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The songwriting partnership between John Lennon and Paul McCartney is legendary. In the early days, they’d write nose to nose—sitting on twin beds in a hotel room, with acoustic guitars in hand. They were like mirror images of each other, throwing ideas back and forth, trading lines, editing and refining. She Loves You was composed that way.
Later in the iconic duo partnership, it was a more common practice for one of them to write the bulk of a song on his own and then meet up so the other could criticize, edit and offer suggestions to improve the raw material. This is how one of my favorite Beatles songs Hey Jude was created. Thinking of Lennon’s young son Julian, Paul McCartney composed a substantial chunk of Hey Jude in the car to help ease Julian’s sorrow from the recent separation of his parents.
Two is always better
The inherent benefits of collaboration don’t only relate to songwriters, writers or artists. They apply equally to business endeavors. And there’s an argument to be made that business activities offer just the same shade of creativity. In business, the same go-it-alone singer-songwriter versus band argument exists.
The best way to approach collaboration was when PureCloud by Genesys was in the embryotic stages of development. The PureCloud development team first asked what they wanted to provide to customers. The answer came back: a cloud contact center that could meet the rate of technological and social change in a customer’s business. They wanted to develop a system that integrates all forms of customer feedback via phone, email and social.
Taking a legacy technology stack, putting it into a private data center and calling it “cloud” seemed a bit redundant. Doing so would make it a lot harder—perhaps impossible—to deliver the new technologies that customers expect as a part of their customer experience.
This meant that, rather than building and managing infrastructure, Genesys would focus on innovation, new technologies and building the best customer engagement platform.
Find what you do best and do it. Learn what it is that you don’t do best and find someone who does it well. Sounds easy, but it’s not. You need to find the right partner and collaborator.
Partnering with Amazon Web Services
To develop PureCloud, Genesys invested in a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). And understanding what this partnership is means we first must talk about what it isn’t.
It’s not Genesys renting servers from AWS. Instead, PureCloud by Genesys is the first customer service platform to use the AWS microservices distributed architecture. Out of more than 75 AWS cloud services, PureCloud by Genesys uses 35 of them. This takes the concept of partnership to an entirely new level. To the customer, it becomes seamless and integrated. That’s really where collaboration pays dividends.
When does a partner become a collaborator?
As an AWS Advanced Technology Partner, the PureCloud development team can preview new technologies from AWS. This means they have real insights into new technologies that come down the pipeline. This affords them time to define how to deliver these new capabilities to PureCloud by Genesys customers.
Sharing and feedback become a two-way street. Genesys gives AWS feedback; AWS gives Genesys feedback. And PureCloud by Genesys has contributed to AWS solutions, such as the Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) and Amazon Elasticsearch Service. Pieces of different technologies work better together, instead of individually. This means the final product is better, and each company is able to bring new technology to its customers better because of the partnership.
Deeper developer relationships grow from weekly meetings. Relationship building isn’t just for show—it serves a specific purpose. AWS knows the PureCloud by Genesys platform and how it uses the AWS technology. Developers from both companies exchange ideas freely—with the PureCloud team unafraid to request new features.
“We like the fact that AWS is bigger than all the other competitors combined—the way they are continually advancing and keep coming up with new ways to do things—all the ways you can link services together. As a result, we can build robust applications.”
— Adam Dyer, Development Group Director, Cloud Apps, Genesys
As trust grows, so does a deeper level of partnership. Genesys works with the strategic technology team at AWS as an active partner in their portfolio. This type of partnership level is exclusive to fewer than 50 strategic technology partners globally. Dedicated business and development teams from AWS are aligned to support the growth of the PureCloud by Genesys platform. Genesys sales, marketing and development teams all integrate with AWS resources.
What makes a great collaborative partnership?
There are a few qualities that comprise a strong collaborative partnership.
#1. Equality: For collaboration to work, both parties need to be of equal stature. Both need to be able to speak up and have their voices heard. It won’t work with an employee/employer-type of relationship. You need to be able to openly say when you think something’s terrible or offer non-sycophant praise when greatness is reached.
#2. Balance safe with innovation: Yes, you need to deliver business as usual, but that can also create a rut. Working with others doubles the chances of innovative thinking and your ability to deliver solutions that your audience didn’t even know existed.
By working with Amazon Web Services, Genesys neatly balances reliability and tech innovation.
#3. An aligned vision: Heard of musical differences? The same is true in business if there’s no strategic alignment. It’s a bit like having an Android phone with an iPhone charger. No form of collaboration is going to work if you’re on totally different pages.
The power of partnership
We live in a connected world. And connecting with the right collaborators is more vital for success than ever.
Companies need to anticipate needs before customers even realize they have them. Increasingly, this is becoming more difficult to achieve in isolation. Partnering to leverage resources, creativity and knowledge is the way around this.
Aristotle wrote, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” This means that when individual parts are joined to form one entity, the value is greater than if these individuals worked alone. Without creative partnerships, the digital tools we take for granted today wouldn’t exist. Think: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. And, in the music field, this means a myriad of iconic songs, such as Hey Jude, would never have been written.
Learn more about the power of partnerships
Genesys has partnered with Forrester Research and AWS to bring you an engaging discussion on 7 Technologies That Will Change the Way You Engage with Customer, June 14th and 15th. I hope to see you there! If you can’t make the webinar live, catch it anytime on demand.
