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We started writing applications in 1998, writing applications for Cisco Voice. At the time
I was heading the software development portion of Berbee, that was an interesting idea. And
so we started writing applications just for phone. The census bureau had actually approached
us with an idea to kind of play off some things we'd already built, which was they wanted
a way to notify all the people in their facility.
That kind of came and went, they didn't have funding for it, but then on September 11 their
parent organization, Department of Commerce, could not evacuate the building like a lot
of people couldn't and they came to us and said, could you finish this off. They asked
us, well, have you tested to X thousand phones?
No. So, Cisco made available to us, a facility down in Richardson. which they were using
for call manager development.
Even though we are able to use multicast to send the audio without which it wouldn't work
at all, we still have to individual each devise to say, "Hey participate in this."
That lab was very heavily scheduled, so they said, "You can have this gear from Saturday
morning until Sunday night. So, you can have this over a weekend, and you have to come
here to do it," things worked out as we hoped.
Two weeks later, they purchased everything. They were in a big hurry. As I remember there
was only three requirements and they were very loose requirements, they said, "make
it easy to use, because the people using it will be under stress if there's an event"
and they're not technical people, they're security personnel with other things to worry
about make it easy to create zones.
They have a very large facility in Washington, and they wanted to create two hundred and
fifty zones within that one building. And then don't bring our phone system down, because
the first thing someone does in an emergency is call their family and friends. So those
have been three of our guiding principles ever since then.
And it's held up well from first customer all the way to what we are today.
Our customers have come up with all these amazing ideas that have pushed it in new directions.
And, you know, the product does 20 times what it did to begin with, and it's still growing.