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."
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NERC Sells ISP
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."
116 Village Boulevard, Princeton Forrestal Village, Suite 390, Princeton
08540-5731. Michehl R. Gent, president and CEO. 609-452-8060; fax,
609-452-9550. Home page: www.nerc.com
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Connecting in the Virtual World
It’s every entrepreneur’s dream. You get an order for
your product from Wal-Mart, or one of the big catalog firms. Now comes
the entrepreneur’s nightmare. To be a supplier to one of those big
firms, you have to integrate your operations with their databases.
Yaron Inbar, founder of Interlace Corporation at 5 Independence
Way, offers a way for companies to rapidly automate their electronic
business transactions. "We deliver a single integration point
through which our customers can reach their entire trading network,
leaving their existing systems and processes undisturbed,"
says Inbar. "Interlace effectively removes the complexity barrier
that has kept both large and mid-market firms from achieving real
value from business integration."
Formerly known as PanamaTech, the firm announced a name change, expanded
from 1,200 square feet to 4,500 square feet at 5 Independence Way,
and took on a new chairman, Etienne Perold. The company had eight
people 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 is
integrating suppliers with electronic systems." Wal-Mart, for
instance, has driven 14,000 suppliers to integrate with their electronic
system.
The company’s clients are Fortune 500 and mid-market companies as
well as their trading partners in such industries as chemical, automotive,
food, packaging, consumer goods, and pharmaceutical. For the large
companies, 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 business
to another," Perold says. "We get documents to flow. Our company
links companies for anything from presenting inventory to vendor-managed
inventory, providing the methodology, infrastructure, software, and
service — we host transactions on our hub."
A venture developer, Etienne Perold was a practicing psychologist
for a dozen years. "I help promising tech ventures achieve economic
viability by recruiting the right people and growing their human capital,"
says Perold, who was named chairman last month after one year with
the firm. He went to the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg,
South Africa, and has a PhD in psychology from Rutgers. His venture
development firm, Founding Partners, helps companies find strategies
to multiply their value, locate and hire the right people, and get
appropriate financing. He has also been a director of Ariel Corporation
at an early stage in its life (the 10-year-old public firm closed
last year) and helped orchestrate the spinoff of its broadband division.
He had also been co-founder of Quantiva Inc., a three-year-old, 15-person
Forrestal Village firm that offers performance management systems
for Internet businesses (www.quantiva.com).
Inbar, the president, graduated from Columbia’s five-year
program, (combining the bachelor’s and MBA degrees) in 1989. He had
been a technology project leader at Bristol-Myers Squibb and Parke-Davis
focusing on integrating data warehousing, CRM implementations, and
handheld solutions into legacy systems.
When he founded the firm as PanamaTech in 1999, the name referred
to how the Panama Canal was a breakthrough in transport, saving a
continent’s travel, and how use of the Internet technology offers
a short cut. Also to how boats going through the canal were entrusted
to a pilot who navigated on the owner’s behalf.
"At the time we changed the name, we wanted to build further layers
onto our capability," says Perold. "We decided that this name
did not focus on the business technology. It did not convey the breadth
and versatility of our technology whereas the new name, Interlace,
refers to artfully linking existing systems to each other. We think
it speaks directly to deeper implications in the market, that when
you accommodate change, without imposing change, you have a winner."
"As an entrepreneur I feel I have a good feel for market opportunity
and the teams that can address them," says Perold. "Quantiva was
an 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 opportunity
that would endure beyond the Internet bubble — a sleeping giant
that is not sleeping any more," Perold says. "Business is
on a steady growing march to electronic integration, and this team
is the best I have found. It combines unusual capabilities in just
the right way."
There’s plenty of room for growth in this market. In 1999 it was predicted
that E-commerce in the B2B area would be $1.3 trillion by this year.
The actual figure is $2.4 trillion, says Forrester Research. Says
Perold: "We’re a new kid on block hugely capable of helping large
firms get B2B right, and we hope they will be happy to talk to us."
300, Princeton 08540. Yaron Inbar, president. 609-520-0022; fax, 609-520-0044.
Home page: www.interlacecorp.com
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Marketing 101
Understand the full capacity of technology, but have
right-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 consulting
practice, Marketing 101, at 743 Alexander Road.
