Q: Is Carmen a high-tech software company?
A: I wouldn't want to go to work if it wasn't. Being around developers and bouncing ideas around about new creative solutions really makes my day. Add to this the research environment, our seminars, the latest findings and debates about concepts and philosophy and you can see the atmosphere is very much high-tech. We want to cultivate this as much as we can.

Q: But Carmen focuses a lot on services and also provides crew planning to its clients. Doesn't that move you away from technology?
A: No. Developing high-tech software is a product decision and providing customer services is a market decision. We believe that the vendors of the future must do both. In addition, expanding Carmen's services has been very good for our software development, and I expect that we will increase our services even more. I used to be jealous of companies making computer games because the programmers would be able to experience their own creations. This is now happening to us because of our focus on services. The user's viewpoint is present inside the product teams. How can you dream up great software anyway, if you can't put yourself in the shoes of the person who is going to use it?

Q: Aren't you a bit too aggressive, trying to develop new products in Crew, Fleet and Operations Control at the same time?
A: As long as the product teams are focused on their products I don't have a problem with developing a lot of products. You need varied talents in product teams because they work on different stages of the product's lifecycle. Looking at a new startup in our industry makes you understand; it looks great in the beginning because everybody is in the concept stage and can talk about great ideas. The whole company then moves on to implementation and then maintenance and it doesn't sound so great any more. With nearly 100 staff we have reached the critical mass to run things successfully in parallel.

Q: So you're doing a lot of technical development -is there anything you definitely DON'T want to do?
A: Of course. I don't want to reinvent the wheel! In every new release we look forward to dumping some code and replacing it with standard components, thus letting somebody else worry about maintenance. This is what we have done with the report browser in v7 -Acrobat Reader is better and it's free! We are replacing our in-house batch system with LSF from Platform Computing, and we are using many components from ILOG and Oracle. We are really trying to stay away from general software development.

Q: Where will optimization technology be 10 years from now?
A: There is a lot of investment currently being made in our industry, and a lot of major ideas on the drawing board, so I think it's safe to expect more action over the next decade than during the last one. Not that the past 10 years have been lost, but the productivity revolution accomplished by our products has taken place in the dark. Much more attention and mind share has been allocated to more visible companies that add less value to the client. We will turn this around in the next decade. If you think about it, running a successful transportation company is a matter of optimization. It doesn't matter if you look at the vehicle, crew or payload. When you can monitor all of them in an integrated fashion you will have the premium tool for managing the business. We have an important role to play, and we are getting ready for it.