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Who's who: Tom Meurer

Tom Meurer's expertise with database management has taken him some interesting places -- from the highest levels of military security, to the first software company to be listed on the NYSE, to e-ClassicSystems, a company he founded in 1999 that counts some of the world's largest ATM deployers among its customers.

January 9, 2003

Tom Meurer and computers came of age at roughly the same time.

The founder and president of e-ClassicSystems took every computer-related course he could -- not many in the early 1960s -- while studying engineering at the University of Notre Dame.

"Some of the professors were still teaching vacuum tubes," Meurer recalled. "They were just beginning to shift to transistors then."

His fondness for the emerging technology led Meurer to electrical engineering. "My other options were mechanical engineering, which meant working in a factory; chemical engineering, which meant working in a laboratory; or civil engineering, which meant building bridges in bad weather," he said.

Tom Meurer

After putting in two years as a Cobol programmer for Goodyear Corporation, Meurer landed in an unlikely spot when he joined the U.S. Navy. "Just out of officer's candidate school, I ended up on the staff of John McCain Sr. (a four star admiral who controlled the Pacific theater during Vietnam) because they couldn't find anyone else who knew how to design systems on an IBM mainframe," he said.

In 1969, he received the Armed Forces Joint Service Commendation Medal for his work designing a database used to support military efforts in Vietnam, as well as the operations of government security agencies.

After leaving the Navy in 1972, Meurer's experience with databases earned him a spot at a new company called Cullinet, that in 1976 became the first software company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Cullinet's flagship product was software written by programmers working for a division of B.F. Goodrich, who didn't want to give up a beloved information management system that ran on a Honeywell mainframe when Goodrich made a corporate decision to switch to IBM. Instead, they rewrote the system so that it ran off an IBM mainframe.

Having done so, Meurer said, the programmers realized they didn't have the expertise to support the new systems software, called IDMS. When Goodrich decided to sell the system, Cullinet was one of several companies in the hunt.

"I was living in Akron, Ohio, 20 minutes down the street from their office," Meurer said, noting that the hometown advantage "gave us a little edge."

After leading the acquisition of IDMS, Meurer relocated to the Boston area, where Cullinet was based. That's where he discovered his biggest strength: the ability to direct a company in its formative years.

Beginner's skill

"I was the fifth person at Cullinet, so I was there from nearly the beginning," he said. "It takes a very different set of management skills to take a company from 10 people to 1,000 people than it does to take it from 1,000 to 10,000 people. My strength is taking an idea, developing the nucleus and getting it started, then bringing it through the first several years."

Meurer left Cullinet in 1979 to start his own company, ETA International. He assembled a staff of about 70 and created several divisions focused on database management for various vertical markets. In 1985, he placed an ad in the Wall Street Journal seeking a buyer for one of ETA's divisions. However, the buyer, Compuware Corporation, wanted the whole company - so Meurer sold it and worked for Compuware for two years.
 
In 1987, he founded Relational and Network Integration, Inc. (RNET), a consulting firm that specialized in database applications on PC network environments.

Jack O'Toole, a longtime family friend and president of ATM management company ISA-Ecash Systems, in 1998 asked Meurer to help him locate a cash management system for ATMs.

To his surprise, Meurer said, "I searched and couldn't find anything like that." Existing systems included vaults, teller stations and other areas of little interest to ATM managers.

At O'Toole's urging, Meurer developed a system that included not only cash management, but every income and expense associated with an ATM. O'Toole provided the retail ATM perspective and enlisted one of his vault cash providers, ChartBank, to give a financial institution view.

The resulting system was ATM Manager Pro. After signing his first two customers, O'Toole and ChartBank, Meurer founded e-ClassicSystems in December of 1999.

Since then, ATM Manager Pro has attracted 78 users, with some 85,000 ATMs between them. Meurer is especially proud of the system's scalability. "We've got some of the top deployers, and some of the smallest," he said, including FleetBoston Financial, Citizens Bank, E*TRADE and Cardtronics.

The next step, Meurer said, will be improving communication among the e-Classic users in various industry segments -- financial institutions, ISOs, transaction processors, armored car companies, vault cash providers and service organizations.

"There are huge opportunities for increasing the efficiencies in how they communicate with each other," he said. "Imagine if an ISO could transmit his cash order in an XML file from his database to the database of his vault cash provider, who could transmit it to the armored company's database."

That kind of vision is what makes Meurer an effective leader, said Tyson Nargassans, his vice president of sales and marketing. "He has a very clear direction of where he wants the business to go. He knows he doesn't have the ability to be an expert in every area, so he hires the best people he knows."

His latest hire is his 29-year-old son, Greg, who heads up eClassicSystems' professional services group. The younger Meurer spent seven years in similar roles at other companies.

 "When you're at a small company, you can pick and choose the best people. We have 12 full-time employees, and like me, I think they all enjoy coming to work every day," Meurer said.

One reason his employees enjoy their jobs, Nargassans said, is Meurer's ability to keep the office mood light. 

O'Toole, who has known Meurer since he moved to Boston in 1975 and shares an affinity for sports with him, said Meurer is "known as a cut-up" among both clients and friends.

As evidence, O'Toole relates a visit Meurer made to his home on Christmas morning. "My family and I were sitting at the dining table. My in-laws were there. Then up the walk and in the front door comes a man wearing a ski mask and goggles, and carrying a leaf blower. He starts up the stairs with the blower and says, 'Don't get up. I'm just going to dust under the beds.' He'd apparently done the same thing to a couple of other friends."