Mark Hoffman’s Fourth Run: Enquisite (Part 2)

SM: Where did you end up working?

MH: I took a position with AMDAL and went through their MBA rotational training program in 1979. I worked for them for a couple of years, and learned a lot. It was a mainframe company and was dealing with some of the most complex technologies for the time, including shrinking circuits and the wiring between them. Chips used to get very hot and AMDAL was the first to put a heat sink on them. They also put a window into the computer and added in some red lights for aesthetic purposes so there would be something to look at.

I was there for about two years. One of the guys who hired me had left to work for Britton Lee and convinced me to join him there. They were making a database machine. Databases were in a niche; people used to say they would do nothing but run decision support systems where you would extract data into them and run them offline for analysis, but that they would never be part of a true transaction analysis system. Britton Lee was building a system that was hardware optimized for databases.

SM: In present day parlance it sounds like an appliance.

MH: It was definitely an appliance. We described it as a database accelerator.

SM: At what point did Sybase start cropping up in your head?

MH: I was hired into the manufacturing side. When I came on board, we had an empty warehouse and we turned it into a huge manufacturing facility. That was another phenomenal experience. I was building competency in other areas and gained confidence that I was doing good work. It was also great to learn the system.

SM: Was that a role where you gained confidence in your own abilities to take on bigger things?

MH: It certainly was. At AMDAL I did financial analysis. I saw how a company fits together. The great thing about an MBA was that when I left, everything just clicked about how it all fits together. The experience at Britton Lee just reinforced everything.

The VP of Engineering at Britton Lee, Bob Epstein, was someone I worked closely with. We were not happy with the direction in which things were going there. We soon started to realize that if you wrote a database correctly, and with the increasing power of general purpose hardware, you did not need to run it on specialized hardware for optimized performance. On top of that, if you began to think of databases being pulled out of the application and think of data as a repository for many applications, then you begin to arrive at the premise for starting Sybase.

SM: What year was that, and what was going on in the industry around you?

MH: It was 1984. Sun was coming up and growing. They were talking about networking and building networked systems. If you went to Wall Street around 1984, people would have five or six PCs on their desks and each would be connected to a different application with one person looking at all of them trying to make a decision.

Not everybody could recognize it at the time, but there was a demand for someone like Sun to come in and enable them to run four or five applications on a single screen. The Sybase technology coming behind it would allow the combination of data behind those applications. You could run separate applications, but they could all be pulling from the same data source. Before, each application had its own data source and there was no good way to synchronize that data and keep it clean. If you had the connected database and a single resource, the applications could be capped and draw from that resource.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Mark Hoffman’s Fourth Run: Enquisite
1 2 3 4 5 6 7