opportunity. Through research, Abel found that the industrial vertical was wide open. Using Cisco as an example of an impressive business case, Abel convinced his father that by leveraging the Internet they could bring significant selling-cost reductions to industrial companies.

Abel also convinced Vic Alston, whom he had worked with at Niku, to become vice president of software engineering at BigMachines. Alston had been working at Andale, a leading e-commerce auction technology provider, where he was director of engineering and had helped small businesses sell over the Internet. Abel brought in Eugene Chiu, with whom he had worked at both McKinsey and Niku, for business development. With his dream team chosen, Scully Brothers awarded BigMachine's first-round financing.

Abel now had to convince an industry that he could help companies savemoney and become more efficient on the front end of their businesses. He became an Internet evangelical, going to trade shows and speaking at Hydraulic Institute meetings. At many trade shows, other than the big gorillas, his was the only software company present.

The other thing Abel did was make sure the software itself was easy to use. The software was designed using a 100-percent Java standard and open architecture and is administerable via the Internet. With its Web-based browser interface, "your average product engineer can maintain the configurator and the software application without knowing a speck of programming language. With the use of a mouse and a keyboard they can point and click and set up the configurator," says Larry Phillips, BigMachine's vice president of product marketing.

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