Abridged History of Intouch Technology Group (Genesis Era)

In the late 1980’s when the personal computer industry was still embryonic there were two guys living in a little Aussie drinking town, with a serious skiing problem, called Mount Beauty.

Chris Heberle, a Kiewa Valley local with an unbeaten cross-country skiing record was representing Australia in the Olympics. Klaas Sybranda was dabbling in a variety of entrepreneurial interests having sold his Apple Grahics studio and left far away Perth, Western Australia for a life in country Victoria.

One day in a computer store in the ‘Big Smoke’ of nearby Albury the two met and discovered they had a mutual interest in desktop publishing and business system development. Klaas was a Xenix (a forerunner to Linux) newbie installing multi user business systems. Chris, a computer science graduate from ANU was on tour with the Australian Institute of Sport.

They started meeting regularly (when Chris was not overseas skiing and Klaas away with his USA connections) collaborating on their various developments. Chris - a bus booking system for a local tour company and Klaas systems for his vacation home rental agency and a restaurant he owned. An RDMS system called Clarion was chosen as the development platform.

The Heberle family were pioneers at Falls Creek ski resort and Chris, the local techie was helping the ski area maintain the computers and dot matrix printers for their Tyvek tickets. Chris asked Klaas to join him at a meeting to review a new ticketing system the ski area was considering. Comptrol from the USA was offered with DOS 6.2 and their incumbent Canadian DOS 1.0 Delta Information system had moved to a Unix based multi user system, which was an upgrade option. With Chris and Klaas both working at the leading edge of the emerging Windows environment and their common desktop publishing experience, both 4GL systems seemed ‘old hat’ in a fast changing IT world.

The ski area contracted Chris and Klaas to write a requirement specification for them and research alternative ticketing systems. Klaas’s American connections had taken him often to the USA and at Mall of America had seen a new attraction; Camp Snoopy using a novel decrementing value barcode scanning ticketing system called Lasergate. Late in 1992 as part of the requirements research project Klaas went to see the system used at Knott’s Berry Farm (the owners of Camp Snoopy) and Disneyland after it became clear that there was no modern system serving the ski industry.

Meanwhile, still as part of the requirements project, Chris and Klaas built a home-grown touch screen to demonstrate Klaas’s idea for a product finding innovation comprising three lists (the Multi List) that had been the design tenet of the forerunner Clarion based LECAFE system for his Grainery Restaurant. Klaas also had an interest in Veritas Computers, an AutoDesk distributor, and AutoDesk Animator was chosen to illustrate the concept. Chris developed an ASCII text database as the simple backend for a Visual Basic 1.0 application on Windows 2.0 to make it look ‘real’.

It was so impressive that the ski area thought it was real, and “if they could produce that in a short time surely they could develop the rest in no time at all”.

Falls Creek was owned by services and infrastructure company Transfield (now Broadspectrum). The ski area GM made a presentation to the board for the fledging “High Plains Group” to develop a new ticketing system. It was met with an arms folded “we got dozens of suits with IT degrees and six figure salaries who’ve looked at the proposed specs and recon it would take them six years to develop”. To cut a long story short, the GM put his job on the line and it was proposed that HPG would build the hardware infrastructure for the ski area and if their so called SkiPass system did not work then Comptrol would be installed on the new hardware. The deal got the go-ahead just 10 weeks before the opening of the ski season in April 1993.

Fortunately, the duo was so convinced of their ideas being marketable that they had already started to develop the software from the exemplary requirements specification they had produced. But they also had to choose and build the hardware from components (the only way to make money out of the project). A 386 motherboard was chosen (the very latest) with Windows 3.0 as the operating system and Lantastic networking (10BaseT) for networking, since no network layer existed in Windows at the time.

