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Chief Technology Officer | Sharpen
Major company achievements: Kevin Schatz has helped Sharpen, a cloud-based contact center software solution that empowers agents and enhances customer service interactions, roll out infrastructure-as-code and auto-scaling technologies. “This means reliable, consistent and auditable platform deployments and the ability to seamlessly handle user/event volumes, at scale and with minimal cost, without engineer intervention,” he says. It’s also lowered the cost of cloud improvement 40% while growing the number of active users year over year.
Challenge faced: The company’s legacy platform was holding it back. It was inflexible and couldn’t do what the company needed it to. It was a monolithic stack, meaning it was all connected—if one part broke, everything broke. If you wanted to work on one piece, you had to work on the whole thing. Not an ideal situation. To fix this, Schatz’s team broke it down into smaller, more manageable pieces, all while keeping Sharpen’s platform up and running 24/7 for customers. “Which was a huge undertaking,” he said. “Our platform is not only more stable and modern, but we now have a lot of new opportunities for innovation in the future.”
First computer: “I don’t recall the specs of our first home PC, which simply ran Norton Commander on top of MS-DOS. For my dad’s work, we eventually upgraded to a new PC running Windows 95—Intel Pentium 133 MHz CPU, 16MB RAM, 1.5GB hdd. It felt like driving a supercar.”
The road: After graduating from Purdue Network Engineering, Schatz was hired by Don Brown’s Interactive Intelligence, becoming the principal engineer overseeing the platform’s core subsystems. He moved into a services operations role, charged with creating a team to build software solutions and improve overall process efficiency, then took on leadership of the company’s global application development team. When the company was acquired by Genesys, Schatz transitioned into an AI role working with engineering to extend, implement and optimize core AI features. He joined Sharpen almost six years ago.
Preferred work atmosphere: “Anywhere engaging with open dialogue, no egos, looking to solve hard problems together.”•
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