Old Tower Hill Road in Wakefield may be better known as the road to Sand Hill Cove and Scarborough beaches than a high-tech gateway. For Christopher D’Iorio, who grew up in nearby Middlebridge, it’s been the path to success as owner of a Web services company.
When he decided to start his own company in 1996, D’Iorio said people told him Providence would be the best location for a high tech company. The lure of the water and familiar surroundings won out, however. He set up an office for NetSense Internet Solutions near Route 1 in a shopping plaza, above a Dunkin Donuts and a Pick Pockets sandwich shop.
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“That was one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever made, and it’s the best,” the 29-year-old entrepreneur said. “I wanted the quality of life here.”
And being located about 30 minutes south of Providence hasn’t hindered NetSense’s ability to attract clients, D’Iorio said. They have since added a Providence office.
In the past few months NetSense has landed projects creating sophisticated Web sites for the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a topic-based search engine for Dartmouth College’s Amos Tuck School of Business Administration. They are also creating an in-house pediatric immunization database for Rhode Island’s Lifespan health care system.
Students and faculty at the Ivy League school in Hanover, N.H., rated and reviewed hundreds of business articles for the search engine, said Kim Keating, director of public relations for the Tuck School. NetSense is doing the programming.
“The other (companies) that were able to do it were just going to do it for an outlandish amount of money,” Keating said.
D’Iorio moved back to Rhode Island three years ago from San Francisco, where he worked in marketing and as an engineering liaison for NEC Corp., a Japanese company that makes information and communications systems. Though the job was challenging, D’Iorio, who has a degree in computer science and mathematics from New England College in New Hampshire, said he felt “burnt out.”
Among his duties at NEC, serving on the international Technical Working Groups – composed of representatives from companies such as Microsoft and Compaq – that wrote specifications for making DVD players and CD-ROM changers. At one point he was flying to Japan once a month.
“I flew 100,000 miles a year that was only in the U.S.; that wasn’t including my Japan miles,” D’Iorio recalled.
“I decided to come home first before I knew what I was doing (for work), and I only knew I wanted to sail.”
Ultimately he and a brother-in-law, who has since moved on to other ventures, saw a need for an Internet service provider in South County, where residents typically had to dial long-distance to use Internet access numbers in Providence. It was a big switch from his four years at NEC. They started the company with their own money and loans from family members, D’Iorio said.
NetSense, which has grown from two employees to 12 and counting, still provides Internet access to clients, but that is no longer its main business.
“We have a base of business from the ISP business, which really runs itself now,” D’Iorio said.
Now NetSense’s staff concentrates more on consulting and building its reputation as a company that does database-to-Web integration projects, he explained. Database-to-Web integration technology provides customers with a more sophisticated Web site or private intranet site, using data from the client’s existing computer systems.
For instance last fall, J. Michael Falvey, who is president of Falvey Cargo Underwriting, found himself in need of a Web site that would give his customers immediate access to their insurance policy and claims information. As luck would have it, his office is in the same building as NetSense.
The three-and-a-half year old company is a Lloyd’s of London underwriter and specializes in insuring high tech and biotech cargo. Falvey said he was trying to land 3Com Corp., a global computer network company in Santa Clara, Calif., as a customer; but 3Com executives “wanted to be able to see their claim status at any time, anywhere in the world.”
NetSense designers created a gateway on Falvey’s Web site, which allowed customers with a password to review up-to-date claims and policy information. This capability helped Falvey lure 3Com from a larger insurance company, and land CompUSA too, he added.
And, Falvey said, they have continued to tinker with the site, adding features that allow Lloyd’s lead underwriter to review pertinent account information. This has made their monthly reporting process easier as well.
”Every month we’d bundle up this big thing. It’d cost us about 60 bucks to send it over, plus we’d have to send it to them on e-mail,” Falvey said. “Now if they need anything, boom, they just pull it up.”
The NetSense Web designers used a programming language called ColdFusion to create the templates and the means to extract information from Falvey’s database.
A simplified illustration of this process would be a client who wants to have a searchable calendar of events on his Web site. Programmers who use HTML, which is a formatting language for Web pages, would have to create code for each individual month.
But programmers who use ColdFusion, made by Allaire Corp., or Microsoft’s ASP, simply create one template for the calendar and a program to tap into the database. That way when a browser wants a list for a particular month, all matching events are called up, popped into the template and displayed.
“These are the next generation of Web sites before you’d have to create 12 pages of HTML (Hyper text markup language) code,” D’Iorio said. “It’s going to cost more for these Web sites but you’re going to be able to keep it up yourself.”
Mary Humphrey, an M.B.A. student working on the Tuck School project, said browsers may be deceived by the simple appearance of their site. “It may not look sophisticated, but it is. The way it’s searching for a page, it’s not just searching for static pages,” she said.
“We’re doing cutting-edge business topics and we’re trying to do a cutting-edge site,” Humphrey added.
D’Iorio said with NetSense’s current portfolio, the company is moving into a position where it can be more competitive.
And having Falvey as neighbor was a definite help. Though NetSense helped Falvey land some new customers, D’Iorio said getting to develop the insurance company’s site has made it easier for him to sign clients like Lifespan and the Tuck School.
”It’s hard to go and get the big accounts unless you have done a project like this, and it’s hard to get a project like this,” D’Iorio said. “We’ve always been like how can we make our prices fit the customer? Now we’re going after customers who can afford this.
”But there are only so many $35,000 Web sites in Rhode Island,” he added. “Companies in New York are doing this for $70,000 … we’d like to be the company that undercuts the Boston and New York companies.”
