Name: Ronald D. Lachman Age: 38 Place of Birth: Chicago, IL Position: Chairman and Founder, Internet Dynamics, Inc. Years in the Industry: 20 Years as an Entrepreneur: 20 Non-Work Activities: President of Alternatives for the Education of the Hearing Impaired, an organization to enable better education for hearing-impaired people. (Benjamin, his 13-year-old son, is hearing-impaired.) Cars He Drives: 1990 Lexus LS 400 and 1994 Mustang GT Convertible Prediction for the Future of Open Systems: "To a certain extent, open systems in computers are becoming second nature. So in the future, open systems will become the way we put all of our systems together and the way we do all of our work. Only by building systems this way can we continue to move rapidly. I think there's a risk that we will not emphasize this and move slower than we have to by being dominated by certain industry players. Inevitably we are going to agree on open systems, but the question still is whether we will mainly use standards that we influence together, or ones that the major industry players offer us. I believe we should control our own destiny."
By Don Dugdale
Entrepreneur Ron Lachman, who was chosen in June's membership election to return to UniForum's Board of Directors after a year's absence, has had a prominent role in the development of open systems technologies for the past 15 years. Since 1990, most Unix operating systems have run technology developed by one of the firms he founded. Most Unix networking in use today originated with one of a sequence of companies that Lachman has headed.
Today Lachman is chairman of Internet Dynamics, a firm he founded earlier this year that is developing a set of Internet server software. Its first products are expected later this year.
Lachman has been consistent in pursuing new technologies and pushing for the spread of standard interfaces. "Right now I view the more popular part of open systems-the one attracting tens of million of computers-as the networking end of it," Lachman says. "And the networking end is far from done. There are all kinds of things that aren't standardized yet in the way you manage and use the network."
In the computer lab, Lachman's job ranged from programmer to systems analyst to manager of application systems. He liked computers so much that he, his brother, and a co-worker bought a DEC PDP-11 computer in 1975, while Lachman was still in his freshman year. He then parlayed his experience into performing consulting work on PDP-11s and in C programming, employing seven or eight persons that he knew from the university computer center. He formed Lachman Associates, his first company.
Lachman was an early user of Unix at the university, although at first no one was paying for commercial Unix work. Then, while he and his associates were still students, they obtained a consulting project from AT&T Bell Laboratories, the inventors of Unix. "Basically, AT&T had an insatiable need for the kind of work we specialized in, which was C programming," Lachman says. By the time he graduated in 1978, Lachman Associates was doing so well that he simply kept it going. In 1979 Bell Labs asked Lachman to help with a project to port Unix to the mainframe and by 1980, Lachman consultants were the lead engineers on that project. By 1983 they had performed several Unix ports and were in demand by AT&T, Amdahl, Control Data, and other companies.
Around the same time, Lachman and Convergent Technologies developed the first Streams-based TCP protocol, which allowed Unix users to have TCP in their processors instead of on expensive cards that were sold separately. System V release 3 included Streams when it was released in 1987 and Lachman's software product was called Lachman Streams TCP. "This turned out to be a very popular product," with more than 70 licensees by 1989, Lachman reports. Lachman consultants at Sun and AT&T also played a strong technical role in the development of System V release 4.
Soon afterward, Lachman bought the business from SHL Systemhouse and renamed it Lachman Technology, Inc., based in Naperville, IL, a 50-person company doing networking software for the majority of the Unix industry. After coming out with a new storage management product called OSM, Lachman had grown the new company to roughly $11 million in revenues for 1994, when he sold it again, for four times his purchase price, to Legent Corp., Herndon, VA, with the intention of taking advantage of Legent's 600-person sales force for the Lachman products and licensing.
Lachman stayed with Legent until last January as vice president of Unix system development, in charge of developing future open systems products. When he left Legent, he acquired from the company a piece of Internet server software technology that is now being called CyberSentry. "That's now the primary product of Internet Dynamics, which I founded in February," Lachman says. "I originally started development of it in Lachman Technology and it wasn't really going to go very far in Legent. I tried very hard to make Legent proceed with it but they couldn't and wouldn't, and I felt it pretty much should be done." Internet Dynamics plans to release a product by the end of 1995.
Lachman is a founder or part owner of several other companies: NetStream, Pittsburgh, which produces a network caching product for Windows; Agora Digital, San Francisco, an electronic commerce business; NAT, Campbell, CA, which makes network monitoring hardware and software; Kinettech, Northbrook IL; and Sandpiper Consulting, Westlake Village, CA. "They're all trying to build a better future world that has technology that involves networking, more standardization, and wider use by more people to make their lives better," Lachman says. "That's really been a consistent theme."
Intertwined with his other efforts, Lachman co-invented Wabi, the technology now marketed by Sun that allows Windows applications to run on Unix desktops. He originally proposed the technology to Kodak in 1991 while still at Interactive Systems and sold it to Sun in 1992. "I just wanted to do it in order to take the momentum away from Microsoft," Lachman says, "to enable Unix to be a viable alternative to Windows on the desktop. I wish Wabi would take over the world, as it is a technologically viable alternative to Windows, and I really can't explain why it hasn't. It's not really viewed as a viable alternative to Windows by most people, primarily due to the marketing barriers erected by Microsoft."
Lachman, who first joined the UniForum board in 1988, wants to see UniForum continue to spread information and educate the IT community on the continuing need for standardization and interoperability. "Fundamentally, we're an educational, user, and professional organization," he says. "Clearly, there are standards that need to be advanced and UniForum is an organization to promote and create this view, through its publications and educational efforts. UniForum should be very active in educating people about security, electronic agents, object oriented systems, and commercial realities of the Internet. These are the future hotbeds of open systems and are all clearly wonderful roles for UniForum." UniForum '96 in San Francisco next February will concentrate on all those areas, he points out. "The Internet is clearly bigger than Unix. Communication standards, security, and replacing private networks with open networks are developing areas. My computer does talk to your computer today via the Internet, but it's something that people are just beginning to understand. That's an incentive to build a telephone network- which is the biggest open system-as a way for all of those systems to communicate with each other securely."