Web product finds international niche

PEPPERELL -- In his spare time, Gary Cook likes to contemplate the mathematical mysteries of the Mayan calendar, an ancient system that is said to have pinpointed modern solar eclipses to the minute. So when he decided to start a software company out of his home in Pepperell in the mid-1990s, the first name that popped into Cook's mind was Tzolkin, the Mayan word for calendar.

"There's no special significance to it," said Cook in an interview. "I just liked the name."

Since then, his privately held Tzolkin Corp., based in Pepperell, has grown into a worldwide company with more than 30,000 clients in 79 countries. In September, the company consolidated its operations, which had been divided between two sites on Main Street, into a renovated former post office at 78 Main St.

The company's main product is a program that allows customers to run a web server out of their homes or small businesses at a relatively low annual cost. During an interview last week in Tzolkin's headquarters, Cook explained how he developed the program that launched a breakthrough for home Internet users and won Tzolkin accolades in PC Magazine in 2002.

The concept for the product is difficult for the layperson to grasp, but the basic idea is this: Every time a person logs into the Internet, a numeric code identifying his or her computer to the rest of the Internet usually changes. This fact has made it difficult -- and expensive -- for private web users to operate and modify websites from their homes, mainly because they needed to buy a static numeric address to run such a site.

While working on a way to hook two computers into a single video game in 1996, Cook stumbled onto a method of linking two computers into a single host server, while allowing these numeric codes, or IP addresses, to change.

"The idea was originally just for games," Cook said. "But we eventually realized that there's a lot more to this."

Cook started selling his product, called dynamic DNS service, from his home in 1996 and patented it in 1998. Typically, Tzolkin's service, known simply as TZO, runs about half the price of the alternative, a host server, Cook said.

Though privately held companies like Tzolkin do not have to report their annual earnings, Cook said his company has made a profit for the last four years. That's notable considering the poor climate of the high-tech market, since the dot-com bubble burst around the turn of the century.

But, then again, many high-tech companies met with disaster because they were obtaining venture capital in products they had not developed yet, Cook said. Tzolkin, by contrast, already had its product well in hand by the time high-tech companies started to flop, he said.

"We really didn't have investors breathing down our neck, saying 'What's wrong with you guys?' " he said.

Cook began his career in software engineering in Rochester, N.Y., in 1974, after attending college at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y. He moved to Pepperell in 1980, where he took a job at Application Techniques Inc., a software company in Pepperell. After fiddling with his idea for video games in his spare time, Cook decided to split off and form Tzolkin in 1996.

From local soccer organizations to hobbyists, clients for TZO run the gamut. One of his employees, he said, is remodeling her house at the moment and is using TZO to broadcast pictures of it to relatives across the country.

But many clients are small law firms and companies trying to buoy their corporate image with a less expensive home page, he said.

"A lot of smaller companies want to look big, but they don't want to spend a lot of money," Cook said. "We offer them something for under $100 a year."

Tzolkin offers several different versions of the service, ranging in price between $24.95 and $99.95 annually. The less costly Standard TZO service makes the client's website part of Tzolkin's home page, www.tzo.com. The premier service lets clients choose their own address for their web page.

Although several other high-tech companies have imitated TZO, few, if any, offer the same variety of service, said Oliver Kaven, project leader for PC Magazine, which profiled Tzolkin in an article in 2002. The magazine named Tzolkin a finalist in its innovation awards for 2002.

"There are several companies that provide the same general functionality," Kaven said in an e-mail. "However, TZO has proven to be the most innovative company in their field. They continuously add new features to their service . . . effectively adding value for their customers."

In the last few years, Cook and his 12 employees haven't stopped there, either.

The company now offers an auto-fail system for web pages, a program that automatically switches a company over to an alternative site during a crash or a blackout. In the last year, the company also began designing web pages.

Cook hopes for more expansion in years to come. Next on the agenda may be software that allows customers to own their e-mail server, he said.

"We're hoping to expand some more," he said. "We'll react to what people want."