Control goes high tech
When Curry started in this industry, those decisions were made by engineers who monitored gauges and turned valves. Technological advancements through the years put the decision-making process into the cyber world of zeroes and ones. "Controls originally were pneumatically actuated," says Curry. "Then the industry evolved to electronic controls and the industrial computer. I could see the evolution to a programmable logic controller (PLC)."

Curry wasn't alone in anticipating the next technological advancement in heavy processing. "Big computer companies were trying to evolve from a data processing environment to do real time control in process industry," he says. "But that was a failure. PLC took ladder logic, which didn't use Fortran or Cobol. The computer had to make real-time decisions and there was no computing power there to make it work.

"The personal computer came along and then Bill Gates brought on Microsoft," Curry says. "It was more user friendly and led to the marriage of industrial process controls operated by a PC."

It was the early 1980s, the Microsoft's disk operating system ruled. "DOS wasn't great but we could do some things with it," says Curry. "At the time, 64K memory was what we had to work with; 128K was big time. When we'd write programs the first thing on our mind was how much memory to use. Memory is so cheap now it's not even a consideration. We're selling systems to automatically make those decisions and trigger the response."

If a process needs to be shut down, "today's systems write a report that shows the conditions that led to the shutdown and alarm," Curry says. "The Environmental Protection Agency wants these reports. For instance, water treatment plants use chlorine. Reports generated for the state show the amount of chlorine used, how much affluent has been discharged from the plant and how much chlorine was dumped into the river."

Undeniably, a knowledge of heavy industry and how the PC could benefit processes has played a significant role at Curry Controls. "The PC has increased our business," says Curry. "It put us into another market. There was a lot of fear of how to program Ôprogrammable controllers.' I built our staff to write these programs. Nobody else was doing it."

Move to Lakeland?
Curry admits that recruiting the engineers to write this state-of-the-art software had its challenges. "Lakeland was a hard sell 10 years ago," he says. "I had a business in Houston at the time and I tried to get those engineers to move to Lakeland, but none of them would move."

Those engineers that would seriously consider a career with Curry made their demands. "Everybody wanted a percent of my business," he says. "They wanted the ownership without any of the risk. As the company has grown, it has become easier to recruit."

Curry Controls is currently operating with 90 employees, half of whom are technical staff. "I've recruited engineers from all over the world," says Curry. "While it's been hard recruiting, once they get here they love it. I have two or three engineers who have been here 15 to 25 years. We have very little turnover. My talent is knowing how to put talent together. We have a great support base of people to make things happen."