Business Point of View: A Better Voting System
Corrections or additions?
These articles by Barbara Fox were prepared for the October 27,
2004 issue of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Life in the Fast Lane
When Ram Iyer needed to raise his GMAT score by 180 points, he
practiced taking the test 26 times. He scored 700 and got into MIT’s
Sloan School.
When he developed a bad case of the jitters about being successful at
the Sloan School, he vowed to climb Mount Rainier, training for eight
months, first climbing Mount Saint Helens, then Mount Whitney, and
then Rainier. With this accomplished, when he reached Sloan, he earned
all As but for one B.
Iyer, a former director of sales at Lucent Technologies, opened Argea
with a one-person office on Emmons Drive in September, 2003, and he
recently expanded to more space. His company outsources global
resources and technologies. His persistence is responsible for his
success, he says, and persistence is the trait he admires in his
former mentor at Lucent Technologies, Carly Fiorina, now CEO at
Hewlett Packard. “She got ahead for a very good reason; she was a bull
dog. ‘No’ was not a good answer,” says Iyer.
Iyer used up lots of patience and persistence to get this far. Last
year it took him nine months to enlist William Batiste, former head of
PriceWaterhouse Cooper’s North American business process outsourcing
practice, but in the end he was successful, and Batiste agreed to be
chairman of the new company.
The newest staff member is Michael H. Thomas, executive vice president
for the pharmaceutical industry practice. He had been CEO of
GlycoDesign, a publicly traded Canadian biopharmaceutical company that
was successfully merged, a group president at R.P. Scherer
Corporation, and vice president of international strategic marketing
at Bayer Inc.
Iyer’s engineering training is in robotics, but he is a born narrator.
He came from what he describes as “humble beginnings” in southern
India, near Bangalore, but says education propelled him forward.
Both of his grandfathers were Hindu priests; his father sold his real
estate inheritance to get his bachelor’s degree and become a high
school principal. Iyer graduated from the University of Mysore in
1982. He earned a master’s in undergraduate robotics from the
University of New Hampshire, and then worked in Seattle for Boeing,
where was in charge of the project to design the assembly robot for
the Boeing 777.
Later, at Lucent, he built the first “lot size one,” an assembly line
that can manufacture cell phones, each one different from the next. He
was head of sales strategy and marketing for Lucent, selling into
AT&T, an account worth $4.3 billion, the single largest commercial
account in the world at that time. He was one of six people who
developed the international strategy for Lucent, and director of sales
for selling into Concert, the $10 billion AT&T/British Telecom joint
venture.
With relish, he tells the story about a risky idea that shows how he
drew support from Fiorina. In 1998 his group had to make a pitch,
worth billions of dollars, to Michael Armstrong, then CEO of AT&T.
Instead of just showing the 22 boxes that Lucent offered, and telling
what they could do, Iyer presented his group’s idea: To build a stage
set and hire professional actors to actually demonstrate the
technology of the future.
“I remember Rich McGuinn, the CEO of Lucent, saying, ‘Ram, I don’t
think so.’ There was a dead silence. Then Carly spoke up. ‘I think
it’s a good idea,’ she said.
It was not his idea, he hastens to add. It came from someone he had
hired. “My claim to fame is once I saw the idea I knew it would work
and I sold it to the muckety mucks. My boss sat by and was quiet. But
Carly said it was a good idea, and Carly had a lot of clout even back
then.”
“We built an entire room and all the demos from scratch, and what we
put together as the Next Generation Network showcase in 1998 is still
there today. We created little scenarios for how the boxes would work,
and then laid out how AT&T could make money doing that.”
“We had an actor sitting on a couch and watching TV for air fares. He
clicked to a hotel in London, and clicked push to talk, asking for a
room facing the gardens, then he pushed a video image of the view to
the garden.”
After Iyer left Lucent he moved to California, where he was a vice
president at inOvate, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm and
incubator. “I specialized in the wireless space,” he says. “We had
‘quality money,’ from VCs like Sequoia, Cisco, Charles River, and the
Internet Capital Group (ICG), and we did OK, but we were riding a
bubble.” He would not want to return to that field, and is fond of
saying, “A good technocrat does not maketh a good VC.”
Most recently, he was the CEO of Fremont Technology Group, an
enterprise software company focused on back-office integration.
