Technology achievement inspired by the arts

Jason Lohrey, founder and CEO of Arcitecta, is the recipient of the 2022 Pearcey Victorian Entrepreneur Award. The award was presented at an event in Melbourne that also featured the 2022 Pearcey Oration, given by The Honourable Ed Husic MP, Federal Minister for Industry and Science.

Lohrey founded the data management software company Arcitecta in 1998, recognising that access to the broadest sets of data would provide the foundation for identifying patterns and making new discoveries. The company’s data management platform Mediaflux has formed the foundation for managing the simplest and the most complex data for individuals through to large teams of people at global enterprises. Arcitecta has been a strategic partner for the Australian Department of Defence for 12 years, managing much of Australia’s geospatial data across the country. Arcitecta’s software manages research data for Australia’s top universities and at one of the world’s top pharmaceutical companies, Novartis.

According to Jordan Green, Chair – Victorian Committee, Pearcey Foundation, Lohrey has been a constant innovator and disruptor.

“Jason epitomises the purpose of the Pearcey Foundation, to promote and recognise Australian technologists who lead the world with their innovations, attract the respect and admiration of their teams, and contribute selflessly to improving our community for a better future for all. The technology Jason makes available through his company Arcitecta comprises unique and uniquely valuable innovations that launch software capabilities in whole new directions.

“The fact that Jason bootstrapped his vision faces down the popular and misguided myth that success requires venture capital. He has managed to achieve global leadership that outstrips the corporate gorillas of the software world. I can’t wait to see what happens next as Jason continues to innovate, disrupt, inspire and explode the envelope of what’s possible,” Green said.

Lohrey is an interesting combination of software maker, artist and entrepreneur. He has a degree in Quantum Physics and Computer Science augmented with Fine Arts. Rather uniquely for the IT industry, the origins for Jason’s inspiration were from the arts as much as from science and technology.

“Software making is performance art, and like any art there is an audience. We need an audience, whether that is one or many. You know the audience is appreciative when they declare, ‘this is a game-changer’,” Lohrey said.

Two key events shaped Lohrey and Arcitecta’s future direction.

In 1986, he accidentally deleted 80,000 words of his aunt’s manuscript. This was the seed for a mission to create systems that would not lose data. In 2002, he spent two weeks in an artists studio at Bundanon on the NSW South Coast. The studio provided a place of reflection that emboldened him to take on a project that had no known end-point — a system that would set the bar for managing data at scale and underpin decades of products for managing data. Surrounded by writers, sculptors, painters and choreographers, he penned the first lines of the Mediaflux platform.

“I cannot overstate the importance of having space and time for reflection in creative environments as an incubator for innovation. I will be forever thankful to the Bundanon Trust for allowing me, a technologist, to be present in a place for artists — a place of inception for a global technology enterprise,” Lohrey said.

“I fully understand that cross-disciplinary and respectful collaboration significantly improves creativity and innovation. It is a model that we are exploring and will amplify in the coming decades.”

In 2021, Arcitecta was invited to participate in the global Data Mover Challenge — a competition seeking to find novel ways of moving data around the world across high-latency networks. Rather than use the week of competition to configure, tune and demonstrate software that was developed over the months and years prior, Lohrey used that week to write the entire parallel networking pipeline from scratch and then configure, tune, refine, demonstrate and document the approaches — Arcitecta was awarded the “Most Complete Solution” and “Best Software Architecture” at Supercomputing Asia in March 2022 — and a new product, Mediaflux Livewire, was born.

“Arcitecta has solved the problem of the lost manuscript. It is a step change, underpinned by decades of research and development — Arcitecta will reveal that technology in the coming months as we plot pathways beyond early-adopter customers to the global backup market,” Lohrey said.

When Lohrey first met with the Defence Imaging and Geospatial Organisation (DIGO) at the Australian Department of Defence in 2008 — now the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation (AGO) — DIGO had around 16,000 CDs and catalogues maintained in spreadsheets. Arcitecta software has transformed the management and use of geospatial data across defence — Mediaflux underpins many systems of national importance.

Coming full circle on the combination of arts and technology, Lohrey promotes a philosophy for creativity combined with scientific rigour to anyone who will listen — that we can create anything we can conceive of if we have enough insight, resilience and perseverance. Lohrey is a founder for an organisation that celebrates ‘Hidden Champions’ — privately held, founder-led and innovative companies. He is working with Grant Petty from Blackmagic Design (and 2020 Pearcey Victorian and National Entrepreneur Award recipient) and the Victorian Government to bring together Victoria’s Hidden Champions over the coming months.

Image credit: iStock.com/Wanwalder