To complicate matters, the quarter has gone soft. Revenues will fall short of projections. Costs outpace estimates. An exasperated Kashou, needing to inspire Gonzalez and his team even as he admonishes them, looks for the right words.
"We need to get extreme," he tells them. "This is like a K-2 expedition. We need all the horsepower we have, and guys, we need it now." Kashou informs Gonzalez that all the resources of the company are now being dedicated to the system conversion. He'll sign whatever check Gonzalez tells him he has to.
Two more people are added to Gonzalez's team. And Kashou hires a software consultancy to finish the development work on the program designed to link customers electronically. No, he's not losing faith, he insists: "I'm just getting real." But his growing fears that Gonzalez might be leading the company off a technological cliff brings Kashou to seek second and third opinions. "I've got to continue to drive this process," he concludes. "It doesn't matter if I don't know what happens outside in sales for a few weeks."
Yet Kashou worries that the company is losing its credibility with its sales force, which has been eagerly selling the benefits of the new system to customers. Now customers have begun to clamor for the ease of electronic transfer held out by CTech Express.
Ten days later, Kashou gets to test-drive the new system. He's elated with what he sees. "An invoice never looked so good to me in my life," he says. An employee who also tests the system E-mails Kashou: "This is better than meeting Christie Brinkley." Kashou fires back: "CONCUR!!!"
* * *
One October morning, a regional sales representative telephones Kashou to announce that the company has just snared the largest account of its life with a huge telecommunications company.
Sales will swell with the new, $2-million deal. But so will production volume. The account will introduce another million records into the system, enough to overwhelm the low-end database serving as the starter engine for Collectech's new system. "We've outgrown it before we ever got it up and running," laments Kashou.
Gonzalez and Kashou agreed they couldn't afford another premature brush with obsolescence: "We had to get a product that was proven and that we wouldn't blow out of in less than a year," explains Kashou.
Data conversion and testing have to begin all over again. But another transformation, one that had been slowly taking place over the past year, is consummated by the crisis: the programmer is becoming a pragmatist, the CEO a systems expert. Kashou, once the hard-nosed minimalist when it came to automation, is letting a long-term vision of his system guide his investment decisions. Gonzalez, once a purist who preferred programming elegance over expediency, is now looking for a sure bet that won't batter the company's bottom line. The two, both driven and stubborn, are finding that the common ground between them suddenly seems more vast than their differences.
The two quickly agree on a plan. They decide to bet on the newest release of a Sybase database, which promises 32 terabytes of storage, or about 16,000 times that of its predecessor. The cost: $20,000, or nearly as much as Kashou had been advised to spend on the entire system.
Kashou is now seeing a chiropractor to ease increasingly intense muscle spasms in his back. His expectations that he might ever finish running this race, much less win it, are dashed. The objective now: to simply keep going. "It's never really over, I guess," he says.
* * *
It's January 1995, and CTech Express is up and running. Does that mean the system meets all the company's needs? Kashou knows better than to ask that question now. As with a programmer's loop, in which a sequence of software instructions repeats itself over and over, Collectech seems destined to continually retrace its steps toward the perfect system.
Despite the 18 months of sweat and setbacks, despite the $200,000 price tag, Kashou and Gonzalez refuse to profess discouragement with their now-mutual fate. "You have to be prepared to take your hits and keep moving," says Gonzalez. Adds Kashou: "Nothing comes cheap or easy or on time. But it takes pressure to make diamonds, right?" Or to put it another way: no heat, no eat.
POWER TO SPARE
If CTech Express had a fender, Jose Gonzalez would polish it with pride. "This thing can beat the heck out of any minicomputer," he says with a satisfied smile. His hard-won system, a multiserver-network that was more than a year in the making, takes up less space than a coat closet. But these days some pretty heavy-duty power can come in small packages.
The boxes housing the main processors that crunch the company's data stand in tight formation along the floor underneath two adjoining desks. The Novell server holding the company database is a 486 machine with 32 megabytes of main memory and 12 gigabytes of on-line disk storage -- about 20 CD-ROMs worth. That's where the database resides. Connected to it by a 100-megabit line is a database server, a $3,000, 90-megahertz Pentium-based machine, dubbed Alice, that routes information in and out of the database. Further turbocharging the system are four $2,300 Pentium machines, which divide and share computing tasks, such as whipping up and printing out a letter. Marketers can phone in from anywhere using modem-equipped 486 color laptops to download client data from the system.
Not everything in CTech Express is state-of-the-art. Three communication servers, one 286 and two 386s -- old warhorses by the Pentium standards of today -- support a client bulletin board. More than 300 clients now dial into the board, using off-the-shelf communications programs such as PC Anywhere, to upload account information or to download reports. Perched above the servers are a few worn keyboards and a bank of six mostly beat-up black-and-white monitors. "These monitors have gone through hell. They're old junk," says a bemused Gonzalez. "But that's all we need to do the job."
