Glenn Nethercutt - Chief Architect at Genesys

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Glenn, the Chief Architect at Genesys, and we discuss how to empower your teams to work autonomously, what it means to digitally transform a company's contact center, and why it's important to listen to and implement customer feedback at every stage of company growth. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) Dude, your beard's looking great.

(Glenn at 00:00:39) Yeah, yeah, I keep trying to trim it. It's been over a year since I've actually had a proper haircut, so hopefully that one's showing off well enough as well. Me with scissors and my own trimmer—let's say it was touch and go at the beginning of the pandemic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:54) Me too, man. This is my first beard I ever grew when I started in the pandemic.

(Glenn at 00:00:59) Wow, that's pretty epic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:00) Yeah, and I'll tell you what, I was trying to mess with it and figure it out and it wasn't working. So I watched this YouTube video of a guy from a beard company, you know, and he said the trick to growing a beard is do not touch it. And so I was like, alright. So he said hide your buzzer, you know, somewhere else outside of your reach. He goes, don't trim it, don't touch it up, don't do anything for like four straight months. And he goes, and then you can go clean up the lines and stuff. I was like, alright. So I did it and it worked.

(Glenn at 00:01:34) Never had a better year to try that journey, I suppose.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:39) Right, right. But where are you located?

(Glenn at 00:01:42) So I'm in Raleigh, North Carolina, the Research Triangle part of Raleigh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:46) You like it there?

(Glenn at 00:01:48) I do. Raleigh's pretty great. So we're about midpoint in our state between the coast and the mountains. So I can go for a little bit longer, maybe four hours to get to proper mountains, or two and a half hours or so and be at the beach. It's a nice little mix. Got good tech density here. We got a lot of telecom that was here years ago, sort of where I cut my teeth in the industry. But lots of universities too. So very university-focused kind of area. Some pretty big names—NC State, UNC.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:19) Yeah, I've got some family out there, so I've been out there quite a bit.

(Glenn at 00:02:22) I do love it here. I don't—you know, being in tech, I've always felt the draw of the West Coast and always kind of toyed with the idea of moving to the Valley or maybe moving to Seattle or Portland. But I never really pulled the trigger on it. I do plenty of trips out there and visits to talk to tech companies, but I've been pretty happy with where I've stayed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:41) Yeah, I would say I think that happens a lot, right? Because I've thought about moving out to San Francisco or all over the places you described too, but I just never have actually done it.

(Glenn at 00:02:55) You know, I've got the benefit now of working for a San Francisco-based company per se, and I get to travel out there a lot without the smaller square footage and the price tag associated with living there. So it's the best of both worlds, I suppose.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:08) We're visitors. We enjoy it, right?

(Glenn at 00:03:10) Yeah. So when you're growing up there, right, what was going on in the technology world?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:19) Oh, wow. I mean, way back, my first real memories of it, you know, even before computer camps and all that good stuff—I remember my first computer, TRS-80, you know, Trash-80 Model III Color Computer. No disk drives. Actually had the old cassette tapes. I remember finally getting that and actually being able to write code in BASIC and playing with it. It was, again, fortunate. I had so many universities even in the eastern part of the state, computer camps and stuff, so I got exposure to that fairly early. But beyond that, yeah, telecom, like I say, was a huge one. Pharma, biotech is also pretty big in the Triangle now as well. So it's sort of all over the map.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:00) I saw that you worked on a Beowulf cluster, and it sounded so cool. I had no idea what it was. And then I Googled it and I was like, oh, that's a Beowulf cluster. I didn't know the name of it, but I knew what it was.

(Glenn at 00:04:13) Oh yeah, man, that's the Wayback Machine. Yeah, that was back when I was an undergrad. I suppose that part of research was real at East Carolina. One of the first big projects I did—this is probably senior thesis kind of work—one of the first available clusters that we ever had, at least on campus. Distributed computing was just starting to get in vogue. I guess again the pendulum was swinging, but lots of small systems working on big problems was starting to become something compelling again. So I guess I did do some research there—distributed Laplace transformations and that kind of thing over Beowulf cluster. So that, I guess, also was sort of my entry point in thinking about bigger system design, not just writing software that's on a single machine doing a single job, but lots of things working together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:02) So you write the Beowulf cluster, which I don't know what Beowulf the name means, but it just sounds cool. This is like a trend. It's like Nethercutt developed the Beowulf cluster. Like, that just is a cool sentence. I like that sentence.

(Glenn at 00:05:14) Well, I can say that I can't take the credit for the name, being a literary one, nor the attack. Beowulf was something sort of like what maybe Linux was for operating system development—how it had these kind of grassroots movement that was coming up. Shortly thereafter, the distributed systems side of it, Beowulf was sort of that notion of network-attached computers that are all talking to each other as opposed to lots of CPUs sitting on one machine. But I like where your head is. I'll put that on my resume of magical spells I know or something about that. There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:49) And so you do this research in college, right? And then what's your first paying gig? What's your first job out of school?

(Glenn at 00:05:57) Yeah, out of school in industry, actually Nortel. So straight into big telecom, carrier-grade communications at the time was sort of where I started. And I've had a pretty interesting trajectory, I guess, over the years, but that was a pretty low-level foray. At that point I was doing some device driver work, and then it was carrier-grade communications. So system-to-system communications, SIP protocols, that kind of thing. But pretty deep in the bowels of how, at the time, how Voice over IP was first getting started, right? The carriers were starting to try to grapple with what was happening over the Internet for the communication revolution, particularly around voice, but text and other things were also kind of coming along. Even TV, video and whatnot over IP was a big part of the challenge that they had in front of them. So I got to ride on that train for a while. That was pretty interesting. Sort of seeing the bowels of how things work and how we've connected the world when you pick up your phone—when people used to have phones on their wall and got dial tone. It's like, there was a lot of magic that happened there. How did that change with mobile, and how did that change with the Internet? Sort of the—that was my first ride.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:12) And then where'd you go from there? How'd you get to Genesys?

