What’s in a Name – the Continued Blending of Alcatel-Lucent/Genesys
A lovelier setting for the 9th annual Genesys conference couldn’t be had as the Ritz at Half Moon Bay. But first, it wasn’t just the ninth annual Genesys conference; it was the first annual Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise conference. But don’t think that the Genesys name has gone away. On the contrary, or perhaps I should say au contraire, ALU has made an even stronger statement about maintaining the Genesys brand with a new updated identity. Starting this week at their sales kick-off meeting Business cards at ALU will look like
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprises (Alcatel logo) and underneath in the Genesys red:
(Genesys Logo) followed by Genesys Communications Network
The intent is to represent that ALU is not just PBX, carrier and networking, but also is playing in the enterprise, and that they are leveraging from three different groups; Genesys, Communications and Networks. This is really about go-to-market, in that keeping them all allows ALU to use the market awareness of the Genesys brand in customer service, UC, etc., and the PBX, carrier, and networking capabilities of ALU.
On top of the business side of continuing the merging of the two organizations and a development of a superior go to market strategy than they have had before, executives pointed out that they felt that they had never seen a year of such technical innovation within the company. For example, within contact center ALU rounded out the company’s work force optimization (WFO) suite, adding quality monitoring and making a lot of progress on Interactive Insights with cradle to grave interaction reporting. The first phase of this was marketed as Infomart, (back-end data repository) followed in 2009 and 2010 with Interactive Insights (front end reporting). So now all of the scalability and consolidated data of Infomart (real-time and historical) has been brought into Insights, providing complete support of the entire Genesys product suite. ALU is also working on all manner of video for enterprise and contact center.
ALU also showed us Social Engagement; which is the company’s entrée into the industry’s much beloved trend of integrating social media into customer service. They have some very interesting customer use cases brewing that I’m looking forward to being able to write about once ALU’s customers get a sizeable chunk of usage data.
Finally, ALU unveiled OpenTouch; which is the commercial name for the converged architecture (ICE), Genesys SIP server, GVP server, and OXE PBX. OpenTouch is a family and packaged offerings that are all about shifting the user from voice centric communications to multimedia communications, on devices chosen by the user. OpenTouch is also about taking communications that are now one-on-one communications to multi person communications with extreme ease, so that the user can add or remove people as their business needs dictate.
Yes, as I normally do, I’ll comment on the new naming convention. Much as there was a lot of stumbling of analysts, and even executives in saying things like OmniTouch instead of OpenTouch, or commenting on how close it was to Siemens OpenScape, it’s a good name. Both OpenScape and OpenTouch speak to the same thing - open. And whether it is touch or scape, both give the end user the idea of what the product is about, so I like them both. Let’s just hope that sales people from ALU/Genesys and Siemens don’t mix them up.
Interesting article!
The character Juliet said: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet.” (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet.)
In Shakespeare’s play about two star-crossed lovers this famous statement you refer to is made. Star-crossed being a pair of lovers whose relationship is disillusioned by outside forces.
Of course it is dangerous to think that Romeo and Juliet is a prophesy about the future of Alcatel-Lucent and the brand name Genesys.
Names are in fact very important. Mixing up names can be a smart marketing-scheme where one product or service benefits from another company’s marketing efforts. Think of names that have become household version even when talking about other products; Kleenex, Ketchup (which actually also works in Sweden) and how competing companies benefit from their establishing of the name.
Just recently there was an article about the American broadband provider Clearwire creating a logo (not a name, but something representing a name) which was, according to Sony Ericsson – mobile device provider – too close to their own logo.
In the play Juliet tells Romeo that a name is an artificial and meaningless convention, and that she loves the person who is called “Montague”, not the Montague name nor the Montague family.
This one short line encapsulates the central struggle and tragedy of the play as well as the tricky business in product and services names.