Genesys, omnichannel customer experience and contact centre solutions, has announced Tony Bates as its new chief executive officer (CEO), effective immediately
Bates succeeds Paul Segre, who will continue with Genesys as chairman of the company.
“In my 12 years as CEO, I have had the privilege of working with the best team in the industry. We have repeatedly disrupted the market, most recently with our cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) innovations, and ended 2018 with US$1.5bn in revenue – our best year yet,” Segre said.
The company stated that Bates has decades of experience and success steering business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies through industry transitions and rapid scaling. This includes leading Cisco’s service provider business and growing its enterprise and commercial division to more than US$20bn in annual revenue.
As CEO of Skype, Bates expanded the business to more than 170mn connected users. Once Skype was acquired by Microsoft, Bates became president responsible for unified communications before serving as executive vice-president of business development and developers. In addition to his role at Genesys, Bates will continue his appointments on the board of directors at both VMWare and eBay.
The company also announced that President Tom Eggemeier will transition into a new role as a partner at one of the company’s private equity investors, Permira. Presently, the Permira Funds and Hellman & Friedman own a combined majority stake in Genesys.
Bates added, “With its next-generation cloud business growing 85 per cent year over year and rapid injection of AI throughout its customer experience platform, Paul and Tom have done an incredible job building Genesys into a market leader with a remarkable customer base. Especially noteworthy is its PureCloud offer, which is one of the fastest growing SaaS businesses ever, on par with high-growth companies like Zoom.1 The immense opportunity ahead of us is clear, and I intend to ensure that we capitalise on it.”
