Geek of the Week: Randy Eckels
This week in cloud computing news turned out to be another big one with industry bigwigs leading the category. Other big names, such as Seagate, had their share of the pie as well; they released backup tools that increase backup speeds by a whopping 400%. 1&1 released new cloud hosting options for the USA market in an overly competitive market landscape. And, as we mentioned above, Google, Salesforce and Windows dominated the weekly news. While all of these are worthy of mention, there is one company that really solves an age old problem in America: school lunch.
Specifically since the start of this century and in conjunction with the rise of social media, we have heard a lot from various people about their kids school lunches via a handful of social media platforms. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all are lit up with pictures of these lunches, which are generally followed by negative feedback from disgruntled parents blasting government policy. You know what we are talking about! They. Are. Everywhere.
Several years ago, the American government got together to discuss the federally funded school lunch programs. While officials were supposed to be instrumental in passing food reform in schools, it seems like nothing truly was accomplished. Hence all of the social media pictures and critical comments. Well, it seems like a solution has been found. But before we get to the solution, allow us to introduce this weeks Geek of the Week and the person behind the supervision of the SaaS product that eliminates this problem: Randy Eckels, President of Horizon Software.
For those of you who may have missed the news, Solana is a SaaS product by Horizon Software that looks to change the way parents and children look at lunch in Americas schools. As we noted earlier this week, Solana is being described as an accountability software for school lunchrooms. Solana helps lunchrooms stay in compliance with federal regulations while providing children with healthy and flavorful options for lunch. Mr. Eckels went on to say that, Solana dramatically reduces the time, expense and support required to implement a state-of-the-art school nutrition platform, allowing our customers to focus on their main priorities of serving nutritious, convenient and affordable meals to students. It should be noted that there are no other products on the market like Solana, which is extremely rare in todays competitive world (and especially in the cloud niche). This fact alone is beyond impressive and shows true innovation, and thus caught our attention right away.
As for Mr. Eckels: prior to becoming President of Horizon Software, he worked at Sting Communications (COO), CBORD (VP of Sales & Marketing), KnowledgePlanet (SVP of Sales & Marketing), and held several high level positions at GTE Corporation and AT&T. Mr. Eckels has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Penn State University, an M.B.A. from Lehigh University and a M.S. in Information Systems from Penn State University.
Congratulations Randy!
