Multimedia authoring firm AimTech Corp, Nashua, New Hampshire, has lured Andy Huffman from Novell Inc to be its president and chief executive. Huffman, once vice-president and general manager of the distributed computing group in Unix System Laboratories Inc, latterly vice-president enterprise solutions, apparently turned down an offer to head Novell’s $100m GroupWare operation in favour of running his own show. Ten-year-old AimTech, which did $8.5m last year and claims to be looking at $12m to $15m this, began life as a consultancy and switched to offering tools for creating multimedia-based training, presentation and retail applications. The market didn’t grow as fast as anticipated, but it claims it has returned to profit in the last few months. The Visual Basic-like IconAuthor development environment is up under six Unixes, Windows and other operating systems. It is planning a slew of offerings soon and looking at integrating Sun Microsystems Inc’s Java and HotJava WorldWide Web technology in its products, but is interested in others too, including Kaleida Labs Inc’s ScriptX. Huffman plans to take AimTech, claimed to be number two or three in its market, to a public offering next year and then go on the acquisition trail. Former president and chief executive Usman Ismail left AimTech at the end of last year. Former CenterLine Software Inc vice-president of US sales, Jack Slavin, is on board.
