Message from Maynard L. Dokken, President & CEO 1997-2001
Milinx was a culmination of over a decade of work. It was named as a derivative of Minix, a Unix OS used to develop the original ASP SaaS server in 1988 by SuccessInc. As well the AssuredCard and AssuredCredit technology were merged into Milinx which provided it a head start on the Hosted Online Payment Gateway and Hosted or Portal SaaS, PaaS and IaaS services which Milinx further developed and operated.
During my tenure as CEO from 1997-2001 Milinx was an innovation and development powerhouse. The company, governance, financial and strategic direction were solid and successful. This site represents the state of the company while I was President & CEO. SuccessInc, AssuredCredit, AssuredCard & Milinx content was pulled directly from website archive links, uspto.gov, sec.gov, news releases and other independent sites and documents.
The strategic direction we charted accelerated growth in the Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) sectors including: cloud; wireless; mobile; (ASP SaaS, ASP PaaS); infrastructural service gateways; bio-encryption; text-to-speech; voice-response; meta relational databases and much more. Years and in some cases a decade or more ahead of our time.
Our philosophy is unchanged. Build a more balanced future for all digital users, we call digital citizens.
Maynard L. Dokken (2022)
NOTE: On August 30, 2001 based on legal advice I left as President and CEO after 14 years of research, development and disruptive innovations. The next stages of ASP SaaS to PaaS and IaaS would need to wait a few more years before these innovations appeared again. I had disagreed with the direction of the new management team approved by shareholders which excluded officers or directors voting shares. Milinx had already exceeded 30,000 active users for a cutting edge technology. The pivot ultimately caused the collapse of the project and operational market entity. The new management had requested that I stay on as Chairman to deal with corporate governance issues. On January 29, 2002 I resigned as Chairman and formed a foundation called MarkCrest to continue with future endeavors and to support innovators and inventors worldwide.
World Leading ASP SaaS, PaaS & IaaS Technology 1997-2001
Milinx Appears on Alexander Haig's World Business Review TV Series — November 13, 2000 BOCA RATON, Fla.—(BUSINESS WIRE) — Multi-Media Productions (USA), Inc. is proud to announce the appearance of Maynard L. Dokken, president and CEO of Milinx Business Group, Inc., on World Business Review.
Launch of Data Center and Cloud Services
Milinx announced the launch of its Application Data Center to set Industry Standard in SaaS, PaaS and IaaS with a suite of subscription based services and platforms including web-delivered business software products in 2000.
This included:
- Server, Storage, and Network Subscription Services
- Web-based applications written in Java and ported to Oracle 8i Database
- Hosting of proprietary solutions at their wholly owned Application Data Center
Key Technologies and Features
The company introduced several innovative technologies:
- miDESKTOP: A hosted operating system environment
- miNETWORK: A network configuration wizard and administration control
- miDRIVE: For data storage and permission levels
- miWEBVOICE: Communications over IP
Integration with legacy applications through import/export features for accounting and address books.
Business Model and Market Position
Milinx positioned itself as:
- An Application Service Provider (ASP)
- A Software as a Service (SaaS) Provider
- A Platform as a Service (PaaS) Provider
- An Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Provider
- A cost-effective alternative to traditional IT systems, network and software management and distribution
- A solution for containing the growth of IT spending for small-to-medium enterprises.
Market Impact
The company reported significant early success:
In its first week of sales, Milinx claimed to have acquired more clients than some established competitors had in longer periods. By October 2000, Milinx announced it had exceeded 30,000 active users.
Security and Infrastructure
Milinx emphasized security in its offerings:
- Implemented SSL encryption for secure connections
- Become a Secure Certificate Authority
- Utilized Sun Microsystems hardware, positioning itself as one of the world's largest scalable pure-play ASPs SaaS PaaS and IaaS using Oracle, Sun and Cisco technology.
Milinx Business Services, Inc., an ASP, SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, provides a complete suite of rented software applications. It provides tools that enable companies to operate more efficiently and economically in a secure operating environment. The company rents these applications, stored on its own servers, to businesses and individuals for a monthly fee. This delivery model reduces the cost of software used, cuts the implementation time for new software and hardware from months to weeks, and allows for frequent upgrades. It also provides best-of-breed applications, virtually eliminating the need to maintain a large, expensive and increasingly scarce human resource component: internal IT staff.
The ASP, SaaS, PaaS and IaaS model represents a huge advancement in the manner in which companies manage their information assets. Milinx has a key advantage over many ASP, SaaS, PaaS and IaaSs, in that it has instituted a clear and focused strategy to develop demand in, what is, after all, an industry in its nascent stages. Milinx has complete understanding of the need for a simple entry point to cloud computing linked to a logical upgrade route leading to more complex applications. This deep understanding of the technology buying process is a result of Milinx's early adoption of the ASP, SaaS, PaaS and IaaS model has led to successful market acceptance among customers from as early as 1998.
