"As vendors, we should sell the vision, but we should also sell
the path."
On an autumn afternoon in 1979, Kay Hammer was sitting in her office alone at Washington State University in Pullman, watching it rain. Recently divorced and with two young daughters, she was asking herself whether she should--or could--continue her career as a medieval literature professor.
"I was looking at inflation rising in double digits and academic salaries rising in single digits. Obviously, I was losing ground by just staying in place. And how was I going to support a family and send two children to college?"
Today, Hammer is sitting in another office, only this time it's a large, sunny space overlooking the Hill Country of Austin, TX. In 16 years, she has become president and CEO of her own company, Evolutionary Technologies International. ETI provides the Extract Tool Suite for automated data conversions.
How Hammer moved from academia to leadership in the software industry is a remarkable story of hard work, determination, and technical talent. It's also a story about organizations in Austin like the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp. (MCC), a research consortium that helps foster and commercialize new technology.
Hammer attended two years at Centenary College in Shreveport and married her sophomore English instructor. This was the Vietnam War era, and her husband had a deferment to teach at the University of Iowa. So they packed up their car, an "old, gold" Nash convertible, and headed north.
Over the next several years, and in between raising children, Hammer earned a bachelors and then a doctoral degree at Iowa. ("The school paid for everything, so I just kept going to classes.") Her Ph.D. included both medieval literature and linguistics. Her favorite book remains the Saga of Burnt Njal, a gripping Icelandic classic in Old Norse about loyalty and bloody revenge.
She taught at Washington State for several years. When she decided to change careers, she chose computer programming, partly because it seemed like a promising field and partly because it was related to her work in linguistics. "Actually, there are many similarities between linguistic theory and software," she explains. "They are very compatible in terms of representations and syntax."
She enjoyed writing software. "Coding is clean and very therapeutic," she says. "It's ideal for a control freak like me because you're creating a little world, and once it's right, it's always right." However, she confesses, "TI made me crazy." According to Hammer, the company produces some of the best technology in the country, but "they don't know how to sell it."
She left TI in 1984 and went to MCC as an employee. She was first assigned to a project developing an interactive computer-aided design (CAD) program for very large scale integration (VLSI) microprocessor design. One of the major problems in the project concerned the optimal structure for the CAD database. The simulation programs used an enormous amount of data, and programmers spent half their time writing programs to take the data needed by the simulation tool and put it in a form needed by the layout tool. What was the best database structure for both simulation and layout?
Hammer realized that there was no optimal data structure. What was needed, instead, was a tool to convert this data quickly and automatically between heterogeneous databases. She also realized that, if developed properly, this conversion tool could be used by a growing number of corporations as they acquired companies and migrated from legacy systems. With the help of other programmers in her group, she knew she could develop a commercial product. The only problem was funding. This is where MCC sponsorship stepped in to help.
Bill Stotesbery, a principal at GTT Communications at Austin and a spokesman for MCC, explains that MCC offers a special environment for startup companies. "They aren't buffeted by quarterly earnings like companies that are already competing in the marketplace." "MCC sponsorship permits the development of products that are too small for many large, corporate R&D departments," he says. In return, the sponsoring companies collect royalties, receive free copies of software, and can use the technology developed at MCC for their own benefit.
In late 1987, Hammer wrote a proposal describing her data conversion tool and shopped it around MCC for four months. One sponsor, Gene Lowenthal, president of Advanced Computing Technology, agreed to fund her project for the next nine months. If she could find additional investors, she could stay at MCC, this time as head of her own company. Otherwise, she would have two months to find a new job.
Hammer didn't waste time. By now she had teamed up with Robin Curle, executive vice president of sales and marketing and ETI's co-founder. Curle provided a range of business experience that complemented Hammer's technical knowledge. "Together, we make up a whole brain," says Hammer, laughing. They found three corporate sponsors in three months, finally stopping at seven after a year. On Jan. 1, 1991, Evolutionary Technologies became the first official spinoff from MCC.
Hammer is quick to emphasize that their success is based on MCC. "We could have never created ETI in a garage shop or with venture capitalists or with a commercial company," she says. "MCC gave us the time and support to do it right,"
Hammer explains that her MCC sponsors, all customer candidates for the conversion tool, provided Hammer and ETI with access and documentation to their own systems for testing and development. They even loaned ETI their own "database gurus" for workshops and consulting. ETI also had three years to develop the product, a luxurious amount of time compared to many corporate R&D environments. Finally, MCC sponsorship allowed ETI to retain 98 percent of ownership--the kind of deal you just don't get with venture capitalists.
Hammer also credits MCC with encouraging a collaborative attitude in her company, an attitude that she is happy to see these days in other areas of business. "MCC was completely innovative in the early '80s," she recalls. "Admiral Inman had to ask Congress to change the antitrust laws before the consortium could even be created. Now you have collaborations like IBM, Apple, and Motorola for the PowerPC chip. That would have been unthinkable years ago."
Scott Williams, vice president of product development, agrees. "She always encourages people to speak their minds." Williams adds that Hammer's attention to people extends to the customer level. "That's one of her greatest strengths: She adopts the customer's point of view." Williams recalls that in countless product development meetings, she always steers discussion toward actual customer needs. She also monitors the ETI customer answer line every day, checking on what questions are being asked and how quickly problems are being resolved. "This means that the crossover to product enhancements and corrections is handled quickly," says Williams.
Hammer sees steady growth in the future for ETI. "We're going to expand our products to give people more tools to manage heterogeneous, distributed environments." Despite open systems, she believes, companies will continue to have replicated or semantically similar data stored in different places. "If you don't have the tools to manage and access this data, you're going to be lost."
At the same time, her plans don't include a return to academia. She admits that she "sometimes fantasizes" about going back to teaching. But, she adds, her present career is far more stimulating. "Two days in this business can seem like two weeks, but then you turn around and the quarter is gone. It's never boring, and I wouldn't change that for anything."