Mark Schiowitz had a customer problem of the agreeable kind. People liked the software. They simply wanted someone else to do the work that came with it. For a programmer selling a tool, that request could have been the end of the conversation. At Digitech, it became the beginning of another business.
In 1994, the company began providing billing services. Its clients could stop at buying technology, or ask the people behind that technology to take responsibility for the process. The distinction would occupy Schiowitz for years. A program could make an office more efficient. Running the office’s work required a different promise, and a different organisation to keep it.
That is the useful turning point in a career that ran from Wall Street systems analysis to four decades leading Digitech. There were later investment partners, a combination with a rival business, and an international expansion plan. But the earlier customer request explains why those later chapters belonged to a company doing more than selling software.
A market with a family history
Schiowitz began his career as a systems analyst on Wall Street. He founded Digitech in 1984, initially building custom financial applications. The company’s early business included analytics software and predictive analysis for financial institutions. His first market therefore made sense as a continuation of work he already understood.
He also knew another industry. His father ran two ambulance companies. The family connection gave him practical familiarity with a field that would become Digitech’s focus. It is a pleasingly concrete origin: financial systems on one side, the workings of an ambulance business on the other, and a programmer able to see a job for software between them.
His education covered related ground. He earned a degree in economics at Bucknell University and pursued graduate study in accounting and computer science at Baruch College. Money, records, and computation would all have a place in the company he built. The career that followed brought those subjects into the same working day.
In 1987, Digitech released Ambulance Commander. Schiowitz wrote the initial versions of the billing and dispatch platform. The founder was close to the product in the most literal professional sense: he had written its code. Before he could explain its business advantages to a prospective customer, he had to make it perform its tasks.
The product also put a boundary around Digitech’s ambitions. A general software consultancy can follow work wherever it appears. A platform for one industry accumulates detail in a particular direction. Dispatch, billing, and reporting became related parts of the same assignment. Schiowitz had moved from financial applications toward the routines of a market with a place in his own family history.
- 1984Build financial applications
- 1987Release Ambulance Commander
- 1994Take on billing services
- 2025Retire from Digitech
The customers wanted the work done
The early software business helped more than 70 companies establish billing departments. That is a revealing kind of product adoption. Installing a program was tied to creating a way of working around it. Customers needed people, processes, and an understanding of how the tools fitted their operation.
Some customers preferred to hand over the whole assignment. Explaining the company’s development to Houston City Council in 2013, Schiowitz described clients who liked Digitech’s technology but did not want to perform the billing themselves. Their requests helped bring about the services business in 1994. Joyce Kerulo joined that year to build the division.
There is a certain comedy in building a machine to make a task easier, then discovering that its admirers would gladly leave you the task as well. Yet their request contained useful information. The software had value. So did the expertise and organisation required to use it day after day.
Schiowitz’s account of the next decade was one of gradual expansion, adding clients over time. This part of the story has the pace of an operating business: another account, another set of routines, another obligation to perform. The service model made the company responsible for work that continued after the sales conversation was over.
By 2017, Schiowitz was explaining another consequence of that shift: incentives. A vendor paid according to software seats has a reason to sell more seats. Reducing the number a customer needs can cut across that interest. A service provider using its own technology has a different calculation, because efficiency affects the work it must carry out.
His argument was about the connection between the product and the business behind it. Customers could compare features, but the supplier’s way of earning money also deserved inspection. A billing platform lived inside a commercial arrangement. That arrangement helped determine what its maker had a reason to improve.
“Focus on performance.”
Mark Schiowitz, 2017
He made his point with a motoring comparison, contrasting the comfort of a Cadillac with the speed of Formula One. The image was rather livelier than an ordinary discussion of office software. It also made his preference plain: judge the system by the job it performs. Optional comforts could wait in the showroom.
Digitech supplies the tool.
The customer runs the department.
Digitech supplies the tool
and handles the billing work.
A bigger company still has to do the small jobs
In 2019, Digitech brought in Pamlico Capital as an investment partner. Schiowitz and the management team retained a significant ownership position and continued managing the company. The arrangement added institutional backing to a business the founder had been building since 1984.
The difference in dates matters. This partnership arrived roughly 35 years after the founding. By then, Digitech had already developed its software and its services operation. The investor was joining an established approach to a particular market. Schiowitz stayed to oversee the next stage, with the company remaining headquartered in Chappaqua, New York.
In July 2020, Sarnova announced plans to acquire and combine Digitech with R1’s EMS business, formerly associated with ADPI and Intermedix. Schiowitz and the combined management teams would lead the operation under the Digitech name. Pamlico and Schiowitz would remain investors alongside Sarnova. The combination took place that October.
For the founder, this brought a larger version of a familiar problem. The company had its own platform and an established service model. Bringing another business into that arrangement meant deciding how the combined organisation would actually work. An announcement could establish the name. It could not move every customer onto common systems.
By April 2021, Digitech was describing that migration in practical terms. Clients inherited through the R1 transaction were being moved from legacy software onto Digitech’s platform. Teams from the two businesses were being brought together, while processing routines and automation were being developed further. Integration had become part of the founder’s operating agenda.
The same quarterly update reported 12 newly signed contracts representing $70 million in annual collections for the agencies involved. Those figures described customer activity, rather than Digitech’s own revenue. Keeping that distinction clear makes the scale more intelligible: the company’s software and staff were working on money that belonged to its clients.
New contracts reported in the first quarter of 2021.
Representing $70 million in annual collections for the client agencies.
The work after the transaction gives the career its changing shape. Schiowitz had once written early versions of a program. Now the organisation he led had to bring acquired customers, staff, and systems into a common operation. The original technical work remained part of the story, surrounded by responsibilities that a first software release could scarcely contain.
Kaunas enters the picture
In December 2021, Digitech announced plans for a global business services centre in Kaunas, Lithuania. The proposed operation would support functions including operations, human resources, management, training, and IT. A company serving a specialised American market was planning part of its working organisation across the Atlantic.
Schiowitz’s comments accompanying the announcement emphasised continuing education, community involvement, and social responsibility. The hiring plans covered experienced specialists as well as opportunities for people to learn new skills through company training. Growth, in this account, included building the capacity of a new team to do the work.
Kaunas added a new geography to the company’s development without requiring a new industry. Digitech could expand how it organised its service while keeping its focus on the same market. For Schiowitz, the announcement extended a career already shaped by changes in what the company took responsibility for and where it could find the people to carry that responsibility.
The last date on the timeline
In June 2024, Pamlico sold its remaining equity stake to Sarnova. Schiowitz was still identified as founder and CEO. His comments looked back on five years of partnership and credited the investor’s strategic guidance and operational support. The company had passed through another ownership milestone while its original founder remained at the helm.
He retired in 2025, 41 years after Digitech’s founding. That span includes several quite different jobs: systems analyst turned entrepreneur, programmer, service operator, investment partner, and leader of a combined business. Treating the whole period as one long tenure misses the changes in the work inside it.
The customer request from the 1990s remains the telling detail. People who liked the program asked its maker to accept more responsibility. Schiowitz built that responsibility into Digitech’s business. A useful piece of software had opened the door; being willing to do the continuing work gave the company somewhere further to go.