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ON THE CUTTING EDGE
By Liese Hutchison
2000
Fast 50 Winners
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Rose
International
Software development and consulting
Himanshu “Sue” Bhatia
CEO
16401 Swingley Rd., Ste. 300
Chesterfield, MO 63017
636/532-3126
www.roseint.com
Himanshu
"Sue" Bhatia, Rose International |
Ranked as the second fastest growing company on the 1999 FAST
50 list, Rose International hasn’t slowed down in 2000. The company
now has six branch offices, five satellite offices and 300 employees.
The founders, Himanshu “Sue” and Gulab Bhatia have moved to Irvine,
Calif., to grow the west coast business, with St. Louis remaining
as its headquarters.
“We expect to have 450 employees by next summer,” notes Eric Token,
corporate vice president. The company’s three divisions—federal,
state and commercial—are growing quickly, with the commercial
side of the business remaining the fastest growing segment. Rose
International expects to open several branches within the next
12 months in the Boulder/Denver area, Albuquerque and Washington,
DC.
The company uses technology to manage the growth by providing
network accessibility to all employees and keeps a thin layer
of management. “High technology doesn’t replace personal relationships,
but you can contact people in a timely manner,” Token notes.
Solutech
Internet professional services
Randy Schilling
President and CEO
117 S. Main
St. Charles, MO 63301
636/947-9393
www.solutechinc.com
Randy
Schilling, Solutech |
Solutech, Inc. is a full service e-Business solutions provider
specializing in building e-Business solutions for Fortune 2000
companies and startup businesses. Using vendor-certified solutions,
Solutech, Inc. helps clients define their Internet strategies
and design, architect, develop and implement solutions to execute
those strategies. Solutech, Inc. provides solutions in five disciplines:
e-strategy, technology, creative, hosting and technical education.
Founded in 1992, Solutech, Inc. is a leading provider of Internet
solutions and employs more than 450 professionals with offices
in Saint Louis (headquarters), Kansas City, Omaha, Des Moines,
Louisville, Nashville, Memphis, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Colorado
Springs, Detroit, Madison, St. Louis Metro East, San Diego and
Portland. The company is a four-time winner and ranked 12th last
year on the FAST 50 list.
Solution
Consultants, Inc. (SCI)
Information systems consulting and training
Michael K. Schmid
President
1350 Eldbridge Payne Dr.
636/530-4515
www.solutionconsultants.com
In the late 1980s, Mike Schmid, with partners Eric Huber and Dave
FitzGibbon, founded Solution Consultants, Inc. Today, SCI is one
of the area’s largest locally owned consulting companies in its
field.
More than 180 consultants provide daily expertise to 80-plus companies
in St. Louis. Their expertise spans the client/server, web, e-commerce,
mainframe, software engineering, training and tech writing environments.
This complete service offering gives SCI the advantage in being
a full-service provider not only at the client site, but also
with special projects being housed in its Chesterfield office.
Schmid plainly states his vision, “We see the challenges of an
ever changing market as the catalyst to provide cutting-edge solutions.
St. Louis is an excellent technical market. Our reputation for
performing quality work in a timely manner is the backbone of
our success. We recruit and hire the very best professionals in
information systems.” SCI is a five-time winner of the FAST 50
award and ranked 38th in 1999.
Sonacom
IT Partners
IT consulting and integration
Rick Oertli
President
5555 West Park
St. Louis, MO 63110
314/781-1700
www.sonacom.com
Rick
Oertli, Sonacom |
Change management lies at the core of Sonacom’s history. When
Rick Oertli purchased the company more than 10 years ago from
the family business—Guarantee Electric—Sonacom was a voice communications
company heavily involved with traditional systems and passive
infrastructure. Pulling wire for telephone and security systems
led to building and supporting data networks. In the mid-nineties,
Sonacom expanded its services again to include IT consulting and
systems integration. “We offered three to four unique services
that were construction oriented and transaction based,” Oertli
states. “Now we’re a consulting based business that designs and
builds the converging highway that supports the new economy, carrying
voice, video and data on one unified platform.”
