The White House has invited LiveOps, a Santa Clara, CA-based company, to join the President and First Lady in a forum hosted by the White House Council on Women and Girls. LiveOps provides cloud-based solutions to labor needs predominantly in the contact center market. The company has an impressive list of investors (Benchmark Capital, Menlo Ventures, etc.), management (lots of eBay DNA), and board members, as well as high-profile customers like Salesforce.com and Kodak. It’s one of the first company to see the cloud computing trend and invested heavily in it. Now it’s definitely reaping the benefits, especially in this economy when companies are looking for any way to provide the most cost effective customer service.

So how did a west coast company focused on contact centers appear on the White House’s radar? Obviously LiveOps is perfectly qualified to speak to issues around workplace and labor challenges, but I’m just curious… after all, it’s a very niche segment of the economy.

Is it the $400,000 spent in 2009 on lobbying? It’s also interesting to see that Maynard Webb, Chairman and CEO, held the minority view in the 2008 presidential election compared to other employees. In that case I hope Webb is representing LiveOps at the forum just to mix things up a bit…

Press release from LiveOps here:

Washington, D.C. — March 30, 2010 — LiveOps today announced that the company will join the President and First Lady Wednesday to discuss the importance of workplace practices that allow America’s working men and women to meet the demands of their jobs without sacrificing the needs of their families. Hosted by the White House Council on Women and Girls, the Forum on Workplace Flexibility will bring together CEOs, small business owners, labor leaders and policy experts to share ideas and strategies for making the workplace more flexible for the American worker and parent.

“LiveOps plays an instrumental role in helping businesses and individuals change the way they think about and approach work,” said Maynard Webb, chairman and CEO of LiveOps. “We applaud the President and First Lady for recognizing the need for a sustainable work model that meets the needs of everyone from parents to students entering the workforce to people living in rural communities far from the center of business commerce. It is a time for innovation at work; and LiveOps is pleased to be helping thousands of individuals across the U.S. establish careers that include flexibility in the way they work and live.”

The White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility will focus on the challenges facing America’s working families and strategies for keeping Americans employed without forcing them to sacrifice parental responsibilities. As a successful company that contracts with more than 20,000 independent agents who work from home, LiveOps understands the critical need for parents to maintain a work-life balance. Founded in Florida in 2000, LiveOps has transformed one of the world’s largest labor-intensive markets: the contact center. Company founders harnessed the Internet to match call center managers with an infinite number of qualified workers — regardless of location. With no location or traditional work-schedule restraints, LiveOps learned it could quickly and easily scale to handle dynamic and unpredictable call volume. The ability to scale made LiveOps’ technology a perfect fit for the direct response industry — an ever-changing market that requires constant flexibility and adjustment. Today LiveOps provides its technology and services to companies in the financial, health, retail and marketing industries.

For additional information about the White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility, please visit the White House Web site at: www.whitehouse.gov.

About LiveOps, Inc.

LiveOps is a rapidly growing technology company offering two innovative solutions for enterprises: Contact Center in the Cloud, a SaaS technology platform for managing contact centers, and Workforce in the Cloud, an on-demand workforce for outsourcing call center calls. LiveOps On-Demand Contact Center Platform brings the value of cloud computing to the contact center by enabling enterprises to rapidly deploy an always-on and instantly scalable contact center infrastructure in a pay-per-use model that enables customers to achieve greater operational and cost efficiencies. LiveOps uses this same technology platform everyday to successfully run the largest virtual call center with over 20,000 independent agents. LiveOps provides enterprises with the on-demand call center platform and community of on-demand independent agents to quickly achieve better business results. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.

Gary Kim at TMCnet has an article on “How much can telecommuting cut carbon footprint?” which offers some insight into the cost savings related to not having to commute to a corporate office:

Lots of people these days are interested in telecommuting, at least in part because of its ability to reduce carbon footprint. Assume that a 100-person company could allow telecommuting three days a week.

Also, assume that employees commuting an average of 33 miles one day to reach their workplace, and that those employees switch to telecommuting three days a week. Also assume that all those avoided trips are taken by automobile.

That enterprise can avoid producing 6,351 pounds of hydrocarbons, 47,362 pounds of carbon monoxide, 3,146 pounds of oxides of nitrogen and 943,124 pounds of carbon dioxide, while saving 47,773 pounds of gasoline each year.

That analysis uses an average fuel economy of 21.5 miles per gallon.

Assume a fuel price of $2.75 per gallon. Workers save $750 in avoided fuel costs each week. Over a month those employees commuting three days a week save $3,250 in fuel costs and over a year will save $39,000 in fuel expenses.

That’s just the savings for the employees. There are savings for the company, too.

Now applying to the contact center business, is there a way to reduce carbon footprint?

Does a cloud-based contact center solution reduce carbon footprint? Not necessarily. Although there are immediate cost savings associated with deploying a cloud-based IVR, the solution provider still has to power its (massive) infrastructure and employ a sizable operations staff to keep the place running.

What about outsourced agents? Although this lowers your headcount and having to provide office spaces, it’s merely shifting the carbon footprint away to the outsource vendor. Plus, most of the time these vendors are far away — sometimes in India, Latin America, or the Philippines — where they pay even less attention to reducing carbon footprint. Their agents still have to commute to work and maybe use older computer equipment which draws more power.

What about on-demand agents? This is the business model for companies like LiveOps which has a platform for companies to expand and contract their contact center workforce based on demand. Most of these agents are home-based, so they save costs on commuting. However, they still have to power their PCs and broadband equipment, as well as home heating/air. Not so much of a reduction?

