Interview with Nicholas (Nic) Birtles

Nicholas Birtles, known as Nic by all his close friends, was born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire in December 1944.  His mother was a chartered secretary and his father was an officer in the army, was taken prisoner of war. After the war, the family moved to Germany, where his father having chosen to remain in the army was put in charge of the local British Army camp. Nic says: “On returning to England, my father became head of logistics for the regiment that he was attached to. He was, I suppose, very mathematical.  He had a very, sophisticated slide rule which was a round, which he tried to teach me how to use when I was quite young. It’s one of those things that always sticks in my mind, and I probably get some of my mathematical bent from him.”

Having started his early education in Germany, Nic’s parents decided to send him to a small public school, day school, called Hymers College in Hull, when returned from Germany.  Nic says: “I didn’t do particularly well in my Eleven Plus, but my parents ensured that I stayed on in the same school. Maths and chemistry were the two subjects I did well at school and then I got a place at Manchester (now UMIST) to read chemistry.”  He adds: “I failed physics, which really annoyed me, but I got good marks in both Maths and Chemistry.”

Despite having done very well at chemistry at school, thanks to a passionate teacher who mentored Nic, he found the university course boring. He explains: “When I got to university, the chemistry was completely different, I didn’t identify with the teachers at all, and found it quite boring.  I had been very good at maths and was always one of the top of the class at school, and again, I didn’t find it quite so stimulating when I got to university. Then I found these things called computers and started to teach myself to program.”

Nic learned to program in FORTRAN, original FORTRAN II, and then FORTRAN IV using the Atlas computer at UMIST, bored with his chemistry course, Nic wanted to switch courses but the university only offered MSc & PhD level courses in computer science, so he opted instead to apply for a role as a trainee computer programmer.

In 1963, Nic began his career as a trainee computer programmer at the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), at Friars House, on Blackfriars Road in London.

Nic says: “They had a big computer centre nearby, so I used to go over and spend time there.  I liked being hands-on on the computer in those days. My first job was as a computer assistant; loading up punch card decks and running computer systems. After a year or so, I then got into the programming side and wanted to prove that I could actually do it.”

CEGB used IBM 7090 and 1401 computers with the programming language FORTRAN IV & Assembler code to develop applications to monitor power station construction. Nic explains: “In the early 1960s there was a lot of power stations being built across the UK, we would get information coming in from contractors on the building work going on and then it would be coded up onto punched cards, run into programs to identify how they were doing, very early Critical Path Analysis, to be able to see where they were in all the different phases of the building project, and what was likely to go wrong and delay the project. It was a fascinating application, I found it really quite interesting.”

Nic Birtles talking about his first job:

Nic moved to English Leo Marconi (EELM) which later became part of ICL. He was based at Hartree House, on the Queensway in London. He says: “I was writing  programs in a language called CLEO, which was the language for the LEO III, and it was similar to COBOL, but, it stood for Common Language for the Expression of Orders.”

One of Nic’s first projects was to write part of an order system for Lyons Bakery. He explains: “I was writing part of a fairly big system for the Lyons Bakery company which was very advanced in those days.  EELM had developed a machine called a Lector, and then a successor would be called AutoLector.” The project involved automatic character recognition and allowed the order team to tick cards which were then read by the Lector. Nic adds: “I wrote some of the actual machine language codes for the Lector and the AutoLector, which was fascinating stuff for one of the order processing systems which was written in CLEO.”

Nic goes on to say how he was always drawn towards working at the forefront of technology. Having spent a year working on this system, he was asked to go to Edinburgh for a year to help train Edinburgh Corporation’s IT team who had brought the new RCA System 4 which was being marketed by English Electric LEO Computers Ltd. A machine compatible to IBM’s 360 systems.

Nic jokes that he “survived by reading the manual every night and trying to keep a couple of pages ahead of the people I was supposed to be getting up to speed on it.  It was a fun time and I really enjoyed it.”

Reflecting on developing these training skills, Nic says: “When I look back on my life, I realise I had about three or four key mentors who made quite a big difference to my career, opening me up to new opportunities and introducing me to new things.  One of these mentors said to me, ‘Nic, you’re not bad as a techie, but you’re much better explaining complex technical things to people who don’t really understand it, who are not conversant with it.’  This off the cuff comment ensured, that slowly I moved out of being pure technical and trying to look just at the, the technical issues, but looking at all the things around it.  Then I went into pre-sales technical work and eventually into sales, and that’s where my career moved forward.”

In 1967, having left English Electric LEO to follow his dream to travel for a while, Nic went to see the World Exposition in Montreal in 1967. He says: “I decided to go and have a look and I ended up getting a job with Burroughs in Montral, I joined there in a technical role initially, but my mentor was a sale manager and I quickly moved into a pre-sales technical support and then a junior sales role after a few years there.”

Burroughs had headquarters in Detroit and were originally manufactured accounting machines and card sorters, later moving into computers. It became a competitor to IBM with other smaller, international computer companies, known as the BUNCH.

