Randy Hilgers is the founder of New Vision Software, Incorporated nvsi.com. Founded in 1994 to use technology to make it easier and faster to learn. Creator of SofTutor Learning SofTutor.com.
Prior to starting at New Vision Software, Incorporated, Mr. Hilgers worked at Fermi National Laboratory, Batavia, IL, Sargent & Lundy Engineering, Chicago, IL, Intergraph Corporation, Huntsville, AL, and AT&T, Western Electric & Bell Labs, Naperville & Lisle, IL.
During his time at AT&T, Mr. Hilgers won the prestigious AT&T Lisle Center Award for Excellence in Engineering in 1988 for his innovative work on automated bank teller systems. He followed that up in 1989 winning the AT&T Lisle Center award for Excellence in Marketing for helping develop one of the first client server applications for the publishing industry and presented it at Siggraph 1989. Only one award per discipline was given out per year. Mr. Hilgers was the first to receive back to back awards. Also during the five years he spent at AT&T, he worked as a computer systems manager in engineering & design on Unigraphics CAD systems, a Unix systems developer, level 4 technical support specialist, taught Unix internals and other classes to developers and support personnel, researched thermal analysis and fluid mechanics of early pc design cooling systems, was one of the leading unix performance analyst and taught classes on rebuilding kernels for optimum performance and a unix security analyst.
If it could not be done, Mr. Hilgers always found a way.
Mr. Hilgers went on to Intergraph Corporation where he received the best of the best award for developing a system that improved internal efficiencies saving thousands of man hours and over $9,000,000 annually. During his time at Intergraph Mr. Hilgers continued to evolve his system until he left in 1992 to work in the nuclear power industry.
Mr. Hilgers has a natural ability of observing and developing cost effective solutions to improve human efficiencies.
At Sargent and Lundy Engineering, Mr. Hilgers managed a system which managed engineering documents and change revisions between contractors, subcontractors and COM Ed's for their Nuclear Power Plants.
At Fermi National Lab, Mr. Hilgers ran the high performance IBM and SGI Unix & server farms. He planned and managed the datacenter move of over 450 computers to their new location, he was given 24 hours and 96% of the computers were up within 4 hours. He also developed a graphical accounting system and designed and built cluster performance tools, so analysts could graphically see where to submit their batch jobs for highest performance of their jobs. At the D0 experiment, he developed one of the first systems to tap into office desktop computers to use their processing power after hours.
In 1994, Mr. Hilgers founded New Vision Software, Incorporated to use technology to help people learn better, faster and more enjoyable. Later in that year they released the first SofTutor system. Over time SofTutor has grown to support over 250,000 users and saving millions of man hours and hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue. One customer realized that by using SofTutor for technical support and only saved each employee 15 minutes a day, which would result in saving the company over $41,000,000 for supporting their 19,000 employees per year. Over the years SofTutor has evolved to an online system and an open learning platform. Since 1995, SofTutor has maintained a 99.976% user satisfaction.
Randy's background is in IT, Computer Graphics and Physics. He graduated from ISU in 1984 with a B.S. degree. While a freshman at ISU, he convinced the Dean of the Physics Department to let him do research work on high energy laser physics, something that was generally reserved for post grad students. Mr. Hilgers developed techniques for developing holograms, using lasers to measure stress and loads on materials and using lasers for communications. Mr. Hilgers was also awarded a A+++ (the highest ever at that time 1984) for his final project, he developed a system using 3D to calculate and plot what would happen to an object if it was to stop moving in time.