Quiet giant: Engineering firm takes on the world.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: Hightech Coloradobiz - Bob Uhler of Montgomery Watson Harza - Brief Article - Company Profile - Interview

As BOB UHLER TALKS FROM HIS COMPANY'S HEADQUARTERS in Broomfield, 400 of his firm's employees are in Manchester, England, tackling a $3 billion capital improvement project to upgrade the city's water infrastructure -- pipelines, treatment plants, pump stations and leakage-reduction systems.

Uhler's company, Montgomery Watson Harza, has taken on thousands of jobs like this all over the world, from Anchorage to Los Angeles to Sydney, Australia, to China.

"We probably have 3,000 to 4,000 projects of different magnitudes going on at any one time," says Uhler, CEO of the company known as MWH. "Some are consulting, some are planning, some are designing, some are constructing, some are overseeing quality, some are operations."

Power and water are life essentials, and Montgomery Watson Harza is one of the top three engineering firms in the field worldwide, with revenues of $856 million last year and anticipated revenues of $980 million this year. All told, the company has 5,500 employees operating in 37 countries.

"I would describe us as a technology engineering and construction company in the fields of power and water," Uhler says. "We do a few other infrastructure things like highways, and we do some airport work. But really, our two focuses are power and water. We're a very big player in the water environment."

"The original rationale for the headquarters being here probably was driven more by it being in the center of the country than anything else," Uhler says. "Once I was here, I decided that we could recruit talent here easier than we could in Los Angeles."

MWH relocated its global headquarters from Pasadena, Calif., to Broomfield in June of last year, shortly after Uhler was named CEO. Previously he served as president of the company's American division.

Montgomery Watson came to be in 1992, when the U.S. engineering firm Montgomery merged with the British firm Watson. Just last June, Montgomery Watson merged with Harza, the world's best known hydro dam and power-generation company.

"They've done some of the biggest dam and hydro power jobs in the world -- in South America, in Far East Asia and in China," Uhler says. "We were interested in the merger because we needed big-dam water-storage and big-tunnel underground geotechnical capabilities. What they needed was a global base of operations."

Through mergers and sheer increased business, the company has grown by leaps since Uhier started at Montgomery as an engineer 25 years ago. "When I...