BusinessReport.com

Technology companies can thrive in Louisiana. They just have to go out of state for clients and employees to a large degree.

Three high-tech firms—Innovative Emergency Management, Antares Technology Solutions and TraceSecurity—say they couldn’t sustain operations if Louisiana was their only market for customers and talent. In most cases, it’s meant opening offices elsewhere. And while it might be easier just to pick up and relocate altogether, all three companies say they’d much rather stay headquartered in Louisiana.

Antares, a software development and information technology consulting firm, was founded 20 years ago and has offices in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The company has just under 50 employees. Software for health care systems is a specialty.

Laura Thomas, the firm’s vice president of sales and marketing, says there is business in Louisiana but you have to look hard to find it. “Could we survive on Louisiana business alone? No, it would be very difficult,” she says.

Among the company’s in-state projects are various Web applications and Intranet services it developed for Unisys Corporation, which has a contract with the Department of Health and Hospitals. But much of the firm’s business comes from out of state, and much of it is based on referrals—Antares’ contract with Saks Inc., the New York-based department store company, for instance.

Thomas says Antares would like to grow, and is looking at opening additional offices elsewhere, but has no plans to relocate headquarters outside Louisiana.

“I don’t see us relocating,” she says. “We are committed to Louisiana and helping growing businesses here.”

Antares’ experiment with a Portland, Ore., office didn’t work out. Thomas says the culprit was bad timing—shortly before the dot-com bust, which left the Portland office full of good tech people but short of work to the extent that Antares began funneling projects from the home office in Baton Rouge.

And while the company plans to stay in Louisiana, Thomas admits finding talented help can be a chore. Antares recruits out of state and finds it easiest to attract people with Louisiana ties.

“We do try to offer competitive salaries, but that’s difficult,” Thomas says. “We don’t have deep pockets.”

Pete Stewart, president and CEO of TraceSecurity, says when he co-founded the company in 2004, the plan was to “do it all” from the Baton Rouge base, though the realization eventually dawned that it wasn’t going to happen.

Trace specializes in IT security compliance and risk management, which demands a talent pool of software programming expertise that just wasn’t available in Louisiana. So the company opened an office in San Diego, where seasoned programmers abound.

“We were just overwhelmed with the quality of resumés of people that had five, six years of programming experience that could just walk in and be ready to go,” Stewart says.

Dallas has become Trace’s “sales epicenter,” he says. The city is thick with people who understand business-to-business sales and marketing—another form of talent in short supply in Louisiana.

“You’ve just got to go where the talent is,” Stewart says.

Louisiana may not be overflowing with programmers like San Diego or sales and marketing hotshots like Dallas, but it is a great place to conduct delivery and support operations, compliance teams and general administration, Stewart says, which is why Trace’s Baton Rouge office handles those aspects of the business.

He admits moving headquarters away from Baton Rouge would make life a lot easier, but insists this is home and he isn’t leaving—though it would be nice to be in Dallas with direct flights to major cities. That most of Trace’s business comes from outside Louisiana is a nonissue as far as Stewart is concerned—there’s just too much opportunity out there to ignore. The company is even contemplating going global, though Stewart wants to make sure the timing is right.

“We’re still a young company,” he says. “We’ve still got a lot to figure out.”

Madhu Beriwal, president and CEO of Innovative Emergency Management Inc., has built the company she started in 1985 into a spectacularly successful operation that applies high-tech solutions to natural and manmade disasters, homeland security and various emergencies—hurricane evacuation, for instance.

Beriwal, who’s long been fascinated by the intersection of science and technology and “human interest,” says she realized soon after launching IEM that she couldn’t depend on Louisiana for her bread and butter and started going after national contracts. Today, IEM has accounts around the world and offices in eight cities—seven of them outside Louisiana.

The company employs IT specialists, scientists and engineers. The University of Louisiana at Lafayette is a good source for IT graduates versed in Java, thanks to IEM’s relationship with professors there. There’s less coordination with LSU, though the company does recruit some grads from there individually.

Dot Net [Microsoft’s technology platform] programmers are hard to come by locally, and there’s heavy competition for the few to be found in the Baton Rouge area. For those employees, IEM has to recruit in Salt Lake City and Atlanta—cities where serious computer gaming work is being done, and where it’s not hard to find people who understand things like computer animation and how to build flight simulators.

IEM, which has more than 150 employees in Baton Rouge, also hires a lot of engineers. That most engineering graduates these days have foreign citizenship presents IEM with a challenge in getting them cleared for the large quantity of classified work the company does for the federal government. But the biggest problem is brain drain, Beriwal says.

“The best and brightest want to leave from here because there are not enough companies doing the kind of think-tank work that we’re doing, so they are reluctant to put stakes down here,” she says.

As for in-state clients, Beriwal says she’s done more work in Russia than in Louisiana.

“This has to change,” she says. “I think one of the biggest problems has been that who you know is much more important that what you know. Louisiana is the toughest market we face.”

After running IEM for 15 years, developing global accounts, briefing the White House on bioterrorism, working with Health and Human Services on biodefense policy and the Department of Homeland Security on catastrophe planning, Beriwal is pretty sure she knows what she’s doing and thinks IEM has proven its mettle. To get that message across to potential in-state clients, IEM has again begun heavy in-state marketing.

Stephen Moret, secretary of Louisiana Economic Development, says the state’s workforce shortage “is particularly acute in the technology sector because we lack critical mass there.”

There’s no easy or quick solution, he says, but LED is implementing several initiatives. These include recruiting techology-related companies; launching incentive programs to growth and recruit technology companies; marketing the state properly; and pushing targeted investments in ventures with high potential—Pennington Biomedical Research Center, for instance.

Also, LED is working with the labor department to import workers for high-demand areas when there aren’t enough workers in-state—a program that could include tech jobs, Moret says.

“Ultimately, we need to create an economy with a greater abundance of knowledge-based jobs, which would naturally lead to a greater proportion [and total number] of technology-related companies and workers,” he says.

That would please Beriwal. Other states have tried to woo IEM away from Baton Rouge, she says, but she’d rather not leave.

“We are being courted to move elsewhere,” Beriwal says. “I would really like to give it a few more years to make sure we are successful here. I’m very dedicated to making it successful here.”