Conversant and Katz

To anyone who worked in the contact center and IVR space during the 1990s and 2000s, the name Ronald Katz or the term “Katz patents” probably jumps out like a curse. Katz’ organization Ronald A. Katz Technology Licensing (RAKTL) activities have been described as shark-like or bottom feeders. RAKTL owns a collection of patents that it licenses to companies, primarily large wealthy companies. A substantial group of those patents cover some very basic IVR applications. RAKTL’s actions to sue or threaten suite against companies that fail to license the RAKTL patent portfolio has been likened to legal extortion. What does all this have to do with Conversant? A lot, actually.

Ron Katz co-founded a company called Telecredit, Inc. that later formed a partnership with American Express as First Data Resources, headquartered in Omaha, NE. In the late 1980s, First Data Resources partnered with AT&T to create, First Data Resources – Interactive Technologies or FDRIT. The “FDRIT Project” would be a large & formative project in the early history of Conversant.

About a thousand ports of Conversant IVR were installed in Omaha, NE. FDRIT had a contract with the National Football League to hold a real time telephone survey quiz during a Monday Night Football commercial break. Almost the entire Conversant organization in Columbus was mobilized to support the effort. A huge number of racks of Conversant platforms each supporting two T1s or 48 ports were installed in Omaha.

As this project was underway, Katz became familiar with the Conversant and its applications. How much familiarity he had with IVR platforms prior to his Conversant exposure is unknown to this author, but he promptly developed patent applications for several key IVR applications such as his patent US5128984 submitted contemporaneously with that Conversant project.  This patent describes in its abstract the use of an IVR application reached via an 800 or 900 number service to provide a quiz or survey — exactly what the Monday Night Football project entailed.

Katz would go on to propose “inventions” which the Conversant team would have to point out weren’t really patent-able since they were already implemented features of the Conversant platform.  In fact, his “IVR application” patent ideas were not novel either.  This led to some friction between Katz and the Conversant team.  Eventually a truce was reached.  Katz would refrain from trying to submit patent applications for the features already in Conversant, and the Conversant team would not actively oppose Katz’ patent applications for “IVR application” concepts.  This led to a smoother trajectory for the project, but may have contributed to later misery within the marketplace.  Most of the Katz patents could probably have been successfully overturned based on existing prior art, but there was no will to engage in that activity as long as Katz wasn’t coming after AT&T and Conversant.