(Glenn at 00:07:15) Yeah. So Nortel was big enough that I got to experience a lot of different aspects of it. That was also, I guess, a pleasant experience of being in a large company was the idea that you could change jobs multiple times every few years perhaps. Different technology expertise, different people that you get to work with sometimes, but still be in the same company. It's a lot easier to sort of tap around and interview internally, I guess. But after that, you know, the sort of bubble was bursting. I was there for that particular side of the ride too and decided maybe big industry wasn't the place for me. And I went from a company—I guess Nortel at its height, when I was there, had around 98,000 employees worldwide. I mean, they were huge, just huge. And I left there and I went to a company with 25 people. So I figured, you know, let's change all the variables other than my location all at once and see what happens. And I popped around in the startup space for a while. Did a little contract work on the side and some startup companies, which either divested or sold off little pieces, some that didn't do so well. But that's sort of my meandering path through that. And then, I guess, when I left, I sort of thought, man, I think I'm done with telecom. I don't think I'm ever going to go back to big telecommunications. Yet an offer was presented to me at Interactive Intelligence was the company at the time out of Indianapolis. And they were basically offering a greenfield kind of project to, again, sort of communications, contact centers, but more than that—chat, video, all sorts of manners of how people talk with each other basically. And they were reinventing kind of the innovator's dilemma sort of idea of disruption from within and creating a brand new division, if you will, that was focused on cloud native. And we had kind of an open-ended blank check from the CEO to start over, right? Write everything from scratch and do it with the most modern tech that we could. So how could I say no?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:22) Was that a founder CEO or just a CEO?

(Glenn at 00:09:25) Yeah. There were a lot of interesting things about it. We were publicly traded at the time, which is also an astounding thing to be able to do inside of a publicly traded company. I think it spoke to some vision and sort of buy-in on the ideas that you do have to disrupt yourself often in order to succeed. And it was a very engineering-heavy, engineering-focused culture, so that probably fostered the ability to do it. And the CEO had a deep understanding of tech and a lot of it. So it wasn't necessarily a hard sell for him. But I would assume that getting investors to buy in on that at the time, getting the board to buy in was a challenge, but one I'm happy that was solved.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:06) I was curious because he sounds like a smart guy.

(Glenn at 00:10:08) Very smart guy, absolutely. And once that company was sold to Genesys, it's been an enjoyable ride there too. We sort of had this secondary business unit mentality where we were also running kind of concurrent paths, because customers are not all the same. And that's sort of where we find ourselves now—there are a few different ways to try to solve problems, and ours is one of them. Very, again, aggressive cloud native, big multi-tenant public cloud types of systems, very SaaS-focused as opposed to a product-focused sort of mentality. But we need to be able to operate in both markets. So the idea of getting a business unit effectively, which is us, Genesys Cloud, to be able to do that was a great trajectory to take once we became part of Genesys as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:57) So did it—so you got acquired by them or spun out? Or how did that work?

(Glenn at 00:11:01) We did. No, it was a full acquisition. So Genesys bought it lock, stock, and barrel. There was a lot of overlap, but together the companies had had, I think, a lot of interplay with each other over the years. Similar domain that they were trying to solve problems in, but divergent sort of market segmentation. But that was changing. Like, the whole world was changing. And I think there was a lot of goodness that they saw in what we were trying to do in the SaaS market, and they wanted to sort of dovetail that into all the things they had been building along the way. So they picked it up lock, stock, and barrel. So at this point, I'd say our collective timeline, we've got over 30 years as a company, Genesys proper. Huge. We serve over 100 different countries. I think we handle, at last count, 70-plus billion interactions around the world every year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:52) Yeah, I saw that. I was like, what are they counting? Like, how do you—what do you—how do you qualify an interaction?

(Glenn at 00:11:58) Yeah. For us, our term for it on the Genesys Cloud side is a conversation, but interaction is pretty industry norm. It could be a phone call. That would just be a single interaction. Could be a chat conversation. So the back and forth of that would be one interaction. Could be an email exchange, a threaded email exchange. So yeah, it's a lot of people talking over the course of a year. Seventy billion plus of them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:23) That's intense. I sometimes think about—not to get too far off topic—but like, I sometimes think about when I'm at an event and everybody's talking, you can't really hear anything, and then everybody's quiet. And it's like, what do we sound like from outside? Like, if you listen to the crowd, you know, I always think that's really, really interesting because it's like listening to bees buzz, right? Like, you hear them all swarming. And it's like, what are they saying to each other? And I always think it's interesting to imagine us as like one giant organism that's just distributed. And it's like, what are those humans doing?

(Glenn at 00:13:00) Yeah, yeah. A little bit of the sort of super organism, the ant colony mentality. I think that's an interesting thought experiment. We are fortunate to have that kind of vantage point where we get to see trends in communication and how things change and how people choose to communicate, at least with brands—maybe not so much with each other, right? That's not the exact kind of business we're in, but certainly how they talk with the companies that they buy from or that they get services from. And Genesys has an interesting role to play in trying to help shape that narrative too. We're applying techniques in AI, machine learning all the time to try to improve that experience. I think if you look back historically, the way that customer experience, contact centers, et cetera, would have been viewed, originally, it would have been software is just an asset to try to create that cloud of bees that you were talking about. And then the service mentality came up. Software as a service sort of came along. And I think we're at a point in our timeline now where we're thinking about it's experience as a service. Empathy is the thing that we as a brand are really trying to chase and invest in. So we have a lot of power to kind of shape and craft how people will get to talk when they're in the best of times and, you know, buying new things or traveling or seeing the world, and in some terrible times when they need to be contacted because of disasters. Had a big part to play in contact tracing as part of COVID. There's all sorts of problem areas that we get to sort of assist in, and that's—you're right. There is a super organism and the sort of ebb and flow of how we talk as a species is interesting to watch.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:40) Or my auto warranty expiring. I get so many calls. Oh, so many calls. But how—I know you don't do that specifically, but I want to put a tie, like a tidy bow on it. So your contact center, you specialize in what?