Nic says: “I was working on the Burroughs 3500, which was a very innovative computer, and had the first MCP, Master Control Program, which was an operating system that allowed the computer operator  to have multiple programs running at the same time, which was quite innovative and new at that time.”

Nic’s first role was to project manage the implementation of the Burroughs 3500 at CIL, the Canadian subsidiary of ICI.  He says: “It became a very successful implementation and went very well.  That was my introduction there.  I had a great time in Montreal.  I love skiing, and so I was off every weekend skiing and living a fun life as a young bachelor.”

In his next project, Nic managed a team of five to implement the installation of B3500s for the Canadian unemployment insurance scheme across five computer centres across Canada.  Of this, his first management experience, he says: “I was probably pretty crass at it. I look back on myself now, I would give people orders, tell them what to do, and then left them to get on with it.  We learn a lot as we develop.”

Of the corporate culture, he says: “It was very much about innovation.  They loved the fact that they were innovative and different, and they used to be very critical technically of IBM, and those were the days when IBM used to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD). An IT manager could never be fired for buying IBM.  So, you were always having to show why your product was significantly technically better, and it would be more effective and more efficient for their needs.  It was quite a tough sell against IBM in those days. , but I had a great boss who really helped me and developed me and showed me all sorts of new things, until he retired.”

In 1972 after five years with Burroughs Nic moved to Comshare, a computer timesharing and software company based in Toronto.  Nic says: “We were going into parts of organisations to develop systems that they could run from a teletype in their own office then connecting over the telephone network to Comshare’s central computer and see the results instantly.  It was innovative, fast-changing, and exciting.”

One of Nic’ projects was for the Toronto Star newspaper who needed to speed up the scheduling of their printing operations and understand how many different issues they were going to print.  He says: “They had many different print presses working, and sometimes some of the print presses weren’t working fully.  So I built a very early type of Excel model to be able to model all this.  I built this in BASIC because there wasn’t any Excel in these days; the early 1970s. The programme was a great success and I just enjoyed that, because you saw very quick results. This was long before the days of the PC coming out and being able to provide people with that sort of instant response was exciting, interesting and a lot of fun.”

After two years with Comshare in Canada, Nic was invited  to move to their London office where there were plans to expand into Europe. Nic adds: “I moved back to the UK in late 1973, and started with ComShare there as a salesman again. They grew very quickly with very big successful computer centre in Chelsea. The company had a tremendous culture.  It was fast-pace, make things happen, you had to deliver, there was no place to hide, but it was a lot of fun.”

Nic was quickly promoted to Sales Directory with 200 salespeople in his team working on sales, pre-sales technical and installation. He adds: “Then we started opening up internationally and had offices in France, Germany, in the Netherlands and set up distributors in Australia and Japan and various places like that.  And I was involved in setting up all that which was quite interesting.”

In the eighties with the introduction of the desktop PC, Comshare moved into software development for in-house financial modelling with a product called Wizard, which was like a multi-dimensional Excel, which was sold to big corporates globally.

After 10 years and realising that he had gone as far as he could at Comshare, Nic decided to move on and accepted a role to set up and run the European & International operations of a Californian start-up called Ingres, which sold Relational Database technology. Ingres was the first main competitor of Oracle and later IBM who eventually developed DB2 which was integrated into the mid-range System/38 and later the AS/400. 

Nic comments: “Oracle had been operating in the UK for about three years before I set up the Ingres operations in Europe, and they were great competitors.  Geoff Squire, who ran Oracle, and I would have stand-up fights through the press; we always used to try and position ourselves as the good guys.  Ingres had come from the academic side and we saw ourselves as the white hats and that they were the black hats. Again, we had a lot of fun, it was a great time.”

In 1990, Nic was next recruited by Gupta, a client server software company based in Silicon Valley, to develop their European business. Nic explains: “Gupta was doing on a PC what Ingres had been doing on minis & mainframes. They had developed a set of software to do SQL databases, particularly around networked databases. I went there and in three years I grew the European business to be bigger than the US business from a standing start. Again, I had a lot of fun with that.  I brought a couple of my old managers from Ingres across who also were looking to change and we had a great three or four years; we were very, very, successful.”

Nic set out to find big customers and great big deals including a multimillion-pound deal with Siemens in the early days of MRI scanners and with companies needing databases for graphical software for early SatNav systems, among other projects. Following his success in Europe, in 1993, Nic was invited by the founder, Umang Gupta to move to Silicon Valley to run the US business as well and take over worldwide sales & operations.  One of his first successes was to set up a reseller deal with Oracle, he explains: “Oracle had tried to develop a database version of their software to run on PCs but couldn’t. They just hadn’t got the right culture and the right experience set, so I negotiated  a deal with Oracle to resell Gupta’s software on PCs.”  However, this resulted Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison, wanting to acquire Gupta and when I told Mr. Gupta that he should accept Oracle’s offer, my card was marked, and I had no choice but to leave Gupta. However, I was proved right as Gupta’s sales declined quickly after this.

