Rewind to the beginning of April 2003. As coalition troops were moving into the outskirts of Baghdad, the then Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz was claiming that Iraqi forces were routing (that rhymes with doubting) coalition forces and were about to be driven out of the country. After coalition forces took control of the whole of the country within a fortnight, US president George Bush claimed an end to hostilities. Political leaders may sometimes be unaware of what is happening on the ground but at other times they are blatantly lying.

At a glance, it might appear that the worlds of politics and IT are a long way apart but, on closer inspection, some interesting parallels can be discerned. In IT, resellers are the closest equivalent of troops on the ground and, although a head office may sometimes be unaware of what’s happening in the field, the lying is rarely that blatant. But the parallels don’t end there. In democratic countries, there’s a saying that oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them. Although this isn’t as often paralleled in business, in the CTI software market, there are some signs of just this phenomena occurring.

The leader of the CTI software market is widely recognised to be Genesys, whose Customer Interaction Management CTI software product has the largest share of the world CTI software market with about 34% in 2005 as measured by the author. [Note: this research measured market share in the CTI software market, not the CTI software plus CTI-capable telephone systems plus IVR systems plus outsourcing contracts plus consulting plus circuit cards plus who knows what else that other companies have been known to report.] The product itself has most of the optional modules such as predictive dialling, routing of emails etc. and off-switch ACD that the more featured of such products offer tend to offer. However, as there are a number of other products in the market with comparable capabilities, Genesys’s success is clearly due to more than these capabilities alone. And unless my experiences on some recent consulting engagements are atypical, they provide some valuable insight on what they are.

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