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 NEWSEprise CTO guides businesses through Web maze By Ed Scannell February 11, 2000 1:01 pm PT BEING THE SON of a dedicated engineer, it is not surprising that English was only one of two languages Eprise's Jon Radoff grew up learning. The other was a programming language that he used to create his first application at the tender age of 7.
As both CTO and co-founder of Framingham, Mass.-based Eprise, 27-year-old Radoff is still in the business of running through mazes and avoiding monsters. But those mazes now are the myriad decisions his IT customers must make in managing and, perhaps most importantly, scaling Web sites to dodge the competitive monsters lurking around the corner. Although Eprise's Participant Server combines content and business-rule management to help ease the management of business-to-business Web sites, Radoff and his team focus most of their efforts on slaying the scalability monster. Anticipating business growth and implementing an architecture that can flexibly handle that growth over the short and long terms are the most critical factors CTOs of both large and small companies are facing today. The problem, Radoff says, is that CTOs often think too small when creating a Web-scale architecture for e-business. "They are stuck in a departmental-oriented approach where they have a couple of whiz kids implementing little pieces for them that won't scale very much," Radoff says. Even when Radoff helps a company implement the appropriate architecture, his job is still not done. In concert with the customer, Radoff and his team examine the extent to which that architecture stresses and strains the company's business practices and even its basic business model. "What fascinates me is looking at the strains new technology puts on an organization, peeling away the next layer of the onion to see what new business functions we need to support. This is what makes the difference between wildly successful products and just mildly successful ones," Radoff says. In the meantime, Radoff is dealing with his own scalability problems as he grows Eprise from about 103 employees to more than 200 employees by the end of this year. The goal may be conservative given many research projections for the rocket growth of business-to-business commerce in 2000. Radoff must not only find quality technical and marketing people to keep his company's intellectual capital high, but he must continually monitor his role as CTO and co-founder. One rule he will have to observe is delegating some of the more fun or exciting tasks to those best qualified to handle them. "No matter how interesting something is, if I can delegate it, then I have to delegate it," Radoff says. The other challenge Radoff faces is one of analyzing his company's current market position and perpetually redefining where and what it should be. Eprise began its life as NovaLink in 1992, creating sites for several large companies, including -- not surprisingly -- DEC. But by the end of 1997, Radoff changed the company's direction, reshaping it into a software developer that leveraged existing skills in services. "People throughout history have tried to define the business they are in, in too narrow of terms," Radoff says. "What happens when you do that is the business markets around you start to evolve, and you can be caught in a definition that no longer applies to the new market."  RELATED SUBJECTS  Consulting/OutsourcingE-CommerceWeb TechnologiesSPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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