Pete Pinckney, Jr. – Vice-President—Operations

When Pete, Jr. was asked by his parents to join the family business in 1986, he was hesitant to accept the offer.  At the time he was 21 and single, with a world of possibilities in front of him.  “I still wasn’t sure I wanted to be in the computer business, especially since I had watched how hard both of my parents had to work to get this fledgling company off the ground.” 

But he accepted, and hasn’t looked back since.  Prior to joining NETWORK, he had held a variety of jobs, working his way through college as NETWORK’s “traffic manager” (which included transportation and set-up of equipment at trade shows), buggy driver in downtown Memphis, jewelry salesman, data-processing manager and salesman for an insurance agency, and finally as a sales representative for a company that developed accounting software for insurance agencies.

It was in that last job when Pete, Jr. realized where his talents lay.  “I was traveling five states selling, installing  and supporting an accounting system, and I recognized the parallels between that job and what my father had been doing for a living all of my life.  I was doing the same thing!” 

Pete, Sr. says, “He had made all of his mistakes on someone else’s money—it was a good hire for us.”

Pete, Jr. was instrumental in the migration of NETWORK’s first Order Desk system from Datapoint’s “mini” computers to micro-computers, or PC’s as we know them today.  “When I was working for the insurance agency, we purchased and installed one of the first three IBM PC-AT system units sold in Memphis.  This was a 6 mhz box.  We got it up and driving five terminals in a matter of hours.  Within three days we had loaded the agency’s entire receivables ledger on a 20 MB disk.  I knew then that they were powerful enough to compete with any mini-computer on the market, and possibly fast enough to handle what NETWORK was doing.”

After officially re-joining the company in 1986, Pete Jr. started by developing NETWORK’s first in-hospital order entry system, “EnterNet.”  This product later became “the DetaileR_x“ which has been installed in over 3500 hospitals and pharmacies world-wide.

By 1991 Pete, Jr. had become project manager for receiver systems, overseeing all support, installation, and new interface    development.  Since then he has been involved in every aspect of NETWORK’s business, including sales, programming, installation, support, and marketing.