By: Deborah Johnson Wood
At a time when technology firms are
downsizing, one Grand Rapids company is expanding three of its service
areas and hiring employees and contractors. OST – recently named one of the Michigan 50 Companies to Watch
– attributes the hiring of 11 employees last year and a projected eight
new jobs and 10 contractor positions this year to the company's growth
momentum.
"Given the economy, our revenue numbers
are down because hardware and software sales are down," says Dan Behm,
president. "Last year we did $33 million. Overall revenues will be
down, but we'll still be able to maintain a decent profit. Services are
up."
Because sales of software and hardware
took a dive, OST leaders decided to turn up the heat under the
company's three most promising service areas: IT security assessments,
managed services and application development. And that push is
generating jobs.
IT security is a CIO's biggest concern,
Behm says. OST plans to grow its security division by 1200 percent, and
that means attracting out-of-state clients. Behm plans to do that with
the company's proprietary product SARA (Security Access for Remote
Assessments), a high-tech product that clients simply plug into their
IT systems.
"We build the team in Michigan and
perform the assessments remotely by sending SARA to the location," Behm
says. "All they do is plug it in. We present the results remotely as
well; they just plug the projector into SARA and we do the
presentation."
The push is on to expand two other
service areas: managed services, where OST provides remote day-to-day
administration of clients' IT systems, and application development for
clients needing web sites, custom applications and the like.
OST currently has 46 employees and 40 contractors.
Source: Dan Behm, OST
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Deborah Johnson Wood is development news editor for Rapid Growth Media. She can be contacted at [email protected].
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