Guy Brown

Yardi

By Leah Etling on Mar 3, 2014 in People

Yardi clients who have had the pleasure of learning from Guy Brown, a senior consultant in the Professional Services Group, or his wife Deborah, Director of Development, may have caught on that they are interacting with a pretty prestigious power couple.

Both Browns have each logged nearly 15 years of service to Yardi, and made notable contributions to the continually improving Voyager reporting process. Deborah currently focuses on the company’s condominium clients and manages the standard Interfaces program, while Guy is involved in writing custom Voyager pages and client training.

“We have different styles and different skill sets. But she’s clearly the brains of the operation,” said of his wife, who he met when both happened to be in Israel as teenagers. Deborah, who called California home, was studying at an American high school there, and Guy, a native of England, was visiting a friend whose father was in the British Foreign Service.

Fast-forward 44 years, and they’ve made successful lives and careers in Santa Barbara, where they settled in 1980. Their two children, Anna and Shannon, are equally hard-working and innovative.

Anna just finished her Ph.D. in chemistry at Portland State University and is involved in nanoparticle research on the chemical element bismuth. Shannon is an environmental scientist who works as a cartographer for a consulting firm in San Diego.

“They’re like me – they want to understand the way the world works,” Guy said of the couple’s children. Indeed, his passion and interest in astrophysics, physics, magnetics, materials, geology and more has created diverse opportunities for work and research.

Though he studied physics in college, Guy’s first job in Santa Barbara was in computer manufacturing, at a company called InfoMag. He became an engineer, drawing from his magnetics research to develop processes for laying down the magnetic thin firms that became recording heads for computer hard disk drives. Next, he moved on to Applied Magnetics, where the need to create smart systems for laboratory instrumentation led to a new skill.

“Back in the 80s, you’d get pieces of instrumentation that you needed to implement in your lab to go measure something, but it would come with a data port on the side, and never come with any software. There was no way to actually use an established piece of software and talk to it. So somebody had to write that software, and that’s how I got my start in computer programming,” Guy explained.

Deborah, a mathematician and statistician, had already learned the basics of programming as well. The Browns spent their life savings and picked up an Apple II, just like the one Anant Yardi used to write the first version of Yardi’s property management software, and Guy began to develop the skills of writing code.

Guy’s ability to jump into a project and create the ideal customized programming solution has been cross-disciplinary. It applied to his work in manufacturing, has been important at Yardi, and is integral to his work on an intriguing geologic passion project involving volcanic research.

One weekend in the late 1990’s, Frank Spera, a UCSB geology professor, fellow musician and friend, asked Guy if he could stop by the university and help out with a little Microsoft Excel project. Fifteen years later, the “little project” is ongoing and has made major strides in the geophysical understanding of volcanoes, with funding from the National Science Foundation.

A computerized model, nicknamed IGOR, allows Spera and his team to simulate the behavioral characteristics of molten magma deep underneath the earth’s surface. Thanks to the model, they can even anticipate what metallic seams will form based on the temperature of the magma and other factors.

“Nobody has ever done this before – to start with a condition where you have hot material, and  cold rock, co-melting, and based on the conditions only, you can predict which metallic seams will form,” Guy shared.

Variables continue to be added to the model to improve predictive performance, and a quicker, leaner “toy model” of IGOR means a subset of the parameters can be assessed in a few milliseconds, allowing up to 140,000 analyses to take place in one hour.

“From those, the geologists can pick out regions where they would want to go and use IGOR to investigate much more deeply. Frank considers this a significant breakthrough,” Guy said.

As a creative escape, Guy has been a longtime performer in the Santa Barbara music community. You may have seen him sing with Fiddlin’ Dave (David Stone) and the Arroyo Boyz (Brown and Bill Rizzi) with Gurl (Kate Ingalls). They blend bluegrass and classic rock at shows around town. With a duo, the ReiGuys (named after the two participants: Reilly Pollard and Guy), and a yet-to-be named new band in the works, music is one of Guy’s passions.

In 1965, at age 13, he begged his parents to let him see the Beatles, who were coming to his hometown of Brighton on England’s South Coast.

“They said I was too young, and there was no way I was going out to a show on my own. So my Mum came with me. She dined out for the rest of her life on the fact that she was the only one in her bridge group who had seen the Beatles play.”

To this day, the Fab Four are still his favorite band of all time.