Pito's Blog

Pito Salas runs Salas and Associates, a consulting firm providing advisory services on the the strategy, design, development, implementation of innovative software products and services.

Pito has over 20 years of diverse experience in the software industry, with a solid track record of innovation, creation, and delivery of software products and services. He combines a deep understanding of the latest software technology with vision of where it is going and how it may be applied profitably. This insight is coupled with a strong and pragmatic business and marketing sense and a reputation for recruiting and developing world class teams building world class products.

With a degree in Computer Science from Brandeis University, Pito began his career as a software developer and engineer. He has had the experience of being a hands-on developer on different teams with different development and engineering cultures and mentalities. The products and projects have ranged from personal productivity software to enterprise scale distributed applications, on a variety of computer architectures, ranging from VAX to NeXT, from Macintosh to Windows and everything in between.

A key part of Pito’s experience was his work at Lotus Development Corporation. At Lotus, he was responsible for the invention and subsequent creation and delivery of Lotus Improv, an application which introduced a breakthrough in spreadsheet and financial modeling. Pito began with the project as a researcher in the Lotus Advanced Technology Group, built the prototypes, made the business case, formed the Improv product group, and as General Manager, recruited and developed the organization into the product group which subsequently shipped Lotus Improv.

In addition to Improv, Pito also worked on various efforts in email and collaboration at Lotus. He was involved in some of the early efforts in Pen computing and Personal Digital Assistants. Subsequently he was the Director of Technology of Lotus’ Inter-enterprise Communications Division.

In 1996, Pito joined forces with Jeffrey Beir to found eRoom Technology. eRoom’s mission was and is to deliver world-class collaboration to the enterprise. They secured venture backing in record time and within a year had the first product in beta. eRoom has won numerous awards for software innovation and customer value.

Pito served as Chief Technology Officer, where he was responsible for the overall technology and product line of the company, both strategy and implementation. Pito drove strategy, product management, product design and engineering to create a product that takes web-based collaboration to a new level.

Most recently, Pito formed Salas Associates, dedicated to further leveraging and bringing this expertise in strategy, design, development, implementation of innovative software products and services to our clients in the Software and Life Sciences Industries.

In parallel Pito also leads a team creating BlogBridge, an open source project developing a a system for discovery and organization of large quantities of information. See www.blogbridge.com for more details. Pito also maintains a blog about leading edge technology and related issues of interest. See www.salas.com

Posted by Pito Salas at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Experience

2004 - 2005 | BlogBridge Project, Arlington, MA Project Leader BlogBridge is an advanced blog and feed reader for power users. BlogBridge is organized as an Open Source project at SourceForge.net, with developers in the US, Ukraine and Moldova. The product has over five thousand downloads, several thousand users, and about 1500 source code downloads. It is in active development and has achieved a degree of visibility in the space. (Note: my work on BlogBridge is done under the umbrella of Salas Associates Inc.) 2002 - 2005 | Salas Associates, Inc., Arlington, MA Founding Principal Salas Associates is a consutlancy, focusing on technology strategy, software development methodology, systems architecture, collaboration Strategy and architecture. Clients are small and medium sized Software and Bio Tech firms. 2002 | North Bridge Venture Partners | Waltham, MA Venture Partner North Bridge is a Venture Capital firm focused on IT and Telecom technologies. As Venture Partner I had three kinds of responsibilities. I was responsible for technical due diligence on new projects being considered by North Bridge. I also would pair off with entrepreneurs with highly promising ideas to work side by side with them to help bring the projects to a fundable state. And from time to time I would advise and consult to existing portfolio companies helping them from a technology, software and strategy perspective. (Note: my work at North Bridge was half time, and under the umbrella of Salas Associates.) 1996 - 2002 | eRoom Technology, Inc. | Cambridge, MA Chief Technology Officer and co-Founder eRoom Technology (originally Instinctive Technology) was founded by Jeffrey Beir and me in 1996, with a vision to create a new kind of internet based collaborative application specifically designed for the extended enterprise. eRoom was backed by North Bridge Venture Partners, Matrix Venture Partners and other leading venture firms.) As CTO, I was responsible at a high level, for eRoom's Technology and Product Strategy. I set the direction for the eRoom family of products, ensuring that the product roadmap supported the company strategy, that the products built meet our customers needs, and that the technologies employed fit well with both our customers technology roadmaps as well as the overall direction of the industry. At different times I had responsibility for the Software Engineering and Product Management organizations. (Note: during the second half of 2002, eRoom represented a half time commitment for me.) 1995 - 1996 | Salas Associates, Inc | Arlington, MA Founding Principal Salas Associates is a consulting practice with a focus on Technology Strategy for Business. Clients have tended to be startups, or established businesses embarking on an internal startup. I am asked to develop, or to participate in the development of a product, service or new business. These are generally in the Electronic Commerce, Internet, and related technology areas. The projects involve applications or services employing technologies such as the WWW and/or Lotus Notes. The work involves the creation or review of architectures, designs, business models, strategies, resource and staffing plans, and actual Lotus Notes and WWW implementations. 1984 - 1995 | Lotus Development Corporation | Cambridge, MA Director of Technology, Inter-enterprise Communications Group (1994 to 1995) ICG was the group chartered with implementation of the AT&T/Lotus partnership to build a new service called "AT&T Network Notes." In this capacity I am responsible for the technical leadership of the overall effort. I am acting, essentially, as CTO for the department. I was leading an Electronic Publishing and Distribution effort using Lotus Notes as the underlying infrastructure. We were creating a product and service called Lotus Notes:Newsstand, providing an end-to-end solution for electronic publishing, including production, distribution, subscription management, viewing and searching of on-line publications. I set the overall technical direction, working closely with the development and marketing teams. I was responsible for the management of those teams, as well as the actual product definition and architecture. Director of Advanced Products, Electronic Messaging Division (1992 - 1994) Responsible for a group chartered with defining the future product direction of the Electronic Messaging Division. We focused mostly on the emerging Mobile Computing market. I had three primary projects: First, I was working on significantly enhancing the Mobile capabilities of Lotus Notes. This was part of the Lotus Notes V4 effort: I spent time with customers, built a Visual Basic prototype, and conducted usability tests, to define and get the new functionality implemented. Secondly, we pursued an effort to build a version of our cc:Mail product for Microsoft's WinPad PDA. Finally, we defined and began implementation of a new product called PNA, Personal Network Assistant, designed to extend a companies communications infrastructure to non-computer devices like pagers, faxes, telephones, and eventually PDAs. Director of Development Pen Applications Group (1991 - 1992) Responsible for management, product specification and development of Pen-based applications with PenPoint and PenWindows. I recruited, developed, coordinated and managed the work of a senior team of 6 architects and engineers. General Manager Improv Team (1988 - 1991) Responsible for the 50 person team that shipped Improv, including Engineering, Quality Assurance, Marketing and Documentation. Most importantly, I was responsible for overall design and tradeoffs in the creation of Improv. In this position, I took a project from nothing and built a full scale product team to design and ship the product. After the initial release on the NeXT platform, I planned and effected the move of the project to Windows and Macintosh for its next release. Systems Architect Advanced Technology Group (1986-1988) I Investigated needs, and subsequently invented and prototyped "Modeler" which eventually grew into Lotus Improv. I Was responsible for the fundamental ideas underlying the product, and for selling it's need to the corporation. The innovative aspects of Improv were: (1) English Language Formulas, leading to great productivity in creating spreadsheets (2) Flexible Views, allowing spreadsheet layout to be changed on the fly. Both of these general areas, embodied in several features, led to a spreadsheet model, which while familiar yielded benefits in productivity and auditability of spreadsheet models. Systems Architect and project leader Jazz Team (1984 - 1986) I was responsible for personally designing and implementing the Forms component of Jazz while being responsible for the work of several other developers working on the Database and Forms components. Jazz was one of the first products for the Apple Macintosh 1979 - 1984 | Software House | Cambridge, MA. Development Manager As the manager of the 6 person System 1032 (a relational DBMS for VAX) Language group, I provided technical direction for the design of this section, as well as being responsible for recruiting, training, and all management of the team. My technical contribution included the design and implementation of large parts of the 1032 Language, the report generator, and other key components of the product. 1976 - 1979 | Digital Equipment Corporation | Marlboro, MA. Senior Software Specialist