Nic left Gupta in 1996 and became Chief Operations Officer at British start-up, Constellar, which specialised in enterprise application integration. Once again, Nic was successful in helping the company grow and secure large orders. He says: “This was about bringing data from lots of different sources, what people used to call the ‘islands of information’ and being able to integrate all this without having to change all your systems, to be able to produce new sets of consolidated information, and things like that.”  Having started as COO, Nic became CEO when the founder left.

In 2001, having sold Constellar to DataMirror, Nic spent a year at Support.com Inc running international sales; a move he describes as “not one of my better moves.”

He explains: “A lot of people don’t realise that the dotcom crash in early 2000 really hit Silicon Valley.  A third of all the people employed in the IT industry lost their jobs in the Bay Area.  There was huge cutback there, whole office parks were empty, suddenly there was just nobody there anymore.  It was quite a devastating time.  In the UK, the impact was nothing like as great as it was in Silicon Valley.”

In 2002 Nic and his wife decided to move back to the UK and begin a new phase of his life saying that he was starting to “feel a bit burnt out by fast changing corporate life” and wanting to do things to give something back. Upon his return to the UK, he re-activated his membership of the WCIT which he initially joined in 1988. He says: “I got involved and started doing quite a few things there, helped fundraising for a new Academy school, which I am still a Governor of today. Eventually I was asked to go on the path to become Master and I’ve had a fantastic time being involved in a lot of interesting projects.  I’m still very active now with the livery company and trying to look at putting something back, having had a relatively interesting career.”

Nic also became a non-exec director of a number of early-stage companies, and did some angel investing.

Nic is still working part time with AERALIS, a UK project to create the world’s first modular military aircraft system.  The cutting-edge concept was created by his step-son Tristan Crawford who asked Nic for advice.

Nic explains: “It starts with what we call the ‘common core fuselage’, which is the basic fuselage of the aircraft and then you can attach different wings & engines on this. Tristan designed this so that you’ve got a central pod underneath the fuselage where you put the engine and we have a patent on this and on the modular design.  This concept is quite normal in civilian aircraft that you can buy an engine from Pratt and Whitney, GE, or Rolls Royce, and they all fit in a pod underneath the wing.  Well nobody has ever done this with a military aircraft until we came along.”

Today, Nic is involved in raising funds and investments. The first round of funding raised £150,000 which allowed them to file the patents and run feasibility studies on the size of the market  Nic says: “We found out there was a market of about six and a half thousand aircraft out there that need to be replaced during the next 20 years.”  The team are now finalising the  raise of £50 million to build 2 flying pre-production aircraft. They have also recently announced a multi-year contract with the RAF.

As well as the aerospace engineering side of the project, there’s also a huge amount of investment needed in IT. Nic says: “We’re looking at IT across every area.  We’ve already got some people doing work on a self-learning, AI and machine learning flight control system, so that it can teach itself to improve its flying and to be able to adjust to when you get high winds and different air pressures etc. But the big part of it is collecting data, and the big data analytics opportunity with this is tremendous.”

Asked if he has any bitcoins, Nic says: “I’m probably a fool because I didn’t buy any bitcoins.  To me, it’s the ultimate Ponzi scam of all time.  It’s pure bullshit marketing.  There is no value to them at all other than hype and they will probably crash badly at some stage.”

On the question of whether public sector IT projects fail more often than private sector ones, Nic says: “What happens in the public sector is that they always try and go for a huge big-bang type solutions …. They’re great, but, they always underestimate the complexity of dealing with the myriad of exceptions. … I think the reason you have these big failures is that they try and accommodate too much, without looking at how much change they’re going to have to make, and then find that the changes that are they going to need to be made to processes and practices that people have, is too difficult.  So they say, ‘We’ll have to change the software to handle all these different myriad of complexities’ and that causes the problems.  That’s why you get these big failures.”

“The latest example of that is the track and trace system which they wanted to have a big centralised system.  Everybody I know in the IT business told them to have smaller modular systems on a local basis, get the local system working, and then leverage it up from there.  They wanted this Big Bang approach, we’re going to build these apps and we’ll do everything ourselves.  We don’t need any input from Google or Apple.  We’re going to do everything ourselves.  And it’s a monumental flop. We spent 20-odd billion £s in building useless software that doesn’t work. That’s one of the reasons why we have one of the highest COVID death rates in the world.  It’s not the only reason but it’s one of them.”

Nic says: “I think having helped a lot of people, some charities and other things I’ve been involved in, do better and to see greater opportunity and bigger horizons.  Mentoring people is about opening the doors to help them see things in a different way than they were seeing them before.  It’s about helping them see a path and a vision of how they can achieve their dreams.  If I’ve helped do that for a few people, I really feel very honoured.”

Interviewed by Richard Sharpe on the 22nd February 2021

Transcription by Susan Hutton

Abstract by Lynda Feeley