(Glenn at 00:14:58) Well, like, channel-wise, we don't. I wouldn't say we specialize in any of them. We certainly have the probably biggest history in voice just because it's been around so long. So how people communicate synchronously like that is a big part of it. But journey and personalization, I guess, is really where we're investing the most.

(Glenn at 00:15:16) Digital transformation. There are lots of brands that are still probably struggling to get away from the just phone call-based world, and they want to either invest in other technologies like voice bots, chatbots, maybe just moving to digital channels. Certainly, millennials and even Gen Xers don't like to pick up phones. We prefer to do text or email or just chat. So I think that's a big part of us, is trying to change how people communicate so it's both more effective and efficient, but also so that you can actually get a lot more empathy. We can build context that you need when you're talking to someone.

(Glenn at 00:15:53) Right? When you call in because your warranty has expired, not when they call you. I don't like that one either. But it's nice to not have to explain who you are and the problem that you're trying to solve. Like, if they can already know that about you, but not in a way that's, you know, the uncanny valley of creepiness where they, you know, ask you, oh, it looks like it's about 80 degrees where you are right now.

(Glenn at 00:16:16) You know, that's getting maybe a little bit too far. But understanding you as a person and what you're trying to achieve and when you're getting frustrated, I think that's really solidly where we're trying to meet the need.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:27) And I'm glad you guys do exist. I remember about ten or twelve years ago, I was working on this project, and the goal was they had, you know, outbound callers and inbound callers. And the goal was there was a delay. They would call in and they would be trying to search their name and pull up this customer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:48) And I looked at the models of the phones, like, oh, they might have an API or something. And the idea was to do an HTTP pop of the person as they called in so that when you answer the phone, all their entire account is in front of you. The amount of difficulty it was, me coming from my world where you could just grab an API and do something really easily between systems to the phone world, because I didn't have any experience programming on the SIPs or the phones or anything and all the stuff you would need. It was massively difficult to do.

(Glenn at 00:17:24) Yeah. There's a lot of irony in a business that has so much tech driving it, in some cases, having such antiquated or at least difficult to leverage solutions for problems like that. It's pretty telling. It's the, what's the idiom? The cobbler's children have no shoes. Yeah. Yeah. Probably a lot of that. Yeah.

(Glenn at 00:17:48) That's very much where we also started. Genesys Cloud. When we had our inception moment, not only were we trying to go, let's go public cloud. Let's be cloud native. Right? Let's actually do a microservices-based approach. Let's do event-driven programming and event-driven systems. A lot of things that we kind of saw from the commercial industry at the time, the Netflixes of the world, if you will, and that was working great in commercial spaces. Really, what we were trying to do is take that same ease of use, kind of to your point. So it can be hard, and integrating those types of systems can be hard. Let's make the tech we use look a lot like what the commercial space is going through right now.

(Glenn at 00:18:26) But let's figure out how to do that in enterprise. And it's not just bigger problems or even harder protocols. We do all that while we still have to get things like PCI certification or HIPAA, HITRUST, SOC Type 2. Like, the laundry list of things that, you know, maybe a Netflix doesn't have to deal with, but we do. That's pretty big and its own challenge on its own right. But also having a focus on API and a platform. So that was the other big one for us. I think it was pretty powerful. We wanted to go platform first. So what we built, we have a product, obviously, we just sell it. Desktop install if you really want it, but web-based for the most part.

(Glenn at 00:19:10) But the idea that we built all of that on top of our own platform APIs, and our customers can come in and build their own, that's been an underlying sort of tenet in what we've designed and created. And it's really resonated too. I imagine that most of the folks that you've had the joy to talk to over the years have been at some point along that kind of timeline with their companies too. I'm curious your thoughts on this one. But many of them are going through their transformations to probably public cloud or SaaS.

(Glenn at 00:19:38) And they're trying to be builders, but they also want to just buy something. And we're very much in that kind of vendor camp of you can build it, you can buy it, you can partner, and we can figure out how to make that happen. I'm curious of what you've seen as the appetite for that across different industries with the people that you've spoken with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:55) Oh, it's super varying. First, I'd say company size. Obviously, a huge factor on to what their strategies are, available cash, things like that, available financing. I also find, I think it's deeply embedded in the culture. So one example would be Salesforce. So I got to talk to Parker. They make crazy amounts of acquisitions. Like, they're, are they a software company or are they an acquisition company? Right? So they've gotten really good at it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:27) Then I've talked to companies, you know, like maybe some server companies that will pick up, they'll pick them up for, it's like why is the acquisition happening? Sometimes they acquire for talent. Sometimes they acquire for straight customers. And sometimes they acquire because it's cheaper to acquire that technology that they want and that team. So sometimes they just want the people. Sometimes they want the technology and the people to run it. Sometimes they, I've rarely seen them where they just want the technology and they don't want the people because there's so much embedded knowledge in the people that make it. You really want that expertise. I mean, just think about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:04) You and me build systems our entire lives. You know how hard it is if you just are handed a code base and are like, here you go.

(Glenn at 00:21:11) Yep. Yep. Yeah. Totally daunting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:14) Yeah. Yeah. So there's just such a wide variety of why they're buying. But I've definitely gotten to walk through all those various types of strategies. What size of company are you?

(Glenn at 00:21:27) So employee-wise, we're north of 5,000 globally, I believe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:33) Is that numbers? Acquisitions. Any acquisition you want almost. Yeah.

(Glenn at 00:21:37) Yeah. We are, I wouldn't say we have the same appetite for that as maybe a Salesforce or an IBM or, you know, the big shops that love to do that. But we've definitely had a pretty good list. We've had a recent one that we've announced intent for that's very much in the DCS, the digital customer service space. So again, trying to make sure we keep that self-disruption pipeline rolling.

(Glenn at 00:22:01) Because a lot of the buyers that we see, they're going digital only. Don't necessarily want to start with, say, the bigger type of solution. They want something smaller and smaller, and we want to be able to cater to all. We had some AI acquisitions that we've done over the last few years. I think that have been incredibly compelling. Our AI story has been, I think, dramatically improving in the last two years. Predictive engagement, predictive routing, interaction analytics. We had a company that we acquired out of Canada that was focused on gamification. It's another interesting avenue to go down. And I think that's played pretty well this year also, given the amount of culture that's been probably hard for companies to maintain with their workforces, right, being distributed, work from home.

