Former Sun execs bootstrap Gorilla Logic

BOULDER Gorilla Logic Inc. is a startup that believes a picture is worth more than 1,000 words. It might be worth 1,000 lines of software code.

The company’s Gorilla Execution Engine, known as GXE, is a tool engineers can use to create software easier and faster with, believe it or not, pictures.

The “pictures” are actually visual models of what the software is supposed to accomplish. The pictures are “drawn” using software design tools like IBM’s Rational Rose or No Magic Inc.’s MagicDraw, tools that have been used in the software industry since the 1980s. In much the same way a theatrical director blocks out a play, a software designer uses these tools to visually create or model the blueprint for a software application from which the code can be written.

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The GXE takes the software blueprint a step further and generates a working prototype of the software that can be run, tested, fixed and run again until it does what the developer wants it to do. It is like taking a virtual walk-through of a house before beginning construction, said Mike Moffatt, director of marketing.

Virtual walk-throughs are critical for home builders, since homeowners often can’t figure out what they really want and need until they see floor plan possibilities. In software engineering circles, the problem is informally known as “I’ll know it when I see it” and is formally referred to “requirements risk,” Moffatt said.

Requirements risk is the leading cause of software project failure, failure that occurs in 30 to 70 percent of software development projects, according to Moffatt. The GXE’s ability to generate a functional prototype from the software blueprint allows programmers and their customers to visualize the end result and make changes to mitigate requirements risk.

“It’s pretty geeky what we do,´ said President and Chief Executive Stu Stern. “We take the pictures that you draw with Rational Rose, and we just run it. We don’t write code. We actually run the diagram. We have some sophisticated technology at the heart of this thing that is able to deduce the necessary processing logic in order to achieve what is being specified in that diagram.”

The company was founded in 2002 by a team of seasoned Sun Microsystems executives who left Sun and pooled their resources to bootstrap Gorilla Logic. Stern was vice president of Sun’s global Java consulting business, which he took from startup in 1996 to a $60 million business with 300 employees across 25 countries. Vice President of Engineering Ed Schwarz was founder of the global e-business consulting organization at Sun. Under Schwarz’s leadership the practice grew to be a $15 million global business with 40 consultants deployed around the world. Chief Scientist Brendan McCarthy was chief methodologist of Sun professional services, and was responsible for creating Sun’s SunTone Methodology used in the delivery of major software projects.

The company is headquartered in Stern’s Boulder home, but the principals work remotely Schwarz in New York City and McCarthy in Dallas. Working virtually was “something we learned at Sun,” Stern said. “We’re used to collaborating and managing remotely. With broadband Internet it’s amazing what you can do.” Stern said, however, as the company grows it will probably invest in physical facilities.

Stern would not disclose the cost of startup, but said he was happy to so far retain 100 percent of equity among the founders. “We may look into some outside financing to ratchet up sales and marketing depending on how much money we will need,” he said. Stern has been talking with local angels and venture capital firms, however, and said, “For the right deal we might be interested in taking money now versus later.”

The driver for Gorilla Logic is the exponential growth of business-to-business e-commerce. It’s one thing for an organization to have its applications work internally, another for its applications to work seamlessly with another organization’s applications. “All the issues with developing computer systems are amplified when you try to do this,” Stern said.

Gorilla Logic is shipping its beta release, known as the Design Edition, in December. Its functionality is limited to rapid prototyping, Stern said. The Enterprise Edition, which turns the visual blueprints into software, will be available in the third quarter 2004.

The Design Edition will be free for download during 2003, and cost somewhere around $500 per user next year, Stern said. The Enterprise Edition will be priced “in line with what server-based software is priced” — between $5,000 and $30,000 per CPU, he said. (Servers can have more than one central processing unit in them, Stern explained.) Gorilla Logic also is evaluating usage- and transaction-based pricing, he said.

Stern was reluctant to name beta user and potential customers, saying only that Gorilla Logic will not appeal to all software developers, just the 10 percent or so that currently use modeling. But, he said, the trend is “gaining momentum.”

Although he claimed the team chose the company’s name because the URL was available, it reflects his wish for the company. “Certainly we hope to become an 800-pound gorilla.”

Contact Caron Schwartz Ellis at (303) 440-4950 or e-mail csellis@bcbr.com