Rick Black, President and CEO of ECRM, is an industry veteran with over 40 years of corporate executive and industry experience. In addition to his responsibilities at ECRM, he currently also serves on the boards of five different hi-tech firms. While his plate is always full, his focus never strays too far from the OCR company in which he was first involved in 1980 as CEO of AM International.

As President and CEO of AM International, Black managed several graphic arts enterprises, including Multigraphics, Varityper, and ECRM. After leaving AMI, he and his partner, Bill Givens (also a previous executive at AMI), acquired ECRM in August 1983 and built the company into a technology leader in graphic arts and publishing applications. Yet from a media perspective, he keeps a fairly-low profile. WhatTheyThink took the opportunity to interview Black to get this exclusive update on ECRM and to gain his perspective on the current state and future prospects of our industry.

WTT: Mr. Black, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. You have an impressive background that I think our readers would find interesting, especially your involvement in the 1990’s with bringing the first CD-ROM readers to market and the development of CD-Rewritable chip-set and drivers. Can you tell us a little about that experience?
           
RB: My partners and I were early investors in Oak Technology in Sunnyvale, California. David Tsang was the founder of the company and became a very close colleague and associate. In 1991, we were making VGA chips, a very competitive market, and exploring new outlets for the technology. The company was losing money and David asked me to come out and work with him, which I did for about 15 months as a consultant and member of his Board of Directors. While sorting through all of the company’s different projects, I came across a CD-ROM chip-set project. We took the project to Microsoft and convinced them to incorporate the ATAPI standard and IDE interface into Windows. This developed as the standard for reading CD-ROMs.