(Glenn at 00:22:45) The idea that we can foster this internal game of how people work and are influenced and encouraged. I think it's healthier than just driving a KPI-only focused sort of model. The idea that you can have people want to achieve more. They want to be better than their neighbor in the next cube over. That's a great thing.

(Glenn at 00:23:08) So it's about empathy, not just for us trying to make sure brands have empathy talking to their customers, but it's even empathy that we have within an organization, within their workforce that we're trying to look at.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:19) So if you were hiring me and I asked you what the culture is like, what are the people like there? You can even narrow it down to like your team. Right? Sure. What would, how would you describe that?

(Glenn at 00:23:30) Oh, wow. So I think one of the first things I say for either interns or new hires when we're having little onboarding sessions, tribe of builders, I think, is one of my first phrases that I use. So on the engineering front, and I'd say really across the board, kind of really tried to encourage and foster that experimentation mentality. Fail fast and often, but do it with a lot of transparency. Some of our best internal sort of cultural rituals or knowledge shares around failure.

(Glenn at 00:24:03) Best failures to learn from are those that you didn't make, that your friend did and you never have to. So people that can have that and not feel exposed, we have a blameless postmortems style analysis, just a blameless culture in general, and super high autonomy. If I were going to boil it down and just sell it to a single word, autonomy is probably the one that I would pick. It's one that we've done both culturally from a business philosophical standpoint, and Innovator's Dilemma maybe coming through on that front, and also from a technology and even processing compliance standpoint.

(Glenn at 00:24:41) Teams here have an awful lot of autonomy. The price for it's responsibility. We have a DevOps mentality that I like to think of DevOps as in the team as the paradigm. Like, when we have teams, they're responsible from the inception of an idea that turns into a service, built as a microservice, deployed, operationalized, kept running, and watched all the way through revenue, all by the same team. Right?

(Glenn at 00:25:08) So there's an ownership mentality. And when you buy into that and you recognize that, yeah, I'm on call for it, but I have a lot of tools and robots around me that actually keep the thing working if I do it right, that's a pretty good trade-off. And you get a lot of sort of leniency and autonomy to do it the way that you want to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:27) I like that. Price for autonomy is responsibility. That's good. I'm like, we need to make a quote out of that. We need to make a little quote graphic and post that.

(Glenn at 00:25:38) Yeah. I like it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:38) On the Insta internet. Yeah. That's truth. That is so true.

(Glenn at 00:25:42) Yeah. It's worked for us in spades. Like, when we started, again, I was there pretty close to day one, first 10 employees or so on the project that was starting PureCloud, which is now Genesys Cloud. And now we are hundreds, specifically just working on that product. So from zero code sitting in a Git repo somewhere to over 400 services now.

(Glenn at 00:26:06) Four hundred microservices comprise what we build and deploy. We're in 10 regions around the globe. We're sort of all over the map on the types of technologies and services that we use from the big vendors, like AWS, for example. And we do thousands of deploys every week in production. So our appetite for the continuous integration and continuous delivery philosophy has been really high.

(Glenn at 00:26:34) And the only way to do that is to have teams that are really enabled to do it. Good guardrails to make sure that they can't break things and good cultural efforts to educate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:44) So when you're on the manufacturing floor and something goes wrong, you smash the big red button.

(Glenn at 00:26:50) Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:50) And the production chain comes to a halt and everybody figures out what's going on. You run through that exercise. How do you guys do that over there? What's your big red button?

(Glenn at 00:27:00) I don't know if there's a single red button, but there's a few layers along our process that we've got for that. We certainly have an organization. One of my teams actually that's responsible for service reliability engineering. And not so much that they go in and try to make sure a team is right or that they tell them how to do it necessarily. I like to think of it as a lateral sort of leadership principle.

(Glenn at 00:27:25) The Spotify-ish model, sort of, very guild-focused. So think of this as the SRE guild as opposed to a team that just does reliability. So they have a set of rituals and processes that they can probably hold things back. We do have at least enough of a change management, automated though it may be, that certainly things have to get approved, and we have ways to stop that approval from automatically happening. And we even have robots that will watch. One in particular that the team's built called Overseer or Overwatch rather.

(Glenn at 00:27:56) That will—

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:57) That sounds cool.

(Glenn at 00:27:58) Yeah. Yeah. Overwatch will make sure that if things are not above board with our normal conformance. Right? You've got to have good alerts. You've got to have good monitoring. You've got to adhere to certain types of principles, some of the 12 Factor App-ish kinds of things. And if you don't, it will notice and prevent you from making your way up into production and sort of trigger the reviews that you need to get above the bar. So those are the biggest things, I guess, we have as to stopping all of the assembly lines.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:27) That's pretty cool. I had a conversation this past week with, and his name is John from Quintaba. But it was really interesting because I hadn't thought about this much, the big red button concept. And they were building this tool. And he was like a really smart guy. And he had done, he was at Facebook when they grew from like 4,000 to 20,000 people and he was responsible for building Workplace by Facebook and a couple other big projects. So I was like, oh, he's really, really smart. And he had a couple of co-founders, you know, there's like three of them and they're relatively small company. But they took all their learnings and got together with all their friends that had worked at Facebook. And they're like, oh, you know, what do we really miss from Facebook?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:12) Like, what did they do well? You know, you're over at Stripe now. You're over at all these big companies in the valley. And they're like, oh, we really miss this one tool.

(Glenn at 00:29:20) It was like a—

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:20) Big red button type deal. And because it allowed us to do this incident response, but the way it allowed that incident management to occur was just tremendous. It was just very valuable. So they essentially built, just started with that seed and built this really cool thing. And so now I'm excited about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:40) I think it's neat. And so I love it. And I heard great things about you too from Henry over at Company Nurse. He's like, these guys are awesome.

