In 1977, David Lynch (now Senior Consultant of SOTA) joined Telos Consulting Services where he performed consulting, product analysis and design for Telos’ Business Systems Division.  In 1980 he moved to Insurance Software Organization (ISO) where he served as project lead for their insurance rating systems team.

Dave moved into the field of Operations Management at Carnation Company in 1985, where the implementation of effective systems management solutions (e.g., problem, change and configuration management) was among his responsibilities.

In the mid 1980’s, IBM announced the CSA (Customer Service Amendment) program that dramatically increased Fortune 1000 corporate interest in systems management solutions.  Armed with applicable systems management expertise, Dave responded to that opportunity by founding SOTA Enterprises in 1986. 

As a consulting firm, SOTA Enterprises provided education and implemented systems management solutions based on IBM’s Information/Management, CA-NETMAN and similar products for corporations including Trustcorp Bank and MCA Universal.  These independent consulting efforts ultimately yielded a “toolkit” of pre-built components that were subsequently sold to clients as part of the consulting arrangements.  

In 1987, SOTA agreed to develop a robust commercial product Integrated Data Center Management (IDCM) for HealthOne (now Allina in Minneapolis) in exchange for control of the resulting software.  From that point, SOTA went on to successfully market IDCM to Xerox, Nestle and 20th Century Insurance.

Soon thereafter, SOTA grew to five full-time employees (including Heather McDougle, now President of SOTA). With a permanent marketing staff (plus a pool of talented subcontractors), policies of fair pricing, uncompromising customer service, and honesty, SOTA became a leader in systems management.  SOTA eventually acquired many Fortune 1000 clients, including Salt River Project, ARCO, Navy Federal Credit Union, Vons Corporation, Airline Tariff Publishing and Allstate Insurance.

As an IBM Business Partner, SOTA provided education and classroom instruction to many IS organizations worldwide. As an expert in Information/Management and NetView®, SOTA has frequently lectured at NEISUG, PISSAZ, IMAGE®, SCIUG and the Information Management National Conference.

In 1993, solutions for systems management began to move from mainframe-based systems to client/server.  SOTA Enterprises responded by reengineering IDCM for client/server deployment, resulting in IDCM/TerraFrame (a PowerBuilder version of IDCM running at UCLA).

In 1996, Dave (seeking a lower-profile endeavor to start a family) took a contract at Kaiser Permanente and was eventually promoted to Project Manager of Warp9 (a multi-tier PowerBuilder application).  The project involved as many as 15 developers and lasted two years.

In 1998, Dave moved to PeopleMover (now Opus/360) to manage transition of the product PeopleMover Staffing from an outside firm (RDS) to in-house development.  The position involved software development, management and the implementation of configuration management systems.  Later Dave was promoted to Project Manager (with Kalani Manuel) of a “skunk works” project TalentScout, an XML/web service based replacement for PeopleMover Staffing.

In 2000, Dave teamed up with Mark Allen (CEO) and Pedram Abrari (CTO) to found Corticon Technologies, a startup destined to make an impact on the emerging business rules marketplace.  In this effort, Dave has worn a number of hats, everything from software development through project management.  He played a pivotal role in Corticon’s technology direction and had primary responsibility for the design and implementation of Corticon’s flagship product Corticon Studio.

In 2005, Corticon tasked Dave to redesign Corticon Studio from the ground up.  The goal was to create an embeddable, model-driven version of Corticon Studio based on Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) and decoupled from the Eclipse UI to enable Corticon Studio to run either inside or outside of Eclipse, key to clinching a partnership with IDS/Scheer (now Software AG).  The result was Corticon Foundation, a set of platform-neutral APIs that implement the Corticon rule authoring experience.  Today, Foundation runs in Eclipse as Corticon Studio 5.X, in AWT on Software AG’s ARIS, and embedded in many end-user-written applications.

In 2011, Progress Software acquired Corticon Technologies, and retained Dave as Senior Architect/Corticon Engineering, focused on the development of new features beginning with Corticon 5.2, including heavy participation in the development of Corticon Server .NET.

In 2013, SOTA made a strategic decision to move away from the business rules space, retooling to specialize in the development of next-generation cloud-connected applications.  Dave did a “deep dive” to evaluate Web 2.0 technology stacks, including Grails, Ruby on Rails, .NET Framework and Node.js.  After working hands-on with these frameworks for almost a year, SOTA selected React, Redux, Meteor, Node.js, and MongoDB as its preferred technology stack for developing new applications from scratch, particularly multi-tenant SaaS.

Since then, SOTA has worked hand-in-hand with Reevix, Traffic Exchange Network, Quick International, Gavel Forms and Pract.us to develop seven minimum viable products (MVPs) and production-ready systems.

As a byproduct of these development projects, SOTA has created VXFrame, a React/Redux/Meteor/Node.js open-source framework for developing greenfield multitenant SaaS systems at low cost.