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An avid nature lover

His interests are many—curiosity in chemistry, passion for art, and hiking and reading, amongst others. Jerry Rudisin, CEO and President, Agitar Software, talks about his life in detail, to Renuka Vembu

He is a nature lover—totally consumed by the forests of his home state Pennsylvania; the plant and animal species and the fossils intriguing him as much as they interested him. Listening to stories about history and astronomy from his father infused a lot of curiosity and interest in him. Jerry Rudisin reminisced, “I do not remember how, but I expressed an early interest in chemistry, so my father built an impressive laboratory for me in the basement. I did everything from serious experiments in chemistry and biology, to making explosives and fireworks. So I would say my father had the greatest impact on me, encouraging a desire to learn about many areas.”

His father dedicated 33 years of his service working in a factory assembling large industrial transformers, while his mother was the office manager at that firm. After they got married, she dutifully devoted her full time and energy on raising her two children; Rudisin and his younger sister, who is now a psychologist. Though neither of his parents went to the university, they profoundly valued education and encouraged their children to study hard and get higher learning. They also instilled a lot of values and sowed the seeds of discipline in their children.

While in school, he did programming and had a keen interest in physical sciences, especially chemistry. After completing his secondary schooling, Rudisin went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and earned his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This was largely made possible by his computer science professors who inspired him and played a key role in his developing a keen interest in the subject. He then moved on to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) to pursue a Master’s degree in Computer Science; his thesis being in distributed computing, where he also started a small distributing company. Though he entered UCLA with the aim of getting a PhD degree and becoming a professor, a few years later he changed his stance and aimed at entering into the industry with the vision of making a greater impact in it.

Back in his hometown, Pittsburgh, Rudisin worked for a few years as a software engineer and then as a software development manager. He explained, “I was attracted to start-up companies, and ended up in two of them—one in Pittsburgh and the other in Boston. I was exposed to product management and marketing and liked it, and eventually moved away to general management. I moved to Silicon Valley to join Rational Software (now IBM Software) in 1991, when it was still a small 10-year-old private company, and became its Vice-president of Marketing. I left in 1999 after Rational became a very successful and valuable public company. The challenge at Rational was how to build on the intellectual property of the company which did much of the work to establish the idea of iterative development of software projects and start to grow.”

After Rational was acquired by IBM, he joined a venture-backed company called NightFire Software as its CEO. The company was engaged in developing supply-chain automation software to telecommunication providers. The biggest challenge facing him was that, even though he had a valuable solution that really worked, the US telecom market entered a depression and customers went out of the business faster than the new ones came in. Rudisin added, “We kept improving the technology to reach new markets in telecom, such as fixed wireless, mobile wireless, and even the traditional landline carriers. But even they cut back their capital spending by 50-60 percent per year. We fought our way to profitability for the last three quarters and eventually sold the company.”

Since Sequoia Capital was an investor in both NightFire and Agitar, it was an obvious next step for him to join the board of Agitar just after it was founded, and become its CEO and 16th employee in July 2003. He asserted with pride, “I have being associated with the organization for over four years—from before we shipped our first product, through the creation of our worldwide sales and service organization, through five major releases of our technology and almost 300 enterprise customers worldwide.”

Rudisin is extremely proud of the work that the Agitar team has done—to bring an entirely innovative solution to the market, fight for recognition and trials by customers, and to have shown customers the value of their solution. He also appreciated the work put in by Rational Software to improve the software development processes of so many of the Global 2000 development organizations.

Working with and leading a team of smart, intense, and creative people, building a lasting technology and a company that can improve how the world builds and maintains the software applications on which it depends, amount to being his main motivating factors. He felt that for all the progress the industry has made, software development is still in the primitive stages with a lot of room for development and scope for improvement. He was of the view that astounding financial success will eventually come in the form of a company that delivers radical improvements and innovations in software development which customers value enough to buy.

On being a team builder, he mentioned, “I do not see any magic in that process. You hire people with intelligence, intensity, initiative, and integrity. You communicate openly. You have a clear shared sense of the mission. You share good news and bad news, and encourage everyone to contribute to the solution. And you lead from the front lines—for me, that means a lot of travel to see customers all over the world.” This explains his frequent visits to India, at least once in every six to nine months, and to Japan and Europe as well.

Being married to his wife for 20 years now, and fathering a five-year- old son, he maintained that chasing and running around his child formed an important part of his fitness regime. Rudisin also has a passion for reading and art, and visits art museums. He also likes spending time hiking in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California.

renuka.vembu@expressindia.com