(Glenn at 00:29:50) Yeah. Henry's a great use case. It's fun watching, again, people who want to construct. Right? It's internally the type of mentality and philosophy that a lot of people internally have, and when that tracks and jives so well with how a consumer of our services thinks and wants to function, you know, it's a perfect match.

(Glenn at 00:30:13) It's great watching how quickly we can enable them. The problem areas that they always need to solve, it's so interesting to see how unique they may be. So, yeah, Henry, I guess for other folks who haven't listened to that one yet, they are dealing with health care inside of workplace. And if you can imagine a harder area hit in the last twelve months, wow. Yeah.

(Glenn at 00:30:37) And they've had to pivot pretty hard. So I think their story of how they can react and how they are going to use and leverage their vendor relationships to just change their tooling.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:49) There you go. So I'm really curious to know, how does, how is it compared to like Twilio? Doesn't Twilio have like a call center type system? Like, why one over the other? Or like, would a person, I know so little about this just to be upfront.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:06) I didn't know if somebody would even choose between those, if they're competitors or if they're similar or what the deal is there.

(Glenn at 00:31:12) Sure. Sure. In tech, I mean, the tech world has plenty of enemies, but a lot more frenemies, I would say. Yeah. Like, Twilio was definitely not persona non grata around here by any means.

(Glenn at 00:31:24) I'd say our origin stories are vastly different. They came in with, you know, sort of the atom and materials that they were working with for the actual mechanism by which you communicate. And they were bringing a very API and builder-focused way on how to send a text message. Right? Let's distill it to one of their easiest use cases.

(Glenn at 00:31:44) And now they've built a bit of an ecosystem and some API layering on top of that. And you're right, they do have some things that work in the customer experience space. But theirs are, I guess, communication-focused, and we're trying to go from the people-centric focused and the journey that people are on and trying to build that as part of it. So I guess it's a difference in the fundamental building blocks on how we're constructed.

(Glenn at 00:32:10) And some of the problem areas that we're going after, for example, are well beyond that one. So I mentioned workforce engagement as part of what our solution crafts as well. So it's not just about, hey, can I send a message to this person? But it's how many times have they spoken with the brand? What's their sentiment been like over the years? How's that relationship changing? How can I guide them to the next best action they should take?

(Glenn at 00:32:23) If they're on the website, when do I interject with one of the agents? You know, the annoying chatbot that just pops out and asks, do you need any help? Like, we don't want to do that. We want to say, in fact, our predictive engagement solution is watching what you're doing on the site, comparing that to what others have done, passing it, you know, vectorizing all that, sending it through some wonderful AI, and out the other side comes a probability score on you successfully being able to do what you're trying to do.

(Glenn at 00:32:39) And if we see that changing, that's when we know that we can interject ourselves. And then tie all that to, well, how do you staff it when you can't? How do you have your workforce know when to grow and shrink throughout the year? How do you schedule them? How do you train them? How do you improve their life? That is a lot greater than the sort of problem domain that I think some of the other competitors in our space go after.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:19) Yeah. Well, that's way more in-depth. That's pretty cool. How do I, is this something where I have to talk to sales or can I go, like, sign up for it? How do I experience it and see it?

(Glenn at 00:33:30) Yeah. There's a website, as usual, is a great place to start. We've definitely done free trial in the past and sort of a just click and poof, you're there. Given obviously moves around the world over the years, we do usually have a little bit of involvement that happens after that. If you're buying phone numbers and you're setting up, oh, I don't know, you need to handle a hundred thousand calls every day, that's the kind of thing that we'd like to hear about.

(Glenn at 00:33:50) But we put you inside of, it's not a single instance for us. It's all multi-tenant. So you're already going into a big pile of other customers, thousands of customers around the world, and hundreds of thousands of users active every week. So, yeah, you join in that, and you benefit from all of the infrastructure that's been built to support them. So there's no hardware deployment. It is truly SaaS. So you can consume it with just a web browser if you want.

(Glenn at 00:34:16) We've had, we've had on-stage experiments before where we had someone unwrap a Chromebook on stage, sign up for our site, have the org ready, and take a phone call before they got off stage for, like, a regular thirty or forty-five minute talk. So whether sales is involved or not, if they will be as part of onboarding, it's still a pretty svelte and fast process.

(Glenn at 00:34:48) Another, I don't know if I'll say the name, but a sort of flag carrier airline in Mexico was one of the comers to our platform during the last year and a half. And as I recall, they needed to obviously have employees starting to work from home. It was thirty-six hours for them from buy to go live with their agent pool being able to work from wherever they were in Mexico. So it's a pretty fast process for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:16) Yeah. I found that it's pretty interesting how you get so excited when you get these big customers, but all the big customers, by default, put in their contract that you can't say that you are, like, their provider. And so then you, I find myself, like, this sucks. It's like you get a Fortune 500 company. Now I can't tell people that, you know, you're my customer. And so, well, you can't market it. But I don't know. I just found that kind of interesting because my experience as a user going around is, like, all the logos are on all the websites. And it's, like, all the logos are on the websites. Clearly, they're negotiating this somehow.

(Glenn at 00:35:53) Indeed. In fact, we have some that you could look at on our website, say, large ride-sharing companies, for example, that while we can show it and talk about it in certain contexts, using their name is not necessarily something that our PR firm and folks internally will shudder if I started.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:12) I know. I know. It's so much fun, though. Like, for me, like, it is hard to, it's hard not to.

(Glenn at 00:36:17) Because we're really proud. Our sort of marquee top-line customer says, Genesys may not be a name that any of your listeners know, but I guarantee you know the brands that are enabled by what we've built. Guarantee.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:30) And isn't that cool though too? Like, when you're at a party or you're out, like, meeting people, it's like to be able to connect it back to something that the person knows. Even if you're meeting, like, when you know, one of your kids' parents, they're not going to be, like, knee-deep in, like, VoIP and stuff like that. But they'll know if a large name, they'll know, like, a Walmart. None of these are necessarily your customers. They know big brand names. And so it makes them feel, like, comfortable, and then you can have that conversation. Unless if you don't want to talk, and then you can just be like, I'm in telecom.

