Meanwhile, Steve was busy building our software, and his project was ready for a test drive when Quintel came on board. He took classes in Microsoft Visual Basic and on the fourth day he leveraged David Katz’s original patent by directing the result of a screen pop to a web page. It was a big accomplishment. I encouraged him to apply for a patent. He received US Patent 6188762, Feb. 13th, 2001, for ‘The Web Call Center.’ This feature became the defacto stan- dard for the entire call center industry. Today, every company in the call center business worldwide uses a method similar to this for handling calls. We never tried to monetize it, but it did help in creating the confidence to propel our business forward. He called his software project Palettech. It stood for an artist’s palette combined with technology and it fueled our growth in many ways. The first thing we did was replace IRT. We installed our new software on every computer we purchased leaving us unbounded by hefty licensing fees. Now, we could start to scale. The continued development led us to be surrounded by highly skilled engineers. Not only did they build the code, but they also participated in client meetings adding depth to our offerings. Steve hired his teacher, Shervin Shakabi, to help him build the software. Together, they built the core of the platform that we would use for the next twenty years. When we moved into production his teach- er couldn’t juggle both jobs. That is how we met Dave Noderer, an RIT graduate in Electrical Engineering and an expert in Microsoft. He has been working with us ever since, about 20 years. Dave grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennesee, home of the nuclear research lab that created the atom- ic bomb. His dad was a Nuclear Physicist. Dave and Steve started to work together two days a week. We paid top dollar, but we were glad to have the expertise. In hiring him, we learned one of the key lessons of running a call center; Always work with the very best people. When new clients came on board, they
always wanted to use the software we created, and invariably, it always needed something extra. Since Dave was a consultant, we were basically reselling his services. It was a solid business model. New clients paid for develop- ment and each step of the way we applied the new features to the entire application, so all clients got the benefit. Our library of features was growing, and as long as they built an administrative interface, we could sell the next client without the programming expense. That’s when a large company arrived, and we were hired to build a business devel- opment application. It was the first time that we required four full-time software develop- ers. Today, we have seven and a handful of consultants.
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