In Australia the Queen’s Birthday long weekend is the opening of the ski season, rain, hail or snow, everyone turns up.  The Gods were favorable to skiers that year and the season looked like it would be a bumper with an early start. Not so good news for the dynamic duo working around the clock on the new SkiPass software and hardware. Fortunately the hardware install was going well. Philips monitors had been chosen and Microtouch (the people making poker machines) were delighted to retrofit their capacitive touchscreen. Because of the harsh environment and the lack of knowledge of how a touchscreen worked a keyboard and Honeywell mouse was also provided as backup. Come the day before opening the software was working all bar printing tickets on Tyvek with the legacy Citizen dot matrix printers. The setup and sales aggregation was done in Paradox and the reports were produced using desktop publishing tools on exported raw data.

At 8am that Saturday morning Chris rushed to the ticket box having worked all night to deliver the floppy disk with the latest SkiPass compile that he and Klaas installed manually one by one for each of the ‘ticket tarts’ so they could start selling tickets, just in time as the ski area opened.  

And that’s how Intouch started.

Original Intouch Logo

It was immediately obvious that the system cleared the queues in a fraction of the time of the old system. The managers also sold tickets (without training, like everyone else) and as one ‘ticket tart’ proclaimed in a news report about the system: “selling tickets is a piece of piss”. Which translates to “very easy”.

A whirlwind season followed with every afternoon one or the other of the now called “Intouch” team making the 40 minute trip up to the mountain to conduct the ‘close out’ for the day.  Work progressed feverishly creating the Resources and Dataview components of the system to automate this time consuming drudgery. Amazingly, every night the sums ‘balanced’ and it was off to the pub for the girls earlier than ever before. This amazing change from trying to figure out late into the night how the money matched the tickets sold, reverberated through the Australian ski industry with a steady stream of luminaries from the other resorts coming to meet the two ‘blokes from the bush’ with the world beating ticketing system up at Falls Creek.

But with only a handful of worthwhile ski areas in Australia the boys were already setting their sights abroad. First port of call on the way to the USA was Mt Cook Line the owners of the South Island New Zealand ski areas (later Air New Zealand).

Next cab off the rank in 1994 was Thredbo Ski Resort in Australia, more corporate (owned by a hotel and cinema group) and sophisticated than Falls Creek. The negotiations were tough mainly over the price – “we can hire programmers all day on any Sydney street corner who can write this software in a couple of weeks”. When Klaas realized that the locum in-house lawyer misunderstood the corporate imperative not to be outdone by lowly Falls Creek the gauntlet was thrown down. “Are you authorized to lose the deal?” - a direct question that got the contract signed by the proper lawyer (on maternity leave) the next day.

Thredbo was a tough patch to hoe starting the project at Easter due to negotiation delays, with Chris mostly back in the office and Klaas on site six hours drive away assisted by the resort’s hands on IT guy, Steve Cronan. The company was still only the two of them operating out of an off-season ski rentals shop as the ‘office’.

The pace picked up in 1995 with another visit to NZ on the way to California and the National Ski Areas Association western winter trade show. Chris and Klaas had just left the boardroom of the Grollo Group; owners of Mt Buller ski resort subsequently dropping off an installation proposal and proforma contract. Mount Hotham was also negotiating to join up. It would not be until after Air New Zealand sold the ski areas that a foray into the land of the long white cloud was made.

The USA connections came in handy building the trade show display in Klaas’s in-law’s garage at Laguna Beach. A mini van was hired to augment the rental car to take the group (being Chris, Klaas, his family and the in-law) up to Squaw Valley at Lake Tahoe.

The trade show was an outstanding success. When all other displays had been broken down Intouch was the lone one standing with a line of people still wanting to see the new graphical UI touchscreen system from Australia. By this time thermal ticket printing had been added, not using the industry standard Boca printer but an ‘out of left wing’ printer call the ‘Barcode Blaster’ at a quarter of the price of the Boca.