Sonacom revamped its identity and its core business two years
ago, divesting itself of the sound, cabling and security parts
of the company. Today, Sonacom IT Partners employs more than 40
people and sees its revenue growing to more than $8 million this
year. The company focuses its expertise on voice and data convergence,
high-tech project management and web-enabled customer contact
technologies in the educational and mid-sized business markets.
Spartech
Corp.
Thermoplastic materials, polymeric compounds and molded profile
product manufacturers
Bradley Buechler
Chairman, President and CEO
120 South Central Avenue, Ste. 1700
Clayton, MO 63105
314/721-4242
www.spartech.com
A three-time fast 50 winner, the publicly held Spartech had $768
million in sales in fiscal 1999 and serviced 5,000 customers from
its 53 operating plants in North America and Europe. In the last
seven years, Spartech has made 16 acquisitions, expanding its
facilities and product offerings. “We also recently recorded our
35th consecutive quarter of improved results,” adds Brad Buechler,
president and CEO.
The company has three divisions: sheet and roll stock; color and
compounds; and molded and profile products. The company’s growth
is coming from taking products, which were previously made from
steel or aluminum components, and transforming them into plastic.
“We’ve introduced five new alloy plastics each year for the last
three years and these have accelerated the plastic transformation
process in our business,” he remarks.
Spartech’s focused growth strategy is centered on four cornerstones—business
partnerships, strategic expansions, product transformations and
alloy plastics.
SSE, Inc.
Information technology services
Susan S. Elliott
Chairman & CEO
770 West Port
St. Louis, MO 63146
314/439-4700
www.sseinc.com
With its move last year into new offices at Westport, Susan Elliott,
founder of SSE, decided the company and its 120 employees needed
to reinvent itself to take advantage of the new location and the
opportunities the Internet was bringing the five-time FAST 50
winner. Instead of Systems Service Enterprises, SSE is the brand
that also stands for Solutions Staffing Education. “It’s what
we’ve been doing for some time, we just needed to position ourselves
that way,” Elliott notes.
The company works to find e-business solutions for clients, offers
supplemental staffing and educates client employees. “That’s how
we differentiate ourselves,” Elliott says. “We bring the e-learning
component to the table.” Through multi-media, interactive tools
and audience analysis programs, the company designs proprietary
e-training solutions for clients.
Elliott is the chair of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Board, a
vice chair of The Regional Business Council and former chair of
the workforce enhancement committee of Technology Gateway.
Stockell
Information Systems, Inc.
Computer consulting
Charles “Chip” Stockell
Chairman
15400 S. Outer 40
St. Louis, MO 63017
314/537-9100
www.stockell.com
Stockell Information Systems’ growth was fueled last year by Y2K
concerns, this year it’s e-commerce. “A lot of projects started
up with Y2K, which we got through, but as soon as everyone fixed
the bug, we went right into e-commerce,” notes Chip Stockell,
chairman.
Stockell offers turnkey services to its clients—software development,
software integration and software augmentation. The company’s
75 consultants work for a variety of clients throughout the region.
The company plans its growth to continue as it develops a software
package that allows SAP applications such as purchasing, inventory
and human resources to integrate with e-commerce applications.
“We’re creating a tool kit solution that would be customized from
client to client,” he notes.
One product the company recently developed, E-Care, is a physician
remote access package that allows doctors to order and review
test results. The success of this product resulted in a new company—E-Care
Link LLC—formed in June. A four-time winner, Stockell ranked 41st
in 1999.