Maynard L. Dokken, president and CEO of Milinx Business Services, Inc., appears on World Business Review to discuss how the ASP model affects the business landscape, and how Milinx is dealing with the prospect of commoditization of the ASP, SaaS, PaaS and IaaS industry space. He also describes what Milinx is doing to enable customers to build communities within this secure digital platform. "Our goal is to become the leading global ASP, SaaS, PaaS and IaaS in the SME and Service Provider marketplace and sectors for business communications, productivity and e-commerce solutions," said Dokken.
Vinton Cerf, vice president of WorldCom and Internet pioneer, serves as industry expert on the panel. He explained the reason that the ASP, SaaS, PaaS and IaaS models makes so much sense in spite of the loss of control that it represents for companies. "I think the critical factor here is cost and cost savings. A company today, if it has to buy software and as you point out, put it into a whole bunch of PCs and then maintain that, it's going to find potentially higher cost then it would otherwise," said Cerf.
The product targeted to the SOHO (small office/home office) sector is comprised of an initial suite of Web presence and e-commerce-enabling tools. Web presence and e-commerce tools allow a company or individual to create their own Web site and sell products and services online. Milinx's three main product suites are Milinx Portal suite, Milinx Communicator Suite and Milinx CRM Suite. These offerings will be augmented in scale and substance in the near term to include a portal suite (Milinx Portal Suite), an electronic storefront (miStore) and a content solution (miContent). The communications suite includes a solution similar to a virtual intranet delivered through the ASP model (miOffice), a unified messaging solution (miMessaging), a Virtual Private Network or VPN (miNetwork), an e-storage solution (miStorage), and a billing application (miBiling).
The Milinx suite of products has undergone numerous iterations in response to feedback from clients. The company also devotes considerable effort to R&D. One of the recurrent themes in the ASP industry is the prospect of ASP, SaaS, PaaS and IaaSs enabling groups to create electronic communities within a secure digital and ecommerce service provider systems using the Milinx datacenter with wired and wireless network and mobile business apps. To this end, Milinx is developing a customizable portal interface for its clients. It has numerous patents pending, particularly in the areas of hosted online payment gateways, ecommerce, biometric encryption, voice context e-mail, voice recognition, and virtual call center environments. The company is also building its own "toolkit," which will enable ease of customization and design for the many applications that it offers.
1997 First eCommerce Payment Gateway
In 1994 Maynard L. Dokken and AssuredCard were launching an in-house online payment technology and by 1995 had an online payment and debt system operating with the SuccessInc CRM. ecommerce payment gateway by AssuredCredit with a hosted version in 1999. It was the beginning of the payment gateway ASP PaaS and ASP IaaS market.
In a December 2000 interview he was reminded that it was nearly a decade before he was at the forefront of commercial use of the Internet, when he established Success, Inc., using an online corporate recruitment company app called APP1.
SuccessInc continued working on the APPNET and APP1 model and had developed a remote CRM and accounting connection system for small businesses. The sale by subscription of this CRM eCommerce system in 1998 presaged the Application Service Provider (ASP) subscription model which many high-tech companies embraced as the future. The technology developed during this period included the Hosted Online eCommerce Payment Gateway.
Innovation, Research, Development & Leadership!
Innovation, Research & Development were part of the DNA at Milinx. We focus on developing proprietary technologies that will enhance and upgrade the quality of the services we provide as an ASP, SaaS, PaaS and IaaS provider. Our goal is to provide additional and unique competitive advantages and to sustain our sector predominance.
It was not until 2008 Google released open source Buffer Protocol as a Data Interchange Format.
2008 - In 2001 Milinx technology included the integration of a Universal OS for all current operating systems with automated data formatting on its MMAP Platform. A similar data technology was not released until 2008 when Google released "open source" the Buffer Protocol as a Data Interchange Format. Milinx was in production with miDesktop and universal data exchange using Java Beans and Oracle technology with meta-data class mapping in 2001.
2011 - Chromebook was not released until almost a decade later.
2011 -As the world absorbed the first fully hosted desktop operating system it was not until a decade later Chromebook was released. It should be noted not only was the Universal OS or World First Hosted Desktop configured to deliver a hosted version it was also being introduced as a Linux version using Sun Microsystem servers and Java Beans to deliver all services to Microsoft devices through a Mandrake OS Sun Microsystem integration.