The first Intouch Trade Show

Back at Laguna Beach swapping notes on the people met the past three days both Chris and Klaas recalled how enthralled had been two Brads; Becken and Berman from a company called Ice Specialty Entertainment. Next day a call came from ISE headquarters in Van Nuys; could the boys come and show their system in the boardroom to the Los Angeles Kings team and their managers. Reluctantly, upon insistence from Brad Becken personally they decided to pack up the ‘dog and pony show’ and head across LA.  By this time the Intouch Technology business was looking good financially with contracts in hand (Mt Buller and Mt Hotham had signed for the 1996 Australian ski season) and a secure immediate future in the ski business. Taking on a contract with ice rinks seemed a distraction. But ISE was insistent especially since they were about to sign up with Comptrol the very system Falls Creek would have gone with. Keen too were Mammoth Mountain introduced to Intouch by the people then printing the Aussie ski industry thermal ski lift tickets. But Mammoth would not contemplate a contract with a company that did not have a USA presence and so the ISE deal of six ice rinks around California was the way to open a USA office and close the Mammoth deal. And a Mammoth deal it was. The largest single install of a new computer system in a recreational facility all at once – ever before. The seven-digit price was also unprecedented. At this time the system license was sold for a once off premium with an annual ‘maintenance’ plan, perpetual subscription still a far away concept.

ISE Head Office – Van Nuys, California

Prior to the Mammoth deal Intouch had already researched an office location in the USA and had settled on Boulder, Colorado. But by 1996 a townhouse had been rented in Santa Barbara, California to service the ISE installations. Travel to and fro ensued between the southern and northern winter seasons and the Mount Beauty and Santa Barbara offices. Up to six trips a year.

Things were looking good for Intouch when Stowe Mountain resort in Vermont signed up in 1998. Intouch had the bookends of the ski industry in both Australia and North America with exciting growth prospects. Intouch was in negotiation with Heavenly Ski Resort and Steamboat, then owned by the Japanese Kamori Kanto company. But Kamori sold to American Skiing Company who was trialing the Lasergate system at Killington after Lasergate bought Delta information systems.

Mammoth was proving true to name and demanding customizations to do things the Mammoth Way. Further, they did not keenly promote Intouch to others for fear of losing momentum on their own expansion agenda; A prevailing problem with ‘big gorilla’ clients.

Intouch had grown to half a dozen staff joining along the way, mostly ‘disciples’ to the ski industry.

Notable, though, to Intouch’s USA success was one. When it was decided that Klaas would move his family to California more than a two-bedroom townhouse was required. The realtor assisting them over the ‘sticker shock’ of Santa Barbara house prices, the late Richard Moore (former lead guitarist of the Troggs), suggested a woman he knew to mind the office, Louise Lange – his wife. Louise was the ultimate ‘mother hen’ with jackboots; Doting over her hires like George Dumont on the one hand and being heard hard nosed: “my employer won’t stand for that” on the other.

And so Intouch expanded from a postage stamp size office uptown and the big table at the back of the Santa Barbara Brewing Company as the ‘board room’ for the Mammoth meetings, ultimately to the whole second floor at 19 East Mission street, with an apartment downstairs. Moving a few years later to 1604 State Street downtown and a penthouse executive apartment across the street to accommodate the steady stream of techies from Downunder.

But there was a fly in the ointment of this stellar success. Vail Resort had started to sell their homegrown system to ski areas in competition to Intouch and were doing deals on price that Intouch were not prepared to match. Front line hardened Vail system users like Casey Parliament bolstered the Resort Technology Partners (RTP) ranks. Top down marketing by Vail’s CEO to other ski areas was hard matched by the antipodean ‘aliens’ often never getting a look in.

Meanwhile peripheral businesses to the ski industry were joining the Intouch client list both in Australia, the USA and even in Europe. Many more ice rinks were added and when this desirable diversification was discussed at a staff meeting especially that having clients close to home was better than being ‘industrial gypsies’ all around the world, Klaas challenged the Santa Barbara staff “if I started here at Mission Street and worked my way down State street I would reach retirement before Stearns Wharf (at the end of State Street) for any lack of clients. Young George Dumont took this to heart and delivered the Santa Barbara Sailing Center down at the harbor as a client – and they still are.

