Who The
The Grumpy Old Tech is Neville Kripp. I've a background in electronics although I haven't really been working directly in the field for a number of years. I started my career with the Bureau of Meteorology here in Australia as a Radio Technical Officer. As part of our training we were exposed to everything from valve (tube) radio and fax equipment through transistor technology, discrete IC's, even a wire wound microprocessor made from many TTL chips, and on to the latest microprocessor devices. At the Bureau I mainly worked on telemetry equipment and wind finding and weather watch radars however all sorts of interesting things would turn up.
After a number of years at the Bureau, I decided it was time for a change and moved to the Waters Division of Millipore where I was responsible for the Australian workshop. Millipore manufactured HPLC (High Performance Liquid Chromatography) equipment, the sort of thing used in labs, hospitals and research facilities for sample analysis. I worked with a small team at Sydney looking after all the repairs that were too difficult for the tech's on the road and staging major equipment rollouts.
After Millipore I moved on to Honeywell were I stayed for a number of years, working in the Industrial Controls Division. Living in the Hunter Valley Area of N.SW. Australia, coal preparation plants and materials handling systems were a big part of my work. During my time with Honeywell, an opportunity arose to start my own business in partnership with another previous Honeywell employee. Integration, Automation and Control Pty Limited (IAC) was born, as the name suggests IAC had a strong industrial base however we recognized that the real differentiator to come would be the integration of control systems data into the information systems. This is when we invested time and effort in our software development team with the result being a cutting edge MES/MIS (Manufacturing Execution System / Manufacturing Information System).
Following the sale of IAC to a multinational (Matrikon) who was subsequently aquired by Honeywell, I thought it was time to get off the industrial merry-go-round so looked for another venture. This was around the time of the iPad being released and cloud technologies becoming more mature so the time seemed right to look at mobile solutions. This was the start of Inzant, our first product was a sales system based on the iPad with cloud backend services that supports mobile sales reps. That initial system has now grown into a full sales front end system with website integration, B2B connectors, B2C connectors and supply chain integration capabilities.
What next, who knows......