Any attempt to catalog all of the people responsible for the Conversant product and its success will necessarily be incomplete and slight some individuals. Over the course of two decades of development and sales, there would be hundreds or thousands of people involved, many who made crucial contributions. However, there was a core set of people who got the whole thing started.
AT&T Conversant Systems – Founders
Although they may not have had formal titles other than their “official” titles as members of AT&T Bell Laboratories or AT&T Technology Systems, the following four individuals were the principals of the venture that would name itself AT&T Conversant Systems.
President – Kendra VanderMeulen
Kendra was a Bell Labs Director who functioned as the business head of the “venture.” She would be instrumental in creating this small startup business within the Columbus Bell Labs and helping to move it forward as a viable business. Although Kendra’s time with Conversant was relatively short, moving laterally to manage a different Lab in Columbus by 1988 or 1989, she has continued to have a very successful business career. After spending some time with Cincinnati Bell Information Systems, she moved to Seattle and became an executive at McCaw Cellular. After AT&T acquired McCaw and made it AT&T’s wireless division, she became Senior VP and General Manager running the AT&T wireless business. She is currently the CEO of the National Christian Foundation, a major Christian charitable organization
Head of Product Development – S. Dean Hester
Conversant is most clearly the “brain child” of Dean Hester. Dean supervised a group in Bell Labs that was building the #2 SES operations support system. Key to some of their work was advanced signal processing. One of Dean’s lead Member of Technical Staff (MTS) was Bob Perdue. Bob had worked as in intern in the Murray Hill speech research organization headed by Larry Rabiner. Dean had conceived the idea that they could not only build a product that understood tone signals but also human speech. With the support of his Department Head Tony Cuilwik, Dean started a “skunk works” activity to bring the concept to life. This would become the Speech Processing Products venture that was renamed AT&T Conversant Systems.
Chief Operations Officer – Sandra Oliver-Sterbenz
Sandra was the venture’s primary liaison with Western Electric and managed all of the support people in the early venture.
Chief Marketing Officer – Harry McHugh
Harry was the head of sales and marketing. Sales in the early venture stage was “untraditional.” Although there were several people in the sales and marketing organization and they would do more customer presentations as the years went by, much of the initial “selling” was done by the Bell Labs team. Kendra, Bob Perdue, and several of the Labs MTS would meet with prospective customers and work to convince them to use the Conversant platform.