Iyer is a trailing spouse; his wife, who has four master’s degrees,
has a staff job at Merrill Lynch, and they have a three-year-old
daughter. He chose Princeton for Argea because of its easy access to
New York, and one of the reasons he rents on Emmons Drive is because
of its Princeton zipcode. “From an entrepreneur’s perspective, that
makes a difference,” he says. “Trust me, that was not by accident.”
Iyer’s office used to be part of a suite maintained by another
long-time entrepreneur, Frank Sardi, who is the defacto small business
coach at this office development, Princeton Commerce Center. “He has
been enormously helpful to me, providing constant guidance, especially
on advertising, marketing communications, and sales prospecting,” says
Iyer. Iyer believes he and his cohorts can overcome the two major
obstacles that keep outsourcing from being successful.
You know what to do but don’t have the right people to do it. “The way
you manage offshore vendors is very different, and if you don’t have
the right person, you are likely to meet with failure. We can
parachute people in,” says Iyer.
A virtual company, Argea uses the “extended enterprise” model, with
key people spread across the country. “We eat our own dog food,” says
Iyer.
You are dealing with an offshore vendor that you don’t understand.
Reams have been written about culture clashes, and one of the major
tomes was written by Argea’s Craig Storti. Iyer gives one example,
that shaking your head from side to side, in some parts of India,
means Yes, not No. “If you are sensitized about the nuances of
business communication, you will be able to deal with offshore vendors
more effectively.”
It doesn’t work to hope outsourcing will go away, says Iyer, because
“Globalization is happening, and outsourcing is a company’s answer to
globalization.”
Originally, Fortune 100 corporations opened plants overseas so that
they could sell into new markets. Now some of the people they train
will become competitors.
“When you spread the knowledge, you will have people moving up the
value chain and becoming your competitors. The only way to continue to
compete is to embrace this model but be one step ahead of them,” says
Iyer.
“Any company can become more globally competitive by integrating a
global set of suppliers and then presenting the best solution to their
clients. That company is the master orchestrator that puts it all
together.”
Not too many consultants focus on outsourcing, claims Iyer, claiming
as competitors Taylor Paul India and Everest Consulting, both located
in Texas. Argea is different from the rest, Iyer says, because instead
of selling a consulting contract the standard way, through RFPs,
adversarial encounters, and open bids, he will draw from a 5,000-entry
database of providers and work collaboratively with them and the
client. “A provider might tell me that if I use their excess capacity
at a different datacenter it can shave 15 percent off the price,” says
Iyer.
He and the head of the International Association of Contract Manager
are of like minds, and they plan to evangelize the industry. “If we
don’t become globally competitive I would be concerned for the future
of my three-year-old daughter,” says Iyer.
“The problem with many consultants is that they sell what they haven’t
staffed,” he says, pointing out that he can draw not only from a
current pool of appropriate people but that he knows where to find
more. “At the end of the day,” says Iyer, “you are buying me.”
Argea, 29 Emmons Drive, Suite C-40, Princeton 08540. RamIyer, CEO. 609-734-9100. Home page: www.argea.comTop Of PageBusiness Point of View: A Better Voting SystemCan you imagine that we are less than a week away from the four-yearmark of the embarrassing 2000 general election? Lawsuits overinadequacy of electronic voting machines and systems are alreadyflying all over this great land before the first vote is officiallycounted for the 2004 election. As a citizen, you may wonder what thetechnology giants in our land have been doing to help this importantmatter of exercising our democracy. The answer is quite interesting:nothing!However, the Washington Road company for which I work, AVANTEInternational Technology Inc., has been spending millions of dollarsand thousands of man-days to develop what one may call a “perfect”voting system: A simple notion that a voting system should ensure thatevery vote cast is counted and counted correctly.Imagine voters of all ages and levels of familiarity with computers orother modern information age gadgets guided through the voting processby the invisible hand of ingenious engineering. They are presentedtheir ballots one contest at a time during voting. If they do not wishto vote on a specific contest or issue, they simply press on the “SkipContest” button and the next contest is presented automatically. Thereis no “Next” or “Back” button to befuddle the voters. No one will beconfused by split screens showing multiple contests that induces themto make mistakes by “under-voting.” It eliminates the 12.3 percentundervote that was reported in California during the U.S. Senate racedemonstrated