The next big thing?

By Don Shilling

A tiny company has big plans as it hires an outside CEO and advisory board.

YOUNGSTOWN — The founders of Zethus Software think they can see their future — it’s right outside their window.

From their desks inside the Youngstown Business Incubator, Eric Parker and Andy Reinhardt can’t miss the new, $6 million office building next door. It’s the home of Turning Technologies, which began as a tiny startup like Zethus but now is bustling with 130 employees.

As the fellow incubator tenant exploded with worldwide sales, Parker and Reinhardt kept laboring quietly for five years to get their computer networking technology just right. Now, they think they have it, and they aren’t the only one.

“We have high expectations for them,” said Jim Cossler, incubator director. “Could they be the next Turning Technologies? I think there’s a very good chance that they will be.”

Parker, 43, and Reinhardt, 40, aren’t so brash to label their company as the “next Turning Technologies,” but they do think they can emerge from the protection of the incubator and establish nationwide or even global sales.

“It’s encouraging to see somebody from the incubator take off,” Parker said. “It’s better than sitting around here and wondering why nothing is happening.”

The Zethus founders certainly haven’t been sitting idly by. Cossler called their product one of the largest, most complicated software packages that’s been developed at the incubator, which specializes in housing software companies.

The founders started with a plan to connect a series of computers to solve complex engineering products, with their biggest customer being Firestone. They were software developers who left the tire maker to start their own company.

They later decided the focus of that product was too narrow, so they switched to archiving. They still are using the concept of networking computer and similar devices.

Their new angle is called “shredding.” Their software breaks up data so that is shared among a variety of computers and then reassembles the data when needed. Failure of any particular computer doesn’t prevent data from being retrieved, Parker said.

Security is the selling point. With no single hard drive containing all of the information, the data is safe from hackers, Parker said.

The product will be marketed to financial and insurance companies, law offices, medical offices and governments.

To prepare for the product’s nationwide launch in February, the founders have hired their first employee, Brad Myers, 43, of Salem. He has been named chief executive and will manage the business aspects of Zethus’ growth.

He most recently was chief operating officer of PI-Track, a Silicon Valley firm that provides fraud tracking services to banks and insurance companies. He also previously owned Myers Research Group, a Canfield company that provided investigative services, and he recently was elected to the Salem school board.

Myers isn’t reserved about the company’s prospects.

“I think this could be so big that I’m being paid by stock options,” Myers said.

Stock options are the right to buy shares of company stock at a discounted price if the company goes public.

Myers said Zethus’ annual revenues could reach into the tens of millions of dollars.

“It’s big enough to attract me here, and it’s big enough to attract big names from the Silicon Valley,” he said.

The other big names are part of an advisory board that he has put together. The four people have had success in building or advising technology companies, mostly in California.

One of them, Chuck Wallace, was the co-founder of Esurance, an auto insurance company with annual revenues of nearly $1 billion, and Michael Schwartz, who led engineering teams at Silicon Valley start-up companies such as Six Apart, Infoseek and Go.

The advisers also are receiving stock options. Each of them will work with the company from one to five hours a month, either on the telephone or coming to the area.

They will provide advice on topics such as building a brand, marketing and technology development. They also have the connections in the industry that can help Zethus grow nationally, Myers said.

Myers said he was attracted to Zethus because the owners have been able to operate without debt or outside investors so far.

Plus, they are eager to take advice on how best to bring their new product to market.

Parker, who lives in Geneva, and Reinhardt, who lives in Fairlawn, said they welcome the Myers’ leadership and advice from the advisory board because they never saw themselves as chief executives of a large, national company.

“Andy and I don’t have the business experience,” Parker said. “We’re not networking, outgoing people. We are technical.”

Myers said his first steps will be finding funding for the launch of the product, which includes hiring staff for sales and marketing.

He said his pitch to investors is that the company is so far along that it doesn’t need money for software development.

“We just need to sell it,” he said.