The fire at Carletos Restaurant a few doors down State Street from Intouch one night caused a blackout to half of downtown. Klaas started the standby generator on the balcony of the office but soon the Santa Barbara police arrived with a cease and desist (the noise) or spend the night in jail ultimatum. The Intouch Data Center in the Intouch office that had seen the hosting of some incredible eCommerce initiatives had met its match.  It was moved (with all new equipment) to its current colocation a few blocks away where it served a dozen years unfailingly providing a ‘free’ hosting platform to Intouch subscribers.

Technically, Year 2000 was interesting for Intouch. The Y2K bug hysteria was easily debunked when Chris Heberle told the Chicken Little clients to just put their computer clocks forward beyond 1/1/2000 and see what happens. Such a practical solution had eluded most everyone else.

In 2000 Mammoth announced a $375 Value Pass (prehistoric prices – a third of the current price) that was offered on-line only for a limited time ‘while stocks last’. Intouch scrapped its then PHP SuperPass system developed by Klaas and he and Alex Sakhatovsky developed WebPoint using Delphi for the Value Pass system. Uncomfortable implementing an untried system Mammoth contracted a third party to develop a backup system, just in case. It was not understood well then that the web does not work like a regular storefront. Thousands and thousands of people clicked the Submit Button at midnight on 1 May when the offer opened. Hosted at a Lancaster, CA data center the sudden barrage of clicks brought down the network. The backup system did not work at all and so the system was turned off just after midnight with a sorry message. Chris Heberle’s Melbourne flight arrived that morning at LAX and was told the saga by Klaas on the arrivals concourse. He requested Klaas’s cell phone and dialed Tony Romo. “Just turn it back on” was his calm recommendation. Sure enough on arrival at the office in Santa Barbara an hour later the system was faithfully ticking away sale after sale and did so for 30 days racking up unprecedented tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

By 2001 California living was wearing thin on the Sybranda family and they moved back to their farm in the Kiewa Valley. Chris had moved to Perth, his partner Dr Sally Young’s hometown and her job as a medical researcher. 9/11 saw the Intouch team of Gary Hickman and George Dumont, installing Campgaw stuck with no way back to Santa Barbara. Klaas took the first flight to the USA from Australia and instructed the boys to start driving across country to find an open airport. They reached Chicago from New Jersey before they could board a plane.

The challenge of living and working in a remote ski town saw the advent of Intouch facilities in Albury, Melbourne, Queenstown, Perth and Hong Kong as well as the Santa Barbara office as a juxtapose between client proximity and staff preferences. Travel and long stints away from home was commonplace and accepted as part of the Intouch culture best described by one, as “this is not a job, it’s a fucken adventure”

Trade Show Display (2003)

Intouch Crew, Santa Barbara (2003)

The Mount Beauty office was finally closed in 2005 when Falls Creek ski area took over the premises then owned by Intouch as their admin office including hiring the long time Intouch office manager.

The Perth office was originally on the ground floor of Chris and Sally’s West Perth townhouse but then a century old house was rented across the street when Klaas too moved to Perth in 2004. In 2006 the Santa Barbara office was closed and moved to Wilmington Vermont since the majority of Intouch’s business clients and prospects were on the eastern seaboard and Louise Lange was retiring and moving to Chico.

Intouch comprised about 20 staff then with less than 100 installations, a handful of which produced 70% of the revenue. Software subscription was also implemented as a ‘take it or leave it option’ for the Ultima suite with a wholesale capitulation of its client base to the new ‘easy entry’ pricing model. It became the basis of a solid revenue stream negating the need for acquisitive growth. Also now Intouch was well entrenched in the New Zealand ski market having landed Cardrona Ski Resort in 2002, NZSKI in 2003 and many other tourist attractions since.

