After SCLogic, where I realized that my technical abilities had plateued and, without funding from outside investors, would likely stagnate, I decided to try something different.

While at SCLogic, I found myself in an ad-hoc sales role and actually enjoyed it. I suppose I am something of a people-person who happens to also be a programmer, although I dispute the "rule" that programmers cannot communicate at a comfort level (either for them or management) to actively engage in the business of sales, technical support, etc.. Let's just call those that can a "rarity" but they ARE out there.

Anyway, after SCLogic, I needed a change of pace and decided to build on my sales experiences. So, I rewrote my resume to push more of my sales experiences and less of my management and technical abilities and took a job as a technical sales consultant for Telispark, a large (100 person) enterprise wireless software consulting firm.

Unfortunately, there were two problems with Telispark: they had neither a definitive wireless product, nor a customer that they were successful in marketing to. However, they found one customer who wanted a wireless work-order tracking system. The problem was that Telispark did not have one to give them.

Seeing as though a work order also happened to be just another uniquely numbered asset, see SCL Intra and Hawkeye for where I am going with this, I volunteered to help out Telispark in a more technical role and was assigned as the technical manager of a rapid application development team to design a work-order tracking system in under eight weeks.

To make a long story short, my four-person development team where I was both manager and developer delivered a fully functional tracking system in six weeks... two weeks ahead of schedule.

There were two items of note in this development project.

First, this project was not in oh-so-comfortable visual basic, but that was a good thing. I actually always wanted to learn Java and picked it up quickly enough to code Sunflower, our internal name for the project, as a J2EE-compliant solution to be deployed on Sun's iPlanet Application Server (mandated by the customer).

Second was the history of why we called the project "Sunflower." While Telispark management (the VP and CEO) tasked me to create a work-order tracking system, I had just spent the last three years of my life working with, and thinking in terms of, a highly scalable tracking engine at SCLogic. My challenge to our team was this: we will not only build a work-order tracking system... we will build a all-purpose tracking engine that Telispark could then build all sorts of applications on top of. This was, in my mind, simply the Java version of SCL Intra and we called it Sunflower to solidify the image of a central engine (the central part of the flower) and many different applications that can be constructed from it (the petals of the flower).

Of course, there were some major differences. The design was more complex, but also more forgiving with regard to its ability to mold itself to any type of uniquely identified asset, as well as the work processes that go along with it. Fortunately, most of the more serious hurtles with understanding how a tracking system should work were behind me and we hit the ground running (aside from me having to learn Java on the fly).

Anyway, as my stories run long, I will conclude it with the following: Sunflower became a very high profile internal project that spun off into a handful of rapid application projects to track many different highly valued items and the team were relied upon to integrate Sunflower into the existing product line. However, the market being what it was, Telispark had some rocky beginnings and fell on some challenging times... but that is another story.