HID and my trip to Irvine

Ok, this last week I was in Irvine, California on an eCommerce project for HID. Pretty low key stuff actually and unofficially this project could go on for a few months. My part in this project is minor I’m just setting up and mapping their customer connection with Siemens in and out of Oracle. No real secrete really when you go to Siemens website your able to order HID card readers and cards, my work allow them to pretty much integrate that order into a rather seamless process which can save both companies $100k’s per year in manual processing and error correction time and costs. My favorite story has to do with a major pharma company in Illinois where we were able to boost their electronic processing of orders and invoices to over $30M per day. This allowed the company to restructure and reallocate from 80+ call center employees to 20.

Ok back to Irvine, if you don’t know HID I’m sure you are familiar with their products. HID makes the security cards and readers that most companies use to control access to entry ways and data centers. For me because I do have a data center, personally I think the idea of doing a project for the company is really cool, as I do with any company whose products I use almost daily. Historically I’ve done projects with Justin Boots, Linksys, Nike, Oakley and Gateway; all companies whose products I use. Now by far the best tasting project was the Lindt & Sprungli Chocolate factory in New Hampshire; I walked out of there with over $200 in Truffles and that was with the employee discount. I was giving chocolate gifts away for months after that project and I don’t think I’ve eaten a single Truffle since.

On this trip I met with a number of really good friends whose friendships I have come to cherish over the years. If it wasn’t in part for their efforts I would not be nearly as successful as I have been over the years. Friends like Reha Duzel, Steve Rockey, Sean Chawla and Manoj Dhruve just to name a few. Being rather a business fanatic by far my favorite meeting was breakfast with Rockey and Reha at the Knowlwood restaurant.

Sean is an entrepreneur and a very strong and ethical business man that has build a technology company worth over a $100M, I truely value his opinion because I know he as been down a lot of the roads I still have to travel as I look to also build my own.

Rockey has a girth of business knowledge that comes from his many years of building businesses up for people and then helping them sell them. I only hope to be able to master even a small percentage of that some day and as I suspected I was not disappointed. After hearing me out it quickly became obvious why he makes the big money. Rockey's true colors came out in about 3 very specific bullet points, which will be the subject for a future post and I will be pursuing for BuDuRu in the very near future now that I'm back in Portland.

Reha is hands down like a brother to me and the amount of grief he has had to endure over the past few years in reference to a shady real estate deal he got involved in really pains me. In short the builder got his money and walked before the job was finished, now Reha is stuck with a house he can’t live in a rapidly declining real estate market. And in an effort to avoid a foreclosure they have been forced to rely on the generosity of others just to survive. Last I heard was that the home was to potentially short sale, it’s a hard way to go; however, the stress of the past few years will finally be over. Meeting with Reha is always a pleasure and I wish him and his loved ones nothing but the very best.

Dinner with Manoj and his family was great; however, he really needs to reset the clock on his DVD player. It’s the only clock in the room and I kept looking at it to see what time it was, turns out that the clock was almost an hour and a half to slow. I thought I was getting out of there around 9:30, turned out to be almost 10:45, no wonder they seemed to be in a hurry to get me out the door. :) Thanks bud. The curry was great, but boy did I pay for it the next morning.