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The tech economy is red-hot in the Lansing area, with growth in software, services and advanced manufacturing.
I got a first-hand look at that economy Tuesday on Day Seven of the Great Lakes IT Report 2008 Spring Tech Tour.
A report released a year ago by the Capital Area IT Council showed that IT employment had grown 20 percent in the region between 1998 and 2004, seven times faster than overall job growth, with 300 area IT companies providing 4,500 jobs, and 9,000 IT jobs in the region overall.
However, the report also warned of a looming tech worker shortage. And the companies I met Tuesday confirmed that.
Once again, my visit to Lansing co-incided with a program run by ConnecTech, the association for technology professionals managed by Automation Alley. ConnecTech put on a program on social media at Michigan State University's Kellogg Center while I met with companies across the hall.
The day began bright and early (7:30 -- well, almost) with a visit from Ryan Vartoogian, president of Spartan Internet. Vartoogian founded the company in 1997, when he was a sophomore economics major at Michigan State University.
"I was always interested in computers and the Internet as well as business," he said. At that time, high-speed cable modem service was being deployed in East Lansing, making it one of the nation's first communities to get such service.
Early on, Spartan Internet provided the basics -- domain name registration when no one knew how to do that, basic HTML Web design for early brochureware sites, basic product sales online.
Eleven years later, Vartoogian said his company has "crafted a specific niche around Internet strategic planning." He said the company interviews client staff -- from the CEO to the receptionist -- to determine each client's "information supply chain," and begins building its online presence from that knowledge.
Recent projects include a new Web 2.0 social networking effort for the Michigan State University alumni association, and work with a Swedish environmental consultant, Golder.
Spartan Internet now has a little over 30 employees, and this summer plans to move into a refurbished Holmes Street School in Lansing. The company will take the top floor, or about 10,000 square feet, of the three-story structure, and a community tech training and research center called the ITEC, for Information Technology Empowerment Center, will take the first floor. (See www.iteclansing.org.)
Vartoogian said his company is hiring, and looks for people with a cross-section of both Web strategy and implementation skills, from supply chain to marketing to communication arts to computer science. The company has participated in the Capital Area IT Council's recent "tech tours" of MSU students showing them that it's possible to have an interesting tech career in mid-Michigan -- and to find a cool place to live and a good social life.
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Next up was Jerry Hollister, COO at Niowave, a high-tech manufacturer (and, coincidentally, another company that recently moved into a former Lansing grade school -- in this case, the Walnut Street School).
Niowave is a spinoff of MSU's National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory. It was formed in 2006 to research, design and fabricate components for the world's 15,000 or so particle accelerators. It was founded by Dr. Terry Grimm, a former researcher at the MSU cyclotron.
Those accelerators push atomic particles to fanstastic speeds, close to the speed of light, and then smash them into each other. Physicists study the results of those tiny but titanic collisions to look for clues about the fundamental nature of the universe.
The company takes its name from niobium, the element used in superconducting accelerators. Niobium, element 41, is a soft metal with high tensile strength, Hollister said, "but the property we're interested in is that at 4 degrees Kelvin it begins to superconduct -- its resistance to electricity goes to zero." That means it's possible to create gigantic magnetic fields within a niobium chamber, magnetic fields that can accelerate particles to close to the speed of light.
Niowave's superconducting chambers look a bit like the barrels of sci-fi ray guns, and that's appropriate, because that's essentially what they are.
But Hollister's no ivory tower researcher. His degree is in industrial engineering from the University of Michigan, so he's interested in building things -- and making them better.
Hollister said most accelerator lab components have until recently been built by national laboratories. But Niowave is betting the private sector can do the job.
Niowave currently has 20 employees, and Hollister said that's what's really unique about the company.
"What makes Niowave really special I think is the fact that we have these high tech world class scientists, and they work with our machine shop -- which is mostly guys who have left GM, and we use the same CNC machines, mills, lathes, that the auto industry uses," Hollister said. "As these plants are shutting down we are picking these machines up very cheaply. We're using auto industry machining and expertise, and these guys really know what they're doing. We got some of the guys from the old GM tool and die shops, and they know how to make parts, they are very good at this."
Niowave has a machine shop, engineering center and clean room in the old school. The spectacular clean room is about 15 by 50 feet and 20 feet tall and takes up more than half the old gym.
Looking forward, Niowave is pursuing business overseas. And it's not just working on physics research -- it's working with the United States Navy on Star Wars-like particle laser weapons that can knock the bad guys out of the sky.
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IDV Solutions LLC visited next. Scott Caulk, the company's product manager, described the company's core product -- software called Visual Fusion Server, a visual composite application platform that allows enterprises to consolidate information in the context of location and time.
