voip telephone system

we started writing applications in 1998, writingapplications for cisco voice. at the time i was heading the software development portionof berbee, that was an interesting idea. and so we started writing applications just forphone. the census bureau had actually approached us with an idea to kind of play off some thingswe'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 havefunding 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 andsaid, could you finish this off. they asked us, well, have you tested to x thousand phones?

no. so, cisco made available to us, a facilitydown in richardson. which they were using for call manager development. even though we are able to use multicast tosend the audio without which it wouldn't work at all, we still have to individual each deviseto say, "hey participate in this." that lab was very heavily scheduled, so theysaid, "you can have this gear from saturday morning until sunday night. so, you can havethis 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 werevery loose requirements, they said, "make

it easy to use, because the people using itwill be under stress if there's an event" and they're not technical people, they'resecurity 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. andthen don't bring our phone system down, because the first thing someone does in an emergencyis call their family and friends. so those have been three of our guiding principlesever since then. and it's held up well from first customerall the way to what we are today. our customers have come up with all theseamazing ideas that have pushed it in new directions.

and, you know, the product does 20 times whatit did to begin with, and it's still growing.