Connecting in the Virtual World
Corrections or additions?
This article by Barbara Fox was prepared for the May 7, 2003 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Life in the Fast Lane
Princeton can expect an influx of suntanned Floridians
this summer when nearly 300 top officers and staff of Tyco International
are scheduled to move into 9 Roszel Road. The new occupants will come
from Boca Raton and Manhattan, and while the New Yorkers might reasonably
expect to make the reverse commute, commuting would be difficult from
Florida.
Gary Holmes, company spokesperson, says that the Roszel Road office
will house “the bulk of the corporate staff” but that the
Florida and New York offices will not close completely.
The 40-year-old now controversial company started as a telephone cabling
firm in New Hampshire. A manufacturing conglomerate, it takes in about
$36 billion a year; it makes everything from paper diapers to electronics
and medical supplies, and it owns ADT, the home security company.
The extravagances of L. Dennis Kozlowski, the former CEO, have been
the subject of much speculation since he resigned last June. Edward
Breen, the new CEO who is a resident of New Hope, is trying to rein
in debt and scandal. Tyco’s company’s offshore headquarters is Bermuda,
and its U.S. headquarters will remain in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
From the “gleam in the eye,” when Tyco began to look at moving
to New Jersey, to when the ink was dry on the deal was about nine
months. Tyco will take 111,768 square feet, all of the smaller of
two SJP Properties buildings on Roszel Road, which Merrill Lynch had
leased through 2009. ClinPhone, which occupies 25,000 square feet
in the two-story building that Tyco wants, will be relocated to the
three-story 7 Roszel Road, where the cafeteria serving both buildings
is located.
The architect for the 9 Roszel Road building was Hillier’s John DeLuca,
and boasts such distinguished design elements as mason-laid brick
with limestone, a long inset balcony, and an 80-foot curve on the
facade (U.S. 1, October 6, 1999). On the inside, the offices will
reportedly be spruced up before the move in. But whatever redecorating
is done, it won’t be anything like what the executives were used to
at their 10-story Boca Raton office. An August 7, 2002, article in
the Wall Street Journal reported that the former CEO’s doctor, fitness
trainer, and yacht builder were on the company payroll, as was his
favorite chef, for whom two executive dining rooms were built. “Executive-floor
staffers could special-order breakfasts delivered to their desks on
china. On Fridays, a masseur came around to soothe away stresses,”
said the WSJ.
The WSJ also reported that the company turned in the 1990s into
Kozlowski’s “personal cash machine,” allegedly wiping out
at least $69 million in personal loans and paying for other extravagances.
A spokesperson for Kozlowski, quoted in the WSJ article, said “the
trainer and doctor were hired as part of a corporate wellness program,
and the chef and corporate dining rooms were added to cut costs and
improve efficiency, as many executives were ordering in costly meals
or leaving the office to eat.”
A nonprofit organization with a little Internet business
on the side has divested itself of the Internet business. North American
Electric Reliability Council, a 42-person group at Forrestal Village,
is the electric industry organization that monitors bulk electric
systems in North America. It has just passed on its Internet Service
Provider business to a privately run ISP based in Newton, Tellurian.
“After 9/11, they needed to focus 100 percent of their time,”
says Joe Giroux, sales manager for Tellurian. “They had been approached
by AOL but did not want their customers to get lost in the large companies.
We are a regional company, very customer oriented, with high end services,
growing fast — we just recently made the Inc. 500. The transition
on May 1 “could not have gone more smoothly,” says Giroux.
Former NERC customers have one year to manually change their settings.
Tellurian founder Robert Boyle, whose father is an IT manager in a
large company, is something of an entrepreneurial prodigy because
he founded the firm in 1995 at the age of 20 and, unusual among ISPs,
it is profitable. Giroux, a 1992 alumnus of Rider University, started
with RCN when it was a 50-person company called C-Tech and ran sales
and operations from Manhattan when it had 5,000 employees. Then he
met Boyle and signed on with the 16-person firm.
“The number one reason Tellurian is still around is that Robert
did not buy into the `build it and the customer will come’ idea. He
believed in growing slowly and that has paid off,” says Giroux,
making an unspoken contrast with RCN. Boyle has bought three companies
this year and made the INC. 500 list. “He has built up quite a
treasure chest,” says Giroux. “We do not have debt. We do
not want to be influenced by someone dictating.”
One of Tellurian’s customers is Nassau Broadcasting, and advertising
on Nassau Digital Media’s ferry terminal screens is part of its marketing
plan.
Tellurian offers NERC customers such additional services as DSL and
24 x 7 technical support, and it pledges not to raise rates for customers
who keep their current plans. “The NERC people were being good
community activists. They realized that you don’t make money as a
small ISP,” says Giroux. He says the money exchanged in the buyout
was minimal. “For the acquisition, they didn’t want money, they
just wanted to be sure customers were taken care of.”