Basically, that means companies can plot maps showing a wide variety of disparate data in a much more meaningful, easy-to-understand way than tables of numbers.
One example: retailers can plot all their stores on a map and visually represent them based on data -- good performing stores green, bad performing stores red, for example, with the ability to click on store locations to get more information.
Caulk said the company's had the most success with crisis management, especially for its customer, the oil giant BP. IDV built BP a hurricane management system that replaced a cumbersome manual series of maps, bringing more than two dozen data sources into one composite view.
"Whenever a hurricane would threaten the Gulf of Mexico, they would come into a room... and tack up a bunch of maps," Caulk said. "One map would show bathymetry (ocean depth), another the location of its assets, another the projected hurricane path and plume, another ocean currents, another projected wind, another projected waves."
Now, all those layers are superimposed on a single computer map. Caulk said BP officials have told IDV that they used to spend 90 percent of their time in such situations asembling the maps, and 10 percent on analysis. Now that 90-10 percentage is reversed.
IDV has also created an application for the federal Director of National Intelligence office on outbreaks of bird flu. A user of this map contributed data he had on the density of poultry populations around the world, which was easily superimposed on the DNI's map. Caulk said Visual Fusion easily adapts to end users bringing in additional resources to add to the map.
Caulk also said IDV is always hiring develops, with C# experience in short supply and Share Point experience always a bonus.
More at www.idvsolutions.com.
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Rawle Hollingsworth has the modest goal of completely transforming chemistry.
Hollingsworth is president of AFID Therapeutics in Lansing and a professor of biochemistry and molecular biollogy at MSU.
And his big idea is to change the raw material at the base of the carbon economy.
Rather than hydrocarbons -- you know, oil -- Hollingsworth wants to use carbohydrates.
In other words, plants. Sugars. All that benign stuff.
"The difference between carbohydrate and hydrocarbon is that carbohydrate has water in it. But it's still carbon," Hollingsworth said. "The challenge is to turn carbohydrate into something useful, and not very many chemists are equipped to do that. But the advantage of this approach is that photosynthesis is free. The raw material is free, essentially."
Hollingsworth's first company, AFID Therapeutics, is using biomass as the starting point of creating materials that can be used in drug development. The company is equipped to do this with refined carbohydrates like starch or sugar, or very crude biomass like corn stalks or sugar beet pulp, the leftovers of agriculture.
The company has 70 pharmaceutical clients all over the world, including the world's top 10 drug companies, and its materials are being studied to treat everything from cancer to autoimmune disease to infectious disease to neurological disease to metabolic disorders.
AFID has 12 employees today and is currently housed at the Michigan Biotechnology Institute building in Lansing, although Hollingsworth said he's looking for a new home for the company.
But beyond pharmaceuticals, Hollingsworth said he's looking to create new chemical processes to create all basic materials now produced with oil.
"Probably 90 percent of our products are entirely new compositions of matter, typically beyond the reach of traditional chemical processes," he said. "Carbohydrate chemistry is a very specialized area. It opens up areas you can't typically get into by traditional methods. It is not a replacement. It is a new frontier."
More at www.afidtherapeutics.com.
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Next up was Jeff Walter, president of Saline-based Latitude Consulting Group Inc., which has an office in Howell and is active in the Lansing-area tech scene.
Latitude is a spinoff of the tech boom-era company Commerce One, which "rolled up" a bunch of local software development shops around the country -- in this case, Ann Arbor-based AppNet, formerly known as Software Services. Latitude was once a company of 300 people that got as small as 16 people before being spun out. Today, Walter said, "we're dangerously close to topping the 100 person mark."
Latitude also purchased Novations Learning Technology, the software arm of a Lansing human resources services firm, Novatiolns, and that's how the company got the presence in learning certification software that is now a major growth area.
Out of Novations, Latitude has created Latitude U, a Web site where the public can post and sell learning content.
Said Walter: "A year and a half ago, we said hey, Web 2.0 is all about user generated content -- but if I was a course author, where would I post my course? As a photographer I'd post my photo on Flickr, as a musician I'd post on iTunes, as a videographer I put my stuff on YouTube, my classified ads go on Craigslist, and the stuff I want to sell goes on eBay. But where do I put my courses? At that time the answer was nowhere. There was noplace a Web based course author could post their stuff."
Well, thanks to www.latitudeu.com, today there is. Course authors can self-register and pay to post their own courses. Latitude U gets a small cut of whatever they sell. It's also added a training provider directory.
Latitude U was rolled out two weeks ago at the annual meeting of the E-Learning Guild, www.elearningguild.org. The reception was enthusiastic, Walter said. And Latitude will also be rolled out at the American Society for Training and Development meeting in June. The company also plans a Web-based sales and marketing campaign to promote it.
