Personality Profile: Derek Vair-Communications Software Entrepreneur

His company pioneers wide-area open systems links

                      Name: Derek Vair
                       Age: 42
            Place of Birth: Montreal, Canada
          Current Position: Founder and Managing Partner, The Software Group
 Years in Current Position: 12
     Years in the Industry: 20
             Car He Drives: 1994 Saab 900
Favorite Non-Work Activity: Flying radio-controlled airplanes and helicopters

Prediction for the Future of Open Systems: "Companies will continue
   to try to use their innovations and differentiating factors to
   lock you into their particular product or service line. One company's
   Unix will be similar to the others but the goal of binary compatibility
   a la MS-DOS is beyond us. You'll get some compatibility, but
   it's not going to be there for everything. I think the big challenge
   in open systems is in networking. That's going well because we
   no longer have IBM dominating things, or Microsoft. What we have
   is the Internet, and it appears to be quite vendor-neutral, and
   I think that's where the critical open systems things are getting
   done."

On UniForum: "The Posix concept, which I think is a good one,
   is not going to extend itself to being global to all operating
   systems. UniForum has achieved a great deal in the last five
   years and we're reaching a point of diminishing returns. UniForum
   as an organization has to look at separate issues to continue
   to be a viable organization."

Finding the way down the road to open systems can lead in strange directions. Climatic extremes have marked the route for Derek Vair, founder and managing partner of The Software Group, based in Barrie, Ontario. His road has led from his native Montreal to the tropics of Jamaica, to the cold of northern Manitoba, to the rain of Vancouver, and finally back to southern Canada.

Vair was born in Montreal but moved to Jamaica when still a baby. There Vair's father worked as a lawyer for an aluminum company, handling the acquisition of property and mineral rights for bauxite mining and aluminum manufacturing. Derek remembers Jamaica as "a great place to grow up." At age 12, he was sent to boarding school in Canada, where he finished high school, then enrolled at the University of Waterloo. He chose as his major a then-new field called systems design engineering, which required him to alternate four months of study with four months of work during his five college years. In addition, the major itself was new and untested. "We were falling off the leading edge because we were always wondering whether this stuff we were doing was relevant," Vair says. "The professors weren't really sure it was either because it was an experiment for them too."

Vair's work-study program took him to a job in his boyhood home of Jamaica, then to a nickel smelter in Manitoba, close to the Arctic Circle. He also worked for the Canadian government-in an agency building atmospheric instruments, and for the Ministry of Transportation, developing methods for digitizing and storing radar data to test an air traffic control computer system. "The half-practical and half-academic aspect meant that when I was finally ready to graduate, I had some experience and knowledge that really helped me get employed in interesting areas," he says.

After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1975, Vair started to do graduate work in experimental mechanics, but left it after eight months. "I felt I wanted to go out and build things," he explains.

Vair decided to go west-to Vancouver, B.C.-where he worked as a programmer for GTE Lenkurt Electric, designing a distributed supervisory control system for microwave stations. The microwave repeater stations are so isolated-some accessible only by helicopter-that they have to be remotely monitored and controlled. Lenkurt discovered that it could build the same type of system for oil pipelines and sold systems to Middle Eastern countries to enable them to control the oil pumping stations, bypassing them for maintenance if needed. "By selling the microwave stuff, which is what Lenkurt really did, they found they had suddenly opened themselves up a niche in a brand new kind of business," Vair says. He wrote code for the Data General Nova 1200 16-bit minicomputers that displayed information on the status of each station for the system operator.

However, his first summer in Vancouver turned out to be still another experience in climatic extremes-the wettest there in 30 years. In addition, Vair had decided that he wanted to work with microprocessor-based communications systems-something that Lenkurt was starting to work with. "But they were going to let other guys do it, not me," he says. "So I decided I'd go find another job. I felt if I was going to advance in my career, I had to go someplace else."

Vair's new job turned out to be with the Canadian telephone company, Bell Canada, in Toronto. He worked in the company's computer communications group, at first writing code for a protocol converter that plugged into an ASCII terminal and talked through the communication line to an IBM mainframe, emulating an IBM terminal. Then the group went on to design and build one of the first packet assembler-disassembler (PAD) devices, which would convert ASCII terminal data to information for X.25, the new standard for packet switch networks. "This was 1978, when X.25 was brand new and exciting," Vair says. "The main problem they had was that they built this wonderful data network that promised to reduce people's communication costs significantly. But it was very difficult for companies to connect to the network. The protocol is sophisticated and there weren't a lot of implementations around."

