In Good Hands With Tauscher

But he didn't fade away like old generals and sports legends do. Instead, he invested his millions through his company, The Tauscher Group, and stayed close to the business, albeit in a very quiet, unassuming sort of way.

No more. No longer a sideline player near retirement, Tauscher is back in the saddle, this time helping to run one of the more famous, albeit troubled, IT companies of the 1990s: Artisoft.

His reason for return: to help maximize the investment his company sank into Artisoft.

Artisoft, as you may or may not recall, was the brainchild of Jack Schoof, one of the industry's most talented, yet most,well, there's no adjective that really describes Schoof. Suffice it to say that he was as mercurial as he was brilliant, undisciplined as he was driven. To some, he was a complete whack job; to others, a genius. Regardless, he was behind one of the most successful network software products the channel ever got its hands on, LANtastic.

Trouble was, Schoof couldn't leave well enough alone. He tinkered and damn near almost drove his company out of business. A series of interesting and talented industry veterans tried to save it, including former MicroAge COO Will Keiper, former Apple vice president T. Paul Thomas and former PowerPC CEO and current Interland CEO Joel Kocher. But none could manage to outsmart Microsoft or Novell, and eventually Artisoft fell into disrepair, serving an ever-shrinking installed base, while trying to come up with the next big thing.

That's the way things have been under CEO Steven Manson, Artisoft's current president and CEO. An eight-year veteran of the company, Manson has admirably served Artisoft, but he hasn't transformed it completely. What was missing was a leader who could guide a company to, and then through, a boom cycle, where opportunities match ambitions.

Enter Tauscher. Through an investment, Tauscher joined Artisoft as chairman in February. Unlike other chairmen who sit back and advise, Tauscher plans on taking a very active role in helping Artisoft achieve its goals day-to-day.

First among the many things he hopes to accomplish is to convince the outside world that Artisoft is no longer the LANtastic company of yore. Instead, Artisoft is more of an IT-telecommunications company than a PC networking company. In fact, its current product lineup looks little like it once did, which is both a blessing and a curse, Tauscher says.

"This company is nothing like it once was. It has a future so radically different from its past that it is hard to comprehend," Tauscher says.

Yet it is that past that Tauscher must contend with. Although its future lies in an IP-based telephony software solution that can literally run organizations, Artisoft is, nonetheless, a publicly traded company that trades over the counter--make that a money-losing publicly traded company. Recently, for example, the company reported a loss for the third quarter of $300,000 on modest, albeit growing, sales of $2 million. While its future is bright, Artisoft is still a creature of the past, with expectations and obligations of a once-proud IT up-and-comer.

Which, of course, brings us back to Tauscher. "It's a fact that we had a huge cost burden and have a whole lot of things that have to be done and sort out that don't fit a small company," he says. "That's a fact."

Nonetheless, the 20-year-plus veteran of the industry sees an opening like no other. And he has been known to charge through doors like a bull on fire. He transformed ComputerLand from a sleepy network of stores into an industry powerhouse. The same was true at Vanstar. He's convinced he can do it again.

"There are hundreds of applications that would benefit from smart applications, which our new solutions offer," Tauscher says. "If you consider that hardware turns over every seven years or so, then you have to believe that we literally have a chance to sell millions of these things. I don't know of a broader opportunity."