Making business fun: Humberto Gerola
Saratoga CEO has a history of helping people translate
By Steve Enders
Humberto Gerola's background is proof that sometimes the evolution of business in this area can take a person to new and exciting places.
What he began as an academic applying physics principles to the then-new high-tech field has taken this Saratoga resident to working alongside the people who have made some of today's most advanced video games.
But Gerola's company, Portola Systems, isn't about video games, it's about practical business software for businesses that don't have the budgets of a major corporation.
The Santa Clara-based company has developed a new software system that livens up spreadsheets and databases of oftentimes overwhelming and complex information. Using the engineers who have come from gaming backgrounds has allowed the company to build software that is both exciting to use and see.
"It was an easy sell to gamers because many were frustrated with it," he says. "They seemed happy that they could apply their knowledge in more technical areas."
Not only that, but Gerola needed people who could transfer the superior, three-dimensional graphics of those games into a business application.
The result is a tool that anyone can understand, because the information is laid out in simple terms.
Before moving to Portola, Gerola, a native Argentinean, worked in IBM's New York research center as a physicist, developing systems that were, he says, advanced for their time.
From there, Gerola headed his first computer-aided design company. It was a success, he says, but then he moved on to head a company called LingraphiCARE America, which developed software that still helps aphasia patients overcome their struggle to comprehend words.
The software, which uses graphical elements instead of words to help patients understand words again, was praised by the medical establishment and is still in widespread use today, he says.
"The brain is overwhelmed by large amounts of data, text or numbers. If you can visualize the information, then you can achieve another level of understanding," Gerola says.
Anyone who's ever worked on a spreadsheet knows the information contained in the data can be quite dry. So in a presentation of that data people often use line, bar and pie graphs to visually display the information.
Portola, in its new software called Coronado, has taken the bar graph a step further. They've formed a way to easily create three-dimensional graphs and allow them to be instantly changed with simple commands.
Gerola showed how the interactive graphs can show cause-and-effect information. On a graph with lines that appeared to jump off the screen, Gerola plotted a scenario where a manager might be trying to see what advertising in the Sunday paper really does for his supermarket business.
It was clear on the graph that the advertisements showed no correlation to better business when they ran. The simple solution for the manager might be to stop wasting money on that advertising.
At the same time, Coronado can play a movie-like month by month graph so the user can easily see trends and changes. Other artwork can be added to graph backgrounds as well, increasing the visual attraction.
Coronado has attracted widespread acclaim in this, its first month on the market, and business is booming. For only a few hundred dollars, small- to medium-sized businesses can tap into this previously unattainable medium of presentations.
The software runs along with Microsoft products, and can be used in Powerpoint and web-based presentations. Portola even entered into agreement with Microsoft after wowing a big crowd at a Comdex trade show in San Francisco last year.
There, during the unveiling of Intel's new Pentium III processor, Coronado ran like a champ, Gerola says, and the processor brought out the true capabilities in the software which until then, few knew about.
Saratoga, California Since 1975
