A doctor from Indiana built a phone system out of software. Donald Brown, who trained as a physician, had already sold one software company to IBM when he started Interactive Intelligence in 1994. His new product replaced racks of business phone hardware with one program running on standard servers. It routed calls, voicemail, faxes and email to the right person. In September 1999 the Indianapolis company went public on that idea.

Dr. Brown's Third Company

Brown co-founded Interactive Intelligence in October 1994. It was his third software company. In 1988 he had co-founded Software Artistry, a customer support software maker that went public in 1995 and was bought by IBM in January 1998. His new bet was that contact centers would rather buy software than closed telephone switches. Interactive Intelligence sold its system to companies that took a lot of customer calls.

Thirteen Dollars to Genesys

Interactive Intelligence priced its IPO at $13 a share on September 23, 1999, selling 2.67 million shares on Nasdaq under the ticker ININ. It survived the dot-com crash and later moved its contact center software into the cloud. Genesys, a larger contact center company, agreed to buy it in 2016. The deal closed in December 2016, and Interactive Intelligence's shares left Nasdaq.

Cover: Three Peasants in Conversation, Albrecht Dürer. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for three people talking (the call center).