G.A. Sullivan
E-business solution provider
Greg Sullivan
CEO
55 West Port Plaza, Ste. 100
St. Louis, MO 63146
314/213-5600
www.gasullivan.com
Greg
Sullivan, G.A. Sullivan |
A five-time winner ranked in the top 15 every year since the FAST
50 started in 1996, G.A. Sullivan doesn’t believe it will be absent
from the list next year. “We’re expecting a 40 to 50 percent
growth rate for the next five to seven years,” notes Greg Sullivan,
CEO. The company’s 350 employees are located in eight offices
throughout the Midwest and in Europe. G.A. Sullivan recently
opened an office in Den Bosch, Netherlands, and is looking to
expand throughout Europe. “Business development in Europe has
gone better than expected,” he remarks. The company’s growth
is putting a strain on the HR department. “We’re hiring a person
every other day,” Sullivan states.
Sullivan says the market’s acceptance of doing business on the
web, especially from mid-cap companies, is a significant growth
opportunity for his company. He recently received the Ernst &
Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for 2000 and was named National
Small Business Person of the year in 1999.
Systems
Consultants, Inc. (SCI)
Software developer and IT consultant
John A. Sharp, Ph.D.
President & CEO
121 Hunter Ave., Suite 100
St. Louis, MO 63124
314/863-0262
www.sci-gateway.com
A two-time FAST 50 winner, SCI ranked 32nd in 1999. The company,
which develops web-based financial and administrative software
for government entities, schools and utility companies, is changing
course. “We’re reinventing the company to go into the e-government
marketplace to provide services and information for government
to citizen, government to business and government to government,”
says Dr. Jack Sharp, president & CEO.
Some examples of a citizen to government transaction include offering
citizens the opportunity to pay utility bills and parking tickets
online. A government to business scenario could include electronic
procurement. And, government to government involves exchanging
information, like delinquent taxes, between government entities.
“We’re the first to market with this product that puts government
entities in a total on-line environment,” Dr. Sharp remarks. “We’re
enabling government entities to have more interactive relationships
with the citizens and businesses they serve.”
Dr. Sharp started SCI in 1983. He had an information consulting
practice while he taught at SIU–Edwardsville. He left the University’s
Business School in 1985 and devoted his talent to the company.
TALX Corp
ASP and software developer
William Canfield
President
1850 Borman Court
St. Louis, MO 63146
314/214-7000
www.talx.com
A leading application service provider (ASP) of HR, benefits and
payroll employee services, TALX Corp. employs 275 people in St.
Louis, with sales offices located in Phoenix, San Francisco, Green
Bay, Atlanta, Washington and Dallas. The company began providing
employee services in 1980 and established the TALX ASP Center
in 1994. “We used to be a software company developing proprietary
software,” notes Bill Canfield, president. “Now our business has
evolved almost entirely into an application service led by payroll
and benefits enrollment applications that we host for the client.”
The company provides employment and income information through
The Work Number service. TALX houses nearly 40 million secure
employee records that allow new employers, landlords and lenders
to check employment records through a 900 number, 800 number or
the Internet. More than 600 companies use this service. “The benefit
to the company is that it releases HR people from answering questions
over the phone about an employee’s work history and salary,” Canfield
says. All TALX ASP solutions use mutimedia including Web, IVR,
and speech recognition.
Tech Electronics,
Inc.
Single source information integrator
Jim Canova
President
6437 Manchester
St. Louis, MO 63139
314/645-6200
www.techelectronics.com
A two-time FAST 50 winner, Tech Electronics ranked 50th last year.
But that’s no surprise to Jim Canova, president, because his company
is the oldest on the list; he founded it in 1962. The company
has almost 180 employees located in a six-building complex along
Manchester Road. Tech Electronics is a specialty contractor that
furnishes, designs, installs, services and trains clients on communication
systems such as telephone, card access, teleconferencing, voice
paging, intercoms, entry control, auto attendant, nurse call,
central monitoring, closed circuit TV, professional sound, wireless
communications, data, and fire alarms.
The big change in his field, Canova notes, is that large network
systems are now linking together into one PC. “Using networking
technology, multiple systems in multiple buildings can now be
monitored from one computer,” he states. The company anticipates
future growth through acquisitions and Canova is expecting future
free time as his three children start running the business on
a daily basis.
Technology
Solutions Inc.
