Tony Moores, Chief Technology Officer

Tony Moores

CTO, RETISIO Inc. · Founder, TJM Solutions LLC

I started working in Dr. Barry Lavine's lab in 1996 while attending Clarkson University. I was doing a lot of data science and engineering, though no one called it that yet. We built genetic algorithms and principal component analysis into tools to do chemometrics, specifically feature selection, classification, and source identification of compounds by the squiggly lines produced by various apparatus. My undergraduate thesis was chemical pattern recognition by genetic algorithm, but I couldn't graduate without taking so many credits from the business school.

Fortunately, I was able to fill that requirement working for ICG, Clarkson's Internet Consulting Group, where myself and my future brother-in-law transformed that business from teaching MS Office to building real dynamic web applications for local businesses with help from Ron Chorba, who talked the local ISP into supporting Cold Fusion so we had a place to host them.

That got the attention of an individual affiliated with Andersen, later Accenture, who threw some of their skunk works our way... we want you to build a prototype so people can shop the mall or the store... but it's got to be on BroadVision cause AC is all in on BroadVision, so that's how I designed it. But the client AC had in mind just bought Dynamo by Art Technology Group, so I redesigned it that way. Shortly after the launch, I accepted a job with ATG as a technical trainer.

That was August 2000, when the Bay was high on VC money and IPO dreams, everybody had a crazy idea, everybody ran ATG. ATG was synonymous with personalization for most of a decade, and I taught it, used it, and consulted with every student who ever came to class with a, "how would you go about..." which was most of them. I was an SE by the time we bought Primus, so my scope expanded into search, natural language processing, knowledge-centered support, and Bayesian models for automated email response while picking up the knowledge and service management domains.

Oracle acquired ATG in 2011; I was issued a robe and a light saber and dubbed Master Principal Sales Consultant before they took all the knives and the toaster oven out of all the office kitchens. In exchange, I got to learn about, and sometimes play with, the types of ERP systems with which we had been integrating, proxying, and interfacing for so many years.

In 2014 I defected from the vendor side and joined a long-time service and delivery partner. As CTO at Professional Access, part of my job there was to widen a practice that had been built around one vendor, so we expanded it into Magento, commercetools, and custom microservices, and built practices around UX/UI and OMS.

I left in 2017 to start TJM Solutions, the advisory practice I still run opportunistically. A gig turned into a short-term position with Mirakl, where I couldn't help but smile to think that the solutions we were hacking at to make MarketStreetMall.com work turned into a domain in its own right. Today I'm back on the product side, serving as CTO for RETISIO.

Selected Writing

I try to write regularly and post on Medium. Some topics include agentic commerce, capability surfaces, composable architecture, functional programming, and distributed operational truth. A few pieces I return to most:

• The Invisible Buyer Has Arrived

  Agents are becoming the buyer, not the interface to one, and commerce systems built for human attention do not survive the change.

• Large Action Models Need Small Action Surfaces

  The constraint on agent-driven systems is not model capability but the breadth of what we let a model touch.

• Is the FP Juice Worth the Squeeze?

  An honest accounting of where functional discipline pays for itself in production systems, and where it does not.

The full archive is at tjm.solutions/articles or tmoores.medium.com.