Education

Brandeis University, Waltham, MA. 1976: B.A. in Computer Science, Cum Laude. Highest honors in Computer Science,

Posted by Pito Salas at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Brief Bio: Pito is the founder of BlogBridge – a cool open source project focused on delivering a great news reader and news discovery system for professionals. Prior to Blogbridge, he was consulting on technology and product strategy to various high tech and VC firms.

Before that he was the co-founder and CTO of eRoom Technology for six years – where he helped lead the company from startup to profitability and ultimately to a successful merger with Documentum. Pito also spent a fair amount of time at Lotus Development and some other Boston area firms.

Posted by Pito Salas at 12:00 AM | Permalink

• Interim, or part-time CTO
• Technical due diligence for investment, Venture Capital, M&A
• Software product development methodology and team assessment
• Assessment, coaching and mentoring of technical executives and staff
• Technology Roadmap assessment and development
• Product architecture and design
• User interface review, feedback, assessment and design
• Product roadmap review, structuring, recommendations
• Competitive analysis, strategic assessments
• Partnering, OEM, and relationships
• Microsoft relationship strategy
• Java/C#/J2EE/LAMP architectural trade-offs
• Product management review

Posted by Pito Salas at 12:00 AM | Permalink

This service includes one or more of the following assessments:

• Software Technology assessment - This assessment looks at the overall technology, architecture and actual code base. What is the condition of the code? How appropriate is the architecture? How current are the technologies being employed? Are they in keeping with the latest thinking in commercial software development? Are the best tools and techniques being used?
• Development methodology and team - This assessment looks at the functioning of the engineering team. What is the development process, and how well is it working? What is the Quality Assurance strategy? How well does the QA team work with the development team? Is the overall development process well structured, too structured, or incorrectly structured? Is it oriented around meeting commitments, around being agile and responsive? What is the engineering culture; how well do the developers work together, with the rest of the organization, and with the executive team? What is the seniority of the team? Are there any weak spots?
• Roadmap and evolution assessment - This assessment looks at the evolution of the software. Are customers' requirements sufficiently factored in? How is customer and field feedback incorporated? Is the direction of the industry, of Microsoft, SUN, IBM, .NET, J2EE properly factored into the plans?

Approach

We always begin by reaching an initial agreement on what the specific objectives are, which often take the form of questions that need to be answered. Following that we conduct a series of intensive one on one, or group conversations with key members of the technical team, and with executives and others in the organization to quickly understand the current state and the future plans, both technical and business. We will usually conduct a technology and architectural walkthrough as well as request a demo of the software. Depending on the length of the project, there will be daily interim reports, followed by a final report.

Engagement

The Rapid Technology Assessment includes:

• Initial goal setting meeting
• Between 1 and 5 days of on-site work
• Daily email-based interim reports
• An end-of-project meeting with all interested parties
• A final written report answering the specific questions

Posted by Pito Salas at 12:00 AM | Permalink

You can reach us at the following locations:

+1 781-646-5894 (Office)

rps@salas.com (email)

Please call or write any time to discuss projects or assignments that you are considering. The first meeting is free :-)

Posted by Pito Salas at 12:00 AM | Permalink