"There are some players out there who say it is all about digital-only, but really the world isn't like that today," he said. Bates is banking on clients seeing past the latest shiny object, instead relying on the company's legacy in voice services as a difference that matters. And fresh rivals are still likely: Zoom is reportedly considering the call center market. But new entrants including Amazon and Microsoft are putting pressure on the incumbents. The industry is littered with decades-old providers like Genesys that are all trying to move from on-premise to the cloud. "But if you don't have a sense of the level of disruption and the innovation that consumers are not just asking for, but frankly driving … they're fickle, they move very quickly." That perspective grounds me," Bates told Protocol. I built infrastructure products that have very long life cycles. "I sold to the largest telephone companies in the world.
And Bates is hoping the experience gained by hopscotching through the tech industry will help Genesys emerge victorious in one of the more ferocious IT battlegrounds in corporate America - one that could be worth $91 billion by 2028, per Grand View Research, if you generously wrap in all the ways businesses spend money to manage their dealings with customers.
He joined Social Capital, which helped fund Slack and Box, for a gig that lasted a year before tech investor Chamath Palihapitiya blew up the venture capital firm he started.īates is now about two years into his run at Genesys, a company that, for the last 31 years, predominantly served as an on-premise provider of contact center software but is now fighting to move clients to the cloud and infuse AI across its product suite. There, he got cut in a round of layoffs as the camera company struggled. After a stint at Microsoft, where some eyed Bates for the CEO job that went to Satya Nadella, he took over GoPro. His big CEO break was at Skype when it was poised to go public - but months into that gig, Bates' venture backers sold it to Microsoft instead. He rose to Cisco's top ranks but didn't get the No. For Tony Bates, that's been running a big tech company.
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