Part 1: Launching Xap for all those college- bound

Hi Allen. You have a vast background with Rockwell and the Space industry - yet is it true that you have not been able to engineer a 360 slam dunk, like your bio states?
I have been told that in my youth - at the peak of my athletic prowess - when I went up for a rebound, at the top of my jump with knees fully bent, a thin piece of paper could be inserted between my shoes and the gym floor. What can I say, "I too can't jump in a 1 g environment."

How did the idea for Xap come about? What started your interest in founding this resource for those who are college- bound?
Years ago, my youngest daughter Lauri was a high school senior applying to college. As I walked into her bedroom, she screamed, "Don't step on my applications." On the floor were 13 stacks of paper applications to various colleges and universities across the nation. As I tiptoed around the applications and looked at each one, it was apparent there was a lot of similar data being collected; e.g. personal and contact data.

They all asked for her name, address, social security number, etc. One application asked for her date of birth in two places on the same application. It was right then that I got the concept of helping students and universities by making this entire process paperless, and for allowing reuse of identical data across all participating universities (100% of colleges and universities in the U.S. someday).

You created the initial software for Xap. What was the most problematic issue involved in its creation?
I created the initial software at home, on nights and weekends. At that time, I had an IBM XT PC with 4 Mhz processor, 60 Mbyte hard drive, 640 Kbytes of RAM, and a color monitor. As a measure of contrast, today I am writing this on a Pentium III, 800 MHz processor with a 14 Gbyte hard drive, 128 Mbytes of RAM, and a larger color monitor. The difference is about 500:1 in performance.

But the real challenge was to write software that contained all the functionality I wanted in an electronic admission application, including the ability to completely customize applications for each university, permit data reuse across all of the customized applications, and be able to create it relatively rapidly.

I used an object oriented, data-driven approach to the design. Xap's Chief Technology Officer, Boris Shimanovsky, will not let me do any programming today as the architecture and software engineering he and his team have created are at least 500 times more sophisticated and capable than my initial design.

What are some of the fundamental objectives in developing a solid client-server architecture?
The fundamental objectives in our system are to have:

• 24 hours a day, 7 days a week operation, with no interruptions
• scalable and expandable to handle all colleges and universities, and all students, globally
• less than 5 second local server system response time under peak loading conditions (a large percentage of students (procrastinators) will try to apply online during the last few hours of a filing deadline).
• Single point failure operation immunity
• Automated database management and backup, including disaster recovery mechanisms
• Separation of production and development servers
• State-of-the-art security protection from denial of service attacks

How did you get so many universities to come on board, and how do you allow data to be transferred directly to the university?
The company has always been based on customer satisfaction. We try to deliver the best product with the best service at a fair value. Also, we were the pioneers in this field, offering the first computerized application many years ago, initially on disk, and then later on the Internet.

These simple and obvious ingredients: product performance, personal customer service and reasonable price, over the long-term have resulted in remarkable customer growth.

Another important element of our customer growth relates to our strategy of marketing to associations of colleges and universities and entire states, in contrast to individual universities, one-by-one.

University participation has increased from the initial 22 California State University campuses to 1,031 colleges and universities within operational Mentor systems across the United States as of this date.

Based on current and firm contracts, the number of institutions participating within live Mentor systems is expected to grow to 1,705 institutions by the end of 2001 and in excess of 2,046 institutions by the end of 2002.

In addition, Xap takes the security of our student data very seriously and was the first company approved by the Department of Education to transfer data from our database to the electronic Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) at the request of the student.

Continued...