North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC),116 Village Boulevard, Princeton Forrestal Village, Suite 390, Princeton08540-5731. Michehl R. Gent, president and CEO. 609-452-8060; fax,609-452-9550. Home page: www.nerc.comTop Of PageConnecting in the Virtual WorldIt’s every entrepreneur’s dream. You get an order foryour product from Wal-Mart, or one of the big catalog firms. Now comesthe entrepreneur’s nightmare. To be a supplier to one of those bigfirms, you have to integrate your operations with their databases.Yaron Inbar, founder of Interlace Corporation at 5 IndependenceWay, offers a way for companies to rapidly automate their electronicbusiness transactions. “We deliver a single integration pointthrough which our customers can reach their entire trading network,leaving their existing systems and processes undisturbed,”says Inbar. “Interlace effectively removes the complexity barrierthat has kept both large and mid-market firms from achieving realvalue from business integration.”Formerly known as PanamaTech, the firm announced a name change, expandedfrom 1,200 square feet to 4,500 square feet at 5 Independence Way,and took on a new chairman, Etienne Perold. The company had eightpeople in 2001 and has 12 full-timers now, plus partnerships.”B2B was one of the darlings of Internet bubble,” Perold says.”The area that has outdistanced the post bubble correction isintegrating suppliers with electronic systems.” Wal-Mart, forinstance, has driven 14,000 suppliers to integrate with their electronicsystem.The company’s clients are Fortune 500 and mid-market companies aswell as their trading partners in such industries as chemical, automotive,food, packaging, consumer goods, and pharmaceutical. For the largecompanies, Interlace helps speed up the transition to electronic transactions,and for the smaller companies it can outsource the whole process.A transaction-based pricing model lets customers track costs.”We do everything except getting money to flow from one businessto another,” Perold says. “We get documents to flow. Our companylinks companies for anything from presenting inventory to vendor-managedinventory, providing the methodology, infrastructure, software, andservice — we host transactions on our hub.”A venture developer, Etienne Perold was a practicing psychologistfor a dozen years. “I help promising tech ventures achieve economicviability by recruiting the right people and growing their human capital,”says Perold, who was named chairman last month after one year withthe firm. He went to the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg,South Africa, and has a PhD in psychology from Rutgers. His venturedevelopment firm, Founding Partners, helps companies find strategiesto multiply their value, locate and hire the right people, and getappropriate financing. He has also been a director of Ariel Corporationat an early stage in its life (the 10-year-old public firm closedlast year) and helped orchestrate the spinoff of its broadband division.He had also been co-founder of Quantiva Inc., a three-year-old, 15-personForrestal Village firm that offers performance management systemsfor Internet businesses (www.quantiva.com).Inbar, the president, graduated from Columbia’s five-yearprogram, (combining the bachelor’s and MBA degrees) in 1989. He hadbeen a technology project leader at Bristol-Myers Squibb and Parke-Davisfocusing on integrating data warehousing, CRM implementations, andhandheld solutions into legacy systems.When he founded the firm as PanamaTech in 1999, the name referredto how the Panama Canal was a breakthrough in transport, saving acontinent’s travel, and how use of the Internet technology offersa short cut. Also to how boats going through the canal were entrustedto a pilot who navigated on the owner’s behalf.”At the time we changed the name, we wanted to build further layersonto our capability,” says Perold. “We decided that this namedid not focus on the business technology. It did not convey the breadthand versatility of our technology whereas the new name, Interlace,refers to artfully linking existing systems to each other. We thinkit speaks directly to deeper implications in the market, that whenyou accommodate change, without imposing change, you have a winner.””As an entrepreneur I feel I have a good feel for market opportunityand the teams that can address them,” says Perold. “Quantiva wasan opportunity based on core drivers that would survive a bubble environment— websites have to work and that is what Quantiva does.””As an investor, I saw that this company focuses on an opportunitythat would endure beyond the Internet bubble — a sleeping giantthat is not sleeping any more,” Perold says. “Business ison a steady growing march to electronic integration, and this teamis the best I have found. It combines unusual capabilities in justthe right way.”There’s plenty of room for growth in this market. In 1999 it was predictedthat E-commerce in the B2B area would be $1.3 trillion by this year.The actual figure is $2.4 trillion, says Forrester Research. SaysPerold: “We’re a new kid on block hugely capable of helping largefirms get B2B right, and we hope they will be happy to talk to us.”Interlace Corporation, 5 Independence Way, Suite300, Princeton 08540. Yaron Inbar, president. 