According to a report published last year, the global CRM applications market was worth $24.3 billion in 2016. The market has been dominated by Salesforce.com, which accounts for 26% market share, followed by Oracle, SAP, Adobe, and Genesys. Analysts estimate the industry to grow 2% annually over the next few years to $26.6 billion by the year 2021. 

Genesys’ History

Genesys is one of the older vendors in the space that has had quite a ride so far. The company was founded in 1990 by Alec Miloslavsky and Greg Shenkman to cater to the call center era that was emerging in those days. By 1997, Genesys had established itself as a leading provider of enterprise-wide platform and applications software that helped organizations integrate critical business information and computing resources with telephony and other media. Its communications tools allowed organizations to manage customer interactions and employee communications to increase productivity, lower costs, and achieve greater customer satisfaction. It was offering a suite of open, scaleable, enterprise-wide platform and applications software solutions that could allow organizations to manage communication through features such as intelligent call routing, outbound/blended dialing and campaign management, real-time and historical management reporting, and Web-based telephony fulfillment.

In 1997, Genesys also filed to go public by raising $45 million. Since being founded, Genesys has grown significantly through acquisitions. Post the listing, it continued down that path. It added companies like Adante – an e-mail management software company and Next Age Technologies – a workforce management software provider to its repertoire. It continued to grow as an enterprise-focused organization. Two years later though, Genesys agreed to be sold to Alcatel-Lucent for $1.5 billion.

It stayed under Alcatel’s umbrella for the next thirteen years. During this period too, its acquisition spree did not slow down — it now focused on telephony. It bought computer telephony integration assets from IBM’s CallPath and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) capabilities from Telera, VoiceGenie, and GMK, to name a few.