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Ellis Gregory is willing to take half the credit for the acrimonious demise of his promising software firm - but only half.
At a time when start-ups garner multimillion dollar buyout offers before they even ship their goods, the outright failure of a company with an innovative technology, powerful partners and high-profile users is unusual. And the story of "little NetTech," as Gregory used to call the company, is about as twisted as it gets.
Over a period of eight years, Gregory grew NetTech, Inc. from the ground up around a network management package called EView. He amassed 35 employees, partnered with Cisco Systems, Inc., Cabletron Systems, Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. and landed big customers such as Sara Lee Corp. and Food Lion, Inc.
Then things went south. In the fall of 1997 NetTech went bankrupt, leaving more than 1.3 million in debt and forcing Gregory to turn EView and NetTech over See NetTech, page 14 to the court for auction. But in an amazing twist of fate, Gregory this month bought EView back from the auction block and will soon resume selling it via his new firm, Bantam Labs, Inc.
Life wasn't always this crazy for Gregory. In 1990, the ex-IBM employee took $200,000 and formed NetTech. Two years later, Cabletron gave him a network management research contract -the result was EView software.
EView, which runs Unix and AIX, lets users monitor the performance of multivendor networks and helps them handle...