Jim Kirkley strives for balance in his application designs

Because CTO Jim Kirkley believes in balance, he’s concerned about the Internet’s ecosystem being thrown out of whack by electronic pollution. “Spam and hackers are polluting our environment, and this could become a major problem for b-to-b integration,” he says.

At QAD, which specializes in enterprise software for manufacturers around the world, Kirkley carries this desire for balance into the design of the company’s supply-chain management applications. “Something is wrong if a design doesn’t have symmetry,” he says. It forces him to wonder, “Have we left out a component?”

In the past year, Kirkley has moved QAD solely to a hosted solution, and his efforts have also led the industry in terms of how supply-chain information is communicated between machines — that is, with or without human intervention — and how it is visualized and accessed by suppliers along the chain.