Permira Delivers a New Beginning

Score one for private equity. Genesys was a division of a large public company, but appears to be thriving as its own entity. Permia, a European private equity firm, acquired Genesys from Alcatel-Lucent a year ago, and it appears to have been a good move for all parties including customers and employees.

Genesys released highlights from 2012:

• Double-digit growth and more than $610 million in revenue.
  
  
• Added more than 200 new customers in 2012.
  
  
• Acquired LM Sistemas to strengthen its position in hosted IVR platforms and self-service applications as well as expand its presence in Latin America.
  
  
• Launched two new solutions to support its growth strategy for mid-market contact centers: Genesys Connect for Service Cloud and Genesys One.
  
  
• Launched Genesys Mobile Engagement to facilitate communications between smartphone applications and customer service agents.
  
  
• Signed new agreements in 2012 with Bell Canada, KDDI of Japan, and Telekom Deutschland for its hosted and pay-per-use contact center solutions.

“2012 was a breakthrough year for Genesys as a newly independent company,” said Paul Segre, President and CEO of Genesys. “We enter 2013 with a strengthened position in the market with solutions like Genesys Mobile Engagement and our new Web Engagement solution to be released in the first quarter, as well as an exciting set of simplified, faster to deploy offers for the mid-market, including Genesys One and our cloud customer service solution Genesys Connect.”

Genesys isn’t the first UC vendor to embrace private equity. Private equity investment groups also own the majority of Avaya and Siemens Enterprise. The arrangement allows these firms to operate without public market pressure for short term gains. Genesys is headquartered in Daly City, CA, and has over 2,000 customers in 80 countries.