I've long known that the state capital is a hotbed of technology development. You've got several major software companies, life insurers, state government itself and Michigan State University within a few miles, and that's more than enough critical mass.
I got more confirmation of that knowledge in Lansing Wednesday on Day Eight, the final day of the Great Lakes IT Report's Spring Tech Tour 2009.
I met with a bunch of folks in the Holmes Street School, a former elementary school on Lansing's east side that's currently being remodeled into a technology center -- the new headquarters for Spartan Internet Consulting Corp., and a community tech resource called ITEC, for Information Technology Empowerment Center.
The building is about 32,000 square feet -- three floors of former classroom space of about 9,000 square feet each, plus a 5,000-square-foot gymnasium. Spartan Internet will take the third floor and the ITEC the first, with the second floor available for rent.
Renovations have begun on the school, which closed in 2002, and should be complete by the fall.
The ITEC is intended as a community technology resource offering technology classes, cut-price computers and even low-cost wireless Internet access to around 1,000 nearby homes in the Holmes Street neighborhood, according to Kirk Riley, its executive director. The ultimate aim is to both bridge the Digital Divide, and to help the Lansing area's IT talent shortage.
Riley said the ITEC is being funded by the Dart Foundation, TechSmith Corp. and MSU, with in-kind contributions from the city of Lansing, the Lansing school district, the Prima Civitas Foundation, Spartan Internet and Lansing IT consultants Dewpoint. It's governed by an 11-member board, chaired by George Stockman, a professor of computer science and engineering at MSU.
The idea for the ITEC came out of the neighborhood, originally proposed by Adam Pitcher, who works for MSU's computer sciences department. Vartoogian happened to read a Lansing State Journal article about the proposal -- and wound up buying the building.
Vartoogian said his total investment in the building will wind up around $1.5 million.
So it's a good thing business is booming for Spartan Internet -- revenue up close to 25 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, and the company's still hiring .Net programmers, php programmers and Web developers. (The company's head count is now 35.)
Vartoogian said a key new service offering is a free Web site analysis and competitive analysis that tells potential customers how effective their Web site is compared to their competitors, and which offers a blueprint to improve bottom-line performance within 30 days.
The offer is advertised at MSU football games, among other venues. Check it out at http://spartan30.com.
More at www.iteclansing.org or www.spartaninternet.com.
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Also reporting a nice boost in revenue is Scott McAuley, founder of MC Squared Technology Group LLC in Okemos.
McAuley, an IT industry veteran, founded the company in 2004. McAuley was laid off from a job as CIO of a mortgage company in 2002, then began selling for New Horizons Computer Learning Centers. He was successful enough, he said, that he "decided if I could sell for New Horizons, I could sell for myself."
The company is in managed services, acting as an outsourced IT department, mostly for small and midsized businesses, though it also does some backup work for larger companies. It now has 14 employees.
"We take the IT equation away from our customers, and allow them to concentrate on the business they're in," McAuley said.
The company has so far marketed itself by word of mouth, though it is beginning to take steps toward some online marketing.
And that's worked well so far -- revenue was up 300 percent last year from the year before, "and we anticipate that much if not more this year." And he said he finds employees plentifulin the Lansing area. "The folks we need are pretty much network administraotrs, and we can find them here if we need them," McAuley said. "The primary thing is how well you deal with customers -- can you answer their questions without being overly technical, do you follow up with them when you say you will -- if you can do that, we will train you on the technology."
More at www.mcsquaredllc.com.
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The good sales news parade kept coming in the person of Ryan Doom, founder of Web Ascender, an Okemos-based Web design and development firm.
Doom joked that he comes from a long family line of geeks -- a brother 10 years his senior, he said, had him installing Linux systems when he was all of 14. He attended Michigan State in computer science, working doing the school year as a system administrator in the MSU computer science engineering lab, and working summers at an Ohio software company called Neoworx that was eventually bought out by McAfee. He later worked for a local IT consulting firm, Artemis, before establishing Web Ascender in 2005 with a partner, Kevin Southworth.
The two men officially quit their other jobs to concentrate on Web Ascender in 2007. The company has grown in the ensuing two years to six employees. They work in e-commerce design, search engine optimization, content management systems and other high-end development on the Microsoft platform. Doom said the company is looking for a project manager and another developer.
The company has just moved to a new, larger office, 2,500 square feet at 4151 Okemos Road in Okemos.
More at www.webascender.com.
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My interviews then took a brief turn to the public sector with a visit from Deb Biggs Thomas, Michigan eLibrary coordinator for the State Library of Michigan, and Elizabeth B. Kudwa, business librarian for the Capital Area District Library, a 13-library system serving almost all of Ingham County.
Kudwa said she provides a wide variety of business resources and services, mostly to startups and would-be entrepreneurs. She helps small businesses write business plans, assess startup costs, locate financing sources, analyze markets, customers and competitors using local, regional or national data, target new customers, monitor industry trends and connect with local small business support organizations and other entrepreneurs.
