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Sometimes you can make your cake and sell it too.
At least, that seems to be the philosophy at a number of local technology companies that mix consulting with product development and sales. According to executives at several New England companies that blend services and products, not only does the consulting help feed the mill for new product ideas, the two tracks help make them recession resistant.
Take, for example, SolveIT Corp., a Westborough-based company that launched in 2003 as a traditional consultancy, helping clients solve IT problems. According to founder and CEO Vasu Ram, making its own products was always part of the plan.
“My aim has always been to transfer the company to product development, but it started off as a service company,” Ram said.
That made sense, given that he had a long background in product development, at companies like The Boston Group of Boston and SkillSoft Corp. of Nashua, N.H. So when Rhode Island-based badge and name tag maker Hook-Fast Specialties Inc. came calling with a need for a full e-commerce system, Ram knew he had his first sellable product, which became CustomView, a modular system for selling goods on the web.
SolveIT now has about 30 employees, with 18 in India and 12 in the U.S. The company is anticipating 40 percent growth this year.
The bulk of SolveIT’s growth is expected to come from some big consulting client jobs, Ram said, and that ability to make up for slow product sales with service is echoed by Michael Benjamin, CEO of FlightView Inc. of Boston.
“It has been a bit of hedge against hard times, the services business,” Benjamin said.
FlightView, which began its life in 1980 as a consulting firm named RLM Software Inc., makes products that use real-time flight-location data straight from radar systems controlled by the Federal Aviation Administration. After the events of Sept. 11, 2001, Benjamin said, the demand for its data products fell, but it saw a significant jump in consulting demand from its biggest services client, the FAA.
According to Benjamin, who came on board as CEO two years ago, FlightView didn’t start out to be a product play the way SolveIT did. It wasn’t until the FAA asked FlightView to create technology that would aggregate the flight information from airline and airport radar systems into one massive, real-time database, that the “light went on.”
“We pretty quickly started to realize there were some commercial applications for that,” Benjamin said. Now the company has about 625 clients, including companies such as rental car agency Hertz Global Holdings Inc., delivery giant FedEx Corp. and even Microsoft Corp.
For Bedford-based machine-vision systems integrator Vision Machines Inc., moving into selling products came about when founder and president Marc Landman watched other systems integrators fall by the wayside. “It is still possible for a small systems integrator to get by. But it occurred to me a number of years ago that it would be much, much better to diversify,” Landman said.
So after more than five years, Vision Machines took technology it had developed for a client and rolled that out as the MatchIT Color Inspection System. It followed that up with the Automated Sieve Certification System, which inspects particles.
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