NJ Tech Companies Answer: What Was Your Greatest 2011 Accomplishment?, Part 1

NJTechWeekly.com asked some N.J. tech companies to name their single greatest accomplishment in 2011. Most had a hard time choosing just one, but we tried to hold their feet to the fire and their statements to our original premise. We present their answers below, in alphabetical order by company name.

Jim Hemmer, president and CEO,Antenna Software Inc. (Jersey City), whose firm helps businesses design, publish and manage mobile websites and apps across Internet-connected devices, said his company had correctly anticipated 2011 future market trends:

Mobile technology is the future. It presents an opportunity for businesses to rethink how they operate and drive innovation in exciting new ways. As a mobile solutions provider, Antenna’s biggest accomplishment this year has been to correctly anticipate market trends and invest in and develop resources and skills in the right areas. A significant part of this was acquiring mobile web specialist Volantis Systems Ltd. and incorporating new technologies into our own offerings. With a comprehensive Antenna Mobility Platform (AMP), we can better help our customers stay nimble, open and future-proof. This holistic approach supports a strategic view of mobility across the business, and helps enterprises increase profits through the mobile channel and—very important—leverage that channel enhance other channels’ effectiveness.

BIO-key International Inc.’s (Wall) Mike DePasquale, CEO, had trouble narrowing down his company’s achievements to just one. He spoke about BIO-key’s pride in being part of the FBI’s Next Generation Identification system, among other topics:

In November BIO-key implementation engineers and the technology team at a leading hospital analyzed three months of operational logs tracking the authentication results at the hospital’s campus. As expected, zero false matches were observed. The measure of performance therefore focused on how often an authorized user was incorrectly rejected by the software. The staff used  BIO-key technology to authenticate users 251,447 times, achieving a true accept rate (correctly authenticating a user) of 99.34 percent. Incredibly, one staff member logged on 5,999 times in November without a single rejection—a 100 percent success rate. These real-world results redefine fingerprint authentication industry performance expectations by significantly improving traditional false rejection rates. By replacing the software but reusing the hardware, BIO-key allowed this customer to repurpose hundreds of already deployed fingerprint sensors. BIO-key’s scanner interoperability provides the hospital the flexibility to offer users diverse fingerprint scanners as utilization grows, thus future-proofing the technology process.

Data Inc. (Montvale), the company profiled by NewJerseyTechWeekly.com at our website launch, said the firm’s ability to grow and create jobs in N.J. in a difficult economic environment was its greatest accomplishment. Arun Verma, president and CEO:

Having been named the New Jersey Technology Council (NJTC) Large Company of the Year and achieved countless client service successes, we find it truly hard to identify that accomplishment. But overall we believe contributing to New Jersey’s economic viability by hiring and expanding constitutes our biggest achievement. Throughout the year we increased our sales and recruiting staff and technology consultant base, employing hundreds of new people in response to growing client demand. Assisting people and advancing New Jersey employment opportunities will help the country emerge from the recession, and Data Inc. is committed to seeing this happen.

ETegrity Systems International Inc.(Pine Brook), a cloud computing company aimed at the small and medium business (SMB) market, had trouble naming just one accomplishment but decided the company’s response to 2011 natural disasters had defined its year. Steven Ferman, president and CEO: 

Most businesses will tell you 2011 was marked by a tough “climate” for New Jersey. The economic climate certainly continued to challenge us, but Mother Nature occasionally stopped by as well to remind us how she can affect operations. eTegrity weathered both climates exceptionally well (pun intended). We continued to provide innovative ways for SMBs to protect themselves from disaster while reducing IT costs and enhancing workforce productivity. In the first half of 2011 we launched our Virtual Office solution, which provides a hybrid cloud computing environment enabling SMBs to operate in a continual disaster-ready environment while significantly reducing IT support costs. eTegrity was there for our clients when Hurricane Irene struck in August. Virtual Office customers were able to access their IT environment while most businesses were down for the count … and our data-backup clients were assured their data was protected from disaster even if they found their servers under water.