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In the News
"CTO answers the call of the auction block " DoveBid's challenge: Set up a flexible system for simulcasting live business auctions online A DESIRE TO IMPROVE the way computers communicate with one another has been a lifelong passion of Francis Juliano, CTO of DoveBid. At the technological helm of the 60-year-old auction house based in Foster City, Calif., the 33-year-old Juliano helped DoveBid become a leader, in less than a year, in simulcasting live business auctions of all types across the Internet. The chairman of the National Auctioneers Association, Jim Roebuck, says DoveBid is one of the top five auction houses in the world. Roebuck believes that eventually all auction houses will simulcast their auctions over the Internet because those auction houses that "have not yet embraced online technology realize they will have to, but are simply moving more slowly."
How did DoveBid get there so fast?
Under his direction, DoveBid's outsourced Internet infrastructure was brought in-house. Because DoveBid conducts almost any type of auction, from the sale of the Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant to equipment auctions for clients such as Lockheed Martin, its online auction system had to be easily deployed and flexible. "We built a team internally and a system internally, and it had to be a system that could work on regular phone lines, because we don't know where or when these auctions will happen," explains Juliano. "We get short-term notice, sometimes less than five weeks, and that was the challenge we had to overcome. You can't get a T1 line or DSL in that fast." As Juliano fine-tuned DoveBid's new network, DoveBid management was compounding Juliano's challenge by acquiring twelve other established auction houses to increase DoveBid's offerings. With each new acquisition came the added task of integrating the newly acquired networks and e-mail databases. Juliano confesses that he has always enjoyed solving problems. As early as the eighth grade, a young Juliano was already hanging around computer stores, getting hands-on experience with primitive PCs. Back then Juliano was offering advice and assistance to computer store customers who had questions even the store employees had a hard time answering. "The CTO role is a dream I grew up with," remembers Juliano. "I love the business side, and I love the technical side." Before graduating from the eighth grade, Juliano began his own consulting service, doing work for an impressive list of clients that included DuPont, in Wilmington, Del., and Hallmark, in Kansas City, Mo. The companies came to him on recommendations from the very same computer stores where Juliano hung out. "I was hooking up desktop PCs to mainframes," Juliano says of his early consulting work, "getting rid of the dumb terminals and turning them into machines that could think." Later, with only a handful of college credits under his belt, the admittedly "self-taught" Juliano jumped right into the high-tech job market, working for Scholastic, a New York-based children's publishing and media company. He was also part of the team at Sony that developed the Sony Data Discman. But it was Juliano's savvy for getting computer systems to communicate with one another that led naturally to his tenure as the director of technology for Office Depot's online services. There, Juliano oversaw the communication between Office Depot's brick-and-mortar operation and the company's online store. The synchronization of the two networks was a logical preface to Juliano's work at DoveBid. Juliano recognizes that his Office Depot experience prepared him for the challenges he would face at DoveBid and emphasized the importance of teamwork. "It's never an individual play, always a team play, particularly in the Web world." As CTO of DoveBid, Juliano understands how his technological contributions foster the overall development of the business. "The microphone was a great piece of technology that allowed the auctioneer to be heard all the way at the end of the warehouse. And now, the Internet has expanded that auctioneer's voice across the planet," he says. "The true challenge for any CTO is on the technology side; the trick is to improve, enhance, and extend the paradigm of what the business is good at." Juliano and his team at DoveBid have created technology that allows Internet participants to bid alongside on-site participants in real time. The results of the bidding activities flow into an enterprise system for billing purposes. This type of real-world/Internet synchronization has been Juliano's forte, and according to Jonathan Gaw, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass., DoveBid's success in executing simulcast auctions not only allows more bidders to participate but also may affect the bidding itself. "You say 'Well, I didn't have to fly to New York so that saved me this money and I can raise my bid,' " Gaw says. Although knowing the ins and outs of business is important to Juliano, he says the technology basics still have to be in place. "If you haven't done the programming or you haven't gotten that call at 2 a.m. because the server is down, it hurts," he says. "I think you have to understand the technology first."
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