Secondary Corporate Image (2007)

Winners are grinners at NZSKI (2008)

Intouch has always been at the forefront of technology with many ‘science experiments’ in such things as hand held ticket scanning, eCommerce, and payment processing. Intouch had the skills and found it easier to roll their own components while others preferred to integrated with perceived ‘best of breed’ third party systems.

SkiPass was first developed in C++, then, when it came time to develop a ski school system in a hurry after a C++ flop, a new approach was needed. Chris had attended a seminar in Sydney, presented by Borland, the company behind the C++ compiler used at the time, where Delphi 1 was unveiled. A decision was made to create a brand new program using the new tool, along with a ‘kindergarden’ SQL database design cobbled together in Interbase to save the day. It did. The database design only lasted a season but Delphi proved a success, with development time reduced by 90%. Delphi version 2 followed closely on the heels of 1, and much of the Intouch system was converted to Delphi 2 in the following year. Skipass was converted to Salespoint when Delphi 5 was released (version 3 and 4 never passed QA tests) and Delphi 5 continues as the mainstay of the core development. The SalesPoint, ResPoint, WebPoint terminology was adopted when the entire suite was then in Delphi 5.

The original Paradox sales data set comprised five tables that could be merged with a utility and created into ‘paxed’ (compressed) datasets. Summary tables were extracted from this and reported on by Crystal Reports. In all its life the original sales table design remained unchanged and survives in concept as the basis of the present transactional data design. Intouch’s acute database design and a lot of their terminology coined in the early days such as ‘Advance Sales’, ‘Guest Management’ etc struck a chord and are now adopted as commonplace in the industry vernacular.

The Paradox tables worked brilliantly to disseminate the ‘resources’ (products and prices etc) of the system to each of the sales terminals (an entirely new ‘Res’ file sent every time an update was done). The bucket brigade of Pax files coming in from each of the sale terminals to a site server and then sent on to a tally center and worked flawlessly and seemingly up to the minute after a sales session was closed. But there was no ubiquitous CRM integrated into the system.

Mammoth required more and had a huge VAX main frame holding all their season pass data. Chris demonstrated (to the dismay of the VAX minder Mammoth staffer) that their entire CRM system could be stored on a single Interbase database running on his modest Toshiba laptop, which was able to return a result from a query in a fraction of a second that would previously take many minutes on the VAX database. The VAX was retired and Intouch moved into the Ultima world – the migration of all of the Intouch system to an Interbase SQL database. Borland, the owners of Interbase, subsequently open sourced the database and made it free. Borland took Interbase back, and Intouch adopted the free, open source version living on as Firebird - to this day at the heart of the Intouch transactional system.

Intouch had sprung from the funding of the purchase of Clarion and a shelf company provided by Klaas to an international presence, wholly owned by the founders and authors, growing organically borrowing only to purchase real estate assets.

A decade into the new century and Intouch steamed ahead in New Zealand aided by Commarc, the independent consulting firm that helped NZSKI select them over RTP and Siriusware. The demo Axess control gate recently relegated to scrap was the start of Intouch’s venture into RFID ski area access control. When the Axess gates were implemented at NZSKI at a celebration of the project’s success the subject of Trojan taking a 50% interest in Intouch to help further develop the system was enthusiastically embraced. Three years later, under duress of an agenda to grow Intouch the founders agreed to sell all of the intellectual property and subscriptions to Trojan and contract for five years to help guide the product to be independent of their collaborative skill set.

Deep beneath the Trojan owned Intouch, structured around contemporary corporate culture, is the pedigree of a pivotal, maverick system created by two guys from a little Aussie drinking town. Cheers.

