Just before the holidays in December we had a chance to look at Genesys Conferencings new 4.0 offering with Tony Teranova and Denise Persson. Like many other RTC vendors Genesys has a converged audio, video and data/web conferencing offering which is primarily targeted towards larger (virtual) meetings for the Global Fortune 500 market. They claim 250,000 desktops and over 80,000 web meetings a month.

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The thing we found so compelling about the Genesys Meeting Center 4.0 platform was the smoothness of the connection and ease of use. Ann Marcus (another CS analyst) and I have been on hundreds of briefings using just about as many web conferencing tools. Inevitably there is always a snag in getting started, or with some feature of the tool part way through the briefing, but none of that happened with Genesys Conferencing.

The tool has all the normal web conferencing features: desktop sharing, application sharing, presence detection, white boarding, even video

This new version offers desktop VoIP capabilities and can deal with an audio conference or web meeting that is mixed PSTN (regular telephone) and VoIP. They have a media server that can also support a call center (IVR) and they have integrated Cisco Call Manager into their media server.

Simple Pricing

One of the features that fuels Genesys growth is what is called the “multi-media minute” which allows an enterprise to “pay as you go” with a single rate of $0.25/minute for any type of conferencing (audio, video, data/web). With an enterprise that uses a lot of minutes that can get discounted to as low as $0.05/minute.

Genesys also offers an extranet site which allows co-branding (or full branding if you are a reseller). It is no cost to set up, and follows the “pay as you go” pricing model. Genesys supports the Cisco Call Manager, for Enterprise VoIP as well as the Avaya PBX. For browsers they support Microsoft IE, FireFox and Safari on the Mac. There is no download, no JVM, no dealing with pop-up blockers! The interface supporting multiple browsers and operating systems is based on AJAX and is pretty intuitive and by the end of this month they will be able to integrate with IBM SameTime. They are also looking at integration with mobile infrastructures.

Genesys the Company

Genesys has 1000 employees worldwide and has opened five new offices in North America alone. At $180M in revenues, this makes Genesys #4 in the conferencing world (by revenue) according to CS. There revenues break out to be 60% in the U.S., 35% Europe, and 5% in Asia (where there is a big push for growth). Recently Genesys raised $65 million and retired much of its long-term debt. Some of that money is also being used for acquisitions and R&D, and they have a new R&D center in Shanghai with a strong presence in China, as well as 23 other countries worldwide.