Diversification, Efficiency Boosts Firm

Systech Solutions Inc. Fastest Growing Company $5 Million to $9.9 Million(55.78%) No. 10 Fastest Growing Company Overall It was 1993, and two Indian-born former IBM engineers had a simple idea for a new business. Arun Gollapudi and Srinivasan Ramaswamy envisioned a professional services firm that would use computer operations to help companies solve problems and better operate their business. Their timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Soon, their fledgling company, Systech Solutions Inc., was capitalizing on what was then a largely uncharted industry the Internet. By 1995, revenues for the Glendale company had grown to $472,000 not too bad for a start-up only to explode to $13 million in 2000. By 2004, those numbers leveled off to about $6.02 million, only to swing back to $9.37 million last year. That rapid growth 55.78 percent between 2004 and 2005 places Systech in the No. 10 position in the San Fernando Valley Business Journal’s list of fastest growing private companies in the region and the No. 1 fastest growing among companies with between $5.5 million and $9.9 million annually. Today, Systech is a major player in the business development circuit, tallying $5.4 million for the first six months of this year. Its client list includes IHOP Corp., Disney, Earthlink Inc., Speedo, American Express Co. Wal-Mart.com, Guitar Center and a slate of Fortune 500 and 1000 companies. It’s also expanded far outside Glendale, establishing offices in San Francisco, Oregon, Connecticut and the United Kingdom and an offshore technology center in Chennai, India. Gollapudi credited the growth to the company’s diverse and often unique offerings. “There’s a tremendous demand out there and we’re growing rapidly to try to meet it,” he said. That diversification was largely a response to the one-two economic punch over the past decade that crippled many start-up tech firms: the dot.com bubble burst of the late 1990s and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “Post 9-11, everything in the IT services industry crashed,” Gollapudi said. “That was an 18-month recession where we didn’t get a single new client. So we practically had to rebuild the company.”