AT&T CONVERSANT

Category: Enterprise

Related to the commercial projects and impacts

  • My Time with Conversant

    by Todd Mason

    I joined the Conversant project in 1986.  I had recently turned 30 years old with a growing family of four.  I left Motorola, where I was selling data entry and word processing systems.  I got the Conversant job through a headhunter, which was a first for me.  Chris Farrar was the hiring manager.  My interpretation of the role was to offload the Product Marketing from Bell Labs personnel, who had much better things to do than sell stuff.  It was a great concept, but it took time to fully remove the Bell Labs staff from the game, plus some of them kinda liked it.

    Chris hired Brad Menard (RIP), Diane Parks, and myself for this sales role.  We shared a window office at the front of the building.  We all smoked (you could back then).  It wasn’t pretty.  We had our own little airport smoking lounge.  We had a division of “territory”, with Diane and I in the Commercial space, aligned with traditional AT&T sales branches across the country.  Brad had the Network side: AT&T subsidiaries, telcos, Bell companies, etc.  Marketing material consisted of a couple of glossy handouts describing the T1 board and the “rack” they resided in.  It was a technical specifications sheet, not marketing material that your typical phone salesperson could use in conversations with clients.  This is not a criticism, more the state of infancy the product life cycle was in.  “Skunk Works”

    We traveled a lot in the beginning, dragging quite a few with us at times.  The role in the beginning was twofold.  Chase anything of reasonable interest, and while you are there, educate the sales force.  We did branch educational training everywhere we went.  That demanded materials, different from tech specs, i.e. applications white papers, cost benefit analysis, customer testimonials.  We created a training binder over time and eventually a class to train Branch Specialists at our facility.

    We had a couple of early wins, Bank of America, and Voter Research & Surveys.  These two clients became great references for us as the product evolved.  As the product demand grew, and the Branches grew comfortable, our roles evolved.  Chris moved on, and we got aligned with Branch Sales regions for a bit.  Some of our folks moved into these Branch Specialist roles: Ken Searles, & Denny Mahle.  I came back into an OR&M (Offer Realization and Management) role in 95ish, leaving in 1996 to manage the VRU team at AT&T Universal Card, which got consumed by Citi a year later.

    I made great friends during my time with the “project”.  A few that I talk with frequently still.  We ran hard those 10 years, traveled to San Francisco 18 times one calendar year.  Every trip involved a branch presentation, numerous sales calls, and many conventions of sorts.  It was a busy time.  I didn’t call out many at all by name in this babble.  There were too many names and faces that ran hard right along with us, for me to list here.  We all did what was needed, from administrative to the Lab and shop floor.  I must admit that I smiled a lot as I looked at the pictorial directories.

    Only because it is expected, I will share a few of my favorite memories:

    • Bill Hagler attending our Halloween party in my home wearing goggles, snorkel, flippers and a speedo
    • Me going back to my hotel room after a long day and reviewing my voicemail on the bed, which included a Doug Brown message that I never heard the end of
    • Gifting Gary Seacrest an inflatable sheep at either his retirement or birthday party, which included reading the back of the box
    • and there are many others.

    This has been fun.

     
     

  • Monday Night Football – Initial Installation

    by David Schinke

    The Monday Night Football IVR application was going to be BIG.   The customer, First Data Resources-Interactive Technologies or FDRIT, wanted to use a TV advertisement during the half-time of an NFL Monday Night Football game to stimulate people to call in.  Callers could answer a question and potentially win a prize.  I was not involved in the development of the application, or part of the Marketing/Sales process.  My participation came at the point of installing the first tranche of equipment on a customer site in Omaha, Nebraska.   But more about that a bit later.

    “How many phone lines do you need to service incoming phone calls?”  This was a question that Conversant IVR products faced throughout their existence.  AT&T had worked this problem of “traffic engineering” for a long time, mostly based on how to provision network switching, transmission and customer premises PBX equipment. How many lines you need depends on the duration of a call, e.g. how much time, on average, this type of call takes to complete. It also depends on when the calls arrive at the destination equipment.  Much of traffic engineering assumes random arrival times for calls following a Poisson distribution.  There is a mathematical formula developed by a Danish telecom engineer named Erlang that computes the number of required ports based on two input quantities, total volume of calls expressed in a unit called Erlangs and the acceptable percentage of calls to be turned away (“busy signal”) when that maximum load is reached.  This Erlang B formula is his primary accomplishment in this area.   

    In early customer applications, we sort of looked at some AT&T graphs, took a SWAG  (an acronym for something unprintable in polite company) at the call durations, and offered the customer our best guess-timates.  Follow-up with the customer’s real experience helped to answer the question but customers always wanted to know ahead of time.  I am not a traffic engineer, and Dave Shain (one of our systems engineers) upbraided me for providing guess-timates to a marketing person.  Dave Shain brought valuable traffic engineering expertise to Conversant.