(Glenn at 00:37:04) Yeah. Yeah. SIP and Voice over IP is definitely the cocktail party killer for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:10) So what's your day-to-day like? You're at this larger company. You acquired. You got in there. You have several products. You have this, you know, customer experience platform. You got a lot going on. Right? What is your actual day-to-day look like?

(Glenn at 00:37:25) Wow. Yeah. It's pretty varied. So architectural guidance, I guess, is a big part of what sort of my sub-piece of the organization cares deeply about. So there's a lot of that kind of practice going on, working with teams that are coming up with new ideas, trying to figure out the right way to navigate. Engineers can be interesting creatures to interface with. Telling them how to do something isn't always great. People like to figure out how to build things themselves.

(Glenn at 00:37:45) But also knowing, here's the way that we've been successful building houses. And also, there's a fire code involved. Right? Like, I see it as a lot of that kind of, maybe an overlay from another industry if you wanted to put it in there. Another big part of it, the SRE team that I mentioned, that's part of our organization. They would be like maybe the fire marshals doing controlled burns.

(Glenn at 00:38:02) Rather than them going into a situation and telling people how to get more reliability by writing this line of code, instead we build our own chaos tools. Right? If you're familiar with chaos engineering, we do every day of the business day in our development and testing environments. We've got all kinds of chaos. The simple ones, like servers just disappear, we've long since gotten past that being problematic.

(Glenn at 00:38:28) But doing more nefarious things that happen in cloud, like 10% of your packets from one set of servers in one availability zone or data center have problems talking to this other one, or 5% of failures trying to write to a database. Like, strange esoteric things that at scale absolutely happen. So ideating on that and figuring out how to build the tools around it that can enable those engineering teams, the bigger community of teams to move forward with surety that what they're building is safe. That's a big part of it.

(Glenn at 00:39:00) M&A is certainly part of it too. I get to, again, saying we have some appetite for sure for acquisitions and such. So I get the benefit of talking to a lot of companies there in that arena. And sometimes it's a partner relationship too. We have a very thriving app foundry that's, sort of our marketplace, if you will, that different vendors can come in and build solutions atop ours. Say some customized reporting for a specific market vertical, for example. Something that we might not either have the business domain expertise to chase or just not want to, you know, specialize ourselves quite that much.

(Glenn at 00:39:25) So I get to talk to a lot of those types of builders as well and see what they're creating. Yeah. I have a lot of leniency of being able to go top to bottom. One thing that Henry did say to you that I thought was kind of funny, that if you have, if your CTO is still writing code, maybe you're doing the wrong thing with your CTO. So something like that. Loosely paraphrased. That's why my title is technically chief architect. So I reserve the luxury to still write code from time to time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:18) I love it. My favorite thing is the opinions are so strong on everybody. And I get the unique vantage point where I've had, like, hundreds of these conversations. And it's just so, it's so diverse. It's really about the person. Right? Like, I don't know if I said this to Henry from my experience, but it's more about the person having self-awareness of where they enjoy spending their time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:33) Because I see very successful CTOs that have office of the CTO and all they do is tinker with a team of 10. They're in a billion-dollar company and they have a VP of Eng or, like, some label of the person who's running engineering or product or whatever. And they just sit there and develop interesting solutions or, like, things that might be ten years off or proof of concepts because that's what they like doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:07) So I think the problem comes up, like, when people reach out to me through, like, the website chat or send me emails, like, listeners. The thing I identify most as the problem is when there's conflict in that. Meaning, the person wants to be writing code but they're not able to be writing code because they haven't shifted their responsibilities and made the right hire so that they can be doing what they want to be doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:43) And so, typically, when that conflict comes up, you know, I'll jump on a call with them or something or send them a nice email, because that's what's happening. And it's like you have to know what you want to do and how you want to spend your time and then hire around you to make that scenario reality.

(Glenn at 00:41:51) I like the zen of where you're thinking is there. Yeah. I agree. I think there's no single structure of an organization. I think that's just the winner. I mean, that's probably some pretty bad old thinking. Yeah. You utilize your company's resources as you need to, but don't be overly adhered to old process and existing culture necessarily. The whole point of innovating is to try to change some of those things.

(Glenn at 00:42:19) I think it's important for people to figure that out for their own career path too. Sometimes, you got to create the job that you want. That's a hard lesson to learn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:24) That is exactly what you have to do. That creativity, that's what you're there for. And when you can empower people that want that, that want that ownership, or that have that creativity, that want to run, man, I have boiled it down to a few things and I'm not, like, at 5,000 people. We're at like fifteen people. But we're not broke, you know. And we were at one point. So, like, you figure out how not to be broke.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:45) And how not to be broke is to have really bright people who want to do good work and then coach them in the right directions and let them have ownership. And if you can get those things right at the, like, and then make sure it's tying back to revenue and that you're directing them. And, you know, I heard something the other day that's been sticking with me quite a bit. Somebody had said, you know, 90% of being a great leader is giving the right work to the right person. I was like, yeah. There you go.

(Glenn at 00:43:19) It's hard to know. If you would ask me, you know, ten years ago, would I have sort of outlined a lot of what my day-to-day is. So another big part of it, I work a lot with our vendors like AWS, for example. I'm pretty close with a bunch of their product teams and their leadership organization. Get the benefit of us being such heavy adopters. And, you know, they have a big ocean of consumers, obviously. And we're bigger than a drop in that ocean. It might be like a bucket, a bucket in the ocean.

(Glenn at 00:43:39) But they have been very receptive, I think, just because of our appetite and feedback on features and capabilities and how to build a modern platform that kind of resonates with an enterprise, like enterprise needs. Because that was, in some ways, their origin story too, but generalizing that for all enterprises away from just the amazon.com side of their world. They've been a great partner in that as well. So I get a good bit of that in my gig as well.