Vair's group developed the device, but then hit a wall. "Around that time, Bell decided they didn't want to put this device into production. I had put a lot of work into this thing and I thought 'I'm not sure I'm going to stay here anymore.'" By that time, Vair had started work on an M.B.A. at York University part-time. While completing the degree, he changed jobs again and joined Alphatext, a start-up based in California. Still working in Toronto as the company's manager of communication software development, Vair led a four-person team in building protocol software for a word processing device. "The thought was to give this box some extra capabilities, so it would be able to communicate with our mainframe," he says.

Then things began to get complicated. Shell Canada Ltd., the oil company, bought Alphatext as well as a workstation company called Artelonics. Alphatext and Artelonics worked together for awhile, at a time when the oil company was trying to use its windfall profits to get into office automation. Vair worked on developing some communication facilities based on X.25. Then the Canadian government stepped in to restrict windfall profits and Shell decided to cut back. "They started moving people from Toronto to California, but I wasn't one of the ones that chose to move," he says. "I left and spent some time deciding what to do. Then I thought I would start a company."

Starting a Company

That was 1982 and the company was The Software Group. With the personal computer beginning to come into its own, Vair thought he would develop communications software for microprocessor-based systems. "At that time the market wasn't settled," he says. "The Apple II was on the market, and these machines really could not communicate effectively with anything. They were mostly being used as stand-alone machines." The company's first sale was a multibus communications card for which it developed X.25-based software, designed for a Motorola 68000-based multiuser workstation.

During that time, Vair also did some communications or systems software consulting, including a six-month project to move Shell Canada's data center from Toronto to Calgary. The Software Group would also would consult with companies in implementing X.25.

A Niche with a Future

X.25 was a niche where Vair saw a future, but the demand was still undeveloped. "Everybody buying a system had X.25 as part of a checklist," Vair says. "But nobody really knew what they were going to do with it if they had it. Everybody knew that X.25 networks were cheaper than private-line networks for most kinds of traffic. So they thought they had better provide it as a product for their marketplace."

The company then developed what was to become its primary business-designing, building, and supporting a family of internetworking cards for connecting Unix PCs to X.25 or frame relay networks. The company built Netcom I, an integrated PAD device that could be used to establish several communication sessions to a single host or to several different hosts. The product was designed for the IBM AT, which originally ran Microsoft's Xenix, a flavor of Unix. The idea was for users to be able to log onto the machine over wide distances. Therefore, Vair planned his product around a wide-area network (WAN) connecting users to TCP/IP LANs using X.25. Today, the product is called Netcom II and it supports all the major Unix-on-Intel operating systems including SCO Unix and Open Desktop, Novell UnixWare, Solaris, and System V releases 3.2 and 4.

The Software Group also developed NetcomRelay, software that allows Unix PCs to achieve the connectivity using frame relay networking. NetcomHighway provides high-speed LAN-to-LAN connectivity. "We have followed the hardware curve to keep up with the improvements in hardware that are available today," Vair says. "Also, we've adapted to the changing environment for communication software." That includes changes to allow for Streams, a communications I/O mechanism employed in newer Unix releases.

The company's customers tend to be organizations that have geographically distributed offices that need to connect to each other or to a central office. Shopper's Drug Mart, a 600-store Canadian chain, uses SCO Unix PCs in each store, which are connected to the head office for administrative functions like stock ordering and financial reporting. The stores also need to communicate with drug insurance plans, which have drug-dispensing guidelines that the stores need to follow. "A negotiation process can go on inside the computer to decide exactly what drug should be dispensed, since some plans distribute only generic drugs," Vair says. "What Shopper's found out was that our products provided them with a single integrated solution to their communication requirement, based on an X.25 network here in Canada, to move all this information to the appropriate place." Siemens, the German electronics giant, uses Software Group products integrated with its telephone switching devices, allowing a Unix system beside a telephone switch to collect data from the switch and to tell the switch which ports to enable or disable.

Exploring NT

Currently, The Software Group is exploring asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and ISDN communication technologies, as well as possible implementations for Microsoft Windows NT. "There's a tremendous amount of interest out there in NT," Vair says. "Speaking solely about the technology, I wonder about NT because in some ways it seems a step backward-a kind of monolithic-type operating system. Unix initially tried to be a modular operating system, to which you added bits and pieces as you needed them. NT can make life difficult for administrators and the technical people that keep things working in companies and organizations."

But his company's future is still based on providing remote access efficiently. "We continue to innovate and provide better ways to do the same kind of thing," Vair says. "We continue to keep our basic X.25 products ever-green with the various operating system versions and new hardware releases. We continue to be focused on wide-area network access."