Technology.

• Position: Industry Outlook - Interview - Company overview

Utah's technology industry continues to face the ongoing challenge of securing a qualified workforce. At our annual technology roundtable, industry experts discussed unique methods to educate, attract and retain top talent. The group also discussed the state's successful Fund of Funds program and other initiatives, while stressing the importance of a continued commitment to training and education in the state.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

How is the economy affecting your company? How have you adapted your business to continue being successful?

HANKS: I'm the co-founder and chairman of Doba. As far as the downturn, we've been very aggressive with our marketing and our positioning. We feel that this is a good time to expand and to push because we see some competitors that are not in that position to do so.

GOODRICH: ProPay is a 12-year-old firm that helps enterprises, large and small, succeed by securing their payments and providing innovative payment solutions. One way that our company has adapted to the challenging economic times is to take a core competency that we've had, which is securing card data from hackers, and making this available to customers. So, we store their card data for them allowing large enterprises to save millions of dollars in regulatory burden and getting them out of handling card data.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

OLAFSON: I'm the CEO for Tomax Corporation. We make software and retail solutions for retail chains and, therefore, are very connected through the consumer to this economy and the downturn. However, I am very happy to report news that I probably wouldn't have predicted three or four months ago and that is that we hope to have a flat year--flat being the new up in some respects. The connection to this economy through the consumer has obviously put a lot of retailers in a different and difficult spot. We've actually reinterpreted growth in terms of growing the business to more of a goal of building quality into the organization with the view that we can continue to build profitability, work on our organization and look after our customer. So in a practical sense with our customers, it means really reaching out to these retailers aggressively, doing what we can to put projects together that move the needle, that drive sales gross margin, inventory performance and labor efficiencies. And, actually it's been a very revitalizing phenomenon for us. This economy has been a very good instructor. This economy has made us think about the business more concretely and more substantively than we have perhaps in the past. Though we may not be growing dramatically right now, internally there's just a real strong sense of optimism about the quality of the business that we're producing and managing.

MELLA: I am president and COO of Control4. We are a provider of hardware and software solutions for home automation. Our world didn't really change in October like some of the financial sectors and others. We had been selling into a difficult housing market for about two years, and the big opportunity for home automation is actually not new homes, it's connecting up and retrofitting all the existing homes out there. That's the other 99 percent of the market. Because technology and price points have gotten to a point where wireless or wired technologies are equally affordable, we've actually seen a lot of dealers and resellers recast their business and doing mostly retrofits in this market. Our business grew 42 points last year, so we're happy with that.

SLOVIK: RemedyMD is a software company in the health care business. We offer specialty specific electronic medical records. We're one of the few companies, with all of Obama's talk about health care and spending, that's actually given a lot of interest in a lot of our products. But, one of the things we've done recently is repositioning a lot of our marketing to go after the stimulus.

REAGAN: ViaWest is a manage service provider with 16 data centers and seven different markets across the West. We're currently the largest privately-held data center company, and basically we provide outsourced Internet infrastructure services to small and medium sized businesses. We're actually growing this year. We're going to hit hopefully 20 percent and grew about 35 percent points last year.

MORTON: I'm vice president of products at Symantec, which is primarily a security company. Our argument as a security company is: How can you actually secure a machine--a laptop, a desktop, a PC--if you don't know where it is and what it's doing? So we're trying to be on the lead of this convergence between systems management and security. Symantec as a company continues to grow. We've done more off-shoring and have been aggressive in watching our cost structure. One of the things that we've done differently since the economy fell is we've started to rely more on our partners for some of the technological innovation than we have in the past. We've gone to some smaller companies that are more nimble and are more likely to invest with the understanding that they'll get some of the power of our marketing team and power of our sales force and the ability to attach to those things we bring to the table if they're willing to assume some of the risk about developing some of the new technology. So I think that's a fundamental shift we've gone to in the past six or nine months.

CUTLER: I'm vice president of services at Novell, which is an infrastructure software company with almost 4,000 employees, about 1,000 of them based in Provo. We just announced quarterly earnings last week and had a slight decline in revenue, but profit was up, so we've done similar things to control our expenses in this economy. Things we've done to make the company successful primarily is around partnering with companies like Microsoft, Accenture, Deloitte & Touche to get a leverage channel for our software products.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

WIDLANSKY: Mangia Technology is a venture-backed early stage technology company. We built a mobile platform connecting fans to concessions and merchandise inside the stadiums. In spite of the economy, in the last 90 days we've closed venture funding and launched a major consumer service here in Salt Lake with our great partners over at Real Salt Lake.

BHASKAR: FatPipe Networks makes wide area communication products for mission critical applications. We've been one of Utah's fastest growing companies for the past six years. To adapt to the business climate, we've stepped up marketing. We set up a 78-man shop in India to do some marketing for us here, and that's helped us.

JACKSON: ARUP Laboratories is a national reference medical laboratory owned entirely by the University of Utah. We've grown about 10 percent a year for the past 15 years on average, and this year is a little bit better than that. In spite of the fact that health care is not as recession resistant as people think, the laboratory business is actually very strong. But, we're being very cautious. We know that [our strength] may not last through a really long downturn. In the meantime, we're investing aggressively in physical buildings and IT.

LEGGE: Red Sky Solutions focuses on local area wiring networking solutions for voice streaming data solutions for our customers. This year we're looking to grow somewhere between 25 and 35 percent. We're not going...