(Glenn at 00:44:09) But if you had outlined all of these and talked about the vanishingly small amount of time I do get to code, which is nonzero, but not as much as it definitely was ten years ago, I'm not sure I would have loved what you were telling me. But having sort of navigated my own way there and found it, it's an interesting, it's a different experience.

(Glenn at 00:44:43) I guess it's the idea of building that house back to that metaphor where the engineering teams are still building lots of their individual homes. And I've got folks that are doing fire code and controlled burn, and I've got the DevOps automation team that's building the tooling, which is basically the roads and the utility companies. And I get to act, with some of my architects, like, they're the city planners, and I get to look at the vantage point of watching a sort of international full system. Back to your ant colony, the meta-organism that is the human race. Sort of the microcosm of that with a couple hundred services and 5,000 people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:16) How much time do you spend, I mean, you have large clients. Right? And they want to know that there's a level of comfort if I can hang out with Glenn. Right? And our servers or our services are dependent upon them. So how much time do you get to spend, like, with your customers?

(Glenn at 00:45:33) I spend, I would say few hours every week, at least, talking either with customer or partner. Probably the same amount of time talking with prospects or customers that are looking to expand and have different challenges. So pretty substantial. Our product team, the PM organization, obviously, is pretty close with them as well, at least for how ideas get into our pipeline.

(Glenn at 00:46:04) I think we've done a great job on that one too, toot our own horn a little bit there. We leverage, you know, an ideas portal where our customers, even internal folks, account team members, for example, can put things up. So not a complete roadmap available for obvious reasons, corporate reasons. But within the customer base, people can actually see what other customers are kind of suggesting, recommending, add on the vote train. That speaks a lot more like a startup than it does an enterprise company with, you know, thousands of people and many thousands of customers. So I really love the fact that we've got that type of tight relationship where our customers can influence what we're building.

(Glenn at 00:46:41) We definitely want to focus on—we've got a vision of the right things to build that help the most people. We're not trying to necessarily do contract work for each individual company, although we do have professional services that do that. But as a platform, hearing a bunch of different ones, I kind of have a rule of three. Usually, you have to do something three times or hear something three times before you build the right version of it.

(Glenn at 00:47:03) So at least having a good sample set of customers asking for a feature, it takes a lot of those conversations to understand what they're really asking for, or at least a generalized approach to one that would satisfy bigger needs. So I really like the idea of listening to the people that you're trying to serve.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:20) Yeah. Back to the buzzing hive. I have found you go around, you talk to enough people, you kind of start to—it's almost as if we're very basic organic AI.

(Glenn at 00:47:33) Yep. Hopefully, not the AI part. But yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:38) That's funny. Dude, this is good. Do you get to geek out as far as exploring things? Maybe not at work, but just in your personal life, like how they're storing data inside of DNA or any of those types of edge technologies?

(Glenn at 00:47:51) You know, if I were a vastly scientifically advanced alien race and I was looking for a way to preserve my culture's knowledge and all the things that we had learned, a self-replicating, self-healing storage mechanism sure makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:06) Right. But too bad its memory's wiped.

(Glenn at 00:48:08) Well, I mean, I wouldn't make it so that it's genetic memory, but I would write it in the genetic code. We've got a lot of the—what, introns or whatever—all the noncoding parts of our DNA that aren't actually making many proteins. That's a great place to, you know, I don't know, hide my recipe for bread or whatever we need to keep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:28) It's amazing how much knowledge—I mean, you have kids, right? I thought you said earlier you have some kids. It's amazing, when you can't explain it unless you have it. But when you have the kids, you see that they'll pick up things and have these traits that, you know, they didn't get from any of the content they're consuming.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:45) You're spending all your time with them, so they're not around strangers. So there is just this pre-programmed, natural personality that's coming out in them and it's hilarious.

(Glenn at 00:48:56) Yep. There are proclivities and personality for sure that is unique. Definitely, nature plus nurture is both prevalent. And, man, yeah, definitely haven't been around other people in the last year.

(Glenn at 00:49:12) So where some of the idioms have been picked up, I guess I'll never know. But it's certainly fun watching the strangeness emerge. The youngest one has just turned two, so she's known just as much pandemic time as not.

(Glenn at 00:49:27) So for us, her family unit—we're almost the only people on Earth. But she is distinctly different personality already. So however that happens, it happens.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:39) I have one that's just turned two a few months ago, and then one that's about to turn four. So my son's the youngest. My daughter's the oldest. And last night, she had said, oh, you know, somebody pushed me at school. And I was like, oh, I'll go to school and beat them up for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:54) Right? You know, jokingly. And I'll protect you. And she goes, no. She goes, daddy's not allowed at school.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:00) She goes, daddy and mommy are people at home. And then she listed her teacher's name. She goes, and they are at school. And you guys live at home. And I see you here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:09) And you're my family. And then I go to school and that's where everyone else is. And I was like, she thinks we're at home all the time when she's at school, that we just are these people that live here constantly. And that's all we do is just wait for her to come home.

(Glenn at 00:50:22) Look at her running a clustering algorithm and grouping people into categories. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:25) I know.

(Glenn at 00:50:26) I, for one, don't exist when people aren't watching me. And I'm sure all of this is a simulation. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:36) Agreed. That's a little quantum trick you figured out.

(Glenn at 00:50:39) That's right. That's right. Maybe a little more strange and a little less Dumbledore, but still nonetheless magical.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:48) Dude, I like you. How long until—I like this future talk too. Like, let's say you're in telecom space. When will I make a phone call into a call center, it'd be completely autonomous, like computer systems handling it, but I have no idea?

(Glenn at 00:51:05) Well, I will say that a lot of the generative algorithms for language are starting to get pretty good. GPT-3s and whatnot being able to solve those kinds of problems. I don't know that you're going to see it in the next five years that they're passing the Turing test, that they could fool you if you were trying to figure it out. But if you were being straight to business, just trying to get it done and not trying to trip them up and find out, yeah, I don't think we're ten years away from that by any means—you being completely fooled by it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:37) That's amazing. I love that. And then how long until I can pay you for an outbound sales team that can pass the Turing test?

