Finding solutions to business problems

Try, try and try again is the fatherly advice Mr Risley relies on

After working in management for more than 25 years, Chris Risley became chief executive of software group Nominum.

His previous posts include head of e.business service provider NewChannel and chairman and chief at ON Technology, where he oversaw the group's flotation in 1995.

Before moving into the software industry, Mr Risley spent 13 years with European industrial companies including BTR, which is now Invensys. He also advised British Aerospace's chairman when the company was changing to BAE.

What was your first car?

A 1962 Ford Custom with 80,000 miles on the clock, which my parents found at a state surplus auction in 1969.

I drove it for two years to 120,000 miles and then sold it for $100 profit.

What I really wanted was any other car than a state surplus Ford.

What was your first job?

My first paid job was mowing lawns for a real estate developer, for $2.75 per hour and I was amazed at how big my pay cheque was at the end of the week.

What was your first house?

My first mortgage was for a small apartment, which I bought from an ex-girlfriend. It was in a handy location, across the street from my first start-up software business.

The mortgage was for $20,000 and the apartment cost me $52,000.

Who is your biggest inspiration?

Honestly, it would have to be my father as he always assumed that every problem had a solution.

If Plan A didn't work, he tried Plan B, when Plan B failed he always had another idea up his sleeve. He never gave up.

He applied this philosophy to everything in life from home repair, computing, his tax return, through to his work.

He was always looking for an alternative way to approach a situation long after everybody else had given up.

What's the best bit of business advice you've had?

A "strategy" isn't a strategy when it describes what you will do, it only becomes a strategy when it tells you what you won't do.

New technologies open up thousands of different opportunities. You can't succeed if you pursue them all. You've got to pick one or two and focus on them.

Your strategy must let you recognise immediately when an opportunity or a potential customer is not part of your company's long-term direction.

What's the biggest challenge facing business now?

I think every business has to think about increasing its internal velocity. The outside world is changing fast.

Globalisation, new markets, new suppliers, new competitors, new alternatives are all causing quicker changes in our corporate environments.

You can't build a fixed corporate infrastructure and then say: "We'll change it later if we need to."

You must build your corporate infrastructure to assume that it will be changing all the time. Business leaders need to emphasise the themes of urgency and fast adaptation.

What can the government do to boost business?

Sadly, "urgency" is not a concept that governments do well. Governments can use their buying power to incubate a market which might not gestate without a large reliable customer - that's very effective.

Governments go wrong when they try to use their legislative power to force a market into existence.

No matter what was intended, market legislation always ends up protecting the incumbent vendors at the expense of innovation, flexibility, and customer choice.

What issue in the industry is grabbing your attention?

Being in the technology game, I would have to say security issues, particularly the proliferation of distributed denial of service attacks ( where hackers hijack several servers which all attack and ultimately overwhelm a company's computer system) and worms, are of interest to me.

These attacks are affecting Telcos, internet service providers and enterprises globally.

With broadband in the home, it has provided hackers with millions of poorly protected machines that they can recruit into "zombie networks".

These "zombies" lie dormant until a malicious person directs them to attack a business, institution, or government agency.

One of the most common causes of network failures is almost accidental.

The infected "zombies" consult the Domain Name System (DNS) to look up other potential victims. When thousands of "zombies" do this at once, the DNS server is overwhelmed and the IP devices relying on that information are unable to operate. Everybody loses.

We're working with Telcos and enterprises around the world to provide DNS server software that can't be overwhelmed.

But until those servers are much more widely deployed, we should expect some terrible outages at Telcos and enterprises that are still using 20th century network technology in the 21st century.

What was the proudest moment of your career?

It happened quite recently actually.

Nominum has spent the last two and a half years building a suite of world-class products for managing network names and addresses, in a relatively new technology space.

We have been selling each of the individual products to customers, but it has only been in the last six months that customers who bought one product have come back and started buying the other products in our suite.

A strategy, which was two years in making, has finally been validated.

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Nominum is a provider of address management and security on the internet

It's management team includes one of the inventors of the internet's domain name system, Dr Paul Mockapetris.

Its customers include NTL, Colt Telecoms and Allianz and the company has seen significant gains in recent years - posting 25% growth in 2003.