Savvy Solutions
Computer Technology Solutions provides IT answers for corporations small and large.
By Blake Tommey Photo by Brian Francis
The perfect storm is brewing.
With the number of technology graduates rapidly shrinking and businesses' reliance on technological solutions growing by the minute, both industries will soon realize turmoil.
Where does that put Birmingham-based Computer Technology Solutions? The answer lies in the eye of the hurricane.
Sanjay Singh, vice president of business development, says CTS, which now provides technology solutions for companies such as Regions and Southern Company, grew out of the "UAB incubator" in 1996 when he and CEO Larry Lilley were full-time professors in the UAB School of Business.
Although the company started small, with no client base or outside investment, CTS now reports an average annual growth of 10 to 15 percent and employs 150 technology, engineering and business experts that have been recruited, educated and supported by CTS since they enrolled in college.
From three offices in Birmingham, Mobile and Atlanta, CTS protégés provide software solutions and maintain systems for major companies including Regions, Compass, HealthSouth, Blue Cross/Blue Shield and Southern Company, plus small insurance and manufacturing operations that also require a robust IT infrastructure. CTS draws nearly 65 percent of its revenue from its "big five" clients and oversees 70 to 80 projects for those clients at any given time, Singh says.
"Think of us like a law firm or accounting firm," Singh says. "Providing technology for business problems is our specialty, and we work very closely with IT departments to devise a system, test that system and provide continued support."
This month, summer vacationers will encounter one of CTS's pillar system solutions for Southern Company on highways across Alabama. As a subsidiary of Southern Company, Alabama Power runs transmission wires to 1.3 million customers in homes and businesses across the state.
While Alabama Power serves two-thirds of the state covering 44,500 square miles, it cannot simply tread where it pleases. And as the company extends transmission lines through land owned by farmers, businesses and other landholders, field workers must negotiate and acquire a legal right of way before construction is possible. Over the last decade, a mounting mess of land asset information, negotiations, leases and legal documents became a problem for Alabama Power's corporate real estate department, which could not easily access or retrieve property information.
But CTS had a solution. After sitting down with decision makers at Alabama Power, CTS experts built a custom software application, the Property Record Information System Manager, which places all documents and information pertaining to transmission lines, land sales and leasing into an organized software system.
"Those millions of pages have to be centralized and put together," Singh explains. "Now, people in the field can quickly retrieve it and say 'Hey, do I have the right to go through this property or not? And if not, how do I enter into a negotiation with the landowner to acquire permission?'"
Within its project management, CTS also provides software systems for nuclear energy companies, which, following 9/11, must perform background checks and testing on employees, vendors and contractors who enter nuclear power plants. CTS software system EM-PACT provides an accessible user interface to nuclear industry employees, manages the data and submits it to the federal government on a daily basis.
In addition to business solutions, CTS performs quality assurance for clients' third party software systems. As a quality assurance provider for HealthSouth, when a software system is deployed into HealthSouth's environment, CTS is responsible for testing the system's functionality, ensuring HealthSouth employees can easily use the system and cutting potentially high support costs on an untested system.
At the central CTS office in Riverchase, closed doors and covered office spaces are a foreign concept, and employees are treated more like prized stallions than paid workers. Singh attributes the company's success to its comprehensive human resources policy.
"What we do here is groom," Singh says. "Our job is to provide enough time and mentorship to our management leaders. Today they are engineers, and tomorrow we are sending them to business schools. We have invested everything in their training and they are running the company on a day-to-day basis."
With backgrounds in higher education, Singh and other CTS leaders teach classes, sit on community advisory boards, provide scholarships and maintain deep relationships with universities across the southeast, including UAB, University of Alabama, Auburn and South Alabama. Singh says CTS is constantly investing in the innovative education of its employees in technology, business and globalization and understanding what an old system is not providing.
"When we bring these human beings, these students in," Singh explains, "what keeps us awake at night is how to train them, keep their skill sets up and still solve the increasing need for technology that is required to run a business today."
