| "We think the world will be converging
and the networks (that) people communicate on will be converging,"
says co-founder Fred Mueller. "We're just ahead of our time ... by
two or three years. People have been talking about this, but we've already
done it.
FreBon has over 1,000 clients, including U.S.
Marines stationed in Iwakuni, Japan, who are earning their college undergraduate
and MBA degrees from professors at Mississippi State, all by way of interactive
videoconferencing, Internet access and data exchange. Corporate CEOs who
are on the road are meeting with home-office staff from their hotel rooms.
Doctors and medical specialists are consulting with outpatients in Appalachia
by using FreBon's network. The U.S. Navy has just begun "LifeLines,"
an unprecedented human resource effort that links naval personnel to one
another, as well as to their families, from anywhere in the world.
Mueller says large law firms are coming to
FreBon to establish links between their different offices. The states of
Massachusetts and Delaware came on board this year to join a growing number
of state governments already under contract that are utilizing the company's
expertise. Horner estimates FreBon's clients are divided "pretty evenly"
between state agencies, federal government and commercial businesses.
Business is good: The company generated revenues
of more than $11 million in fiscal 1998, up 349 percent since 1995. In
addition to its McLean headquarters, FreBon has offices in Massachusetts,
Michigan, New York, Maryland, Florida, Georgia and Japan. Over the past
year, the company has doubled its employees to 40.
More importantly, FreBon is beginning to build
its own complete network. Customers now have the full array of multimedia
services.
"We have created our own network,"
says Horner. "We're actually providing the network between all of
the points that link in a multimedia conference. We provide the transmission,
the equipment and the management."
Horner and Mueller formed FreBon in 1991 after
meeting through a teleconference project for the CIA. Horner is a specialist
in security technology and Mueller is a video expert.
But even the CIA wouldn't be able to keep FreBon's
success a secret now: FreBon has built its reputation largely by word of
mouth, but the company is about to hire its first marketing director.
Now, as the company's potential is realized
and its ideas become more mainstream, a real-life George Jetson could work
from another galaxy and still keep old man Spacely apprised in real-time
video, with all the facts and figures right there on screen.
It's not hard to imagine that someday, while
on the road, George could even phone home and see Jane, his wife, talk
to his daughter, Judy, and even see his boy, Elroy, off to bed.
© April 1999, Media General Business Publications
Inc.,
publisher of Virginia Business Magazine
|
