Message from Spark Founder and CEO Chad Trytten

Thank you for taking a moment to read the Spark corporate blog. We are excited to introduce this new means of communicating with our customers, partners, and colleagues based on your feedback. On behalf of the Spark team, I invite you to visit the blog on a regular basis and post your comments on the news and ideas that interest you most.

In this, my first Spark blog entry, I'd like to convey the vision, mission, and core values that we focus on at Spark every day. It is through our shared plan for the future, based largely on feedback from users, that we hope our process of continuous improvement translates to a superior customer experience.

Spark was founded in April 2006 by a team of robotic engineers in Vancouver, BC who worked together in 2004/05 at the University of British Columbia on the US Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge for autonomous vehicles. The Grand Challenge was to build an autonomous vehicle to travel across the Mojave Desert without any human intervention and accomplish a Mission Objective. The team quickly established that the first problem to solve was not in the capability of each component, but in the difficulty of getting the various components to talk to each other simply and reliably. A burgeoning industry, robotics - at the time - did not have many dedicated sensors, actuators, devices, or software but rather borrowed from existing applications. Being forced to use components from different vendors that supported different standards and ran across different environments posed an intractable problem out of the gate. Traditional approaches demanding the definition of a single communication standard were too expensive (especially for a volunteer organization) and would take too long to implement (especially for easily-distracted students), so the team began to develop a very different approach (that was quick, efficient, and effective without being prescriptive).

Enter Distrix.

Since then, we have focussed on the tedious but necessary task of developing user-defined code generation and support tools for developers and operators of complex, distributed, and legacy systems. We maintain close involvement with our customers so we can gather their feedback on our products and enhance our solutions to meet their ever-changing needs.

The tremendous feedback we gather from our customers has allowed us to expand the power of Distrix and help implement solutions far beyond the realm of robotics. In fact, it's always an education for me, personally, to find out how our customers have employed Distrix in new and innovative ways. Can Distrix be used as an Ethernet-to-Serial bridge? That, and more. Can Distrix be used as glue between remote and hosted sites? Apparently so. Can Distrix be used to allow multiple robots to communicate spanning separate networks and across the continent? You bet it can. Did I ever imagine these applications? I wish I could say yes, but I cannot.

With that in mind, it is our vision in 2010 and beyond to become the leading provider of information exchange and integration software for real time systems. As we continue to work with you to improve the quality and scalability of our products and expand our solution set to include system management tools, support for very low resource environments, and support for certification and regulatory compliance, our mission will continue: to provide a secure, build/runtime-configurable, vendor-agnostic, high-performance, standards-neutral, and content-independent real time infrastructure for information exchange.

The Spark team could not realize our vision and mission without our dedicated and expanding customer base and our strong set of core values. Throughout our organization, we embrace openness, trust, respect, and innovation. For those of you who know me personally, you can appreciate exactly what I mean: it is our way of life. These values represent who we are, and they are fundamental to everything we do. Whether you are looking to become a Spark customer or have already worked with Spark, we look forward to exceeding your expectations and delivering on our vision, mission, and core values to help you address your unique system integration challenges.

Sincerely,

Chad Trytten
Founder and CEO