Maintenance and repair service provider of bar code equipment
Cayloma “Cayce” Sebek
President & CEO
743 Spirit 40 Park Dr., Suite 102
Chesterfield, MO 63005
636/519-4770
www.tsiservice.com
Cayloma
"Cayce" Sebek, Technology Solutions |
A FAST 50 newcomer, Technology Solutions Inc. was founded in 1995
by Cayce Sebek, a component engineer. The company’s 13 employees
in St. Louis and Los Angeles maintain and repair bar code equipment.
Clients include Boeing (which uses bar coding technology to inventory
airplane parts), Anheuser-Busch (which uses a bar code system
for real-time warehousing) and several others, including IBM,
Citicorp and Lockheed Martin.
The only bar coding maintenance and repair company in the country
headed by a Native American woman, TSI is experiencing tremendous
growth in the government and defense industries as a SBA 8(a)
certified company. Sebek received the 1997 Entrepreneur of the
Year Award from the St. Louis Economic Council and is located
in the council’s west county enterprise center.
The company currently supports large, multi-national clients.
“As bar coding technology becomes more affordable, small and mid-size
companies will realize the advantage bar coding offers them and
we’ll be poised to take advantage of that new market,” Sebek notes.
The Trinity
Companies, LLC
Total information systems solutions
Frank Foster
Russell Bryant
Patricia Beseda
Partners
707 Spirit 40 Park Dr., Suite 100
Chesterfield, MO 63005
636/681-1400
www.trinitycos.com
A FAST 50 newcomer in 1999, Trinity ranked sixth on the list.
Managed by three partners, the company encompasses several business
units: Global Applications (systems support via client/server,
Internet and Intranet), Trinity Infrastructure Services Group
(designs and implements networks as well as operational support),
Trinity Data Collection products (manufacturing processes and
inventory control) and Trinity Core Systems Group (staff supplementation
and legacy support). Founded in 1994, Trinity employs 30 people
in its St. Louis and Houston offices.
Its latest focus is on business intelligence. “We’re working on
a strategic level with clients as we help them pull all their
IT systems together and make sure it solves their business problems,”
notes Frank Foster, partner. The company’s success in providing
total information systems solutions means it must double its current
office space to accommodate the new hires. Replacing employees
who leave isn’t a problem. The company has the first person it
ever hired working for it and boasts a 95 percent retention rate.
TTI Newgen
Systems integrator
James A. Whitt
President and CEO
449 Sovereign Court
St. Louis, MO 63011
636/227-6996
www.ttinewgen.com
James
A. Whitt, TTI Newgen |
A systems integrator of audio/video teleconferencing systems,
wireless mobile data communications and computer systems since
1991, TTI Newgen was founded by Jim Whitt after spending 20 years
with General Electric. The company’s product line includes teleconference
phones and bridges; wireless modems and aircards; videoconferencing
systems; ruggedized laptops and printers; wireless modems and
aircards; and personal computers.
The fastest growing segment of the three-time FAST 50 company
is in video conferencing systems. Clients include AmerenUE, Energizer,
Ralston and Clayco Construction. Audio conferencing is another
growth area, experiencing a 30 to 40 percent increase. “Smaller
companies are now able to afford purchasing 24- and 48-port audio
conferencing bridges that allow them to significantly reduce telecom
cost versus using traditional conference bureau services,” says
Jim Whitt, president and CEO.
The company’s 30 employees are located in its St. Louis, Kansas
City and Toronto offices. TTI Newgen is also starting to work
in the United Kingdom on client sites.
Ungerboeck
Systems, Inc.
Event business management system
Dieter K. Ungerboeck
President 87 Hubble Rd.
