coordinated customer conversation across channels and contact points via an integrated conversation and context manager, can be deployed as a fully hosted or SaaS solution via a network of service provider partners. Today, more than 20 partners, including Deutsche Telecom, Echopass, Orange Business Services, Qwest, Teleperformance, Telstra, West, Working Solutions, and Verizon, deliver Genesys solutions in cloud-based models.

According to Tamblyn, service providers that offer Genesys hosted solutions benefit from a modular, scalable framework and open platform that allows them to customize and deliver value-added services via a secure multitenant architecture. Enterprises benefit from a hosted solution by minimizing or even eliminating capital expenditures by paying only for what is needed on a per-port, per-seat, or per-minute basis. They also have rapid and affordable access to new technologies as soon as they become available.

Tamblyn says the hosted services market has really only taken off within the past few years. "It took us five years to reach this milestone, but we've seen a real uptick in demand in the last five years," he says.

"The hosted and SaaS market is seeing a tremendous amount of growth. Hosted provides a way to extend the enterprise and enable employees outside the contact center to play a role in customer service," said Ian Jacobs, senior analyst for customer interaction at Ovum, in a statement. "Hitting such a milestone is a clear indication of the value to enterprises, and more important, to their customers, of a well-integrated on-demand solution."

"We're thrilled that our Genesys suite has gone beyond the 1,000th hosted customer milestone, and our hosted service provider partners continue to add to that number every day as their customers realize the financial and operational benefits this model offers them," Tamblyn said. "With such a large acceptance of our SaaS and hosted approach, we now are able to address a wide range of vertical markets and customer service needs."

Among those, the company recently launched a social media monitoring solution, called Genesys Social Engagement, a workforce management solution, and a skills management solution. The company is also working on several solutions for the mobile space, Tamblyn says.

In a separate announcement, Tamblyn said that starting in mid-summer, Genesys Conversation Manager will be available as a stand-alone product, untethered from its larger intelligent Customer Front Door (iCFD) solution set. Conversation Manager provides a 360-degree view of the customer through all of his cross-channel experiences into a repository of customer data and context.

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