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West Grabs Genesys

Posted by Ken Molay February 20 2008 10:20 AM EDT

Let's see... It's been more than two weeks since the last web conferencing corporate acquisition, so we were way overdue.

Fortunately West International Holdings Limited has stepped up to the plate and made things interesting by offering to buy Genesys.

For those of you unfamiliar with the players, Genesys is a French company providing audio and web conferencing solutions in North America and Europe. West Corporation (that being the holding company's public-facing corporate moniker) owns InterCall, a one-stop shop for audio and web conferencing technology and services. InterCall has proprietary products and also resells conferencing solutions from other manufacturers such as Microsoft and Cisco/WebEx.

West bought up conferencing provider Raindance in 2006 and promptly turned off all marketing and promotion of the product. To all public intents and purposes, Raindance disappeared. Genesys is larger than Raindance was and West seems primarily interested in it for the increased foothold it would provide in the European market.

The formal press release announcing the tender offer states that "The Offeror does not intend to merge Genesys with InterCall nor with any of its subsidiaries." But at the same time, the release is studded with phrases such as "facilitate the operational integration of the two groups," "operational synergies," "reduction of overheads," "economies of scale," and "certain reorganization measures because, notably, of the existence of redundant or duplicative positions within the two groups or of the rationalization of certain activites." Do you ever get the impression that legal teams get paid by the syllable?

I have both positive and negative feelings about all these acquisitions. Larger networks and communications infrastructures can provide more reliability, especially on international conferences. I'm happy to see more expansion and integration of the international market for conferencing. And the bigger companies simply have more cash available to promote conferencing as a desirable communications and collaboration medium. That helps everybody.

The potential negatives include a reduced competitive landscape, which can limit feature development and competition on price. The big companies are sometimes less responsive to individual support problems and user requests than their smaller, hungrier competitors who feel a closer tie to each customer.

This won't be the last acquisition you'll see in the space. There are still independent conferencing providers such as iLinc, ON24, ReadyTalk, Sonic Foundry, Stream57, TalkPoint, WiredRed, and many others that can provide ready-made technology and customers to a large enterprise player wanting to add more collaboration offerings to its mix. Who will be next to go?

[Disclaimer: Company names in the preceding paragraph are for illustrative purposes only and do not indicate any knowledge or assumptions on my part about business operations, financial status, or deals that might be taking place now or in the future.]

UPDATE - February 20: Robb Cason over at Corvent reminded me that while Raindance did drop off the radar after the InterCall acquisition, it is back as a prominently featured web conferencing tool on the InterCall website under its new name of InterCall Web Meeting. I really need to go through the new version to see if anything has changed besides the name. There were some features of Raindance that I really appreciated when I used to use it a couple of years ago. Nice to see it back in action!