(Glenn at 00:51:45) An outbound sales team that can? There's no hope.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:50) I want them to be closing deals. It will happen one day. It's just that's a hundred-year time scale probably.

(Glenn at 00:51:58) Maybe. Maybe. We'll see.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:02) What are you excited about in the near-term future for technology?

(Glenn at 00:52:06) Well, I mean, within our industry, obviously, there's a ton around AI and there's a ton around—I love the cloud journey side of it. If it doesn't come through the idea of what we built and how we built it, the "how" to me has just been just as important. So I guess doubling down on a lot of those strategies and seeing how they play out, how a more services-focused world and market, how that jives. But ML for us, AI for us, is clearly the big one. So I'm excited to see what we do in the assisted space there as probably as much as anything.

(Glenn at 00:52:40) While deflection or complete self-service automation and handling by the bots that you just mentioned is a cool idea and great, and certainly we need some of that to do more with less, I love just as much, probably a bit more, the idea that the bots actually don't exist to replace the people. They exist to actually improve what those people are doing. So for us, Agent Assist is that type of technology where it's suggesting, hey, this is what they're asking about. This is their history, and I think I know what their problem is even though they can't articulate it. And you don't have to figure it out, but I can tell you what I think it may be.

(Glenn at 00:53:06) I can do guided workflows. I can even offer you what I think the next best resolution is for doing this. Right? They want to cancel their cable service or whatever—and not trying to upsell them because the flowchart tells me to, that's one thing. But knowing that we should proactively reach out because of their usage pattern and try to upsell them, that could be useful to say, hey, you seem to like all these things. We've got a package that is actually $2 more, but you get all the things that it seems like you want to get. I think technologies like that that help us understand what people want and empathize with where they are, that's a pretty exciting space, watching that part of ML expand.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:58) That's interesting.

(Glenn at 00:53:59) And yeah, and outside of our space, I want to see where quantum goes for sure. I think we're a bit farther off on that one maybe than some would like to believe. But we always underestimate what we can do in one year and overestimate what we can do in ten, I think. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:16) What's the result? What are we looking for out of quantum?

(Glenn at 00:54:20) I mean, there's certainly a huge amount of privacy that we can actually derive from it. It's interesting when people talk about quantum. One of the first things they talk about is breaking crypto, but the idea that we actually get better privacy out of using quantum algorithms instead, I think, is pretty amazing. Optimization problems suddenly become a vastly different thing. We—again, for workforce planning and engagement and stuff, we have a bunch of different techniques, discrete event simulation or a lot of mixed integer programming type models, right? But the idea of being able to take quantum technologies to that to optimize and solve for things, that would be huge. And then outside of that, boy, man, let's go from Mars. Sign me off.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:02) Let's do it. I want to make sure that we have a call to action. So people want to explore the system. Maybe they're looking for contact center solutions. Where do they go? What do they do?

(Glenn at 00:55:14) Yeah. Many of the people that are probably listening to this are either fighting similar battles about how to rapidly innovate, how to do more with less, how to differentiate themselves. That's sort of the game that we're playing, and we're trying to chase experience as a service and not just software as a service. So really helping you expand what you can do, and how you do it and how you empathize and how you build trust and loyalty with your customer base in a healthy cycle. So, yeah, jump online, genesys.com.

(Glenn at 00:55:45) There's other offers as well as ours that you can explore if you've got different demands. But if you also like public cloud, you like the idea of being on a microservices cloud-native architecture, and you like what I'm talking about with platform and you're a builder at heart and you want to be able to build on top and not just consume something, look at what's there. We've got a developer center that's got APIs and articles, and our dev evangelists are there trying to explain things and how to do unique problem solving all the time. Great place to explore, and in all those places, you can find a way to click and get more info and talk to said salespeople if you want to onboard and try it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:22) Excellent. And then what are you learning right now as a leader?

(Glenn at 00:56:26) Oh, like, what am I reading? What am I watching? What am I...

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:30) Just what are you learning? What are you seeing out there in the world? What's that hard lesson that you're learning right now that you probably don't want to share?

(Glenn at 00:56:39) Oh, hard lesson that I'm learning. I guess one of them is technology supply does not always equal the market demand. Sometimes tech supplies more. Sometimes you're building something that's not what is needed yet. Sometimes you can't build enough to satisfy what people want in a particular arena.

(Glenn at 00:56:58) And that's hard as a technologist. I guess throwing back to the VHS versus Beta—dating myself here—VHS versus Beta conversation. You can have different tech and some with better tech, and that doesn't mean that it will always win. So figuring out how to sort of rectify that in your brain and build what people need, what they're going to need, but not something that they're not going to need for ten years can sometimes be a tricky balancing act to go through.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:25) Yeah. Living in the future is tough because it has to be close enough to where—if you already have a stable system, right, and your customers are happy, then you already have that process of you're interacting with your customers. You're building what they need in the right now. But to build out in the future, it gets really, really unclear. Am I building something that's three, six, nine, twelve months, ten years out?

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:45) And figuring out where to hit that, that's where you've got to run the experiments and place bets and sometimes you'll lose, but you've got to keep trying.

(Glenn at 00:57:53) Yep. Yeah. It's the Gretzky comment about skate where the puck's going to be. That's sort of the best mentality to approach it with.

(Glenn at 00:58:03) But we all want to—I think especially futurists and technologists are particularly vexed by this. We want to skate to where we think it's eventually going to go and sort of overshoot a lot of that. And it can be hard to pull yourself back from that sometimes. Overbuilding and over-engineering is an easy thing to do, but being practical, bringing an air of practicality and awareness of other pressures beyond just the technical, is a continuing challenge. But then also to figure out how to convince people that some of their long-held beliefs and how they do things are wrong without telling them that they're wrong.

(Glenn at 00:58:38) The best technique is to have them arrive at the conclusions that you wanted to make, but they're the ones who drew the conclusion. That's the best way. It's a decision they made in their brain. So I guess learning that technique is maybe a big one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:56) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.