News

Who's Who: Peter Jarvis

Fast cars and rugged keyboards allow Storm co-founder Peter Jarvis to share his passion for life and work with everyone around him.

March 24, 2002

Sometimes, Storm Data Entry Technology co-founder Peter Jarvis has to junk the company car and drive one of his own vehicles to client meetings. It turns out the clients like it that way.

The personal touch is not what Jarvis' clients are after. Instead, they like the thrill of the unknown, because Jarvis has a way of finding cars that express the sporty, somewhat exotic, nature of his personality.

There is the Porsche 944 that is a favorite of one of Storm's longest-running clients, RS Components section manager Richard Claydon.

"My company car is a Mercedes and I drive it on all my business calls," Jarvis said. "But every time I've got to make a call on Richard he'll call the day before and say `Bring your car, we'll go out to lunch.' Lunch usually consists of picking up a sandwich at a roadside stand and driving around for an hour (in the Porsche)."

Then there is the Bond car. That is right, a Bond car, a James Bond car. A Lotus Esprit, Jarvis saved it from junkyard oblivion five years ago only to discover it had first been used by England's Pinewood Studios in an early 1980s James Bond movie.

"I was able to research it and found out I'm something like the 12th owner," he said. "I found it in a very tattered, disheveled condition. Every year I do a little work on it and it's doing great."

Storm co-founder Peter Jarvis has become a regular at the annual KioskCom trade show.

Jarvis likes to keep himself busy, whether it is working at Storm - which is best known in the kiosk industry for its rugged keyboards and Jarvis' willingness to demonstrate their durability - flying or refurbishing his slick sports cars.

It seems like a lot for one man. But people that know him say his personality is like that - revved up.

"Peter's among the highest-energy individuals I deal with," said Nancy Halpern, program manager in NCR Corp.'s retail and financial group, financial kiosk division. "He's always on and always calls back immediately. Sometime he's kind of in your face. But that's what I prefer in a vendor rather than the type who say `Well, we didn't call this week; we'll call next week.' "

Jarvis, Peter Jarvis

The Lotus Esprit represents the essence of the 44-year-old Jarvis, whose everyday life often seems like an epic tale with an even better story hidden within.

Jarvis is not sure which Bond film the Lotus appeared in, but he was told by studio officials it had been driven not by Bond (probably played by Roger Moore) but one of the bevy of women that are just an arm's length away from the fictional British super agent in each film adventure.

But by the time Jarvis found it, the Lotus was more like a broken-down moonshine mobile than a double-naught spy car.

Peter Jarvis loves his sports cars: a Porsche 944 (top) and a Lotus Esprit once used in a James Bond movie.

"Peter described the Lotus as having a weed growing up through the car," Claydon recalled (Jarvis said it was actually the Porsche). "My mate found (a vehicle) in similar circumstances which literally had a tree growing through it. He had to chop the tree down to start working on the car."

One of the Lotus' most unique features was a partial metal shelf with four holes built into the car behind the driver's seat to accommodate a camera mounting. So what did Jarvis do? He removed the metalwork. Then he discovered the car's origin.

"Unfortunately I replaced it," Jarvis said about the shelf. "It took away the value of the car a bit."

Keyboards are forever

Jarvis started privately owned Storm (known in England as Keymat Technology Ltd.) in 1986 with managing director Peter Ward -- whom Jarvis called his mentor and the company's inspiration -- and venture capital help from Hambros (now known as Investec Group Investments). The company's goal is to produce rugged and responsive data entry devices for industrial and public applications.

The company's genesis lay in Jarvis' frustration with his employer in the mid 1980s, a manufacturing company that was slow to develop switch technology he had patented.

"The managing director said `If you think you've got a good business idea, you can go and do it,' " Jarvis said. "I went home and talked to my wife and decided to do it."

Storm received an early break when Sir Clive Sinclair, who developed the first pocket calculator, chose the company to supply keyboards for his organization. Currently, Storm designs and manufactures keyboards, keypads, access control devices, and integrated keypads.

The company's clientele include NCR, which is using Storm keyboards for kiosk pilot projects involving several banks in Europe and retailers in the United States, including Alaska. Halpern said the quality of Storm's products and its people sold the company on NCR.

"We started with a different vendor, then we went back and forth a lot between the vendor and Storm, and finally settled on Storm," Halpern said. "They were very responsive to what we're doing."

Shaken, not stirred

In kiosk circles, Jarvis is known as the guy who tried to destroy his own product. The incident occurred at the 2001 KioskCom trade show and conference in Orlando, Fla.

"A potential customer came up and we did our standard sales presentation," Jarvis said. "So he said, `Really, how tough are they?' "

Over the course of the next few minutes, Jarvis - with a little help from his colleagues -jumped up and down on the keyboard, attacked it with a hammer and a pair of pliers, and poured lighter fluid into the assembly and lit it on fire. Such confidence was rewarded with a keyboard that survived the ordeal and kept working.

"I'd never really gone to these lengths before to show how tough they were," he said.

Perhaps not, but Claydon said the demonstration was typical of Jarvis' willingness to take chances on his product.

"He's very much a character," he said. "Every single project launch we do with them there's a story, whether it's a guy hanging (a keyboard) in a canal on a rope and then losing it or something else."

Last year's attempted carnage left an indelible mark. At this year's KioskCom event, attendees frequently dropped by Storm's booth and asked the inevitable question: "What are you going to do to the keyboard this year?" Jarvis, perhaps for the first time, was subdued.

"My colleagues were sort of discouraging me," he said. "They said `Last year you proved your point.' Last year, we were pretty much an upstart."

But now most people in the kiosk industry know about Peter Jarvis, his durable keyboards, and his slick automobiles.