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Wednesday, February 17, 2010
The Mover
Akorri CEO has adapted through 40 years of tech revolutions
By Marc Songini, Special to Mass High Tech
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Allan Wallack
CEO and President, Akorri Inc.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, City College of New York; master’s degree in electrical engineering, Northeastern University.
Those who plan a long-term career in information technology must be prepared to adapt to new technologies every three or four years, according to Allan Wallack, a veteran of Massachusetts high tech and the new CEO and president of Akorri Inc.
“Nobody does it alone,” Wallack said. People come into a company bringing their experience, and then learn from others to come up to speed on new technologies and markets. He has seen a lot of technologies come and go — mainframes, minicomputers, and more. The same applies to companies, including once mighty Digital Equipment Corp.
In January, Wallack became head of Littleton-based Akorri, which provides software to help companies manage their IT infrastructure with a focus on virtualization. He brings the experience of having spent 40 of his 64 years in tech. After a stint in the U.S. Air Force, Wallack joined DEC, where he held a various positions, at times running $200 million product lines.
Since 1980, he has participated in five startups. “You have to think with your heart and your head simultaneously when you do a startup company,” he says. “There is the risk and the unknown, the unproven environment.”
Having worked at DEC, he faced culture shock with young companies. “What I had to learn was that the pressure in a startup company is very different. The best example I can give you is a machine gun—in a large company you shoot many bullets and some hit and some don’t, but the company is successful in any case. With a startup, you have one bullet, and it has to hit the target day one.”
Among his most recent roles was as president and CEO of Maynard-based telecom company Spring Tide Networks Inc., bought by Lucent Technologies Inc. in July 2000 for $1.3 billion. Previously, Wallack had been CEO of Billerica-based Chrysalis Symbolic Design, an electronic design automation software company bought by Avanti Corp.
He has served on a number boards and worked as a consultant. He decided to get back into the CEO game after consulting for Akorri. “They hired me as a consultant for a couple of days a week, and I was having so much fun doing this, I was here six or seven days a week. When they presented me with the opportunity as CEO, I jumped at it.”
For Akorri, he has a simple plan in the long term: “Build a great company.” That could lead to an IPO or creating a large privately held firm, he said. In the near term, the most important milestone is to “acquire lots of customers and keep them all happy.” It will also require raising additional cash. As he comes aboard, Akorri is showing some momentum. Last month, the firm announced it had its best fourth-quarter performance yet, with a 134 percent increase in revenue over the year-earlier quarter.
“This is really an exploding market,” he said, adding that virtualization’s time has come, allowing companies to take full advantage of existing resources rather than over-provisioning their data centers.
New York native Wallack holds a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from City College of New York, and master’s in electrical engineering from Northeastern University. In Massachusetts, he enjoys the easy access from Boston to the mountains or seashore. “Massachusetts is a great state, full of universities and a high work ethic,” he said.
Marc Songini is a freelance writer in Mansfield.
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