Management Toolkit

CIOs ally to beat software firms

Alorie Gilbert CNET News.com

Published: 30 Apr 2004 10:30 BST

Where are you starting?
Our thought is that Avalanche should make it easier for corporations to use software from these companies. For example, there are thousands of shops across the country that use Oracle or SAP or Siebel, and each of these shops are writing interfaces between them. So if you are running, you know an Oracle General Ledger and you want to connect your SAP application to it, everybody is writing the same bloody interfaces. It is ridiculous to have hundreds of organisations writing the same interfaces.

One of the things available through Avalanche is AppTalk, which allows you to do that integration work. So we think it just makes a lot more sense for a shared library of interfaces between major applications that we can write once, keep in a repository, and everybody can use.

Your bio says you grew up on a farm in Minnesota. Is there any kind of farm connection to this in terms of the way the farming industry works?
I think it is just kind of a fluke, a fun fluke, that (Avalanche chief executive) Jay Hansen, (Avalanche vice chairman) Scott Lien and I all grew up on farms. But I think the idea of sharing and collaboration is certainly a strong one in farming communities the world over.

In terms of Avalanche memberships, are you primarily targeting companies in North America?
Yeah, our geography right now is the US. We think the idea would be equally applicable anywhere on the planet. We are just not legally set up right now to easily work outside of the US. I think our anticipation would be to grow our membership here in the US and then branch out because the same dynamics work anywhere on the planet.