And during a solution implementation? Odds are you are flying in consultants from other places to work on your project. Air travel is definitely not carbon friendly. If your company has a green initiative and yet rely heavily on flown-in contractors, then you ought to raise this issue to executives. The company may have bought the greenest technologies, but still deficient in executing a green project plan.

Factors such as globalization, economics, and implementation make it difficult for a contact center to reduce carbon footprint significantly. Is there hope? It’s up to the companies to come up with their green initiatives and make sure everyone, top to bottom, is on board. Company processes and policies should be aligned to facilitate the execution of green initiatives: vendor selection, hardware procurement, telecommuting policy, travel policy, facilities management, etc. If enough companies insist on reducing carbon footprint in their contact centers, then the vendors will pay attention to this demand and adjust accordingly.

Yesterday Genesys (owned by Alcatel-Lucent) held an analyst conference to present the latest and greatest about all things this #1 CTI software vendor has to offer. Thankfully, plenty of #staranalysts (seriously?) members were generous in tweeting the information onto the #GenesysAR stream to share with everyone. Yours truly, being a simple amateur n00b blogger, didn’t get to attend this fabulous event at the serene Rosewood Sand Hill in Menlo Park, CA. But who needs physical presence when virtual is the trend and telepresence is chic, right? Yet having been to a Genesys G-Force conference where attendees are constantly being fed in a luxurious venue, I sure miss this:

Well, I suppose there is always G-Force Chicago in April… At any rate, what’s an analyst conference without shout-outs, right? Is it like the MTV Music Awards show without the lame jokes, outrageous stunts, and questionable attire…?

All right, onto business. First, CEO and President of Alcatel-Lucent’s Application Software Group, Paul Segre, took the stage to ease concerns about the recent restructuring and reorganization. It’s all about leading:

While that may hold true, the last time I checked Wall Street Journal, companies restructure and reorganize to cut costs which often translates to reducing headcount. When I spoke to a couple of laid off Genesys employees last year, none of them mentioned anything about the leading part. Either management did not convey this top-down, or maybe it was just a reaction to the global economic meltdown? There’s really no shame in admitting that — everybody’s hurting these days. But luckily for my ex-Genesys friends, they have since found jobs with competitors. (Whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Whoever gets laid off in telecom, stays in telecom. It’s true.)

Alcatel-Lucent is in the global telecom equipment business. In terms of its $8 billion market cap, it is dwarfed compared to its well-known competitors: Nokia ($52 billion), Motorola ($15 billion), Siemens ($79 billion), Cisco ($130 billion), and Ericsson ($32 billion). However, it did strike gold with the Genesys acquisition. It bought the #1 contact center software company with an established worldwide customer base, and leaves all the aforementioned competitors in the dust when comparing contact center sales. The strategy then, of course, is to tie ALU hardware sales to Genesys software:

It’s a no-brainer. Oh, I remember fondly of the (supposedly) first U.S. integration between an Alcatel-Lucent PBX and Genesys CTI. It was somewhere in sunny, humid south Florida during summer, and I was working with a senior Genesys consultant. At the time Genesys was already part of ALU, but amazingly the PBX shipped with an E1 telephony interface card so my poor PM had to authorize the purchase of a T1 adapter. To further our amusement, the PBX came with French manuals and the console was dotted with nothing but French. We all wished then we had paid more attention in high school French class…

But I digress. In order to align the sales resources between the parent and child companies, ALU had to obtain more control of Genesys. Not to say that Genesys was a runaway company, but it was the best and logical business decision. And when former President and CEO Wes Hayden left for Nuance (and now President of LiveOps), CTO Paul Segre was a good fit to lead Genesys because of his past history with Alcatel (VP and GM of Wireline Access business unit).

Much has improved in the ALU-Genesys technology integration. Just recently I was on such a project and it was a pleasant surprise. It wasn’t like fitting a square peg into a round hole anymore. Even the PBX technician swore by the ALU switch, “I enjoy working on it more than the Avaya,” he’d told me. That spoke volumes especially coming from a seasoned PBX tech. Definitely kudos to the ALU and Genesys engineers.

So what else does Genesys have in store for CTI fanatics? The elusive Genesys 8 makes an (updated?) appearance (hmmm, didn’t I see it last year at G-Force Orlando?):

Quite a combo meal indeed. What does this mean for implementations? Will the team have to deal with three different vendors? It’s already a major task just to get to Genesys Tech Support (upgrade, send logs, we’ll call you back), I’d hate to be on the field putting in Genesys 8 and having to work with engineers from Lithium and InQuira also. Even if it’s cool that tweets can get routed in G8. (Really nothing major considering emails and faxes can get routed already.)

Of course, the obligatory but nonetheless intriguing Apple iPad reference, note that Apple is a Genesys customer:

Sigh. Apple’s coolness factor has just gone down a notch. We all know the iPad isn’t for serious business — games, games, games!!! Okay, and ebooks! And by ebooks I mean comics! (Dilbert would look great on a contact center iPad.)

As I had posted before, Genesys is ready to pounce on Nortel customers. Nortel customers can probably negotiate a good deal now. Yet not sure how else to put in an ALU switch without rip and replace? ALU would want to sell the hardware.

Later there was an NDA segment which barred those in attendance to disclose juicy information. Wonder what it is? I’m thinking an embedded chip which can be injected under you skin that contains all your preferred IVR menu option trees. So whenever you pick up a phone to dial an IVR, just put the speaker near the chip (don’t embed it near your eye ’cause then you’d look like an idiot) and it will automagically navigate through the system to get you to an agent. In other words, the chip emits a DTFM tone of zero. #rumor #secretproduct

There’s a lot more information from these top industry analysts. Again, to follow the complete Twitter conversation, search for #GenesysAR. If you love to hate or hate to love Genesys, then you owe it to yourself.