A Texas native, the son of educators, Hisbrook graduated from the
University of Texas in 1976. He worked in publishing sales, did marketing
management for Barnes & Noble, and was vice president of marketing
for Lechters, an upscale kitchen and housewares store. When Hisbrook
started his own business last year, one of his first clients was a
former Barnes & Noble colleague, David Cully, the founder of Blue
Tulip, the gift and card store with a flagship location at Nassau
Park.
At Barnes & Noble, Hisbrook had learned that entering E-commerce with
the right product mix at the right time is very crucial to success.
Though Blue Tulip’s business does not lend itself to an E-commerce
strategy, it still uses technology appropriately in the store, says
Hisbrook. "They do a fine job of creating and printing lots of
materials for consumers. Custom printing is an important part of their
business."
Hisbrook used the E-commerce knowledge gained at Barnes & Noble when
he worked with XLibris, the publishing-on-demand company that started
in Trenton and moved to Philadelphia. Like many dotcoms, it had to
change its business model.
"In 1999 the world was full of thoughts about the Web’s very rapid
growth and valuation increases," says Hisbrook. "XLibris thought
it was a community. Part of its strategy was to aggregate a large
number of writers by offering free services, and to make money by
selling additional services and selling books. That turned out to
be not a valid concept."
Printing on demand is now the chief core service for XLIbris, and
it 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 postcards
and bookmarks.
Five years after its founding, XLibris has 5,000 books available through
a printing on demand business, and it is a strategic partner of Random
House Ventures LLC. Its competitors are 1stBooks and IUniverse.
"When XLibris changed its business and pricing concept," says
Hisbrook, "it became an astute controller of cost, a relatively
good marketer, and survived the bust. With 60 employees, it is in
the black."
08540. David Hisbrook. 609-203-5727; fax, 609-520-1300.
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Leaving Town
05401. 802-657-6000; fax, 802-657-6292. Home page: www.gdatp.com
The 10-person combustion research lab at 11 Deer Park Drive closed,
and calls are being taken in Burlington, Vermont, where about 500
people work.
The company was formerly known as Princeton Combustion Research Laboratories
and had a testing laboratory on the Forrestal Campus. It had had contracts
to help the U.S. government in determining the feasibility of disposing
of munitions stockpiles in Russia and Ukraine and in determining the
commercial viability of recycling the munitions components for industrial
applications in these republics of the former Soviet Union.
306, Marlton 08053, 856-988-7400; fax, 856-988-7500. Home page:
AmeriCredit Corp. moved from 5 Vaughn Drive to Marlton.
Drive, Suite 130, Roswell GA 30076. Peter Mathe, sales manager. 609-395-9912.
Home page: www.br-automation.com
B&R closed its 7 Centre Drive office and calls are being taken at
its headquarters in Roswell, Georgia, though the New Jersey phone
numbers still work. The firm sells operator panels, PLCs, and industrial
computers.
Kenilworth 07033. David W. Buckman. 908-241-3457; fax, 908-241-3459.
David W. Buckman moved his commercial architecture practice, formerly
called Silverstein Buckman Architects, from Georges Road in North
Brunswick to Kenilworth. Phone and fax are new.
Avenue, Bala Cynwyd 19004. 888-999-2644; fax, 609-730-1005. Home
page: www.cmihinc.com
The placement service for nannies, housekeepers, and companions has
moved from 2 South Main Street in Pennington to Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania
and has a new phone and fax.
Avenues, Linden 07036. 908-474-0800; fax, 908-474-0804.
The El Paso Corporation moved from Forsgate Technical Center, 1095
Cranbury South River Road, and has a new phone and fax. It is the
regional office for cogeneration plant in Camden, Bayonne, and Linden,
and was formerly known as East Coast Power.
Technical Center, Suite 24, Jamesburg 08831. 609-860-5971; fax, 609-860-5974.
Home page: www.pandatel.com
The North American office of a manufacturer of fiberoptic multiplexing
systems has closed. The company is headquartered in Hamburg, Germany,
and an employee, who did not wish to be named, says that she does
not know whether the firm will open another office on this continent.
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Deaths
statistician at the Educational Testing Service and had retired to
Arizona.
adjuster at New Jersey Manufacturers Insurance Company.
he was emeritus professor of English and associate university librarian
for rare books and special collections at Fireston Library.
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