Bill Jackson, a former military software developer who has made a career developing communications applications for top secret U.S. government operations, has brought his flexible style of software solutions to the paging industry.
The company he helped found-J Technology Inc., Athens, Ala.-recently released the PageWizard Plus, a 32-bit, Windows-based paging configuration management, terminal interface and billing software solution, which allows users access to all their pager configuration, inventory and billing information.
The software program allows users to track such things as transactions, inventory, terminal interface and state generation. It also can send pages to several accounts, deactivate or activate pagers and configure subscriber account information like payment type, payment period, due time and delinquency dates, tax structure, coverage region and so on.
“PageWizard gives you the tools to customize and configure your business for maximum growth,” said Jackson, the company’s vice president and program developer. “PageWizard’s strengths lie in the terminal interface and its unique telephony feature. The telephony feature allows you to give agent access to field personnel via a (mobile) telephone. Field personnel can sell a pager, configure it and activate it, all from a remote site.
“All you need is a trench coat with pagers hanging in it,” he joked. For instance, PageWizard can be programmed to mass-page all the user’s paging service subscribers, notifying them to pay the bill or lose service. Users can program the date and time this message must be sent, specify it to remove specific numbers once payment is made and to shut off service if no response is received after that date has passed. What once took hours, Jackson said, now takes minutes. It also can compile such standard reports as terminal reconciliation and account history/status.
“We find ways to make our application flexible enough to meet (the industry’s) needs,” he said.
This flexibility, he said, stems from his previous work as a software developer and computer programmer for the military, where he specialized in the highly classified Joint Special Operations Command, or “black ops.”
While in the military, Jackson supervised some 140 software developers. “I spent the last 15 years developing high speed, high input systems designed to meet the special ops community’s requirements,” he said.
As it turns out, each special ops division had different system requirements, and he had to create a system that could be versatile enough to meet them all. “We had to learn to make applications morph to different requirements,” he said.
He formed JTI two years ago to continue this work, primarily as a government contractor. The company initially only created software for paging and other communications methods for the JSOC, which supports the presidential situation support staff and other classified activities.
Jackson said a “fluke” led to the creation of the PageWizard for the civilian paging community. “A local paging company needed a program to let it communicate with the terminal to update pager configurations, and the idea just took off,” he said. “Now, it does everything but light the candles on the Christmas tree.”
His work with the government taught him to make systems flexible, and as such, PageWizard was developed to meet the different system requirements for different paging systems. The program has been integrated with paging terminals owned by Glenayre Technologies Inc., Prism, Unipage and Zetron Inc., he said, which also acted as design consultants. “This application was designed by the paging community,” he said. “I don’t know the paging business, so I have to go with how (the paging industry) does business, not Bill Jackson. I’m just a tool they use to meet their needs … For a competitive arena, I’m amazed at how well they’ve helped to get this product to market.”
