Selsius Systems

» see selsius.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Sixteen months. Organized in July 1997, sold on 30 November 1998. There are products on this site that took longer to get a beta out than Selsius Systems took to exist from end to end, and the protocol its engineers wrote in that window is still running in office buildings today.

The company was not a garage startup. It was carved out of Intecom, a Dallas maker of private branch exchanges, which was itself owned by Matra Communications under the French conglomerate Lagardère. Inside Intecom there had been a division called Incite building a video PBX, led by Richard B. Platt and David C. Tucker, and the video PBX did not sell. What it had was a distributed call control architecture, and rather than let the team disperse, the parent companies spun them out with the architecture and about 35 people. Tucker took the chief executive's job and Platt ran engineering, with Kevin Brown on sales.

The thing they built was an IP PBX, which in 1997 was close to a heresy. A line of telephones that plugged into Ethernet rather than into a phone jack, and a server application called the Selsius-CallManager that decided what those telephones did. Around it sat gateways to carry calls out to the network everyone else was still using, plus voicemail, an automated attendant and a softphone. English Wikipedia claims the Selsius 30SP was the first commercially available IP phone and marks the claim as uncited; the dated detail underneath it is that in November 1997 the company sold five of them to Southwestern Bell's TRI lab in San Antonio.

~ the record ~

~ the napkin ~

The architecture predates the company by four years. The Incite concept was reportedly outlined on a napkin in 1993 and became a division inside Intecom in mid-1994, which is another detail English Wikipedia carries without a source. What is solid is the lineage of the code: the Incite Multimedia Manager became the Selsius-CallManager, which became Cisco CallManager, which is now Cisco Unified Communications Manager. That is four names on one call control component over thirty-two years, and the code has never been out of production.

~ the first phone ~

Cisco announced a definitive agreement on 14 October 1998. Its own press release puts the terms at shares of Cisco common stock and cash with an aggregate value of $145 million for all outstanding shares and options, subject to Hart-Scott-Rodino clearance, with a one-time charge against after-tax earnings of three to six cents a share for purchased in-process research and development. Mario Mazzola, then running the enterprise business, said the acquisition signaled the new world in PBX technology. The deal completed on 30 November, and that second release is where Cisco notes for the record that Selsius was a wholly owned subsidiary of Intecom.

Almost everyone went across. Platt and Tucker became Cisco executives running the product they had designed, and most of the engineering organization followed. The software they brought was not finished: inside Cisco it got called CallManagler for a while, on account of how much was missing. Cisco shipped it anyway and spent the next few years filling in what was missing.

~ the protocol that stayed ~

Selsius phones needed a way to tell the call control server that they existed and that somebody had picked up the handset or pressed a digit. The engineers wrote one and it is called the Skinny Client Control Protocol, SCCP, skinny because it put the intelligence in the server and kept the telephone cheap. Cisco inherited it with the company and never stopped shipping it. Its sibling, the Skinny Gateway Control Protocol for analog gateways, was eventually retired.

I have no personal story here. This was enterprise telephony sold to American businesses in 1998, when I was fourteen, in Ankara, and entirely unaware that an office phone system had software inside it at all. The closest the thing ever came to me was the generation of gray plastic Cisco handsets that ended up on office desks everywhere including here, each one registering to a server every morning in a dialect written by a company that lasted sixteen months.

Headcount is the one number the sources argue about: English Wikipedia says about 55 people at the acquisition, and a 1998 Lagardère document says 51. The same Wikipedia paragraph claims around 3,000 phones sold in the first year and carries no citation for it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »