News

A Script for Success

• By Doug Barney
• 07/01/2005

Jason Judge and Brian Styles hope that in a decade or so you'll think of his company, the Boca-based ScriptLogic Corp. ScriptLogic isn't as audacious as the computer to beat back the Apple II. Instead the goal is grounded—to help Windows admins do their jobs more quickly and effectively through automation so they can spend time working on more exciting strategic projects.

It's no surprise that ScriptLogic's strategy is so fundamental—the company started life as a Novell NetWare value-added reseller (VAR) named Inteletek, explains company founder and ScriptLogic CTO Brian Styles.

Seeing no good Windows NT scripting or admin tools, Styles wrote his own. "I searched for such a tool, and couldn't find anything. "NT had no centralized management, admin or scripting," Styles explains. Style's NTscript filled that gap.

By 1999, with NTscript in hand, Styles was ready to give up the VAR life and become an ISV. And so ScriptLogic was born. "All of a sudden we became a software company," Styles explains.

In its early life, ScriptLogic focused on helping admins handle clients more quickly and easily through scripting, security configuration and the management of user profiles, among others. That strategy now touches some 3 million desktops, though company CEO Jason Judge "wants the other 97 million."

Judge, who joined in 2001 as employee number eight, made a leap of faith. On visiting the firm, he "saw that guys just didn't leave—they were wearing the same clothes." That passion piqued Judge's interest who did some research, and hit a few discussion forums. He asked a friend, a software analyst for a large investment bank, about the opportunity, who told Judge it was the wrong move. "I hung up on him!" Judge explains, convinced that ScriptLogic was a diamond in the rough.

The company didn't have a lot of infrastructure, so Judge helped craft a one year plan focused on new products, staff, sales and marketing. "It took less than eight months to meet the one year goal," Judge says.

That's when the venture capitalists started calling, and despite the dramatic tech market downturn, Insight Partners invested $8 million in 2003, roughly a third of all the venture capital invested in Florida that quarter.

By late in 2003, ScriptLogic was ready to tackle servers—and bought Orlando-based Small Wonders Software which had an AD-aware server tool that ultimately became ScriptLogic Active Administrator.

The tool was a perfect fit, and so were the people—Judge says there's been 100 percent retention of Small Wonders employees. Small Wonders founder Brian Small now serves as vice president of product development focusing on the server side.

Users seem to like what they see, especially from Desktop Authority, considered by many to be the company's flagship product. "We use Desktop Authority as the 'set it and forget it' approach to ensuring that each desktop is auto-configured a specific way for each user when they log on. Map drives, deploy printers, and anything else that requires a certain configuration at logon and/or with a higher degree of granularity that GPOs don't offer," said a posting to the ScriptLogic message board.

ScriptLogic execs believe their firm has made its mark in the Windows space. "We pioneered a market that didn't exist—we based a product on need. And being a VAR, we saw the need," Judge says.