Sun Honors Business Leaders of the Net Economy

Sun has chosen 18 new customers and business partners to join the prestigious ranks of its iForceSM Heroes program. Selected twice a year, iForce Heroes are business and technology leaders from around the world honored for their unwavering vision and leadership in adapting to market requirements amidst challenging conditions. The Heroes' actions have helped their companies, customers, and communities thrive in the Net Economy. Sun is recognizing the following Summer 2001 iForce Heroes:

Pam Scanlon, executive director, Automated Regional Justice Information System (ARJIS). Scanlon and her team at ARJIS developed Infotech, a solution that provides San Diego's more than 10,000 police officers instant access to real-time crime information via a laptop and wireless connection from their cars.

Marc Karstaedt, vice president, Energy Markets, Burntsand Inc. Karstaedt is tapping into the inherent synergies between the Internet and a natural gas trading system (liquidity, anonymity, and security) to help introduce and evolve an online trading exchange for the natural gas market that is more efficient and helps reduce costs.

Mark Dickelman, vice president, M-commerce and Wireless, Bank of Montreal. Dickelman and his team developed "Veev," Bank of Montreal's mobile Internet service that helps consumers on six networks across Canada and in the U.S., get real-time banking and brokerage services, market information, stock price alerts, links to news and more.

Norbert Nowicki, senior partner, Computer Sciences Corp. Nowicki has been aggressive in promoting the adoption of Net technologies in formulating business strategies for his clients to help them succeed in net markets and to reduce costs and increase revenues.

Shiro Inoue, CEO, Famima.com and director, E-Retail Service, FamilyMart. Inoue's brainchild, Famima.com, consists of in-store kiosks that combine the Internet and convenience stores to create super convenience stores. These kiosks help improve one-to-one marketing and customer loyalty by enabling customers to enter their preferences and make special-order purchases online. Famima.com service has since been expanded to enable access through NTT DoCoMos i-mode service.

Guy Tallent, CEO and president, Identrus. Tallent was instrumental in developing a process to streamline trading partnerships by providing the trust behind the transaction. To do this, he enlisted six of the top banks to join him in the Identrus consortium, a group that offers public key infrastructure (PKI) authentication to corporate customers through their financial institutions.

Hector Alonso, chief operating officer, Impsat Fiber Networks. As early as 1995, Alonso was encouraging his employees to anticipate business and consumer Internet needs. As a result, his company has emerged as a leading provider of Internet and data transmission services in Latin America.

Minoru Okada, president, Lawson Ticket. Okada, who is rapidly gaining strength in online pop-concert ticket sales in Japan, set his sights on using technology to streamline processes and to move ticket sales through the newest gateway to the Internet: mobile phones. Okada was instrumental in teaming Lawson Ticket with NTT DoCoMo's popular mobile phone service, i-mode, to sell tickets and give users information about their favorite artists.

Michio Matsui, president, Matsui Securities. Matsui successfully transformed the traditional brokerage firm he inherited into one of the first full-scale online trading services in Japan.

Ernie Allen, CEO, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Allen's ceaseless pursuit and brilliant implementation of Net-enabled technologies has helped NCMEC increase the recovery and reunion rate of families with their lost children from 60 percent to 93 percent.

Kei-ichi Enoki, Managing Director, i-mode, NTT DoCoMo. In 1997, Enoki was charged with launching Japanese leader NTT DoCoMo's new mobile business. Enoki conceived of the platform, i-mode, and launched it with a 12-month head start on Western carriers. I-mode is now the envy of the wireless world, expecting to triple the original user estimates and poised to lead 3G innovations.

Paul Pocialik, CTO, Noblestar. Pocialik established within the IT consultancy a culture of continuous innovation, harnessing the power of leading-edge technologies, particularly wireless advances, to transform how corporate enterprises operate. Pocialik and his team have developed a range of ready-to-run wireless iForce solutions that bridge the wired and wireless worlds, including a GSM-based mobile payment system for the Swedish postal service.

Robert Yap, executive vice president for information technology, Port of Singapore Authority (PSA) and managing director of Portnet.com. Yap is the driving force behind Portnet.com, PSA's e-commerce subsidiary and a global, Internet-based community to help the entire shipping industry increase productivity and cut costs using an end-to-end information workflow-resource booking and billing and documentation solution for shippers, shipping lines, port operators and local government agencies.

Rob Knourek, president, Reuters Retail Solutions Division, Reuters Ltd. Knourek led Reuters to develop TIBMercury, one of the first shrink-wrapped, Internet-based online equities brokerage system that allows banks to create online trading facilities without the risks and costs associated with developing them from scratch. Through Reuters' solution, banks and brokerages connect to multiple exchanges, and user accounts and portfolios are handled.

Marc Benioff, chairman, Salesforce.com. Benioff established a subscription-based model to offer enterprise services via the Web, providing customers with a powerful, scalable customer relationship management (CRM) solution without the hassle and expense of installing, upgrading and supporting the products.

Noritoshi Murakami, Senior Manager, eCommerce Banking, Sanwa Bank. Realizing that banks have the opportunity to play a key role as the trust behind online business, Murakami headed up Sanwa Bank of Japan's participation and role in the workgroup defining the specifications for Identrus.

Henry Visconde, CEO, Sydeco. Visconde was a driving force in helping Sydeco, the IT arm of one of Brazils foremost pharmaceutical companies, Laboratrio Biosintetica, gain a competitive advantage by embracing the Internet and wireless technologies to quickly gather and process sales force, market and customer information.

Randy Wilhelm, CEO, Thinkronize. Wilhelm founded Thinkronize to provide teachers and students a cost-effective, easy-to maintain ASP solution to provide them the tools they need via the Web, and to free them from the burden of upgrading and maintaining software. [...read more...]

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