Klaas Sybranda – co-founder lives on Aore Island, Vanuatu
Chris Heberle – co-founder lives in Tasmania, Australia

Acknowledgements of significant contribution:

Janet Hamilton – original office manager - payroll manager, Falls Creek Ski Resort
Dave Chamberlain – foundation staffer - IT Manager, Mt Buller Ski Resort, Australia.
Rory Hayden – original Intouch USA GM - retired, Oakland, California
Louise Lange – original USA office manager - retired, lives in Chico, California
Fiona Jury – foundation staffer - System Project Manager, Sydney Living Museums
Gary Hickman – foundation staffer - Business Analyst at Agilysys, Santa Barbara, California
Alexander Sakhatovsky – foundation programmer - Software Delivery Lead, ABB Enterprise Software, Melbourne, Australia
George Dumont – longest present employee - lives in Big Bear Lake, California
Enih Phillips – Intouch accountant - Santa Barbara, California
Ned Woolley – foundation staffer - Helpdesk Manager, Kapish, Melbourne Australia
Luigi Salleo – next longest present employee - lives in Perth, Western Australia
Gina Lee – UI designer -  Rolltrack owner, Perth Australia
Suzanne Bauer – Intouch Media - Suzanne Bauer Photography, West Dover, Vermont
John Bailey –  Intouch Media - Deadly Fun Events, Brattleboro, Vermont
Leigh Simmonds-Lacey – WebPoint programmer -Team Lead, Netfira, Perth, Australia
Peter Broberg – Intouch business manager - Monitor Bookkeeping, Perth Australia

Intouch Staff Roll Call – 1993 – 2013 (by office: ABX = Albury; MEL = Melbourne; MTB = Mount Beauty; PER = Perth; QLD = Queensland; SBA = Santa Barbara; VRT = Vermont)

Statistics

Statistical period = 20 years

Total number of people ever employed = 85

Median age of employees = middle aged

Number of different countries of origin of staff = 19

Percentage of employees with tenure greater than 12 months = 57%

Average length of employment > 1 year = 5.5 years

Majority of employees from = Australia (31) & USA (26)

Largest number of people employed in one location = 26 (Perth)

Largest number of people employed at one time = 20 (2006)

Longest open office location = 13 years (Mount Beauty)

Employment of males to females = 2:1

Most productive revenue office in one year = Santa Barbara

Most effective independent office = Melbourne

Total number of programmers ever employed = 18

Number of practicing Muslims = 1

Number of employees succumb to mental illness on the job = 2

Number of employees dismissed for dishonesty = 1

Total number Delphi programmers employed = 16

Most surviving programming done by = 3

Percentage of programming done by employees = <50%

Percentage of sales by employees = <5%

Largest number of programmers at one time = ~5 (2006)

Proportion of support staff to programmers = 2:1

Largest category of staff employed = Support (31)

Second largest group of people employed = Sales/Admin (25)

Least successful employee group = Delphi

Last present employee of the era = Koen Turrekens

Employees with highest client impact = George Dumont

Number of employees came from a client = 3

Number of employees went to a client = 3

Number of employees went to competitor = 1

Number of employees came from competitor = 1

Employees who left and returned = George Dumont, Ned Woolley, Louise Lange

Employee most risky task = Fight off kea birds affixing antenna on roof at NZ Ski Area (George Dumont)

Employee recruited by walking in the door = 1 (Daniel Del Conte)

Employees sponsored to immigrate = 1 (Alexander Sakhatovsky)

Highest mileage of a company vehicle = >150,000 miles (Dodge Caravan - USA)

Most owned company vehicle brand = Subaru

Longest owned company vehicle = Toyota Landcruiser (8 years)

Vehicle/s succumb to damage driven by employee = 1

Road most travelled = Highway 395 (to Mammoth)

Journey of highest mileage = Eyre Highway (Mount Beauty – Perth, Australia)

Most common airline used = United Airlines

Most frequently travelled route = MEL - LAX – MEL

Longest existing client = ISE (21 years)