Five Questions With: Glen Ilacqua

GLEN ILACQUA is president of South 6 Inc., an information technology staffing agency that emphasizes cybersecurity. / COURTESY GLEN ILACQUA
GLEN ILACQUA is president of South 6 Inc., an information technology staffing agency that emphasizes cybersecurity. / COURTESY GLEN ILACQUA

Glen Ilacqua, president of South 6 Inc., talks about the new company that he recently opened in New Bedford. It is an information technology staffing agency that emphasizes cybersecurity.

PBN: When did you officially open?

ILACQUA: We officially opened in the fourth quarter of 2016. However, we’ve been building the team and the organizational infrastructure for some time.

PBN: How many employees do you have?

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ILACQUA: That’s not as simple a question as it seems. Our core team in New Bedford has five full-time permanent staff. However, since we place IT workers (the IT industry likes to call these folks “resources”) in roles at our clients’ locations, we have a pool of over 350 IT specialists of all types, with a specialty in cybersecurity skills.

PBN: Can you explain how you work with your customers?

ILACQUA: Our administrative and sales work is done in New Bedford. However, we deploy resources throughout the Northeast. In cases where clients have multiple locations, we have no geographic restrictions. In fact, for some technical roles, we even assemble teams of workers located globally and deploy them in the states through the H-1B visa program. Clients engage a business like ours when they have technical challenges that are of limited duration (generally under two years) but require workers with specialized, highly skilled training. The direct answer to your question is that the nature of information security – whether responding to a cyberattack, or building secure data infrastructure – usually requires on-site resources, while cloud technologies are less geographically defined. Either way, we deploy our services as needed.

PBN: Where did you get the name from and what does it mean?

ILACQUA: Ah, what’s in a name? I spent the early part of my career back during (dare I say it?) the 1980s in consumer goods. I had the big national ad agencies (for a while my account shared the creative team responsible for Campbell Soups, Velveeta and Isuzu automobiles during the “Joe Isuzu” campaign), and remember spending countless hours in board rooms refining slogans, product names, brand marks and the like. I don’t even want to admit the revenue spent on testing these ideas. Sometimes that work produces great results. Other times, it’s wasted energy – regardless of what the agency tells you to defend their fees. I’d like to say we used a special algorithm to choose the name and the latest virtual focus group testing to prove the perception of the brand. Eh, yeah. Not so much. The name means nothing – and everything. Not any more or less than say, “Accenture.” It’s actually a truncation of our address. We’re located on South 6th St. The name seems to be doing what it should. It is evoking a “that’s cool” response and questions from people who like it. We went with very simple and elegant graphical elements, and we think it works.

PBN: Where did you get the idea for the business? Have you worked in this field long?

ILACQUA: I’ll answer this in reverse order. I’ve been in and out of the IT field since the ’90s. I’ve worked in seven industries and executed my work on three continents over the years. Last year, I was recruited to help the largest staffing firm in New Bedford reposition and diversify. The firm, now called Roberts Joseph Staffing, provides roughly 40 percent of the direct labor to the allied fishing and seafood processing industries in New Bedford (still the largest fishing port in the nation in dollar volume). I decided that IT, and cybersecurity in particular, would present the largest unmet need in the marketplace over the next decade. We have assembled a senior management team along with seasoned consultants, all with 25-plus years [of] experience sourcing and deploying highly skilled and vetted IT and information security talent to industry.

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