by other voting systems. The “one-way-voting-path”ensures no unintentional undervotes will ever be made by any voterentering the voting booth.Further imagine that, when the voters have completed their selectionson the touch-screen, voters are presented with private paper recordsof the choices for verification. After verification, the paper recordsare retrieved automatically for an audit trail and for manual recountif ever needed. As for the blind and visually impaired voters, theyare guided in the same way with voice assistance and assured of theirselection with immediate voice read back of choices they made. At theend, after the paper records are printed, the contents are read backto the voters for verification just as for sighted voters.Would you think such voting system is too good to be true?Actually, the solution is now available and proven. It was firstintroduced to the public in March, 2001, in a press conference at theWaldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. Avante’s engineers and staffstarted the development of such a system with a patent filed only fewdays after the November, 2000, election. Avante’s pioneering effortsand voting systems have helped states like California and Illinois tohave laws enacted requiring what is now called “voter verified paperaudit trail” (VVPAT).In fact, Vote-Trakker – the first voting system with VVPAT – is anexample of proven and available system that all of the concernedcitizens of our voting infrastructure point to. Since then thesolution has been perfected with real elections in Sacramento,California in 2002 and Connecticut in 2003. The system made by Avantehas passed the 1990 FEC voting system standards and is the only systemthat has passed 2002 FEC voting system standards. This system is alsocertified for use in New Jersey and 20 other states.Avante now awaits what may be its first major order from its homestate of New Jersey in the pending RFQ. New Jersey has been givenmillions of dollars of federal funds to update its voting systems inall 21 counties to meet the mandate of the 2002 enacted “Help AmericaVote Act.” Almost all of the current voting systems in New Jersey donot meet the HAVA mandates.Besides pioneering the making and usage of a voting system with a”paper record audit trail” that is voter verified, Avante alsopioneered the first online voter registration system that capturesbiometric digitized signature. The captured biometric digitizedsignature not only reduces the memory requirement to 300 bytes from 50Kbytes of typical digitized signature from paper, it is a patentedtechnology that can play back the signing motion like a movie (minusthe presence of the person of course). Any layman or judge can viewthe movie to verify if someone actually signed the document.Avante is now working with partners such as Dell, Computer Associates,etc. in bidding on a contract for the State of New Jersey to provide auniform Statewide Voter Registration System (SVRS) that will eliminateduplicate voter registration as well as provide better voterassistance. Any voter can print out a map to their polling place orpreview the layout of the polling place in pictures. Voters can beassured of their data’s privacy better than all other states’ SVRS ifthe New Jersey chooses to use the Avante system that provide anoptional biometric digitized signature authentication before anyelection official can log onto the database.Tallone is vice president of business development for Avante.Avante International Technology Inc. (AI Technology), 70Washington Road, Princeton Junction 08550. Kevin Chung, president.609-799-8896; fax, 609-799-9308. Home page: www.votetrakker.comTop Of PageGlass WomanAnna Wojcik (pronounced Vo-chik) is inventing next generation coatingsfor optical fibers. Having emigrated from Poland, she won SBIR grantsand has opened a three-person company, Hybrid Glass Technologies, atPrinceton Corporate Plaza.Wojcik’s late father was a musician, and she was one of five children.She earned her 1973 undergraduate degree in organic and inorganicchemistry, and also her PhD, from UMCS in Lublin, Poland. As a seniorFulbright scholar she came to the United States to study at BrownUniversity. She is a single parent, and she has a 19-year-olddaughter, who now attends Rutgers, and a 28-year-old daughter, abiochemist.After her stint at Brown she worked as a scientist in Massachusettsfor two years. “I got the flavor of being in business,” she says, “andI understood that I can open my own business and be an independentcontractor.””My target was government,” she says. “I knew about SBIR from thebeginning and applied immediately – four times, in 1997 and 1998, andI was successful once.” Her Phase I grant was for $100,000. Her PhaseII grant, for the Navy, is for specialty coatings for optical fiber.”I am the only winner of the Phase II grant, and now I can get $1million.”The grant required her to leave Rutgers, where she was leasing spaceas a visiting scientist, to open a bigger laboratory. “Gettingcontracts from the government requires me to be fully independent,”she says. She has two employees and plans