Genesys AppFoundry: Fast-Track Your Customer Experience Innovation

If you had to explain the impact technology has on society, what are the first things that come to mind? When one of my university professors posed this question to a group of alumni recently, my answer was simple: Technology lowers the barriers to entry to acquiring knowledge and disseminating information. For businesses, it creates new, more efficient, and less costly business models.

This is true of all landmark advancements in communications and media—Gutenberg’s printing press in 1439, Morse’s telegraph in 1844, Bell’s telephone in 1876, the transistor in 1947, the first modern computer in 1953, and finally the internet in 1989—they all reshaped every industry they touched by drastically lowering the barriers to entry while simultaneously growing the total addressable market, often exponentially.

In that spirit, we launched the Genesys AppFoundry, an online marketplace focused on customer experience (CX) solutions, during G-Force 2015. The AppFoundry is a resource center for you to discover, research, and connect with a broad range of CX applications, integrations, and services that address your unique needs.

Genesys AppFoundry Website

 

The AppFoundry is accompanied by a new Genesys Developer Program and portal that provides documentation, video tutorials, sample code, and a forum. With the AppFoundry and the improved Developer Program, Genesys not only provides customers with a single resource to discover and purchase new solutions, we’re also taking a more active role in enabling and growing the developer community by giving their creations a direct path to market, as well as fostering innovation through access to the assets, training, and community support of the Genesys Developer Support Portal, or DevFoundry.

There’s an AppFoundry for That

Nearly a month has passed since we launched AppFoundry, and we’ve gotten great reviews from the press and analysts. No doubt this is due to the depth and breadth of listings available. Industry analyst Shelia McGee-Smith even noted that the AppFoundry launched with more applications and partners than any other CX-focused marketplace.

Currently, AppFoundry has 80 listings, but we’ve received more than 25 new applications since October and expect to add many of these applications to the marketplace in the coming weeks, quickly bringing the count over 100. This momentum is evidence that we’re on the right track. Impactful innovations make sharing knowledge, communication, and services with a wider sector of the population possible.

What this means for Genesys Partners and Customers

As Marc Andreessen, of VC firm Andreessen-Horowitz, put it: Software eats the world and will continue to do so. Education, communications, transportation, publishing, entertainment, and advertising all rely on it. All of these sectors have been continually disrupted by technological advancements that lowered the barriers to entry. This, in turn, forced existing players to compete with new, more efficient, and less costly business models.

The impact that technology has on society and industry is the same impact Genesys intends to create by opening up our cloud APIs and launching the AppFoundry. We want to enable both our customers and the developer community to bring new innovations to market more easily, inexpensively, and quickly than ever before.

This will prove to be a huge benefit to our existing developer community as well as a host of new independent software vendors (ISVs) that will take advantage of this program. And our customers, as our CEO Paul Segre put it, “can now fast-track the delivery of customer experience innovation through a single online marketplace.”

2016: The Year Ahead

In 2016, we’ll continue to invest in the AppFoundry, doubling the size of the developer support team and opening up a host of cloud APIs. We’ll also begin offering sandboxes of our cloud environment. This is necessary to allow integrations with the Genesys Customer Experience Platform and represents a significant change from the way partners and developers accessed our technology in the past. This is also a move that drastically lowers the upfront investment required to build on the Genesys platform.

What's Next_Blog AppFoundry

Our growing developer support team will offer partners regular office hours while they continue to add content to developer articles, produce video tutorials, write sample code, and moderate the forum on our DevFoundry.

Not only will access to the Genesys platform improve, so will its openness. The Genesys Customer Experience Platform has been an open one since its inception and boasts a large and flexible set of APIs included in the SDK. However, our cloud offering has, in the past, not been as open as our on-premises portfolio. That will change in 2016.

Key Takeaways

With the launch of the AppFoundry and DevFoundry, there’s never been a better time to be part of the Genesys ecosystem. This is true for both customers and developers. Genesys is re-committing to being an open-systems company, and we’re looking forward to working with our network of partners and developers to help companies large and small modernize the CX.

Stay on top of the latest developments by exploring the AppFoundry to find the latest solutions for omnichannel journey management, reporting and analytics, self-service, knowledge management, and visiting the DevFoundry for updates throughout the year.

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