In 2002, Joel Gathercole founded Netrique Inc. and started telling call centres their phone calls could travel over a data connection. It was a hard sell. Copper worked, VoIP was unproven, and the businesses who took the bet were doing something genuinely early.
What he actually built in those years was routing. Not phone lines — logic. Which call goes where, what happens when nobody answers, how a queue behaves at capacity, what the fallback is at 4:55pm on a Friday, how a caller gets to the right person without being punished with seven menu levels first. Call routing is a state machine wearing a headset, and Joel spent years getting it right, building on-premise Asterisk PBX systems and call-centre architecture for real businesses.
Then it scaled. From 2006 to 2026 he served at TriageLogic — a relationship that began as a VoIP engagement and became a 20-year career, ending as Director of IT. There he architected and scaled telephony infrastructure carrying clinical nurse triage, where a misrouted call is not an inconvenience but a patient waiting. That is telephony under the highest standard the field has.
MapleReceptionist is what that 24-year arc produces when AI voice becomes viable.
The AI part gets the attention, and it should: a caller speaks naturally, is understood, gets an actual answer, books an appointment, or is transferred to the right human — no menu tree, no "press 4 to return to the main menu." It answers at 2am. It answers when everyone is on a job site. It never puts a caller into a voicemail box nobody checks.
But the reason it works is the unglamorous part underneath. Transfers scoped correctly per client, so calls never leak between tenants. Sensible behaviour when a transfer is not answered — re-engage the caller and offer voicemail rather than hanging up on them. Booking handled by texting the caller a link, because reading a URL aloud is a bad idea and DTMF booking flows are worse. Per-extension voicemail greetings. These are not AI features. They are 20 years of telephony scar tissue, and they are the difference between a demo and a system a business can put on its main line.
Joel builds on-premise, hosted, or hybrid, and does not scope on-premise out of the conversation — he built on-prem Asterisk PBXs for two decades and knows there are businesses for whom that is still the right architecture. The decision gets made at the site, with the client, not assumed in advance.
MapleReceptionist is part of the MapleWorkSuite ecosystem from Joel & Nanz Inc., built in New Brunswick for Canadian SMBs. Twenty-four years after Netrique, the job has not changed: get the caller to the right place, quickly, every time. The technology in the middle finally caught up.