Velant's Academic Roots
Velant founder and CEO H. Donald Ratliff, Ph.D. is also executive director of The Logistics Institute at Georgia Tech. That puts Ratliff in the company of Princeton's Alain Kornhauser of ALK Technologies and MIT's Yossi Sheffi, formerly of Logistics.com, among other university-based transportation software entrepreneurs.
Velant isn't Ratliff's first venture. In 1979, he helped found CAPS Logistics, which Netherlands-based Baan Co. bought for $70 million in 1998.
During the 1980s, optimizing truck fleets meant deciding what deliveries went on what trucks, then routing individual trucks, Ratliff said. Later, computers took on other tasks — matching backhauls, calculating actual road distances and deciding how much could go on each truck, for example. But times have changed.
"Service requirements got tougher. Instead of "deliver Thursday' it became "deliver between 9 and 10 Thursday,'" said Ratliff.
According to Ratliff, recent improvements in routing optimization follow improvements in computing power.
"What makes the optimization problem so difficult is the number of available options. You need some pretty powerful mathematics, and to handle that you need powerful computers. So we designed everything to take advantage of the emerging generation of technology, which is parallel computing," he said.
That involves computer clusters, which Ratliff defined simply as "a whole bunch of them."
But Velant customers aren't expected to buy and maintain computer clusters. Velant is a hosted solution, accessed by customers over the Internet or by some other remote means.
"For our hosted service we use the IBM co-location facility here in Atlanta. In today's technology it doesn't really matter where the computer is,"said Ratliff.
"You want it in a secure facility with back-up generation that's fail-safe. Then you want enough computing power to do it at speed. In general, we think that for dynamic routing, most of our customers need service within about an hour from the time you know what the orders are until you have the routes and schedules built," he said.
"The computer generates solutions without human intervention. It's a lights-out kind of solution development."
Now 57, Ratliff launched Velant in October 2001. The Atlanta-based company employs 50, more than half of them Georgia Tech graduates.
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