Profile: Juan Perez

"The land of opportunity" may seem a tired cliché at times, but to Cuban immigrant Juan Perez, the phrase speaks of vivid reality. The son of parents who left what he calls the "closed system of communism" in order to gain access to opportunities more for their children than for themselves, he is now the president of Adusa, and is busy transforming life in his adopted country.

"I think he's a savvy technology executive that also has a tremendous amount of business experience," said Rick Schrader of IT firm Aquitec. Schrader points to Perez' dual ability to pull together technical requirements and marketing, leading the way in developing self-service ordering in delis, restaurants and other food venues.

Perez earned a Bachelor's Degree of Science in Computer Science for Business from DePaul University, and was the chief technologist and system architect for an IBM-owned software company that served retailers. He joined Adusa in 1998, and his first big success there, helping to solve the Y2K crisis, created a challenge in its wake. Having accomplished its purpose, his company needed a new direction. Perez had the vision to provide it. He has made Adusa a pioneer in self-service ordering.

"(He is) very professional. He has a great understanding of what he's trying to accomplish," said Frank Lomoro, vice president and general manager of Sunset Foods, which implemented self-service deli kiosks from Adusa. "We've had it up and running for about a year now. It's working out very well."

That kind of client satisfaction should be no surprise, given Perez' background and careful preparation. He describes the turning point for Adusa, after the year 2000.

"We had a large void to fill in terms of business as far as all the Y2K work that had come to an end. And so we started sort of pre-planning. Given that most of us in the company had software development in our backgrounds, we naturally gravitated toward developing our own products. We had to find the proper industry to do it. We knew we didn't want to go back to the large systems that we were doing integration work for, and for which we had developed that worldwide chain store system, because that would take a really heavy development effort. So we focused more on smaller-scale retail systems, and came across the growing opportunities with self-service systems specifically."

Making the transition from systems integration consulting work to software development in the self-service segment involved hard work, but now Adusa is an industry leader. "I think we have probably one of the top, if not the top, applications for self-service in the supermarkets with our deli self-ordering," said Perez. "I'm excited about that and I'm proud of that accomplishment for the company, not just for myself."

Perez can also point with satisfaction to the restaurant product Adusa launched last year, and characteristically, he gives much of the credit to the other players on his team.

That team mentality is a natural outgrowth of Perez' love of sports, particularly baseball, the national passion of his native Cuba. At 45, Perez doesn't play competitively as he used to, but still enjoys playing casually both with his friends and with his three children, age 8, 12 and 18. The oldest is beginning studies at University of Illinois this fall. At this time in his life, Perez can look back to his childhood in Cuba and see how far he has come. He lays great stress on the efforts of his family, there and in the United States, to make life better for the next generation.

He admits that his memories of Cuba, which he left at the age of eight, are "from a child's perspective." The hard work of his family kept him from directly experiencing what he now knows were shortages of "things to eat, things to wear, housing, etc." His father was a pre-med student at the University of Havana, and his mother was a schoolteacher.

When his parents relocated in the United States, "they had to forgo getting back into school." His father owned a small ethnic store, and his mother worked in a doctor's office.

"The opportunities were definitely for us, for the kids, for my sister and me," he said.

For relaxation, Perez loves to read, with the subject matter ranging widely, from business, to classic literature, to spy novels. Recently he savored the poignancy of rereading Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, the story of a Cuban village fisherman told by a great American writer.