Article

Apunix celebrates silver anniversary

While the San Diego kiosk firm toasts 25 years in the business, its founders are welcoming three new members to their family.

October 19, 2006 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance

By anybody's standard, 25 years is a long time to be in business — and it is an eternity in the tech world. The list of tech firms that have made it to their silver anniversary is indeed an exclusive club.

Today, the San Diego kiosk company Apunix, which has become well known for its innovative use of open-source software to ensure extensible systems, is a part of that club.

Peter and Sylvia Berens, then graduate students at the University of California San Diego, founded the company. In between student-teaching and completing their Ph.D.'s in physical chemistry, the couple began a home-brewed tech firm in that most timeless and enduring of facilities: their garage.

"We had this Unix machine in our garage," Peter Berens said, referring to the operating system that would lend his company its name (their first applications were written on array processors using Unix). "We had a huge nine-track tape that we could use to back it up."

And then, in one of those business-defining moments, an earthquake destroyed their disk drive and they lost a week's worth of work. That turned on the light bulb for the couple, and they began to offer software that performed unsupervised back-ups — a new idea at the time.

Their first order for the back-up program came from a rather large client: the National Security Agency.

"That kind of kicked us out of our garage," Peter Berens said.

Drs. Peter (left) and Sylvia (right) Berens pose with marketing guru Timothy Gendreau.

"We have our own corroborative experience," Sylvia Berens said. "Peter's experience is on the technical side, and I'm on the project management-customer service side. We have skill sets that we share in common and skill sets on our own."

Apunix veered into the kiosk realm about eight years ago, they said, with a deployment of 16 kiosks in grocery stores and public venues. Those multi-function kiosks, like the back-up software, were ahead of their time — they dispensed information and gave customers the ability to pay their water bills.

In the years since, the company has deployed innovative programs for rental car companies, trucking firms, restaurants, casinos and even churches.

"Apunix has done a lot of innovative things with their software and the projects that they have managed," said Rufus Connell, research director of information technology for Frost & Sullivan. "(They) pioneered the use of thin clients, kiosk appliances, and wholly flash memory based systems. They are one of the only kiosk vendors I know that have turned on an entire kiosk network simultaneously, remotely."

Today, the company resides in a newly designed office space, with a customer entrance that overlooks a picturesque view of trees and lake. The Apunix of today employs 22 people; Sylvia Berens said their current facility has "a lot of room for expansion" as their growth continues.

Another growing family

While the Berens' have watched their business family grow, they've recently welcomed new faces into their home, as well. In April, the couple legally adopted three orphaned sisters from Kazakhstan, Zarina (age 7), Madina (9) and Malika (12).

Sylvia and Peter Berens with Madina, Zarina, and Malika.

"Older children are very rarely adopted," said Peter Berens. "Once a child gets out of the toddler years, the ability to find families goes down to single-digit percentages. It's a very dismal situation for these children."

The girls got to move to their new home in May; their previous home was a remote building used as a prison under Stalin. "They're enrolled in American school and are quickly learning English and having the time of their lives," Sylvia Berens said.

During the yearlong process of visiting the orphanage, dealing with the adoption process and working to get the girls to their new home, the Berens' knew their attention couldn't be as firmly focused on Apunix as it had in the past. That, they said, turned out to be a blessing in and of itself.

"Our employees were prepared for this," Peter Berens said. "We had almost a year to prepare them. And it's good for the business, too — we've allowed more people to grow into more roles and giving them more responsibility. It allowed the business to become more independent of Sylvia and myself, and show that it really could run on its own."

"It's like anything else," Sylvia Berens said. "You have to be prepared and be ready to deal with changes. But it's exciting to give three little girls an opportunity to have a rich life, in terms of being what they can be. The opportunity to give a child love and get loved in return, that's what we wanted — and that's what the girls wanted."

SelfService.org editor Bryan Harris contributed to this story.