Genesys Acquires Informiam: Embedded Analytics Trend Continues

I'm working on my top trends for 2007/2008, to be published next week, and one of the trends is definitely embedded analytics. Over the last decade, enterprise software has done a great job of capturing details about every customer interaction--information that previously was lost to the ether. However, now companies are realizing they have this huge store of information and no way to leverage it. I hear horror stories of support management having to keep a staff of 6-10 programmers on staff just to analyze the data and look for something meaningful.

This is quickly changing. As I've written about previously, enterprise software vendors have been acquiring standalone analytics/business intelligence vendors to embed in their suites, offering business-user targeted real-time analytics reporting created for specific business roles and problems. Outside of core CRM and ERP, this trend is also happening in contact center applications, with Verint acquiring Witness to bring together 'best of breed' workforce management (WFM) and quality monitoring (QM) on a core analytics platform. And today another announcement that further proves this trend: Genesys, with 4,000 customers for contact center software, has acquired Informiam, an Atlanta-based vendor of realtime "Business Performance Management" tools.

There was a great slide in the announcement deck, which I will paste in for your reference, showing the various packaged analysis areas Informiam delivers.

There are a couple of things I find very interesting about the suite:

• There are no single vendor environments. Even though Genesys offers technology for call routing, WFM and IVR, other vendors names are listed in the diagram. Hopefully, this indicates an acknowledgement from Genesys that though the analytics platform can be highly integrated with their own data sources, for 'real world' environments they will also have to integrate to multiple third party platforms to do true enterprise reporting.


• Business user targeted reporting is key. Unlike the multi-purpose BI platforms acquired by the CRM/ERP vendors, Informiam already had packaged reporting for customer service areas like workforce utilization, volume and quality, so customers don't have to build it all themselves.


• A look beyond the basics. On the press/analyst call this morning to announce the acquisition, Informiam highlighted some of their capabilities, and an area I found fascinating was bordering on Systems Management: analyzing outages impacting call center operations to not only help identify the root cause of the failures, but also to intelligently alert agents when outages occur with procedures for workarounds or backup systems.

I've been a fan of Genesys for some time, and in fact I included them in my Forrester eService Wave last year because they were further along for multichannel contact center than their competitors (and they scored better than some eService vendors). I'm happy to see they are including better analytics early in the game, showing they remain attune to the market.

If you are shopping for any enterprise software for your contact center or tech support operation, be it CRM, order management, knowledgebase, self-service, contact center infrastructure, whatever, be sure to add a section to the RFP detailing requirements for real-time analytics. If you currently use a 3rd party BI platform, with a staff of specialists, don't assume you will always do it that way. Best of breed, pre-integrated analytics should cut the time and cost to implement a new system, and definitely accelerate ROI from the project.

If you have any questions or comments, please add a line or send me an email. And as always, thanks for reading!

John Ragsdale
VP Research
SSPA
jragsdale@thesspa.com