Sachs ('93) awarded Outstanding Young Engineering Alumnus Award

June 10, 2002 -- The Rice Engineering Alumni Association has named Eric Sachs (BACS, 1993) the recipient of the 2002 Outstanding Young Engineering Alumnus Award.

Sachs founded his first company in 1993, during his final year at Rice. Wolf Communications, for which Sachs served as Chief Technology Officer (CTO), was the first company to provide corporate e-mail outsourcing. Temporarily named WorldCom, the company is now known as Interliant.

All of the company's founding team members were Rice graduates, with the company retaining a high percentage of Rice alums through the years. Interliant's staff grew to 200 by 1999, when it was acquired. The company went public that summer, listed as INIT on the NASDAQ, and remains a leading global application service provider.

[Eric Sachs and Joanna Griffin]

Despite Eric Sach's remarkable accomplishments, perhaps his greatest achievement is yet to come. In August 2002, he will marry Joanna Griffin. Congratulations!

While at Interliant, Sach's work included joint development efforts with both Lotus and Microsoft to develop software that would allow ISVs to create hostable applications on their respective collaboration platforms. During that same time, he also served as a part-time lecturer for Rice's Computer Science Department for two years, and served on the funding campaign for the 5th year reunion of his class.

"I hope I will have many other opportunities in the future to contribute to Rice and the community," Sachs said.

Sachs now serves as CTO for Libritas, a company that has more than doubled its revenue over the last year. Acting as both an ISP and ASP for small to medium sized business, Libritas, located in San Francisco, also integrates voice, data, and unified messaging services for customers.

The Outstanding Young Engineering Alumnus Award is awarded annually to a George R. Brown School of Engineering graduate who has made significant strides early on in her/his career.