by Chuck Van Meter, President, Interactive Northwest, Inc.
It all started in 1983 when Gary Van Gordon and I earned a spot in the coveted AT&T Achievers Club, and received a free trip to California’s Monterey Aquarium.
We were working for AT&T–or was it American Bell? (The changes in Avaya today have nothing on the churn of the Bell System divestiture!) We were renting (we still could not sell equipment) the Western Electric “state of the art” Dimension PBX and durable ComKey handsets with “mash button” conferencing. The only place you’ll find those relics today is on the Museum of Telephony website.
Fast-forward to 1992 when Gary and I joined again to start Interactive Northwest, Inc. (INI) and, as they say, “the rest is history.” One of our first projects was a customer beta program from Bell Labs for Conversant INTRO, a co-resident IVR and Audix messaging system. This was the start of a trend as we continue with alpha and beta programs even through today’s efforts for the newest Avaya Experience Portal. SIP, WFO, WebRTC and even IP telephony simply weren’t part of the discussion 25 years ago. Analog versus digital was the battleground back then.
We continued our enterprise focus and weathered the changes as the AT&T Enterprise portfolio became Lucent, Expanets, and eventually Avaya. During this time we created a number of OEM products for the Conversant platform such as a TDD recognizer, system management tools, call center applications, and an updated voice messaging system modeled after Audix Voice Power. One of our strengths was in identifying weaknesses in existing products and filling the gaps. This continues even today with INI EQuilibrium™, an application permitting Avaya Aura® Experience Portal to scale more easily.
Steadily growing from two guys –I sold, Gary installed– to the team of technically gifted folks we have today has been great fun. Through our highs and challenges over the last 25 years, we’ve continually engaged with talented and amazing partners and customers. This has been rewarding from our first efforts with local car dealers, health care clinics and hotels, to providing applications for enterprise organizations in every vertical from finance to government. We’ve formed great friendships, initially with a single AT&T channel, and now with many Avaya partners and customers.
So how did we get to 25 years? I have thought about this a lot and before Gary passed we discussed this often. We believe there were three strong traits or values which helped us succeed. First of all, fairness. Fairness in how we treat and compensate employees and how we work with channels and customers so that “everyone wins” has always been a key driver. Second, curiosity –the continual beta work and new technologies we’ve explored have given us confidence that we can address complex projects with new ideas. And, finally and possibly most importantly, it is the customer focus. We listen and provide solutions as self-service continues to move away from call deflection toward a better caller experience. The slow evolution of past technology has been replaced with today’s exciting, fast pace. Bringing INI’s 25 years of experience and expertise forward gives us the ability to continually innovate for our partners and customers.
We are excited as we look ahead to another 25 years. This is still great fun!
– Chuck