Genesys Acquires SDE, Creators of the Genesys Customer Interaction

Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories has acquired German firm SDE Software Development Engineering, a spin-off from unified contact center solutions provider VoicInt, for an undisclosed amount. SDE’s primary product is the Genesys Customer Interaction Portal.

The Customer Interaction Portal is a Web-based, thin-client software solution that helps service providers deliver hosted contact center capabilities, such as self-service and agent-assisted service, to enterprise customers. The customer interaction portal is a key component in Genesys’ hosted contact center solution strategy.

“Forward-looking service providers recognize that enterprise users have high demands for both control and flexibility in their hosted customer service solutions, such as call centers,” said Nicholas De Kouchkovsky, who recently took over as president of Genesys after its president and CEO, Paul Segre, was named to a larger role at Genesys’ parent company, Alcatel-Lucent.

“Adding SDE to Genesys sustains the total solution that delivers this agility and level of control, and helps us deliver on the promise of enabling service providers to create innovative, profitable products to sell to their customers, which is one of the key values in forming the Alcatel-Lucent Application Software Group” De Kouchkovsky said during a Jan. 22 conference call to announce the deal.

For Genesys, the SDE deal allows it to expand its application hosting business, something De Kouchkovsky said “has become so critical that we thought we should bring it in-house.”

But despite the cost savings, hosting has not seen as much of an uptake as many had thought because companies do not want to give up control of their applications.

The acquisition--coupled with another deal announced today in which Genesys acquired Conseros, a Canadian provider of a key business application that enables enterprises to manage and distribute high volumes of work items virtually anywhere in the enterprise--is part of Alcatel-Lucent's continued investment in applications software and Genesys’ build out of its portfolio for customer service software. having inaugurated its Applications Software Group in January.  “Genesys expects the use of service delivery software to be a driver of growth for our core products, and a key technology that expands our footprint beyond the contact center,” De Kouchkovsky said.

The Conseros software will be incorporated into a larger Genesys solution called Genesys intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD), which drives the need to more effectively manage tasks in the organization by dynamically reprioritizing tasks and interactions across all channels and media in real-time.  Comprising a management dashboard environment providing a view of all tasks across departments, users can quickly determine business priorities and service levels for all interactions based on business value to ensure the right resources, regardless of location, are proactively receiving the most critical or highest value tasks at the right time. Businesses can therefore optimize resources by determining common skills and reprioritizing workloads across the entire enterprise.