AVTECH Software Inc., a technology company that has been quietly headquartered in Newport for more than a decade, is raising its local profile in the midst of a rapid growth phase.
The company develops and manufactures hardware and software to protect data centers against computer hackers and interruptions caused by power failures, floods, fires and other environmental events.
AVTECH is a privately held company with about 100 employees, including 25 at its headquarters in Newport. The company also has sales, service and engineering facilities in Pennsylvania, Olympia, Wash., and Sheffield, England, said Michael Sigourney, AVTECH's senior product specialist.
"We're a teeny company, but the reason we're teeny is because we chose to go down a privately funded road, as opposed to getting venture capital," Sigourney said.
Since moving into the data-monitoring-and-security niche in the late 1990s, AVTECH has become a leading manufacturer of IT and facilities environment monitoring solutions and one of the fastest-growing companies in its marketplace, Sigourney said.
AVTECH has 30,000 customers in 104 countries and two customers on Antarctica. Its products monitor data centers owned by more than 80 percent of Fortune 1000 companies, including such industry leaders as Microsoft, Marriott Hotels, Harley-Davidson, Yahoo and eBay, and some of the world's most secure data centers, including those in the Pentagon, the White House, all branches of the U.S. military and most branches of the U.S. government, he said.
Recently, AVTECH was contracted by the United Nations to help support its peacekeeping mission in Liberia, which the U.N. launched in 2003 to coordinate and oversee a ceasefire agreement and work towards resolving years of conflict in that nation.
AVTECH will provide its new Room Alert 26W units to monitor environmental conditions in 40 data centers the U.N. operates in Liberia and other African nations associated with the mission. Knowing immediately when issues or events occur in the data centers will help U.N. officials prevent downtime and costly hardware replacement in the data centers and communication networks, ensuring continuous operation of the mission, Sigourney said.
 The Room Alert 26W product is designed to monitor computer room temperature, humidity, power, flood, room entry and other events in multiple locations. The product uses wireless technology, communicating information about the data center via e-mail, mobile phones, pagers and other mobile devices, using a secure, private protocol.
"My guess is what they're doing down there is they're sharing data about economic situations, standard communications between those different offices, they do a lot of coordination for supplies and things, they work closely with the Red Cross," Sigourney said. "Their systems down there are probably being used the same as data centers all over the world. The difference is that the United Nations deals with real-world situations where people die. If you don't get medicines to the right place, if you don't get United Nations peacekeepers in the right place at the right time, bad stuff happens."
AVTECH is in the midst of rapid growth, Sigourney said, having grown about 50 percent in sales revenue each quarter for the past seven quarters. The company has relationships with about 1,200 resellers, about 1,100 of which have signed up since January and are learning about AVTECH's products, he said.
"When they start selling, this is going to be a huge growth business," Sigourney said.
In anticipation of that growth, AVTECH hopes to expand into the old Sheffield school building in Newport and is currently in discussions with Newport officials and the R.I. Economic Development Corporation to line up funding to buy the building, Sigourney said.
The company is outgrowing its offices on the first floor of a converted mill building, and could be forced to leave Rhode Island if it is unable to find a space to expand here, he said.
"We're growing very fast here, and we expect that probably if we can get this building that we're working on, that we're going to probably add 25 to 30 people in the next 12 to 18 months," Sigourney said. "We've looked around and there's not a lot of places for businesses to grow in this area, and yet we want to stay here, because a lot of our employees are based here." |
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AVTECH Software, Inc.