From Intel To Independence

Barely a year ago, Wang was enjoying a life of privilege. A one-time vice president of Symantec, Wang had previously made a small fortune establishing and later selling 20/20 Software. He had a dream home on an Oregon lake and a growing reputation as a man who could help transform businesses into enterprise-software powerhouses. That's when the calls from headhunters began pouring in. Most he dismissed. One he did not: LANDesk.

LANDesk is a Sandy, Utah-based developer of software-management applications that has followed a circuitous route to where it is today. Founded in 1985 as LAN Systems, the company was bought by Intel in 1991 when the chip giant fancied diversification. Over the years, LANDesk developed a reputation for useful, if not altogether exciting, technology. And since the company's spin-off in 2002, things have looked even better.

For starters, customers have been very interested in the asset management, software deployment, and OS imaging and migration capabilities LANDesk has in spades. But the company needed some new management and infrastructure to make the most of its opportunity as a standalone company. Wang was an ideal candidate. But first the company had to convince him to trade fir trees and Lake Oswego for the desert and the Wasatch Mountains.

To get to know LANDesk, Wang spent six weeks at the Hotel Monaco in Salt Lake City. One Sunday afternoon, he and his wife, June, took a stroll around downtown. Like many cities, virtually all of the stores were closed. Unlike elsewhere, however, so, too, were most of the restaurants, museums and points of interest. Walking around town, they began to appreciate the unique culture of Salt Lake City, and the magnitude of the decision they were about to make.

After much deliberation and a few weekend trips to nearby Park City, where he and his wife fell in love with the Saturday brunch at the Easy Street Brasserie, Wang accepted the job. The "business opportunity was too fabulous to pass up," he says. To eliminate any temptation to back out, Wang sold his beloved home on Lake Oswego and Vancouver, Wash., too. For someone in love with Oregon, that was akin to Spanish explorer Hernando Cortes burning his ships off the coast of Mexico.

Wang says the move was worth it for three main reasons: LANdesk's technology portfolio, its channel strategy and the company's core team of engineers, which remains largely intact after being spun off from Intel last year. LANDesk counts on the channel for virtually all of its business. To keep partners engaged and satisfied, LANDesk has worked to increase the average margin on products from 2 percent to 4 percent to 18 percent to 20 percent through pricing action, Wang says.

Momentum aside, LANDesk still faces a number of challenges. For starters, the company must build better name recognition, Wang says. One thing that will no doubt help LANDesk: the elimination of a one-press-announcement-per-quarter restriction that the old Intel regime had oddly imposed. (Heaven forbid the LANDesk Management Suite upstages the Pentium processor!)

Also needed: additional investments into administrative overhead that Intel's corporate infrastructure took care of before. To that end, Wang brought in a new vice president of sales--Michael Hall, formerly of Vignette--and a new CFO--Bert Young, formerly of uSight and Talk2 Technology.

More recently, Wang has begun an effort to change the company's culture to make it more competitive. One of the things that astounded him when he arrived was to find that its flagship product, the LANDesk Management Suite, had not been upgraded in two-and-a-half years. He quickly had his engineers complete the version 7 upgrade, which the company unveiled in May. Wang has also focused the company on license-management capabilities, which have spurred sales as buyers flock to products that can help them avoid overbuying software licenses they have no need for.

With momentum building and the capital markets again showing signs of life, many are asking if Wang sees an IPO in LANDesk's future. Possibly, he says, but not until the company has two to three years of solid operating results under its belt. And he and the Wangs have more brunches at the Easy Street under theirs.