    The Monday Night Football IVR application was going to be BIG.  AT&T was going to have to provide a substantial number of T1 digital trunks from the central office that served our customer.   The final configuration would be about one hundred Conversant 3 “boxes” each supporting four T1 connections.  This is just short of 1,000 telephone connections!  It was decided to begin on the customer site with a small amount of equipment, some connected to the customer’s PBX, some connected directly to a small number of T1 trunks.  We would also connect the “back-end” to the customer’s computer and verify that connection.

    At this juncture, I had a reputation within the Dept. as “good with the customer” and “good with managing an installation”.  So, a “hardware” person and I (a “software” person) went to Omaha to install the first tranche of equipment.  I do not remember the line configuration, but I had some lines connected through their PBX and some direct T1 trunking.   We did the usual drill of unboxing, arranging, mounting, and connecting equipment, starting up, loading software, checking-out hardware etc.   Now it was time to “place a call,” which we did with a desk phone and “onesies” to each cabinet of equipment.

    It was almost lunchtime, but this application would call for a heavy call load.  How to be sure that the Conversants and the network trunks could handle it?  Well, let’s just use one machine to test another.  I had enough lines to load a T1 incoming trunk so I set up outgoing calls on 24 lines, and could place one incoming T1 trunk in service.  Maybe two T1 trunks at a time for a total of 48 calls out and 48 calls coming in; I don’t remember.  We “blasted” the network for about a half-hour to 45 min and verified end-to-end load capacity on all the equipment.

    About 1:30 p.m. a customer technician we were working with came in and asked “Did you guys do anything in the last hour?”

    “Yes,” I answered, explaining that we wanted to verify end-to-end performance for each trunk.

    “That explains why people were having trouble making calls and getting incoming calls over lunch hour!” he said.

    Through negligence, I had overloaded the customer’s PBX equipment and disrupted their phone service for the better part of an hour.   I was very apologetic, stating that, “ It doesn’t have to be done again, and we are surely very sorry for the disruption.” The customer was somewhat understanding, although it did get mentioned to our management with no serious repercussions.

    On a personal note, when it came time for the second and larger tranche of equipment to be installed, I asked to be relieved of the task of managing the installation.  Perhaps I felt badly about disruption of customer service, perhaps I was simply tired of the travel, hotels, being away from family.  I don’t clearly remember the reasons.  Management agreed, enlisted Larry Whitacre for the task, and I didn’t do this type of work again until the voice messaging service application was installed in Jacksonville, FL.

  • Checkfree & Intuity Audix

    by Bill Lenzotti

    I was part of Conversant from 1990-1997.  My first project was the application for Checkfree Corp. in Westerville.  This was one of the original bill payment systems that did not require the client to write checks.  This system was not as user friendly as the online bill payment systems of today, but it was fun to be part of the forefront of this innovation.

    I spent a lot of time with Conversant as part of the Intuity Audix team.  Part of those duties was to work on smaller teams on Intuity Lodging (voice messaging for hotel guests) and the Fax Attendant (using a computer to receive multiple faxes simultaneously, which an old-style FAX machine could not do).  This technology is still in use. 

    I also got to work on tool development.  I worked on the Intuity Load Generator (ILG), which allowed us to create about 30 simultaneous inbound calls to the AUDIX system and leave messages.  It was fun working with the Cornerstone platform team as I was using the IRAPI library with that tool.

    I also got to help develop the Enhanced Migration software, which was used during an upgrade of the old Audix hardware to Intuity Audix. The tool  essentially recorded voice mail messages that were on the old Audix platform and used IRAPI to add the message to the user’s new mailbox on new Audix system.  It was a brute force solution that took several hours to complete, even when transferring about 25 users’ data simultaneously.

    My work took me to some interesting places.  I performed a product upgrade for Intuity Lodging at an Embassy Suites hotel in Atlanta, and performed the first Enhanced Migration in the bowels of a Dayton-Hudson Department store warehouse in St. Paul, Minnesota.  Perhaps the most interesting trip was when I did an Intuity Lodging presentation and demonstration for potential customers at a Lucent facility in New Jersey.  During my morning equipment setup, I briefly shared the room with a guest speaker who was there for that location’s Diversity Day.  The person was NBA legend Kareem Abdul Jabbar, who at 7’2”, remains the tallest person that I have ever met.  I think we were both nervous about our assignments that day.

    Lot of great times, a lot of great people.  And in spite of what they say, it was nice to see how the sausage was made!