Rimas Buinevicius spent the majority of his professional career in various research and engineering development roles in the biomedical, defense and industrial control industries before joining Sonic Foundry in 1994.

At the time, Sonic Foundry, founded in 1991 in Madison, was trying to make it as a multimedia software company specializing in audio software. Buinevicius helped take the company public in 1998.

After the dot-com bubble burst, Buinevicius, now chairman and chief executive officer, sold off Sonic Foundry 's struggling proprietary personal computer software to Sony in 2003 and began reinventing the company 's product line and business model.

It now specializes in Webcasting technology for educational and business institutions in the U.S. and internationally.

Its chief product, Mediasite, allows presenters to automatically bring together a variety of media -- including video, images, Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, links and graphics -- into an online Webcast and interact with remote viewers.

Such moves haven 't seemed to quell investor doubts, however, and the company has continued to suffer financial difficulties, leading to recent employee cuts and notices of possible delisting from Nasdaq.

Q: Who uses Sonic Foundry 's products?

A: Sixty-five percent of our market is higher education, including well-known universities around the country. Approximately 25 percent is corporate. Then the remaining balance is government, K-12 schools and a smattering of health institutions and uncategorized international work.

We 're really dealing with a transformation in university education. Forty-two to 45 percent of higher education students are now adult learners. They 're looking for flexibility -- taking classes online, getting retrained, all this -- so you have a huge, unpenetrated infrastructure in terms of universities that are doing things the old-fashioned way. We 're seeing now that, both in the U.S. and worldwide, education is changing. The market is really being driven by the consumer, who turns out to be the student, who is saying, "I want to go to the university where I have the ultimate flexibility. "

Q: What is "rich media " and how does Sonic Foundry employ it?

A: Rich media is really the assemblage of audio, video and graphics into one common interface. It can incorporate links to third-party content, third-party message threads and Q&A polling. A lot of interactivity that is centered around the content that you 're focusing on.

In our world, it also tends to focus on knowledge experts creating something or purveying their knowledge. It might be a lecture, it might be a briefing at a conference, an exhibition, what have you. ...

Commonly, people think it 's PowerPoint, but it can go beyond that. In the medical community, it could be medical imaging. Someone might show a beating heart or cancerous cells or things like this. The imaging piece comes in with the actual talking head of the knowledge expert and so you have those elements assembled and delivered over the Web. ...

The "eureka " moment we had with the company was realizing that presenters not only use PowerPoint to anchor their presentations, they go beyond that. They go to digitizers, white boards, document cameras, medical devices, and they use these devices to try to create ad hoc presentations. ...

Q: How has the market for digital media changed since you took this post, and how is the company moving to change with it?

A: It 's changed a lot, but in a lot of ways it hasn 't changed at all. The most difficult and challenging aspect of it is we saw all of this coming back in the mid-1990s -- streaming audio and video, transactions, micro-markets, it 's all an offshoot of multimedia. The problem is that markets don 't develop as fast as entrepreneurs need them. It used to be having training on a CD was the norm. There was no Internet, there was no streaming. We lived through the advent of music, mp3s, things like this, and developing technology around that and video streaming and such. We 're now starting to see maybe the next generation of mass proliferation of media, both from a low-end and a high-end perspective.

We end up delivering technology that has a lot longer life these days than we did in the consumer software days. Today, when we deliver technology, it tends to have a three- to five-year life span. When we were doing consumer software, video editing, audio editing and such, it was a year before an upgrade was necessary. Standards were changing, consumer demands are typically much faster paced than enterprise demands. Enterprise wants stability, wants incremental change; they don 't want a lot of constant changing, whereas consumers tend to want to tweak software, they want to always be up to date. That poses it 's own engineering challenges. ...

In terms of where we were going as a company, we envisioned this world where media would be used as a form of communication in the future. We didn 't know how it would transpire fully, but we knew that if we could figure out a way to get there that would be a much more lucrative market for us, especially as a niche player and a smaller company. It would be a unique playing field for us. ...

Q: Sonic Foundry has had a lot of bad financial news in recent years. Do you see that turning around in the near future?

A: Well, we certainly hope so. We look at the technology sector and in a lot of cases we move in a broad group. Microcaps are certainly out of favor right now. We have survived these big upward and downward spikes in terms of shareholders and investor sentiment. We 're at a low right now. It 's not a good time unless you 're in alternative energy stocks right now.

From our perspective, we have to keep focused on the business. That 's really what the core is. For the last five years, we 've essentially been a public startup company again, because we started in 2003 with a new market opportunity. We know where the market is going. We know this is going to be a great market in the future. Our job is basically to position ourselves to be a market leader. So, starting from zero five years ago, we now own 40 percent of this niche of a niche market.

Our objective now is to continue maintaining that focus, building that market, riding this trend that we see. The biggest issue has always been can you maintain a differentiated, competitive advantage with your product, and can you have enough runway to be there when the inflection point happens. It 's partly a waiting game and it 's partly a positioning game.

We have to be way more adept at identifying market opportunity and channeling our resources there and just focusing on our costs and making sure that we do things right. So that 's the bet. If we 're right, then it 's going to be a huge winner. If we 're not right on the timing, if it takes too long, if the market gets blind-sided by some new technology, then it 's not the right bet.

RIMAS BUINEVICIUS
Chairman and chief executive officer of Sonic Foundry, a Webcasting technology company
Business address: 222 W. Washington Ave.
Web sites: www.sonicfoundry.com and www.mediasite.com
Employees: 94
Sales: $16.5 million in 2007
Stock symbol: SOFO on the
Nasdaq market
Age: 45
Hometown: Chicago, but has lived in Wisconsin for 23 years
Family: Married with a 7-year-old son