I guess I should talk a bit about the products. As I mentioned, there are six products. Advanced Inbound is the one Prasad's squad along with Shankar's team work on. Basically it's all inbound telephony, routing and queueing them to appropriate call center agents. Although Prasad has a very good vision statement for Advanced Inbound, I would describe it as "Delivering Inbound Calls to Agents".

Email Center is one of the squads under Pick. Unfortunately Advanced Inbound is on the 9th floor (where the switches are) and everyone else is on the 2nd floor, so I don't know that many people on other teams. Francois Hisoire heads the Email Center squad, composed of two very small teams. Francois lives quite near Oracle, and has lived there for years before he joined Oracle. I'm not too sure how good he is as a manager. He seems to apologize too much.

Saradhi Boorela leads one of the teams. I worked with him before when doing Dynamic Reports. Again, I don't have a great impression of him, because he was not really interested in the project. Neither was I, to be sure, but I kept plugging along. Saradhi just wasn't all there, though now he's doing fine. My vision statement for Email Center is "Making Email Equivalent to Telephony".

Norman Chan heads the Scripting squad, composed of just one big team. After Michael and I were hired, I think Norman was next. He comes from Pick's old job and he impressed Pick enough to be the first hire from there. We actually have quite a few hires from there. Anyway, I don't know too much about Norman other than he got married after coming to Oracle and he runs a good squad.

Chris Sibona I've met. He was hired from some Oracle department out in Colorado, where still works and lives. Chris used to fly in occassionally for a few days, though with our current belt tightening I don't know if he still comes on over. Rathna Sundaralingam I've worked with before back in we were working on Reports. Rathna is great to be around. She's very talkative. She comes from consultancy, I think, and has much experience with the Oracle database and PL/SQL and things like that. Very compentent and knows what she's doing. I think she's working on iSurvey, apparently part of Scripting.

Scripting has been around for a while, and for a while it was the most accomplished product we had in Dave's platoon. It's also been one of the more tech stack independent products, relying too much on Windows technologies. With Oracle's move towards a universal tech stack, Scripting has had to jump through hoops to get the product to conform to standards. Anyways, I'd describe Scripting as "Guiding Unskilled Agents Through Interactions".

Outside of Dave's platoon, there is Advanced Outbound. Basically it's predictive and progressive dialing, automated cold calling. I'd describe it as "Saving Time by Automatically Calling Customers". There's also Universal Work Queue, which is supposed to tie together CRM applications with telephony and email and any other work items that we add. I'd describe it as "One-Stop Interaction Center Interface".

Finally, we have our QA support, which we work with closely. Robert Wang heads the QA team on the West Coast. He is married with a couple of kids. Good person, very hardworking, goes the extra mile to learn the product and even learn Java and C so he can understand what we do. He has three people working for him, all women. And though we call them "Robert's Angels", it's not meant in a bad way.

Irene Yan is Robert's first hire. After she was hired and was working for a couple of weeks we had some kind of hiring freeze and she needs an H1B visa which we stopped processing. So she had to stay at home for a couple of months until things got back to normal. Irene does QA for email so I rarely have to talk to her. She also applies patches to the QA database.

Rosie Wu was hired next. And after that Sara Xu. They both work on telephony, various switches between them so I do work with both of them. They're very nice, though at times a bit exasperating. Everybody in QA can speak Chinese which is a bit annoying 'cause they know I don't. I'll be working away trying to fix a problem in the QA lab and the girls are chatting away and I can't understand them at all. Still, they're good people.

So that's some of the people I deal with. I left out a lot of people like Product Managers. It's a happy group and I think a real feeling of camaraderie. I enjoy working with them and we're doing a good job I think.