| arenas. Twice named in the
Fast Tech 50 by Deloitte and Touche and once awarded
the PaceSetters Award by Anderson Consulting, Mr. Unland
later sold the company to pursue enterprise software
development.
Mr. Unland earned a Bachelors of Business
Administration from the University of Texas at Austin
and has published white papers on "The Knowledge
Worker," "The Knowledge Revolution,"
and the future of technology services.
He has great interest in the future
of software and technology as it relates to technical
issues like Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs)
and the growth of standards-based solutions like Web
Services (i.e. SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, etc.). Moreover,
Mr. Unland is deeply interested in what all of this
means for a young software and services company.
“I feel that the closest analogy
to today’s software environment is the airline
industry in the 1980’s. Deregulation and the
Internet had not yet impacted that marketplace. With
the growth of these disruptive forces in the 1990’s,
airline routes became more open. Incumbent airlines
could not lock out upstart competitors.
In a like manner, today’s huge
software companies typically try to use their size
to lock customers into solutions with proprietary
interfaces. However the tech-downturn and failed promises
of the Internet bubble have angered many technology
buyers. I believe the market has made a collective
decision to gain the upper hand in dealing with their
software and technology vendors by aggressively driving
towards the establishment of “true,” mature,
open standards. Therefore, software companies that
adhere to the old proprietary paradigm will lose until
they embrace what the market is demanding. It will
not happen overnight…but it will happen.
Open Standards and Open Source will
continue to drastically affect software and technology
companies. I envision a day where a dissatisfied client
could call a software vendor one day, unplug the application/
service, and have a “better” service up
and running from a competitor with minimal downtime.
This flexibility will be due in large part to open,
standards-based interfaces. With that future in mind,
Jericho Systems will compete on innovation, performance/
scalability, flexibility, features, price and service;
not proprietary interfaces. |
