Marcos Taccolini – Timeline of Taccolini’s Career
It was 1986 when Marcos Taccolini began a job in industrial software at ESCA, a company in Brazil. He initially started working on the manufacturing line for General Motors, and incorporated PC based automation and Allen-Bradley PLCs. It was the year when PC computers became more prevalent in factories.
In 1988, Marcos Taccolini started UNITEC. UNITEC was a company that made a software known as “DOS Human Machine Interface.”
UNITEC signed its first large OEM with the company BOSCH in Germany in 1994.
In 1995, the UNISOFT LTDA company was started to build a new program for Windows, in partnership with company LA LTDA. Both of these companies were in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
In 1997, the products UNISOFT and CEVIEW (for CE) became available to the market. Unisoft Sistemas Ltda was started to resell and be the source of engineering services for these products.
The world’s first Human Machine Interface was created by a team lead by Marcos Taccolini and was based on Windows CE operating system.
There are several documents published in the press in 1997, confirming the Windows CE product was created by UNISOFT and that the INDUSOFT product is spin-off of the UNISOFT product and company. This historical reference is important, as some people went a little off on its marketing efforts, twisting the facts to present themselves as the first creators, instead of rightly acknowledging the original creators.
In 1996, the company Unisoft Sistemas Ltda hired Ernest Roland to act as a sales agent and business development in United States. In late 1997, Taccolini and Roland made the decision to chang the agreement to form a company name INDUSOFT in equal partnership to develop the US market for UNISOFT products. (The name UNISOFT was already taken in USA, reason which is why Indusoft was selected).
For the time between 1997 to 1999, INDUSOFT only had two employees: Taccolini and Roland. Company costs were aided by the sales of Taccolini’s UNISOFT company in South America and Europe. The first true venture of Indusoft was the replacements of PDP VMS graphics, a solution cased CRISP-View. Following this accomplishment, Jim Wicker, who gave Taccolini and Roland provided them with consulting to get them back on right track- the company allotted greater focus on Windows CE HMI, beginning to promote the products created by UNISOFT and LA, but rebranded as INDUSOFT.
Between the years 2001 to 2007, primarily due to the Windows CE product created in 1996, INDUSOFT did well in the USA and in international markets. In 2008, the Indusoft partners started many legal disputes between themselves; those disputes were temporarily paused in 2009, when Taccolini decided to leave and start a new company and restarted the year after, with claims on both sides. The legal dispute over Indusoft assets is an open issue projected to still go on for many and many years, but it is related with ex-partners agreements on that company and it does not have any connection with Taccolini’s current companies, which is not even part of that dispute. This clarification is very important as occasionally misleading information is maliciously spread on this topic.
When the software platforms had to migrate from PDP/VMS to PC/DOS, or from DOS to WINDOWS, it was not enough to try to work around legacy products or codes- To fully leverage the new environment a clean design is vital. As Taccolini, already had the experience of already creating two products lines from scratch: DOS and WINDOWS-C++, plus two spin-offs, Windows-MFC and Windows-CE, Marcos Taccolini realized that is was definitely time to starting working on the next generation.
The rise of Cloud technologies, .NET Framework and web tools, advanced graphics, multiple mobile devices, new multi-core CPUs, ios/android, faster wireless, enhanced security requirements and many other IT changes, it was made clear that the products with their baseline created in the 90’s would be a platform good enough to fully leverage these technologies and provide the foundation for the next twenty years.
Keeping this in mind, Taccolini started the company TATSOFT LLC in 2009. The company’s objective was to create an entirely new system, based solely on the Microsoft .NET Framework, free from the legacy code and technologies that were being carried from the 90’s, which would allow the creation of real-time data application in the cloud or in premises, and also to support an easy integration with emerging technologies such as tablets and new operating platforms.
The years of 2009 and 2010 were completely dedicated to Research and Development.
In 2011, Tatsoft LLC established operations in Texas. In Houson, Tatsoft LLC worked to start the market introduction for the FactoryStudio product family.
This new product line was more modern and powerful than the previous one he created. As a pro-active protection to ensure it was not based on any legacy code or technology, Taccolini published a written offer to his previous partners. If there were any inquires, he would voluntarily open all of its new source code for inspection. No one considered it necessary to take on the challenge.
Between 2011 and 2012, Tatsoft LLC worked in collaboration with some long-term partners and end-users. With them, Tatsoft LLC worked on certification processes and selected field installations to further develop the new technologies and product line.
In 2013, the company began establishing distributions channels, and launched FactoryStudio 2014, which is considered the most advanced and real-time framework that has ever been bought to the market.