Gossip, Weddings, and Manipulation

Chapter 4 - Really

“Vivek it’s so nice to meet you.” Tara said as she shook my hand.  “Have a seat.”

“I’d like to spend today’s meeting going over the architecture of both of the companies, our respective teams make-up, integration of the products, and next steps with getting the teams to work together.  Does that work for you both?”

“Sure, that sounds like a good plan.”  Patrick answered since I was still too dumbfounded to.

“I noticed Genki also uses many open source products.  Looks like we both use Linux servers, SQL databases, and the security on your sites looks good too.  Since both companies use some of the same hardware I think merging the databases and consolidating all of our servers should be relatively easy.  I’ve included an overview of our architecture for your review, but I feel fairly certain between both of our Database Managers and the System Architects they should be able to come up with a plan and timeline for merging both systems.”   Tara stated as she slid over the file with her French manicured hands with all of the blueprints of Gaze Gamings system architecture.

“I think the hardest part will be making sure all of the information on shared customers is accurately combined from both companies’ products.  Any points, preferences, and the merging of logins will need to be done.  For those customers that don’t overlap, I think it should be fairly straightforward.  Do you know how many customers overlap between both companies? I think if there aren’t too many overlapping customers it may make sense to hire mechanical turks and have them manually merged rather than coming up with a system wide merge.”

She just launched into business mode and there was not even a single sign of recognition.  Is she a good actress or did she not remember me? I mean here she had haunted my dreams for months and yet she didn’t even give me a slight glance of recognition.  Or maybe she was a good actress.  She looked like a sweetheart at the engagement party and then stabbed Armaan in the back.

“Yes that makes complete sense.  If there isn’t too much overlap we should just handle the merging in a manual manner.”  I inserted trying to pretend I was focused on the conversation at hand.

“Great.  With regards to making an app for the games that Genki Gaming has, I think we should start with a game that’s not too popular.  That way if we have some hiccups, it won’t upset too many of your customers and there won’t be too much of a backlash.  And there is bound to be some issues in adding an app version of the games.  Patrick, do you know if you want to convert all of the games or just the more popular ones? I was wondering if you could go through your products and prioritize which games you want replicated and in which order.  Sara, our Director of Product than will give you an estimate on time and effort to see if you still want to do it given the cost.  I believe you have something like forty games, correct.”

“Yes, we have about forty games, but I don’t think we will want to convert all of them over, some of them have not been so popular and we’ve toyed with discontinuing a few of them.  I’ll definitely give you a list of our priorities and the analytics on each of the games so you have an idea on which ones bring in the most traffic  and the ones that bring in the most revenue.  I’ll have that list to you by the end of the week.”  Patrick stated.

I was slowly getting more irked by the minute.  All four of us in the meeting were all equals, yet Tara had took over the meeting and ran it like she was the one in charge.  Not that I was disagreeing with her approach.  I would have taken a similar approach, but who put her in charge.  Or maybe this was her way for gunning for the job because at the end of the merger, let’s face it one of us would be let go.  You don’t need to two directors doing the same thing.  .