Genesys Licensing is one of the topics that has always been a mystery to me. Also, I feel that most of the licensing rules are not truly justified.
The concept of per-user license, despite everything you might have heard, does not benefit anyone but the company that is selling the product. Genesys, like many other companies that offer per-seat per-function licensing, claims that this enables smaller companies to enjoy the same functionality as bigger companies for far less. Also, it enables larger companies to fine-tune their call centers costs without paying for the functionality that they do not need.
In my honest opinion, Genesys just got greedy.
Here are the reasons why I think that Genesys licensing structure does not benefit the end user:
Genesys requires purchasing all the license in advance. Without a bulk purchase order, per-seat costs can be twice than what you would pay if you buy all at once. Most call centers do not start with 3000 people at once, but gradually grow. Purchasing 3000 seats when in the beginning you only have 1700 people onsite is hardly beneficial to the end user.
Got OCS, URS and all the other bells and whistles? You need to pay for them upfront, even if you do not start using them 6 months from now.
Want to hook up a NiceLog to T-Server? You must pay for recording licenses for all of the seats in the call center, not only the active ones. In fact, if you ever decide to do anything to improve on Genesys, or replace some of their products, you still need to pay for the license of the replaced product, even if you are using your own application and not Genesys.
Want to use hot-standby option for T-Server, because there is a chance that it might fail? You must pay for HA option. Somewhere along the way, everyone forgot that HA is needed only because T-Server decides to go down south from time to time and unless you have HA, you are stuck with an angry SV.
If you own several call centers, you cannot just take the license from one center and apply it to the other. Instead, you need to purchase the new ones. Does it make sense to any of you? I mean, if we are paying for functionality and we are paying per seat, why would it matter which call center we use it at?
Annual support fees are another joke. You cannot just start support contract from when you want, cancel when you do not want, and then start again. For example, you are required to buy the first year of support. If you do not, and then decide after one or two years that it is time for you get some help, you must pay for all the preceding years as well. We had a client who had several call centers, and then mouthballed one of them for two years. Once the need for that call center has arrived, Genesys demanded payment for the last two years even though the call center was offline. I do not think this is benefiting customer, do you?
If you are a large company with a lot of subsidiaries, you cannot make one of your subsidiaries a Genesys reseller. I guess, if you do that, it would be depriving the existing resellers of their right to collect half of the annual fees. It also forces client to shell out twice as much in maintenance fee and become completely dependent on their Genesys vendor for all of future Genesys projects. I do not see how it is benefiting clients.
Genesys products are designed to penalize clients for combining Genesys technology with other third-party vendors. IVR, Nice, Routing, Callback, custom functionality all requires Genesys licenses on top of license from third-party manufacturers.
There is a reason why Genesys did not include softphone as part of their framework, because it usually generates 100K+ per client in additional revenue to either the vendor or Genesys. Selling Genesys CTI without softphone is like selling a car to a person without a driving wheel, break and gas pedals and then requiring them to buy this from your brother across the lot.I don't think this is sincere, do you?
Don't get me even started on their SDK! You need to pay for SDK, then once you develop something with it, you need to pay to Genesys for each connection to T-Server and for each DN that is going to be affected by your product. If you force people to pay for development kit, at least have the decency not to charge for their creativity. If we would create a network application with C++ on Windows, we do not expect nor would we accept Microsoft to charge for each TCP/IP connection our application makes. Why do we let Genesys get away with it? They tout this Genesys Developer Program, but the way it is structured, it actually penalizes developers to use their T-Server platform. When you sell that application, Genesys requires additional licensing for each DN that would be affected for it. In essence, you end up in this omni-directional profit-sharting partnership with Genesys, where Genesys would get parts of all your sales, but would not share any of your loses. Remind me again, why exactly I am doing this?
Overall, the idea seems to be: if you are using Genesys in anyway to benefit yourself, pay up.
I think there are two different cultures in Genesys, one developed by those Russian boys who had the brains and creativity to put together a really awesome product that has grabbed a third of the whole market share, and then you have all those leeches who try to suck as much money out of the client as they can to justify their salary and/or existence (like in regional office for Genesys in Japan), knowing pretty well that client will oblige given that there is no other viable alternative.
Genesys needs to re-evaluate its current licensing policies, because regardless of how innovative and flexible their products are, if clients start to feel company taking advantage of them, it is just a matter of time before something else would pop up to replace them.
