At times I think of our group in terms of military organizational terms, because "group" and "team" are a bit vague and interchangeable at times. In that case Simon is still in charge of a team. Prasad, who has two teams under him, is in charge of a squad. Pick has three squads and an extra team working for him, so he's in charge of a platoon. Andrew Kass, our VP is in charge of the company, with Pick, John Kuzmicki, and Mike Graves leading the three rifle platoons of the company. Under Kass there's also a Quality Assurance platoon, a Product Management platoon, and a couple of misc squads.

Anyways, Prasad Kodur is in charge of our squad. His real first name is much longer (Naharimprasad I think), which is not uncommon for Indians. Prasad was Dave's first hire, who he got from the Applications Division (this was before there was a CRM Division -- there was only Apps which is the back end stuff). As I heard it, Pick got to choose one person from any other team to give him an old-hand with which to build his team with. He went around talking to other people and Prasad was the only one who was impassioned. When asked about his current project, Prasad was rather vocal about what was wrong with it and his whole product, because he was being stifled.

Prasad has an MBA as well as a technical degree. He's a really smart person and has that marketing side to him that's very useful. For example, we had a company all hands meeting with Kass, and when asked to summarize the Advanced Inbound product in five words or less, Prasad gave a good answer ("Routing, Queuing, and Distribution for Interactions" or something really close). And that's because Prasad had already thought about it and come up with it because he knows that's something that needs to be done on the business side.

I'm not too sure if Prasad would do well as a director because he's rather blunt and abrasive. Pick, though also quite coarse and direct when he's with the gaming group, is much more controlled in a professional environment. Pick knows how to play the corporate game. Of course, then again Prasad doesn't need to be politic.

So Simon leads one of Prasad's two teams. The other team is led by Jax Law. Like Simon, Jax is also brilliant and works hard and has implemented some amazing things on the Oracle Telephony Manager. One of the problems with what he and his team does is that it's very infrastructure stuff. It's hard for Product Managers to gauge how valuable their work is. They code the nuts and bolts -- everything else is attached on top.

Sonali Inamdar is in Jax's team. She is very tall -- sorry, that's the first thing that comes to mind. She's worked on the ICSM which stands for Interaction Center Server Manager (Interaction Center being the current buzzword name for Call Centers). The ICSM is composed of a console (which is a web page) that lets you start and stop our various servers. It also incorporates being able to view the server logs and server status lights. Pretty slick really.

Edward Wang is the other team member in Jax's team. He implemented the new statistics recording, totally replacing the rather badly implemented first version that I did. Edward is a pretty nice guy. Methodical and good at finding bugs based on the scant logs we produce. He just has a good knowledge of the inner workings of the OTM and its various components.

Shankar Radhakrishnan leads an independent team of three. They're responsible for the softphone and the routing module. The softphone has become a cool- looking virtual phone, though it still has a few shortcomings due to the design decisions we made initially. The Routing Module is quite complex. Built to run in the database it's composed of a graphical editor and then a rules engine. Routing is a key component of Advanced Inbound.

Shankar has two people working for him, Ravi Jayaraman and Girish Vasvani. Ravi hase been around for a while and is mostly working on the database schema and related release-type stuff. I forgot to mention that Shankar's team is responsible for the Call Center schema and the message strings and the JSP pages, all of which Ravi works on. Girish is relatively new, and apparently Ravi's high school chum. Girish sits in my cube section and works on the Routing Module.