Unitask Software Hiring, On The Grow

A software company automating some of the more headache-producing manual tasks for Oracle software users is hiring and aims to triple its size in each of the next two years.

Unitask Software "provides extending software to automate a lot of the manual stuff it takes to run (Oracle) for your company," CEO Dale Royal said in a recent interview.

The company has three major product lines:

* Output Director, which lets an Oracle user take whatever they see on a screen and print it, fax it, email it or copy it to a document depository. Oracle does this, but only by a tedious manual process.

* Migration Director, which allows users to much more easily input changes in Oracle databases. Royal said one customer went from four people working full-time on such changes to one person part-time thanks to Unitask.

* Security Director, which automatically scrambles fields in databases for security purposes. "Everything's on the Internet and everything's in a database, so everything about you is sitting in one of those fields in a database," Royal said. "We scramble all those sensitive fields so that if a hacker gets in or somebody steals a disk, it's scrambled data, they can't see it."

Royal said the company was founded in Israel by three Israeli Navy veterans six years ago out of an Oracle consulting business. A couple of venture companies scooped up the business and asked serial entrepreneur Royal to run it -- and he agreed, provided the company was based in his home base of southeast Michigan. Automation Alley has provided $250,000 in funding for the company, which now has 18 employees in 8,000 square feet of space in an office building overlooking a lake just off Telegraph Road.

Royal said about 25,000 organizations globally run the Oracle Ebusiness Suite and could be Unitask customers. While the "heavy lifting" of developing the product is done, Royal said Unitask continues to look for developers, along with quality assurance, sales people, marketing people and technical support staff.

"We will triple the size of the company this year and we would expect similar growth next year and probably a doubling the year after that," Royal said. "We could be a $50 million company in five years, easily."

Royal is a Central Michigan University grad who says he never dreamed of a career in technology, but went to work for AT&T out of college and wound up designing networks. Later he left for Network Systems Corp., then Sequent Computer Systems, Open Vision Technologies, and Coeum Software, along with working on several projects for venture capital firms.

More at www.unitask.com.