Frenchman Olivier Fischer came to Ohio for an education and stayed for opportunity.
Since then he's founded two Cincinnati software companies.
Entrepreneur Olivier Fischer did not plan to settle in Ohio when he went to Ohio State University 25 years ago to earn his Ph.D. in computer science.
But he fell in love, and he and his wife moved to Cincinnati so she could take a job with Procter & Gamble. Fischer worked for P&G for a time, too, before helping to found or co-found three Ohio-based information technology firms.
While he was at P&G, the rise of the Internet was just beginning to penetrate the Fortune 500 companies, and Procter, like most, began devoting resources toward how to leverage the Internet. So the company set up an internal team of IT and marketing people to explore Web opportunities.
Through the dynamics of this group, Fischer, who specialized in the technical aspects of creating positive user experiences on the Web, met up with strong P&G marketing minds including Cincinnati new media guru Pete Blackshaw. The pair was part of a group that went on to found Planet Feedback, an Internet portal centered on consumer feedback that eventually was sold to Nielsen and has grown to hundreds of employees in the Greater Cincinnati region.
Fischer worked on Planet Feedback but stayed at P&G for four and a half years, working on user interfaces and databases, trouble-shooting the consumer experience of P&G's Web site, and creating new ones while rapid prototyping many of P&G's new e-commerce ventures.
"I enjoy building beautiful things, and a well-designed interaction between a human and a piece of software is a beautiful thing!" says Fischer. "My father is a well-known fashion designer in France, and I think I inherited his passion for beautiful things, well built."
Around 2001, Fischer took a buyout and left P&G and started transmissions llc. The company is housed at the Hamilton County Business Center (HCBC) and consults in software design and software development. Its software streamlines the translation of complex graphics files into other languages.
This software, currently in use in 21 countries on five continents, earned the company the 2005 Emerging Technology Award from the Governor of Ohio for being on the cutting edge in pursuing new and emerging technological developments.
Mike Venerable, an executive-in-residence with CincyTech who gives Fischer management assistance, says Fischer is an example of someone in the software industry who has an intimate understanding of a process and how it could be improved.
The roots of Fischer's second venture inside HCBC began to grow in the spring of 2007, when he turned his expertise toward work-flow management for creating packaging and marketing materials. His first software focused on translations had made him more aware of the increasing need for multilingual packaging in the consumer goods industry.
Working on consumer goods, he realized companies were not only struggling with the development of multilingual packaging, they had issues with coming up and managing the original English content.
Fischer's new product - also the name of his second company -- Ubelix, streamlines this process to dramatically reduce rework and errors by enabling revolutionary content management, resulting in faster time to market and reduced costs.
Fischer created Ubelix more than three years ago, but it wasn't until he met a Connecticut entrepreneur at a trade show in New York that the business took flight. The fellow was marketing his own work flow system for package development. Six months later they began marketing their products together. A year later the Connecticut company was purchased by Eastman Kodak, and Ubelix can now leverage the worldwide salesforce of the Fortune 500 icon.
There are other opportunities for different revenue streams around his software. He can be more service oriented. Venerable called this "utility-like computing services". For example, when a company using Ubelix needs translations for one of its package, he can find translators to provide the translation. When a medium-sized company develops a package for a faraway market, he can connect the company to legal experts with knowledge specific to the given country.
It's the service role that the companies want so they don't have to deal with a wide variety of contractors. It is the one stop shop.
Although Fischer's companies have not received CincyTech investments, it has had multiple roles with Ubelix, helping to identify opportunities and helping with the business operations side. Venerable also helped them navigate contract negotiations.
Venerable sees a company like Ubelix as the future of software as a service (SAS). Forget cloud computing, he says. Service-oriented software companies that can put the right people together and perceive a need are the ones who will succeed.
Photo by Michael Keating/The Enquirer