609-520-0022; fax, 609-520-0044.Home page: www.interlacecorp.comTop Of PageMarketing 101Understand the full capacity of technology, but haveright-sized expectations about its possibilities for your small business,says David Hisbrook, a former adviser to Barnes & Noble, XLibris,and the Blue Tulip retail store. Hisbrook has opened a consultingpractice, Marketing 101, at 743 Alexander Road.A Texas native, the son of educators, Hisbrook graduated from theUniversity of Texas in 1976. He worked in publishing sales, did marketingmanagement for Barnes & Noble, and was vice president of marketingfor Lechters, an upscale kitchen and housewares store. When Hisbrookstarted his own business last year, one of his first clients was aformer Barnes & Noble colleague, David Cully, the founder of BlueTulip, the gift and card store with a flagship location at NassauPark.At Barnes & Noble, Hisbrook had learned that entering E-commerce withthe right product mix at the right time is very crucial to success.Though Blue Tulip’s business does not lend itself to an E-commercestrategy, it still uses technology appropriately in the store, saysHisbrook. “They do a fine job of creating and printing lots ofmaterials for consumers. Custom printing is an important part of theirbusiness.”Hisbrook used the E-commerce knowledge gained at Barnes & Noble whenhe worked with XLibris, the publishing-on-demand company that startedin Trenton and moved to Philadelphia. Like many dotcoms, it had tochange its business model.”In 1999 the world was full of thoughts about the Web’s very rapidgrowth and valuation increases,” says Hisbrook. “XLibris thoughtit was a community. Part of its strategy was to aggregate a largenumber of writers by offering free services, and to make money byselling additional services and selling books. That turned out tobe not a valid concept.”Printing on demand is now the chief core service for XLIbris, andit also does copyediting, manuscript data entry, and marketing services— such as press release and publication announcement campaigns,book review mailing campaigns, and promotional aids like postcardsand bookmarks.Five years after its founding, XLibris has 5,000 books available througha printing on demand business, and it is a strategic partner of RandomHouse Ventures LLC. Its competitors are 1stBooks and IUniverse.”When XLibris changed its business and pricing concept,” saysHisbrook, “it became an astute controller of cost, a relativelygood marketer, and survived the bust. With 60 employees, it is inthe black.”Marketing 101, 743 Alexander Road, Suite 6, Princeton08540. David Hisbrook. 609-203-5727; fax, 609-520-1300.Top Of PageLeaving TownGeneral Dynamics, 128 Lakeside Avenue, Burlington05401. 802-657-6000; fax, 802-657-6292. Home page: www.gdatp.comThe 10-person combustion research lab at 11 Deer Park Drive closed,and calls are being taken in Burlington, Vermont, where about 500people work.The company was formerly known as Princeton Combustion Research Laboratoriesand had a testing laboratory on the Forrestal Campus. It had had contractsto help the U.S. government in determining the feasibility of disposingof munitions stockpiles in Russia and Ukraine and in determining thecommercial viability of recycling the munitions components for industrialapplications in these republics of the former Soviet Union.AmeriCredit Corp. (ACF), 1 Greentree Center, Suite306, Marlton 08053, 856-988-7400; fax, 856-988-7500. Home page:www.americredit.comAmeriCredit Corp. moved from 5 Vaughn Drive to Marlton.B&R Industrial Automation Corp., 1325 North MeadowDrive, Suite 130, Roswell GA 30076. Peter Mathe, sales manager. 609-395-9912.Home page: www.br-automation.comB&R closed its 7 Centre Drive office and calls are being taken atits headquarters in Roswell, Georgia, though the New Jersey phonenumbers still work. The firm sells operator panels, PLCs, and industrialcomputers.Buckman Architecture Group, 725 Federal Avenue,Kenilworth 07033. David W. Buckman. 908-241-3457; fax, 908-241-3459.David W. Buckman moved his commercial architecture practice, formerlycalled Silverstein Buckman Architects, from Georges Road in NorthBrunswick to Kenilworth. Phone and fax are new.Caregivers Maid in Heaven Inc., 289 MontgomeryAvenue, Bala Cynwyd 19004. 888-999-2644; fax, 609-730-1005. Homepage: www.cmihinc.comThe placement service for nannies, housekeepers, and companions hasmoved from 2 South Main Street in Pennington to Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvaniaand has a new phone and fax.El Paso Corporation (EPG), Railroad and ChemicalAvenues, Linden 07036. 908-474-0800; fax, 908-474-0804.The El Paso Corporation moved from Forsgate Technical Center, 1095Cranbury South River Road, and has a new phone and fax. It is theregional office for cogeneration plant in Camden, Bayonne, and Linden,and was formerly known as East Coast Power.Pandatel, 1095 Cranbury-South River Road, ForsgateTechnical Center, Suite 24, Jamesburg 08831. 609-860-5971; fax, 609-860-5974.Home page: www.pandatel.comThe North American office of a manufacturer of fiberoptic multiplexingsystems has closed. The company is headquartered in Hamburg, Germany,and an employee, who did not wish to be named, says that she doesnot know whether the firm will open another office on this continent.Top Of PageDeathsAnn Griffith Angell, 69, on April 17. She had been a measurementstatistician at the Educational Testing Service and had retired toArizona.Diane T. Nevius Updike, 50, on April 25. She was a claimsadjuster at New Jersey Manufacturers Insurance Company.Richard M. Ludwig, 82, on April 28. At Princeton Universityhe was emeritus professor of English and associate university librarianfor rare books and special collections at Fireston Library.Next StoryCorrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
