Conversant grew from a small team of people within the Columbus Bell Labs to the “venture,” a group of individuals responsible for all aspects of an emerging product: product management, sales & marketing, R&D, manufacturing, and support. Although they were initially all, or nearly all, located in the Columbus Bell Labs and the Columbus Works (the Western Electric factory collocated with the Bell Labs engineers), Conversant would expand dramatically beyond that.
As Conversant became a standard product, some of those business functions such as product management and marketing would extend to New Jersey. Sales would engage AT&T/Lucent sales people first in North America and then globally. Technical support would merge into a support team in Denver. The number of people and functions touching and touched by Conversant would extend broadly.
Early in its rollout, Conversant would reach beyond AT&T. Conversant was an inherently programmable device. An IVR platform is useless without the applications that its customers need. AT&T had a small amount of internal application development capacity, but it was soon apparent that Conversant needed third party developers. A program was created to embrace and empower Independent Software Vendors or ISVs.
Therefore, there is no simple way to do justice to all of the people, organizations, companies, and even customers who can rightfully claim their part in the Conversant story. This page provides links to documents and pictures that identify a subset of these remarkable professionals.
The Conversant venture had four principal managers.
Pictorial Directories
Various organizations within Bell Labs produced pictorial directories that provide us with a visual record of most of the employees within those organizations. The following show some of the individuals who worked on the Conversant product.
Division 549 Pictorial Directory
Columbus Voice Systems Organization
Select Organization Charts
The following are departmental organization charts from Lab131E, JoAnn Zelasko, Director. Shown are three departments directly involved with Conversant work:
MAP-D Skit
As one might expect, the talents of the development team extended beyond their technical skills. As a group with an entrepreneurial spirit, it was not unheard of for individuals to push their ideas in clever ways. The skit in the attached video, obviously created with some professional quality assistance, was written and directed by Art Sullivan and acted out by Cary Fitzgerald, Mary Barrett, and Ilane Mathews. (video graciously provided by Cary Fitzgerald).
To put this in context, the team that grew from the Conversant organization eventually encompassed three somewhat distinct groups: the Conversant IVR team, the Columbus Intuity Audix team, and the Cornerstone (underlying platform for Conversant and Intuity Audix) team. The MAP-D was a single board computer circuit card designed and built in Denver for the Definity PBX . This circuit pack was technically capable of supporting a number of the Intuity Audix and Conversant features. However, it wasn’t Columbus R&D’s place to make that call. This skit was created by some of the Columbus team to advocate for features on the MAP-D with the “audience” for this video being relevant AT&T product management. Although the effort did not ultimately have the intended goal, it’s still interesting to watch.
MAP-D Skit 10/25/1995
2 responses to “The People”
that was awesome! Such great memories. Cheers!
Cary doing Khrushchev at the end was epic.