Monday, February 18, 2008

The Mover

New challenge 'scales' up Beckerle family science tradition

By Jay Rizoli

Mike Beckerle has science in his blood. His father is an oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. His brother is a chemist. He got his first computer-oriented job at 14, and he says of his own technological inclination, "by the time I got out of high school and into college I really knew that that's what I wanted to do." Today he's the holder of eight patents and the chief technology officer at Oco Inc. in Waltham.

Beckerle, who joined Oco last month, began his trek in an unusual place for a Falmouth native -- Montreal's McGill University, where he took computer courses "until I ran out of computer courses to take," then moved to the University of Waterloo (Ontario) and graduated with a mathematics degree.

Back home, he pursued his master's at MIT and later joined the Motorola Cambridge Research Center as part of a parallel, scalable computing project of MIT and Motorola. "This was the days of trying to develop what we call dataflow computers, and given what that has led to, it was successful research," he said.

Beckerle took his scalable experience to Torrent Systems Inc., where he created Torrent's scalable computing technology, and pretty much stayed put while the companies changed around him: Ascential Software acquired Torrent in 2001, and IBM Corp. acquired Ascential in 2005. The only break in the chain came at the turn of the millennium, when he left Torrent to start Fact City, which did searches on fact- and statistics-filled databases for web companies. It didn't last, and he returned to Torrent before the Ascential buy, but he says the experience taught him the value of software as a service.

"Fact City suffered the fate of many around the dot-bomb," he said. "But what we were doing is remarkably similar to what Oco is doing. It's a different business model, but tremendous similarity in technology."

Beckerle's most recent position was as a senior architect at IBM, but he had actually had Oco, a software-as-a-service provider of business intelligence and data integration products, in mind before he knew that Oco existed.

"I wanted to go back to a smaller company, and I talked to investors and friends saying I wanted to deliver business intelligence in an SaaS model," he said. "Within weeks, Oco came to my attention, and I was like, 'Shucks, somebody's already doing that.' "

No matter. Beckerle says he's thrilled about delivering a bigger and more efficient system and putting customer's scalability worries to rest.

"My personal business and technology mission is managing the world's business information," he said. "You can depend on the provider to take much of the cost and complexity out of it for you. The big companies and medium-size companies have traditionally had the advantage, and Oco is really leveling the playing field."

Jay Rizoli is a freelance writer in Franklin.