EMR Telemetry ... the end

Prologue:

Most of the people involved have passed on, and I’m one of the few remaining that was on the inside to witness the decisions.  While this is my opinion, I will try to be as honest as possible.

Introduction:

During my time at EMR, I met many talented and smart people, who shaped my time there to be something I recall with fond memories.  People like Joe Keller, Jud Strock, Art Kelly, Gary Schumacher, Marvin Edgeworth, Bud Thurmond … the list could go on, but these guys helped me extensively and their memory will live with me always.

I landed my dream job at EMR Telemetry (aka; Fairchild-Weston) in 1983 as a Senior Applications Engineer.  The company, located in Sarasota Florida, employed about 1200 people.  In a town as small as Sarasota was back then, the company was a major force there.  

This article will highlight three times where decisions were made which helped destroy the company, with a fourth one at the end for the “final nail”.  Sure, corporate decisions didn’t help, but the lack of success that these decisions caused forced the stakeholders to make decisions which eventually closed the company.

The Company:

At the company were four Strategic Business Units … mine was telemetry (known as EMR Telemetry from its founding name), and the second borrowed ideas and product from EMR and it was called Signal Processing … they did classified projects for the “three letter agencies”.  The third was the “black box” business for commercial airlines, and the fourth was Data Recorders (which then was mostly the old “reel to reel” magnetic analog units).

EMR had provided equipment to all of the space programs up thru the 1980s, and commanded over 80% of the market … so indeed, going to work for EMR was fantastic … we had money … we had prestige … and we commanded the market.

The EMR Product:

Telemetry systems, were for the most part, a huge bank of “front end” signal capturing equipment, connected to a large “main frame” computer with disk farms, and custom software (the software alone often ran to six figures).  As a result, most systems were in the one million dollar range (sure, today, a system that powerful is a Dell PC and a few plug in cards, but back then, we were in the stone ages).

My First Act:

I had established myself there as someone brash enough to “fight the good fight” and “think outside the box”.  I got that reputation, I think, because when I first joined, about 1 year in I was given the task of “Capture Manager” for a major pair of Request for Proposals (RFPs) from a major aerospace company.  The first thing I did was tell the President, Joe Keller, that he was wrong, and that the Request for Proposals (RFPs) should be ignored … the spec was asking for something we could not do.  In the end, we requested an audience with that company, made our pitch, and got awarded a major contract from them.  I was a hero.

Myopia at its best:

A friend from the Data Recorders unit came to me one day and said “we have this huge RFP that involves recording lots of videos … you think outside the box, so how would you architect a solution?” (back then, video was an analog signal about 5 MHz bandwidth).  So I spent a few hours and sketched out a diagram that showed a box converting the analog signal to bits, and using new high capacity disk drives to store the data.  I told him that using his current analog recorders would result in an expensive solution that was based on aging technology, and that my approach was based on new approaches that were started to be embraced by industry.  Note that neither of these products truly existed then, but today, video encoders, decoders, and digital storage are everywhere.  

Anyway, my friend floats this up the chain of command, and shortly thereafter, our CTO comes into my office to explain to me that I clearly don’t understand video signals.  If he had seen the wisdom in my approach, EMR would be “the name” in video encoding and digital recording.  Now, I could have fought for the idea, but it was not my SBU, was not my project, and not my product line … so I just shrugged and got back to my work.

A House Divided:

At one point in time, Signal Processing had been contracted to write “high end” software for their customer that did data visualization and data storage.  While at the same time, the EMR Telemetry side had their own software … so sure enough, the two products were being pushed simultaneously to the same customer sets.  So Marketing, Sales, Engineering, Customer Support, Training, everyone, was trying to figure out which product to invest time and resources into.

Finally, management called everyone together where the two different development teams got to pitch their product so that a winner could be chosen … so we would have one core product, one marketing vision, one product to train, and sales would know which product to support.

At the end, management decided to keep both … support both … invest in both.  The house was now divided.

Money Dried Up:

In the late 1980’s, PCs were coming of age, and some OEMs were trying to develop low cost telemetry systems to compete with EMR.  Their problem was that the customers had lots of money to buy “good” systems, developed by the professionals at EMR, so they didn’t get much traction.

However, in 1991, the Cold War came to an end, and Congress started using the term “the peace dividend” to justify cutting DoD budgets.  The result was that our customers, who had money before, now had little, and they were being forced to buy PC based systems instead of the huge “main frame” systems of before since they had little money, but a continuing mission.

To address this, I assembled a few engineers, borrowed some software, and took some old signal processing hardware, put it together, and showed management how EMR could be the solution for PC-based telemetry systems … allowing our customers to have “the EMR brand for 5% of the cost of a main frame system”.

I can still hear the words … “Tim, I can’t keep 1200 people employed selling $50K telemetry systems”.  At this point, I knew the end was near, and started looking for a place to move to.  And indeed, it came to pass that they could not keep 1200 people employed while offering million dollar systems either.

Final Act:

One of my last programs I led was a new data multiplexer, running what was, at the time, the incredibly high rate of 50 Mbps.  It was successful, and management decided that they wanted to take that product, modify it for the commercial world, and market it to a new customer set.  Well, in Product Management, we call that the “Launch Risk Matrix” … where basically, new product brought to new customers is the highest risk.  

At about this time, I decided to leave the company because after all the other stupid moves, and figuring this was just not going to work (IMHO), I needed to get away.  They offered me the position of lead on that team, but I knew it was the wrong product to the wrong market, so I politely declined.

Indeed, after I left and they demo’d the new product to the new customer for the first time, it caught fire.

Epilogue:

Today, the SBUs are gone, the buildings are gone, and the only ones left in Sarasota are retirees.