Walter said Latitude officials have noticed an increase in courses being posted to the site over the transom, ranging from "four or five belly dancing courses, a skin physiology course, a course on how to build crystals, and a course in Arabic on how to use a CAD-DAM tool."
More at www.latitudecg.com or www.latitudeu.com.
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Next I got a visit from one of my favorite Michigan tech companies, TechSmith Corp. of Okemos.
All TechSmith has done is build a worldwide following in screen capture and recording software.
TechSmith president Bill Hamilton said what's new and interesting now is a Web site TechSmith created called the Jing Project, which allows users to make little videos or snapshots on their desktop and moves them to a server, where they can share links to the files.
Hamilton said Jing.com can be used to communicate a wide variety of data and so far the site has attracted 118,000 registered users, who have posted more than 250,000 pieces of content. And "we're adding about 20,000 people a month, almost entirely by word of mouth," Hamilton said. "This is one of our experiments, trying to understand what the Web 2.0 thing is all about and how it's going to affect us. It doesn't actually cost us that much to run this for free, so we look at this as a research project to see what people like."
Hamilton said TechSmith's research group is also studying how screen capture technology fits into mobile devices -- not to mention the flexible display screens of the future.
In the meantime, the company plans several product introductions, including the first major new release in two and a half years of its SnagIt screen capture software. The new version due out in June, will add more powerful editing capabilities. The company is also about to release a business version of its Camtasia screen recording software called Camtasia Relay, along with a Korean version of the softwaer in May and a French version in September. Also due in July is a new version of its Morae usability software that will add more video capabilities, meaning it can be used by focus group managers, not just usability professionals.
Hamilton said he's comfortable with his decision to forego building a new headquarters in Lansing and will continue to rent space at an Okemos office complex -- in fact, he's just rented a fifth building. The company is also looking at a satellite office between Brighton and Ann Arbor to boost its recruiting abilities in southeast Michigan, and will continue to get more involved in telecommuting as gas prices rise.
More at www.techsmith.com.
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This year's Tech Tour also FINALLY gave me a chance to visit ACD.net, the entrepreneurial bandwidth provider.
Kevin Schoen, who graduateed from high school in 1989, started the company in 1986 -- do the math -- as ACD Computers, a computer assembler that at its peak put together 8,000 to 10,000 machines a year. When the Internet came along in the mid-90s, Schoen ditched the hardware business in favor of providing Internet service. The company added competitive phone service in 1999 and DSL service in 2000.
Today, ACD serves the Lansing, Jackson, Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids and Benton Harbor-St. Joseph areas. It's also building out the Battle Creek and Saginaw areas and adding wireless capabilities. The company eventually intends to move into Detroit's western suburbs.
The company now has 53 employees, 40 or so in Lansing, where it moved into an old warehouse on Grand River Avenue a year ago and built a new data center.
Looking ahead, Schoen said ACD plans to install a video head end around the end of this year, and would then start competing with the cable TV companies. He said he plans to offer cable channels on an a la carte basis with an emphasis on channels the big cable operators won't or can't carry.
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My last visitor of the day was Scott Morrison, vice president of marketing and product strategy at Sircon Corp., an Okemos developer of software that electronically links insurance agents, insurance carriers and state insurance regulators.
Morrison said Sircon sales grew 26 percent in 2007, coming off 37 percent growth in 2006. The company now employs 120 people, up 20 from my last visit a year ago. And it's about ready to introduce a new product that will offer compliance and risk management for large insurance carriers.
"We're trying to promote Michigan as a great placce to be if you're in technology," Morrison said. "We hear a lot about people leaving the state. Auto companies, Pfizer closing. But a lot of companies that are our size, 100 plus employees, are growing fast."
Morrison said the company has refocused its recruiting efforts at Michigan State University, along with the University of Michigan, Central Michigan University and Western Michigan University.
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I ended my day in Lansing with lunch with Dewpoint Inc., the IT consulting company with active practices in identity management, business intelligence, security, storage and data center support.
Dewpoint is opening a Southfield branch office with an open house Thursday, May 1 from 3 to 6 p.m. that will include a demonstration of Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Global Desktop system. The office will house sales and technical field staff, many of whom are already assisting clients throughout southeast Michigan.
The office is located at 25800 Northwestern Highway, Suite 150.
Dewpoint president Andy Kotarba said that if all goes as planned, Dewpoint will grow from about 55 employees to nearly 90 in a matter of a few months. The company is emphasizing Sun's money- and energy-saving new server system. And it's involved in the Lansing ITEC effort at the Holmes Street School. |
