After our first data warehouse was up and running, we were confident that we could run a production Unix environment.

There was a project afoot to move our call center from a homegrown system to the Clarify product. We started by conducting an in-depth study of their customers and how they used the product. We considered Sun, HP, and IBM hardware, and later Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM database engines. I wrote two big reports and shared the results with the many stakeholders.

Fortunately, some of Clarify's biggest customers used Oracle on HP-UX, and that's what we went with.

This project was made even more interesting by its use of Computer-Telephony Integration, which linked the phone system with the Unix boxes for better call handling. There were plenty of memory leaks in the product and lots of finger pointing all around before it started working.

This project also allowed us to get some much-needed administration headcount. From there we developed the standard hallmarks of production systems: change control, on-call rotation, escalation procedures, off-site backups, and so on.