Client Testimonials

Ron Mak was the principal architect and lead developer of Internet-based healthcare systems for use during clinical trials. These systems enabled the clinicians to monitor and communicate with their enrolled patients and allowed each patient to periodically upload personal medical status information. Such capabilities lowered the costs and improved the efficiency of running large trials and fostered a closer relationship between the clinicians and the patients. The trials could then generate more reliable results in less time.

Ron worked closely and effectively with the MDs who were advising the projects. He had the experience and technical knowledge to design distributed end-to-end systems that included web browser-based user interfaces, middleware services, and backend access to medical databases. He displayed strong leadership skills with a team of developers whose work was successfully evaluated by major pharmaceutical companies.

- Shomit Ghose, former VP of Engineering, Caresoft, Inc.

Bill Woo is an experienced systems architect with long experience in the healthcare field. During our years at TDS, he fought bureaucracy and inertia to introduce new concepts and technology to a moribund firm, bringing the energy and insights of Silicon Valley to the development of the next generation of EMR systems. Bill has extensive domain knowledge in healthcare which, coupled with his knowledge of systems design, development, and deployment in both the acute and ambulatory areas, give him insight into the information requirements of practicing clinicians.

- Charles Rogerson PhD, Med Informatics UCSF,
Healthcare Practice, Tata Consulting

Ron Mak has an outstanding talent for software and system architecture. He uses best-in-class tools and techniques to build systems that are reliable, scalable, and maintainable.

Ron also has the flexibility to step in and tackle whatever job needs to be done. At InterSurvey, Ron worked on software development tools, test fixtures for web applications, and system architecture, and was able to shift gears to meet the demands of each project.

I'd hire Ron again in a minute!

- Bob Nicholson, former VP of Engineering, InterSurvey

Bill Woo and I worked together over a number of years at Tandem, Compaq and HP. Particularly during the Compaq and HP years, I valued Bill's tremendous knowledge both from a technology as well as from a business perspective. What made Bill so valuable to me (and the geography and customers I was supporting) was the fact that he was one of two people I knew in the entire HP enterprise space who knew not only the NonStop products (our division) but his knowledge spanned across the entire HP enterprise line of products and included detailed competitive know how as well.

I remember sitting in a meeting with the CIO, lead technical and business people from Deutsche Bahn (German Railway) at the HP Executive Briefing Center in Cupertino where the discussion centered on evaluating and making recommendations on a potential infrastructure deal between DB and HP, with Sun and IBM as our competitors. Bill went through our entire enterprise offering (hardware and software) discussing what the advantages and disadvantages where, along with a competitive view incorporating equivalent products from Sun and IBM. As HP has standardized on Intel chip technology, he explained the Intel roadmap and compared it to the IBM Power 5 roadmap and highlighted advantages and disadvantages between the different chip technologies. We discussed our own SQL database and compared it to Oracle and IBM's DB2.

The customer was so taken by Bill's knowledge that they insisted on changing the agenda so we could add another 90 minutes to Bill's originally scheduled 120 minute presentation. To finish off this recap, we did not only talk technology, but also touched upon business issues/impact with this customer. Needless to say, some time after this meeting DB decided to buy our products and implement many aspects of the infrastructure conversation we had with Bill in Cupertino during their visit.

- Mike Hurst, Global Field Marketing, Hewlett-Packard Company

Ron Mak was the architect and development lead of the middleware of the Collaborative Information Portal (CIP) used on the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission. The middleware distributed, integrated, and coordinated the use of science and engineering mission data, situational awareness data, and information and knowledge repositories in response to requests from client applications. He advocated for and led the successful adoption of industry standards (web services, Enterprise JavaBeans, Java Message Service, etc.) and the integration of commercial off–the–shelf (COTS) software (WebLogic application server, Java server–side technologies, etc.) for the CIP middleware.

By leveraging his successful experiences with the CIP for the MER mission, Ron designed the Systems Health information Portal (SHIP) for the Integrated Systems Health Management (ISHM) Testbed and Prototypes (ITP) project. This enterprise system will access, integrate, and securely transport heterogeneous data from disparate sources for both ground–based mission personnel and astronauts onboard the space station and the future Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV). Despite being a late–comer to the project, Ron was able to make effective presentations to the project manager from NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) and to the project members at Ames and other NASA centers that convinced them that SHIP needs to be an important part of the product. He consistently got good cooperation from the other project members.

Ron is highly committed to excellence, and does whatever it takes to ensure mission success. By using CIP as the foundation for SHIP, Ron minimized risk. This strategy, coupled with Ron’s extensive knowledge base and his dedication to thoroughly researching all alternative tools (including make versus buy) and developmental strategies, brought efficiency, effectiveness, and organizational clarity to a project whose success is very important to NASA in general, and to NASA Ames in particular.

Ron has a lot of charisma, and communicates easily with a wide spectrum of people, which is a factor in the degree to which he is sought as a speaker for diverse forums.

- Larry Hogle, Associate Director, University Affiliated Research Center (UARC)
University of California at Santa Cruz / NASA Ames Research Center