St. Charles, MO 63304
636/688-2000
www.ungerboeck.com
Dieter
K. Ungerboeck, Ungerboeck Systems, Inc. |
What’s new for Ungerboeck Systems is a new corporate headquarters
built in the high-tech corridor along highway 40 in St. Charles
and a new office in London. Its industry leading software product,
EBMS, which allows organizations to completely manage a mass assembly
event, is used by venues and events on five continents, including
the Sydney Opera House, the Olympic Stadium in Sydney, the latest
and largest convention center in London, the St. Louis Convention
and Visitors Commission and the Giants’ Pac Bell Park.
EBMS is also installed in convention centers in Los Angeles, Montreal,
Toronto and Detroit. The company employs 50 people in its St.
Charles, Sydney, London and Vancouver offices.
A two-time winner, Ungerboeck ranked 34th in 1999. Fifty percent
of its revenue stream comes from outside the United States. It
has 20 percent market share in the exposition center market, is
the leader in the convention center market and is doing quite
well in the sport stadium and performing arts center market.
WAN Technologies
Network integrator/managed services provider
Tim Johnson
President
2316 Millpark Dr.
St. Louis, MO 63043
314/432-4355
www.wantec.com
“A FAST 50 Sprint in 1998, ranked 5th in 1999 and still growing
in 2000, WAN Technologies offers a high level of network integration,
network support and network management services for the mid-sized
marketplace. The company presently supports seven levels of applications:
Voice/Data/Video integration, LAN to LAN connectivity, LAN to
Mainframe connectivity, Remote Access, VPN/Extranet, VoIP/VoFR,
and LAN Switching. WAN Technologies maintains a list of supported
manufacturers and products. It markets these technologies to the
telecom industry, enterprise customer and emerging service providers
across the U.S.
WAN Technologies headquartered in St. Louis also has offices in
Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles. Clients include Express
Scripts, Trane Co., Armstrong Teasdale and Donaldson Lufkin &
Jenrette.
Wave Technologies
International, Inc.
Information technology training
Kenneth W. Kousky
President
10845 Olive Blvd., Ste. 250
St. Louis, MO 63141
314/995-5767
www.wavetech.com
A five-time winner ranked 29th in 1999, Wave Technologies recently
sold to Thomson Learning, a Canadian conglomerate that focuses
on education. The purchase by a large multi-national corporation
allows Wave to spend more time and money on research and development.
“With our capital budget now with Thomson Learning, we can bring
one or two products to market by the end of the year,” states
Ken Kousky, president. “Before we sold, we could bring one or
two products to market every six months.
“We now have a unique opportunity to build a $200 to $300 million
enterprise,” he adds. The company is expanding its services internationally
and has 200 total employees, 150 of whom are in St. Louis with
40 positions currently open.
Wave has a 50 percent market share in Linux training materials
and focuses its business on certification programs. Five thousand
training kits are shipped each month through Wave distributors
and more than 100,000 people are trained on Wave products annually.
World Wide
Technology, Inc. (WWT)
Marketer of integrated technology solutions
David L. Steward
Chairman and CEO
127 Weldon Parkway
St. Louis, MO 63043
314/919-1401
www.wwt.com
David
L. Steward, World Wide Technologies |
A four-time FAST 50 winner ranked 8th in 1999, World Wide Technology
was recently recognized by Black Enterprise Magazine as the largest
African-American corporation in the United States. Its sales doubled
from 1998 to 1999, allowing it to jump into first place. “It’s
the first time a high-tech firm has been on the top of the list,”
notes Dave Steward, chairman. “It reflects the new economy firms
emerging across all sectors of our society. The company experienced
$413 million in sales in 1999 and expects its growth rate to continue.
E-commerce solutions is the focus at World Wide, which just celebrated
its 10th anniversary. The company’s 600 employees are housed in
10 buildings in St. Louis with offices in Hearndon, Virg., Cincinnati,
Dallas, San Diego and Silicon Valley. WWT recently spun off Telcobuy.com,
an e-marketplace company for the telecommunications industry.
The company is majority owned by World Wide, but expects to go
public this year.
Liese L. Hutchison, APR, is an assistant professor in the department
of communication at Saint Louis University and a free-lance writer.
2000
Fast 50 Winners
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