Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 16, 1994                   TAG: 9402160032
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: C-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: STEPHEN FOSTER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG                                LENGTH: Medium

SUCCESS STORY GOES SOLO

Tuesday, the library-automation and computer-software developer weaned itself from its parent, Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties, a division of Virginia Tech.

The Tech unit, which invested $400,000 to start VTLS nine years ago, was repaid $2.64 million for its 55 percent share of VTLS. Tech Intellectual Properties, a nonprofit corporation, helps find commercial outlets for ideas and technologies that originate within the school.

"It's been our greatest success story," said Ray Smoot, Tech's vice-president for finance.

Twenty years ago, Tech's Newman Library went hunting for a way to computerize the catalog of its 1.75 million volumes. It didn't find any systems it liked, so it made one.

"When I first started on it, it was just something to play around with," said Vinod Chachra, president of VTLS. He previously was Tech's vice president for information systems.

Now the system he helped create and other software tools are used by more than 200 clients worldwide. The National Gallery of Art, Russia's state library and the Ohio County Public Library in Wheeling, W.Va., are among VTLS clients.

The company has grown steadily and now employs 80 people, many of them Tech graduates. Chachra said Tuesday he had just hired four more.

After three years in offices at Newman library, VTLS in 1988 became the first company to move into Tech's Corporate Research Center. Chachra says it may need to construct its own building soon.

The decision to go solo, Chachra said, was based partly on a need that the system itself addresses: speed.

VTLS is developing technologies that are expanding the scope of its markets. Multimedia presentations the company has created, for example, show the molecular makeup of aspirin and flip to a definition at the touch of a computer mouse, or play a Beatles tune while screen animation shows the words, or show full-motion video.

With markets opening up worldwide - Chachra spent 112 days out of the country last year - the company needs to be able to make business decisions quickly, without having to check with its parent, VTIP.

Also, VTIP needs money to fund other projects, and its role is to nurture ideas until they are ready to make it on their own, he said.

"This was a good time for VTIP to cash in," Chachra said. "Now we have more flexibility."

How did the little guy grow up so fast?

"We knew that it would grow, but we didn't know what kind of life it would have," Chachra said.

VTLS systems are multilingual. As long as a computer screen is capable of producing the text, whether it be English, Polish or Arabic, the system can adapt.

Libraries across the world have been automating in recent years. But to survive, the company will have to find nonlibrary clients. Museums are interested, Chachra said. Some businesses can use the systems.

And because of the need to keep upgrading its software and technologies, VTLS spends a full third of its resources on research and development, Chachra said.

"We do good R&D," he said.