Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 22, 1995 TAG: 9501200038
SECTION: ECONOMY PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LEIGH ANNE LARANCE SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
What if your business really did require reinventing the wheel?
For firms like VTLS Inc., which develops library automation and information management systems, technology development is a never-ending cycle.
``Products we developed in '85 were obsolete in '89,'' said President Vinod Chachra.
One recent project involved transferring Princeton University's card catalog to computer. Today that technology is state-of-the-art, but tomorrow it will be old news. ``It makes it very difficult to train our customer base and move them along with new products,'' Chachra said.
It's a challenge, but not an impossibility. Software engineers already are developing products that will move the company's customers into the 21st century.
And those technological challenges make it possible for small towns such as Blacksburg and rural communities, better known for cow chips than computer chips, to breed international competitors like VTLS.
VTLS started in 1985 with 10 employees and sales of $700,000. Now in its 10th year, VTLS has a staff of 80 and has $7 million in sales, Chachra said.
The company is broken into five divisions: administration, marketing, international, software development and customer service. The last two are the largest - with 25 workers in software development and 23 in customer service. Eight employees work in the international division.
``The majority of people working here have computer science and business backgrounds, followed by library sciences,'' Chachra said.
Some VTLS employees - including Chachra - are multilingual.
``We can interact with our customers. More and more we're trying to hire people who know the technology and can read and write in different scripts,'' he said.
VTLS operates out of a building in Virginia Tech's Corporate Research Center, but it sells to the world. The company has branch officers in Finland and Spain and plans to open an office in Poland and Germany by the end of 1995.
Half of the company's business is overseas, Chachra said. ``Our exports provide jobs in the Blacksburg area,'' he said.
Employees' global expertise is also helping to expand the customer base, since VTLS' software programs can work in 16 different languages. Soon the company will be adding languages and charters to serve China, Japan and Korea, Chachra said.
Employees' language skills are important, since two-thirds of sales are related to service, training, support, consultation and education, while a mere one-third are because of products, he said.
``Our telephone bills are more than $13,000 per month, and this despite the fact that a majority of our business is done over the Internet,'' he said.
Chachra said travel took up $400,000 of the company's budget last year. His own itinerary included trips to Helsinki, New Delhi, Thailand, Zurich, Moscow and Budapest. That meant 46 trips and 101 days on the road.
One thing Chachra believes will hurt the Roanoke and New River valleys in the coming years is inadequate air service, because poor connections and limited service increases the cost of doing business. For VTLS it may mean opening branch offices elsewhere in the United States.
``It's difficult to make one-day business trips to anywhere,'' Chachra said. ``We cannot function as a global business without adequate airline service.''
VTLS INC.
THE COMPANY: Originally known as Virginia Tech Library Systems, VTLS was founded in July 1985 as an offshoot of a Tech project. The company designs library automation and information retrieval systems.
HEADQUARTERS: Corporate Research Center, Blacksburg.
OPERATIONS: Half of this company's business is overseas. Its products are in the National Agricultural Library, the Virginia State Library in Richmond and the National Library of Switzerland, among others.
ANNUAL SALES: $7 million.
EMPLOYEES: The company has 81 workers are divided into five divisions, including 23 in customer services, eight in the international division, 25 in software development, 14 in administration and 11 in marketing.
THE FUTURE: The company expects to at least double its size, to 160 employees, by 2000.
by CNB