Genesys Hires Former Cisco and Skype Exec Tony Bates as CEO

Genesys, the global leader in omni-channel customer experience and contact centre solutions, has announced Tony Bates as its new chief executive officer (CEO), effective immediately. Bates succeeds Paul Segre, who will continue with Genesys as chairman of the company.

"In my 12 years as CEO, I've had the privilege of working with the best team in the industry. We have repeatedly disrupted the market, most recently with our cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) innovations, and ended 2018 with $1.5 billion in revenue – our best year yet," Segre said. "I couldn't be more thrilled to step into a new role as chairman at this high point in the company's history and welcome our new CEO, Tony Bates (http://bit.ly/2HaCgVD), at a time when there's so much opportunity for Genesys."

Bates has decades of experience and success steering business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies through industry transitions and rapid scaling. This includes leading Cisco's Service Provider business and growing its Enterprise and Commercial division to more than $20 billion in annual revenue. As CEO of Skype, Bates expanded the business to over 170 million connected users. Once Skype was acquired by Microsoft, Bates became president responsible for unified communications before serving as executive vice president of business development and developers. In addition to his role at Genesys, Bates will continue his appointments on the board of directors at both VMWare and eBay.

The company also announced today that President Tom Eggemeier will transition into a new role as a partner at one of the company's private equity investors, Permira. Presently, the Permira Funds and Hellman & Friedman own a combined majority stake in Genesys.

"The opportunity to lead Genesys at this pivotal moment is truly an honour," said Bates. "With its next-generation cloud business growing 85% year over year and rapid injection of AI throughout its customer experience platform, Paul and Tom have done an incredible job building Genesys into a market leader with a remarkable customer base. Especially noteworthy is its PureCloud offer (http://bit.ly/2Vf97xi), which is one of the fastest growing SaaS businesses ever, on par with high-growth companies like Zoom.1 The immense opportunity ahead of us is clear, and I intend to ensure that we capitalize on it."

Brian Ruder, partner and co-head of Permira's technology team commented, "With Tony at the helm, Genesys is poised to continue achieving record revenue, profitability, customer success and business impact in the market, building on the incredible foundation Paul and Tom established for the company. We are thrilled to keep working with Paul as chairman of Genesys, and to welcome Tom to Permira, where he will continue to help the Genesys team drive growth and bring his talents to our entire technology portfolio as well."

Tarim Wasim, partner at Hellman & Friedman said, "Tony brings years of proven success leading technology businesses as they navigate change and drive rapid growth. We welcome his energy, direction and leadership as Genesys builds on its recent momentum. We would also like to thank Paul and Tom for their stewardship, deep engagement and strong initiative in propelling Genesys forward as the undisputed leader in the customer experience market."