Part 1: From basement to Cisco, and puzzle solving

Is it true you launched this amazingly successful company from a basement?
(Laughs.) Yes, my partner and I were working at another company initially and put Alta software together to take a product that they were shutting down. That didn't work out; they didn't want to do it. So here we were, we had started a company and we had each put in five thousand dollars. And we started thinking, "How are we going to get this started and off the ground?" And so the way we did it, was we actually went and got a customer and then we made them pay us.

Now that's a very novel way to do it, in this day and age...
Yeah, exactly and it's funny because you know after we had this first assignment which was about three months long, we not only had money in the bank, but we also had a customer! So we were a real business!

Did you redecorate the basement?
No, we had to replace the carpet though because those carpets aren't really designed for eight or ten engineers pacing on it continuously.

What does successful e-business architecture mean, because there are lots of different websites where people say they're doing it, or these companies have paid millions of dollars and it's a failure, so what is it when it is successful?
Well, the best way to tell you is by example. We built all the systems and wrote the software that runs e-commerce at Cisco. That's one of the largest e-commerce systems in the world and it does over 50 million dollars a day in revenue.

Is it true that you only had six software engineers on a team that designed the entire system?
Yes, just six engineers. When we started the company it was an opportunity for us because we were competing against companies who were pitching sixty people on a team to design a system. My partner and I came out of Oracle and we were software designers and inside of a software company. And you would never see a team of sixty software designers working on one project in a room together. You only need six or ten who are really bright and really experienced.

It's not about typing. It's really about design and getting the key things right. We never really viewed it as labor intensive. So we would go to customers and we could build systems so much more cheaply than our competitors. I think Cisco paid like two million bucks for the system we built for them.

Our approach is really for us to provide a system for the company to connect the Web, mobile devices and telephones, into the internal systems of the company that were by the way, never really designed to do this.

The Web is an environment where thousands of people can come on a site at one time. We build things to create sort of a shock absorber on the internal side to handle all those people coming to a site that wasn't really originally designed for that number.

And does your team look at it like a puzzle in solving each customer's unique set of needs?
That's a good way to put it. Because every company really has a unique set of systems that they want to put in place, and what we're good at doing is building them something that really gives them a competitive advantage. Because a lot of people out there will try to just sell you a generic approach that everyone will buy.

The problem our clients have with that is, "Well, that just makes me like everybody else and I want to do things that other people can't do." And that's what we allow them to do, and engineering is definitely like solving a puzzle.

How many times do you have to pull your customers along and convince them of technology?
Lots of times, but normally by the third time they trust us and know that what we say will work. You have to build a track record over time and build their trust.

What about the people who want technology to do everything?
Great question. A year ago people were completely panic stricken that they were going to fall behind, so they wanted to do everything under the sun. Now it's on the opposite end of, "No, we can't do anything. Let's just pull in." And what we do now is try to find the middle ground for them. What's going to make you money or save you money? And is it something that is going to help your customers?

Our whole approach is to actually start with writing down what it is the customer is going to see and what the user needs. We build the system from there. There are a lot of situations where people build things just because they can, but that the customers don't really need.

We had a packaging company who told us they had a guy come in who pitched them this technology for a shipping service that could send fax receipts for every stop the package would make. And the CTO said, "We have a lot of people where that might be a lot of pages." And the guy came back and said, "Well, I don't know about that, we just have this technology that can do this."

I can't imagine how many pages it would be from the US to Korea, for instance... But that's a great example of how we have technology out there that's so new, people don't really know how to apply it to its best use.
Exactly. And this guy came back and said, "Well, the other idea we have is to page the customer every time something goes wrong with their package." And the CTO asked, "Well, how would you determine something is wrong?" And he was like, "Well, that's what we wanted you guys to solve."

It sounds like you have people who are adept at creating more work instead of less by wanting to put all this new technology to work.
(Laughs.) Right, and that defeats the whole purpose. Cisco was really a good example of keeping it simple. They said, "We don't need to solve all the world's problems. Let's take one problem at a time. Let's take a problem that we know is a problem, that has a really simple answer and let's do that one first." And that strategy served them well because they could actually get it right. Sometimes they did something that didn't work but they didn't do a hundred of them. It comes down to common sense.

Like "keep it simple stupid?"
Yes! And people will just spend hundreds of millions of dollars, for example buying ERP systems which were effectively just accounting systems. I was like "Are you really going to get hundreds of millions of dollars of value out of getting a better accounting system?" And I don't think anyone ever asked that question.

What questions do you tell a company to ask?
We tell them, "Forget about the technology for a minute. Find out what things you're going to do that will benefit the customer and solve some of their problems." What's inefficient today? And let's try to understand that. We understand the technology and you understand your end and in the middle is the solution.

We call it "playing Jeopardy." Our clients tell us the answer and we try to figure out what the heck the question was. They tell us, "We want." And we'll say, "Now why could you possibly want that? What was the question that somebody asked that this is the answer to?" So we try to get them to turn everything around to come up with the questions and we'll come up with the answers.

Continued...