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One to Watch: BBA Abel Banda Wants to Guide Your Net Evolution
by J.B. Bird
Imagine you’re the CEO of a medium-sized company that sells consumer goods over the Web. While on vacation in the Caribbean you have one of your typical flashes of marketing genius – a great way to spice up your Website. You have to act now! What do you do? A) Call your marketing and IT departments from a beach-side bar and pray that they can translate your brilliant idea into action, maybe even before your two-week vacation is over. B) Fly home immediately and do it yourself, over the protests of friends and family. C) Plug in your modem and laptop and fix the Website right then and there, without ever missing an island breeze.
BBA Abel Banda is banking on the last answer, and on his ability to deliver a new brand of Internet technology that will put creative decisions in the hands of those who need to make them – marketers and CEOs, not techies and systems managers. Banda has a vision that he can help businesses integrate websites throughout their operations while making the whole experience more seamless and user-friendly. Hundreds of information management entrepreneurs have similar visions. What they don’t have is Banda’s secret weapon: his personally developed technology.
Under the auspices of Darwin Solutions IT, a company he plans to launch this year, Banda has developed original code that, he says, will make web applications even easier to use in real time than the most user-friendly graphics and word-processing programs. “In real time” means that changes can post immediately to Internet and intra-net sites. The advantage is that with permission, anyone can edit a Website – marketers, CEOs, the art department – without having to rely on, or even think about, the IT professionals who currently dominate Web production at so many large sites.
Austin-based Story Server is the industry leader in this field, selling a suite of products that customize Websites and content for individual users. With a recent IPO and over $50 million of annual revenues, Story Server creates a strong headwind for competitors. Banda believes, however, that his first major innovation – a fully drag-and-drop web-editing tool – will be a jump ahead of the field in technology. From this base, Darwin will help businesses integrate e-commerce throughout their operations, making websites fully functional information machines. Finance officers will be able to get key data in real time from the Web, marketers will have constant access to information on geographic sales and click-through traffic, CEOs will be able to monitor profit margins and market share as they rise and fall, and the whole enterprise will be rigged to servers that orchestrate e-commerce through a powerful suite of analytical tools, customized for an industry’s particular needs.
Banda calls it “Amazon.com on a plate.” With a modest goal of “guiding e-commerce evolution,” Darwin IT will, he believes, be able to help any company become the Amazon.com of their industry.
“Darwin is a dream,” says undergraduate business professor Cathie Alexander, “and I think Abel will rise to the occasion.” Alexander has worked with Banda since his freshman year at UT, and she says that he has been able to do anything he puts his mind to. “The only thing that might stop him,” she says, “is not finding people to work with who have the same fire.”
Anyone who spends a few moments with Banda can tell he has a lot of fire. He has a rare combination of talents: computer programming brilliance, Michael Dell-sized ambition, great skills as a communicator, and an infectious passion for his mission – bringing IT power to the people.
These skills helped Banda organize and lead a successful undergraduate enterprise, Internet Express. This winter they helped him land Darwin’s first potential client, Drs. Foster & Smith, an Internet pet products company based in Wisconsin. While Banda customizes their new e-commerce site, he has also hit the trail for venture capital. When he finally launches Darwin, he will tap the hardware skills of his younger brother David and the know-how of friends and other MSIS majors from the Business School.
The School will sorely miss Abel, who has been one of it most valuable student employees over the last three years, a veritable website dynamo of innovative designs, concepts, and databases. The School’s loss will be the business world’s gain.
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