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TIG Adeptly Spreads Its Reach and Its Net

TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION GROUP

CEO: Bruce Geier.

Revenue: $341.5 million in 2011; $317.7 million in 2010.

No. of employees: 450.

Year founded: 1981.

Company description: Information technology systems integrator and computer equipment reseller.

Key factors for success: Profitable every year since founding; maintains highly trained specialists, and continually updating staff with changes in the industry; wide network of support offices.

There’s a U.S. map in the conference room at Technology Integration Group, thick with dots marking the computer systems integrator’s offices and warehouses. The dots have proliferated in the last decade.

In fact, TIG’s map now shows the coast of China floating at its left edge, with a dot on Shanghai.

TIG is growing. It is now the third largest firm on San Diego Business Journal’s list of Largest Private Companies, having advanced from the No. 4 spot last year. Its 2011 revenues were $341.5 million, up from $317.7 million in 2010.

Telling TIG’s story requires a little bit of imaginative flight over this map on the conference room wall.

Destination, Shanghai: The city on the East China Sea is a few hundred miles from Korea and Japan. TIG’s China office on Lujiazui Road is not contributing the bulk of company revenue — at least not yet. The office did roughly $10 million of business in the past year, said Bruce Geier, TIG’s president and CEO, up from $5 million in the previous year.

“We’re getting established,” Geier observed. “It’s just like starting anew here.”

“We don’t sell as much equipment over there as we sell here. … A lot of what we’re doing is providing labor over there,” he said.

Geier said the Shanghai office deals largely with expatriates from North America, Europe and Australia, representing multinational companies. These might be biotech companies, auto suppliers, food service, hotel, legal or accounting firms.

A cloud computing center located two hours out of Shanghai is a joint venture with a Chinese software company.

Sharing an Understanding

“The reality is American companies would rather deal with American companies,” Geier said, noting there can be difficulties with language, currency and time zones. “They’re 12 hours opposite of New York,” Geier said. Even computer part numbers are different in the U.S. and Chinese schemes. “The part numbers don’t line up.”

Destination, New Mexico: A good deal of TIG’s growth has been by acquisition.

TIG’s most recent large acquisition closed in February when it took on Commercial Data Systems, a $30 million company. The business gave it contracts with the national labs at Los Alamos and Sandia, N.M., as well as the Washington, D.C. area, Geier said.

There have been smaller acquisitions since early 2011, businesses in North Florida (WaveNet Technologies), New Mexico (Integrity Networking Systems), and Oregon (Obsidian Technologies). Each had about $5 million in annual revenue, Geier said.

TIG has two dozen sites in all, including a contract manufacturing facility in Colorado.

Roughly half of TIG’s business is in the public sector: federal, state and local governments, schools and hospitals. “Some of the schools, believe it or not, are still doing well, through bond issues and being able to raise funds in other ways …,” Geier said.

TIG is a federally registered small minority business, though it has outgrown the small business definition for state and local governments.

In the Neighborhood

Destination, Miramar industrial neighborhood, San Diego: TIG occupies 48,000 square feet here, split among three buildings in a modest office park. “We’re pretty much busted at the seams,” Geier said. Though the arrangement works, there are little inefficiencies. Geier said that he needs to have three receptionists. “It’s a little bit of hassle on a rainy day,” the executive said. “You can get wet going between buildings.”

Geier said he hopes to move the business to a single building soon.

One recent technological adventure has been implementing an Oracle computer system, which has boosted efficiencies and streamlined processes.

Geier admits a love-hate relationship with Oracle. “The conversion was difficult,” he said, comparing the system’s installation to the stress of building one’s own home. The machine is expensive and complex, and it takes a lot of maintenance. “All in all it’s a great thing,” the executive said. “You’ve just got to keep working at it all the time.”

Destination, cyberspace: It’s a place that’s constantly changing. So what’s hot now?

Geier mentions BYOD. That stands for bring your own device. These environments let users connect to the network using the machine of their choice, whether it is an Apple Inc. iPad, a tablet running the Android operating system, a laptop or a PC. Increasingly, information technology departments are being more flexible about the devices company officials can use.

Other hot areas are virtualization, which efficiently consolidates the resources of multiple servers, and Big Data, the storage and management of large amounts of information. Geier said he sees a future where the business owner with access to the most data will have strategic advantage over the competition.

Geier says he also sees a future where voice commands will take the place of typewriter keyboards. “It’s just a matter of time,” he said.

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