Chapter 18: The Changing Face of Technology

Tom Salonek

A Peek into the Future

Ten years ago I left West Group, a legal publishing firm, and started my own technical consulting practice. Today I am the founder and CEO of two successful businesses - go-e-biz and Intertech. Go-e-biz does e-business consulting services. For the past two years we've been on the Inc. 500, and we've won numerous awards locally for being one of the 50 fastest-growing firms in Minnesota.

Intertech provides three-to five-day hands-on workshops for enterprise developers. We teach programmers how to program. Our customers include Lockheed Martin, NASA, and the Mayo Clinic. Basically, we work with groups that have high-tech staff who build mission-critical software. In the beginning these two firms were together; we did consulting and training. A couple of years ago we spun the consulting services into its own offering, go-e-biz. Ten years seems like a short time, but in the technology world, a lot can happen in a short period of time.

Technology changes constantly. To stay competitive in this changing climate, there has to be a strong interest and desire to be in this business. This interest doesn't have to be particular to technology. For example, after we made the Inc. 500 one of our customers, who is with United Way, sent an e-mail I thought was a good summation of what we had been through. He said, "The growth you've had, and your ability to stay together, is a testament of your ability to get along with people." No one is inspired to work for someone who manages them instead of leading them.

When it comes to customers, there's always adversity, and technology provides an additional interesting wrinkle for both our businesses. We're dealing with something that's constantly changing. In sales, for example, there will be some amount of diversity if you're selling something, but with technology every three to five years there's such a significant amount of change in what you're doing that it's hard to keep up. It's just a whole new variable that makes trying to be consistently good or consistently great challenging.

In the next few years wireless and mobile will be significant. Today they're not, because every company is obsessed with what the return will be. This is tough: With new technology it's difficult to assess the potential return.

Another area that will be significant is Web services. In short, interconnected devices are the future of technology. For example, I have a cell phone that uses the same address my desktop PC would use. It will make talking between devices, as well as talking between companies and systems, possible. And http, XML, and the other protocols that go along with those will integrate devices, companies, and systems.

I think the Internet will continue to proliferate to small wireless devices. Data will become more centralized, meaning that we won't have a copy of our address book on our desktop and a copy of our address book on our phone; we'll have a central, secure place where that data will be stored. We'll be able to access it from our desktop or from our phone. The use of wireless technology will become faster and more consistent, but that will only occur in areas that are dense enough in population to support the infrastructure required to have fast, reliable wireless data access.