Evolve Technology Group is using the tough economy to its advantage by helping clients improve efficiency — and the company is growing as a result.
Two years ago, Evolve’s revenue increased 30 percent over the previous year. Last year, revenue gained 40 percent, and the company is on track to increase more this year, said Robert Johnson, the company’s founder and co-chief executive officer.
The company’s clients include state departments and Fortune 500 companies.
Started in 2001 as a value-added reseller that designed and installed primarily Cisco Systems Inc. equipment, the company’s services have evolved to include training companies with Internet security systems and making data centers more efficient.
Along the way, the company has become a value-added reseller for hardware heavyweights such as Computer Associates, IBM and EMC and a security partner with Websense Inc.
Value-added resellers design, configure, install and integrate computer and communications systems for customers that don’t have their own information technology staff.
The companies that resell the equipment set up the systems that a customer will use day-to-day. The customer might not even know the service or equipment exists without the consultation of a reseller, said Dan Francisco, principal of The Francisco Group, a technology company communications firm.
“They go into an environment and they bundle all the technology to make it do what you want,” Francisco said.
Johnson had worked for Cisco, and he started Evolve to became a Cisco reseller.
Evolve opened its doors just as the tech boom turned into the tech bust. Evolve moved to focus on a government niche. That served the company well for years, and it has had major contracts with state departments such as motor vehicles and corrections, as well as the California Public Employees’ Retirement System.
“Government is a big part of what we do. You can’t be in Sacramento and not serve that segment,” Johnson said.
In recent years, the company has broadened its scope to include more commercial companies. While much of the company’s growth is still in Northern California, it does work nationwide, mostly for Fortune 500 companies, Johnson said.
Evolve’s business with the state hasn’t slowed. In fact, the company is getting more contracts to make the state’s data centers run more efficiently and more economically. It also is adding security and compliance to its list of services.
The company is fueling sales by pushing data center efficiency improvements.
“A large portion of our business is the state, and it is no secret the state is having difficulty, but we keep getting orders because of the uniqueness of our business model,” said Paul Imhof, head of the data center practice with Evolve.
Rather than just selling equipment, the company focuses on saving its clients money.
“We analyze their environment, and we see where we can consolidate multiple services into one platform,” Imhof said. The magic number is a return on investment in 18 months or less, he said. If Evolve can show it can return the investment in under 18 months, it often gets a sale.
Technology has advanced so much in routers and servers, the newer ones use less electricity, have more power and are faster.
Evolve also can model when a data center will run out of capacity, power or cooling, which are major issues in data centers today.
Data centers are the most expensive commercial real estate to develop, and with the increasing demands of information and telecommunications, companies all over the world are running out of power, cooling and space, said Peter Van Deventer, chief executive officer for SynapSense, which develops and deploys data center monitoring equipment.
Evolve also has become the largest partner in the West Coast with Websense, a web and e-mail security company, said Jeff Manibusan, head of sales for Evolve.
The Evolve offices have a training room to do authorized Websense training and formal certification for up to 20 people at a time.
Neither Websense or Cisco returned calls for comment.
There are many value-added resellers in the Sacramento area, primarily because of the state and its contracts, said Roger Akers, local technology venture capitalist. “They are a pretty big part of the local economy.”
If a person goes to a vendor, the vendor will sell what they have. If that person goes to a reseller, the reseller will bring in the best vendors, said Curt Lewis, president and founder of LinkSource Technologies, a telecom reseller.
Increasingly, customers don’t want to have their own IT staff. They look to resellers as trusted advisers to know what the state-of-the-art equipment and services are, Lewis said.
“We look at a company’s entire telecom spend, and then we see how we can save them money,” he said.
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