to hire two more by January.”At the end of the two-year contract, my company will start to producesmall quantities of this product.” She will continue production unlessshe decides to license the technology.”Physical glass is made by melting at high temperatures, but thesol-gel technique uses chemicals to make the same glass at roomtemperatures, and we can incorporate all kinds of organic materials,”she says. This method does not make huge quantities of glass but itcombines the advantages of glass and polymers to make glass-likematerials with functionally typical of polymers. The resultingmaterial can be photosensitive and have a low refractive index;nanomaterials can also be attached. “The combination of glass andpolymers has endless applications,” she says.Hybrid Glass Technologies, 1 Deer Park Drive, Suite M,Monmouth Junction, Anna Wojcik, president. 732-329-8087; 609-688-1894.www.hybridglass.comTop Of PageCrosstown MovesC.J. Parts Distributors, 2 Chilton Way, Trenton 08638.Richard Boothby. 609-924-1393.C. J. Parts Distributors vacated its store at 190 Witherspoon Streetand moved to the main location in Trenton. Soon it will open a storein Dayton. The Princeton location was owned by Richard Boothby until1995, and Boothby now works in Trenton.Loth Floors & Ceilings, 1750 Whitehorse Mercerville Road,Suite 9, Hamilton 08619. Christopher J. Walsh, president.609-586-5441; fax, 609-586-4473.Loth Floors and Ceilings moved from 3,000 square feet at SanhicanDrive in the third week of October and has a similar sized space inHamilton. Phone and fax are new. It sells and installs carpet, tile,and linoleum.Top Of PageManagement MovesBristol-Myers Squibb Company (BMY), Route 206 andProvince Line Road, Box 4000, Princeton 08543-4000. PRI. 609-252-4000.www.bms.comElliott Sigal has been named acting head of Bristol-Myers Squibb’sPharmaceutical Research Institute on Route 206. Sigal, the senior vicepresident for global clinical and pharmaceutical development, has beenat B-MS since 1997. James Palmer, the company’s chief scientificofficer and president of the research institute, recently underwentsurgery, according to a spokesperson.Dataram Corp. (DRAM), 186 Princeton-Hightstown Road,Windsor Business Park, Building 2-A, Box 7528, Princeton 08543-7528.Robert V. Tarantino, chairman and CEO. 609-799-0071; fax,609-936-1369. www.dataram.comLars Marcher, 42, is the new president and COO of Dataram, replacingRobert V. Tarantino, who remains a full-time chairman and CEO. Marcherhas been executive vice president and COO for two years. He majored ineconomics at the Aarhus School of Business, and he has an MBA and agraduate degree from Macquarie Graduate School of Management inSydney, Australia.Windsor Business Park is the global headquarters for Dataram.Exide Technologies (XIDEW), 3150 Brunswick Pike,Crossroads Corporate Center, Suite 230, Lawrenceville 08648. CraigMuhlhauser, president and COO. 609-512-3000; fax, 609-512-3071. Homepage: www.exideworld.comPresident and CEO Craig H. Muhlhauser, CEO for three years, hasannounced he will leave the company by next April “to pursue otheropportunities,” according to a press release. A national search isunder way for his replacement. In May the company emerged from Chapter11 bankruptcy.J. Timothy Gargaro has just been appointed as executive vice presidentand CFO. A graduate of the University of Detroit, he has an executiveMBA from Michigan State University and is a CPA. Gargara has more than20 years experience with first tier suppliers to the automotiveindustry, including a stint as CFO and executive vice president ofOxford Automotive.Exide makes industrial and automotive lead-acid batteries for majorretailers that include Kmart. Its batteries are also produced for golfcarts, farm equipment, boats and wheelchairs.Top Of PageLeaving TownGAB Robins North America Inc., 3 Terry Lane, Suite 1,Burlington 08016. Anthony Ruggieri, manager. 609-219-0500; fax,609-219-9213. Home page: www.gabrobinsna.comThe insurance services firm expanded from 6,000 square feet at 1009Lenox Drive, Building 4, Suite 205, to 9,600 feet Burlington, and 42people work here. Though the phones still work, there are also newphone numbers. The lease had expired, and the company needed a biggershowcase for its operations, says Jeanne Neufeld. Owned by BreraCapital Partners, it is a processing office for casualty, workers’compensation, and rehabilitation claims.Top Of PageMilestonesCharged: Michele Goldsborough, formerly a paralegal at BuchananIngersoll at Alexander Park, of identity theft and theft bydeceptions. Prosecutors say she used personal information from clientsto get $18,670 in loans.Died: Dorothy K. Weingart, 76, on October 15. With her husband, shefounded Dewey’s upholstery shop in Princeton Junction.Died: John E. Stoddard, 72, on October 17. An owner of Standardbredhorses, he was CEO of EDUSCO Service Corp. and worked at Wm Sword & Coon Chambers Street.Died: Harry “Hank” Strauss, on October 18. The third generation ownerof Harry Strauss & Sons, he founded Office Express Strauss.Next StoryCorrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
