From the Living Room to Success

LAS VEGAS - Dec. 10, 2015 - PRLog -- By Lyle Hancock (CTO, Sonoran Systems)

Some of you who know and worked with me remember that I came out of the cellular industry - a regional director of operations for one of the largest companies in the country at the time.

Career wise, I was doing well and moving up the ladder. With $26,000 in savings, in 1988, I left my secure station in the big corporate world and started my small one man company to design my first commercial network fault management system. I named it SwitchMon.

Knocking on the doors of my friends in the cellular and telephone industry, I released version 1. It sold like hotcakes and before long, I needed to hire employees to keep up with sales and support.

Before long, I had outgrown my living room and opened up my first real business office in Las Vegas in the mid 90’s. By 2000, my employee count increased to ten and I was into my third generation of product design.

Following several years of a synergistic relationship with a business solutions (BSS) technology company out of Phoenix, we decided to merge and form our present company “Sonoran Systems Inc”. It was the perfect foundation to merge our technologies and product lines and reach into a greater scope of market opportunity.

With an OSS development team in Las Vegas and a BSS development team in Phoenix we completely redesigned both product lines from the ground floor and released ArTrac G4, our fourth generation OSS product line and Sierra Vista our BSS product line. Both product lines were a success and saw worldwide distribution. We forged new relationships with telecom manufacturers who private label our products for their customers.

With continued market success, we released our fifth generation of ArTrac G5 and Sierra Vista in July of 2010. Generation six is now on the design board.

A year ago, work began to downscale our VLS (Very Large Scale) OSS product line to fit in and run on the new inexpensive mini servers available today. The idea was to introduce a third product line that would be attractive to small businesses and startups. Two days ago, we released our third product line, which we named Sonoran Enterprise Management or SEM for short.

If you ever feel the entrepreneurial spirit with an idea for a product and service, remember that saying: You can change course by navigating the bumps in the road, mitigating the worries, fixing the mistakes, and grasping a new opportunity along the way. But the hardest thing to do is commit to believe in yourself and your idea, the true key to success, and get started flowing.

It has been a journey. Although it has its occasional challenges, I certainly don’t regret my path.