She said she frequetnly works in partnership with the Michigan Small Business and Technology Development Centers and the Service Corps of Retired Executives, which also assist would-be entrepreneurs and startups.
Kudwa has a bachelor's degree in business and formerly worked in market research for a consulting firm. She opted out of that high-stress position, got a master's degree in library science from Wayne State, took her present post.
Right now, Kudwa said, "we're seeing a lot of people who have been laid off and rather than get back into the fray and go to work for somebody else, they are taking an idea they have and considering turning it into a business."
For more information, contact Kudwa at (517) 367-6301 or e-mail kudwae@cadl.org.
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Then it was back into the private sector in the person of Daniel Young, president and CEO of Aegis Bleu LLC, a security software provider.
Young has a bachelor's degree in criminal justice from MSU with a specialization in security management. He began working for a private security company his sophomore year and was a supervisor by his senior year. A few years past graduation he took a state job as assitant regional coordinator for bioterrorism preparation. He was promoted to regional coordinator in 2004, a position he held until July 2008.
During that time, Young said he worked with the city of Lansing on a critical infrastructure protection project that started with identifying weaknesses in security. He said he looked for systems to measure those weaknesses -- and found them all "cumbersome and subjective."
So he developed his own -- now called VASST, for Vulnerability Assessment Security Survey Tool. It uses PCs and handheld devices to conduct security surveys to identify weaknesses in physical security -- everything from inadequate door locks to window locks to employee badging to a lack of TV surveillance. That system is now being used by the city of Lansing, and Aegis Bleu has several employuees in sales and programming.
Young said he'll be moving into part of the second floor of the Holmes Street School once its renovations are complete. He plans on hiring between 10 and 20 people once he moves in this fall -- in finance, sales, administration, programming, development and support.
"VASST is like taking a security consultant and turning it into a computer program, kind of like Turbo Tax does with a tax accountant," Young said. "It's as timely and objective as possible. Hopefully it will revolutionize the security assessment process. It took me two years to create."
Young said he plans to add more products in safety and hazard assessment, and to offer services in security training.
More at http://www.aegisbleu.com/, including an online demo.
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My final visit of the day came from John Forsberg, CEO of Lansing-based i2 Integration, a founded in 1994 as a division of John's father's ad agency, the Forsberg Group.
Forsberg said he began working for the agency in the 1980s, first doing slide shows, then moving into corporate videos and CD-ROM presenations.
"When the Web came along, since we were already doing interactive, it was a pretty simple leap," Forsberg said.
I2 has spent the 15 years since working the Web, first being a pioneer in Web video, then adding high-end application developmetn in the late 1990s, and then adding an open-source content management system product called DotNetNuke in the mid-2000s.
"We work with health care, nonprofits, government and b-to-b, and everybody wanted to be able to update their sites, not only add content but functionality, and they wanted to be able to do it in-house," Forsberg said. "Doing customization and selling third party modules for DotNetNuke took us global ... we're now building and selling modules all over the world."
Forsberg said the company saw strong growth last year, has had a rough few months, and is optimistic about the coming months.
"Last year we had the best year in the history of the company," he said. "But this year in January it was like somebody flipped a light switch. In January and February we didn't have a single RFP come in. Now, the last six weeks, we've seen a flood of RFPs coming in. It's clear they're gearing up, getting ready to spend money."
The company now has 10 employees. More at www.i2intergration.com.
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I ended the Tech Tour with a bit of pure fun -- a quick visit to the Impression 5 Science Center downtown and its energetic young executive director, Erik Larson. Amid mobs of schoolchildren, Larson walked me through the center's many exhibits and outlined plans for expansion of a pre-kindergarten area and more exhibits.
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And that's how the 2009 GLITR Spring Tech Tour ended, with me heading back home to Dearborn Wednesday afternoon.
It's a little early for me to write an essay on What It All Means -- I want to give it a little while to sink in. But I want to thank everyone involved in the tour -- my boss, Georgeann Herbert, as well as the ad sales staff at WWJ, for making the trip possible despite tough economic conditions, WWJ promotions director Debbie Spatafora and promotions staffer Courtney Olbrich for their help in organizing getting me the Tech Tour Mobile and putting together trinket bags for me to give away, Danielle DeLonge at Automation Alley for her help in arranging interviews for me in Flint, Marquette and Traverse City, WWJ Webmaster Marisa Fusinski, the folks at LaFontaine Automotive Group for a week's use of a heck of a gorgeous automobile, the GMC Yukon Hybrid -- and most of all, everyone who was willing to take time out of their busy schedule to talk to me about the future of technology-based economic development and entrepreneurship in Michigan.
I'm considerably more optimistic about the future of this state than I was a week ago, and I hope you are too.
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