Tony Bates taps Genesys to lead cloud market

Genesys®, a global leader in omnichannel customer experience and contact center solutions, has announced that Tony Bates has been appointed Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately. Paul Segre, the former CEO, will be promoted to Chairman of the Board at Genesys.

Segre said: "In my previous 12 years as CEO, I have been fortunate to work with the best team in the industry. We have continued to disrupt the market, especially in recent years with cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) innovation. At the end of 2018, Genesys revenue reached $1.5 billion, the best year in the company's history. I am very excited to take on the role of Chairman at this historic time for the company and to warmly welcome new CEO Tony Bates."

Bates has decades of industry experience and has successfully driven different types of businesses to success through industry transformation and rapid expansion, including business-to-business and business-to-consumer models. His achievements include: leading Cisco's service provider business; leading Cisco's enterprise and commercial divisions to expand annual revenue to more than $20 billion. Bates also served as CEO of Skype, during which time the company's business expanded to more than 170 million users.

After Skype was acquired by Microsoft, Bates became president of unified communications and executive vice president of business development and growth. In addition to his CEO position at Genesys, Bates will continue to serve on the boards of VMware and eBay.

Genesys also announced that former president Tom Eggemeier will become a partner at Permira Investments, which together with Hellman & Friedman holds a majority stake in Genesys.

“It’s an honor to lead Genesys at this critical juncture,” said Bates. “Under Paul and Tom’s leadership, Genesys’ Next-Generation Cloud business has grown 85% year over year, rapidly infusing AI applications into the Customer Experience Platform. Genesys is the undisputed market leader with an exceptional customer base, including the introduction of our highly anticipated PureCloud product, which is one of the fastest growing SaaS businesses ever, on par with high-growth companies like ZOOM. There is a huge opportunity on the horizon, and we should seize the opportunity.”

Brian Ruder, Partner and Co-Head of Permira’s Technology Group, commented: “With Tony Bates at the helm, Genesys will continue to deliver record revenue growth, profitability, customer success and business impact. We are delighted to have Paul as Chairman of Genesys and to welcome Tom to Permira. At Permira, Tom will continue to help the Genesys team drive growth and bring his talents to our entire technology portfolio.”

“Tony has a successful track record of leading transformation and driving rapid growth for multiple organizations, and we welcome his continued energy to Genesys’ future growth,” said Tarim Wasim, partner at Hellman & Friedman.

We also thank Paul and Tom for their stewardship of Genesys over the years, making it the undisputed leader in the customer experience market.”