Current Work

I currently work at an excellent company named "Computer Telephony Solutions," but most of the people who know us call us Oaisys, since that's the name of our product. We are a small company with 23 employees total. We are based out of Tempe, Arizona, but have several regional sales members that work across the country. We develop custom and turn-key solutions, largely software based, to help make businesses more productive when using their phone systems.

I generally describe what we do, during casual conversation, as software solutions that work in concert with your phone system to provide desktop information about a call. For example, a typical customer might be a doctor's office. When the phone rings, our software looks up the caller ID in the doctor's office database, extracts the pertinent information and pops up a screen on the PC's desktop before the call is answered. That way, the receptionist can answer the call more intelligently, and can also be much more efficient, as the patient's record is already available for viewing and/or setting appointments, etc.

We also provide many other call-related services, such as call recording, call routing, and custom IVR applications.

My role in the company has been the design and implementation of most of the back-end functions and the supporting software that work together with the phone system to bring that screen pop to the PC's desktop.

I've been with the company for 8 years (since 1996), ever since the company was started. I was the second person hired (the first one was the CEO and founder of the company, Skip Welch). And yes, we did survive the dot COM bubble burst, the Telecommunications crunch, and the recession of 2001.

Past Work Experience

My past work experience is largely Telecommunications as well.

I worked at Qualcomm in sunny San Diego for nearly a year (1996) on their Base Station / Call Processing team. Although I didn't work there long, I got a feel for what a large company is like and all the resources available for the developers and staff. They truly provided their engineers a great work environment. Qualcomm also has a group of extremely talented people, which made me sad to leave. But the opportunity at a startup like Computer Telephony Solutions (Oaisys) was begging me to come back to my Native town of Phoenix.

From 1989 through 1996, I worked at Inter-tel, in Chandler, AZ. This was my first full-time job out of college. Over the 7 years, I worked on various projects, including their legacy PBX system Call Processing (all of which was written in 68000 assembly language), embedded OS (again 68000 assembly), Axxess Call Processing (C++), and various tools including a distributed compile/make program that would distribute the large Call Processing C++ compile across many workstations.

While going to college at Arizona State University (ASU), I worked part time at the ASU Computing Commons. Back then (1984-1989), PCs were not too common, so ASU had large rooms full of VT100 terminals that all connected to a switch from where you could select various different mainframes to work on projects. My job was to retrieve paper printouts, do backups of the mainframes, and generally try to keep the students happy with any simple questions I could answer.

Looking back at that job with the towering double- or triple-wide refridgerator-sized mainframes (which were probably much less capable of any cheap PC you could find today) amazed me at how far we've come with computers. Just 20 years ago seems like such a stone age of technology.

I even remember how much hype and buzz was going around when we upgraded one of the mainframes to 64 megabytes of RAM (rows upon countless rows of discrete zip memory chips). That amount of memory was almost totally unheard of back then. Now PCs are whimpy if they don't have at least 512megs of RAM. It almost brings a tear to my eye.

Before my ASU job, I worked at a consulting firm named BTI Consultants. I was sort of a gopher, PC guru, and data entry whiz-kid at that job, doing anything they asked me to do. PCs back then were only 8086 based, and we were lucky if they had 512K of RAM. Most of the PCs we had at that time did not have hard drives. It's difficult to imagine. Floppies were everywhere. Amazing and scary.

Probably not worth mentioning...

While in high school, I had several odd jobs. One was working for an office of Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance, circa 1983, in downtown Phoenix (I doubt the company even exists anymore -- I googled it and found an outstanding law suit). However, this was my real first introduction to the IBM PC (8086, 256K RAM, two Floppies, Green Monochrome screen, with bright and dark text, and even blinking characters. WOW!). Even though that PC was inferior compared to today's PCs, I instantly "fell in love" with it and was programming on it within weeks (my main job was data entry on pending insurance policies).

During the summer of 1982, I worked at St. Mary's High School, with a dear friend of our family named Sister Eileen (may she rest in peace). The school had an old Heathkit "PC" with 3 floppy drives (1 internal, 2 external) that they wanted to use to keep track of their alumni (the OS was CP/M with a BASIC interpreter). I took the job of programming up an application to enter, sort, and print the alumni names and addresses (my first "UI"!). It was also my job to enter the names, taking them off of old 5x7 typewritten (and sometimes handwritten) cards. That was quite an interesting experience. I wrote the sort in Z80 assembly language to speed it up. The "BASIC" sort took hours. The assembly language completed in less than a minute. This was my first (and definitely not last) foray into optimizing routines into assembly level. Speed demon!

My first job was a paper route (which I was not very happy about). The only redeeming quality of the route was that I could enter the addresses into my Apple ][+ computer and print it out. Yippee! I loved the smell of that printer with the heat-sensitive paper. I was absolutely giddy about computers at that point. It obviously stuck with me for the rest of my life.