In light of some new partnerships and an infusion of venture capital, Warwick software company Mesa Systems Guild, Inc., has expanded its staff and will soon expand its office space too.
Money from Mid-Atlantic Venture Fund in Allentown, Penn., has already helped Mesa expand its staff by allowing them to hire five new full-time people in the past three months — including a chief executive officer, two engineers, and a controller — and has increased the number of contract engineers it has employed, according to Alan Hecht, Mesa’s vice president. This has brought the total number of full-time employees at Mesa to 18, said Hecht, noting that executives there plan to add three more sales and marketing positions before the year is over. Additional hiring is also anticipated in 1999.
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Up until this point, the eight-year-old company has been “self-financed,” Hecht said. But, he explained, “this opportunity is a huge opportunity and we needed the capital to grow.”
Because of the new employees, Mesa is also expanding its space at the Quaker Lane office building where it is located. The fact that a few high profile customers are using the company’s Mesa/Vista software, which allows users in different areas to share data about complicated projects, has perhaps contributed to Mesa’s need to start hiring more workers too. Designers and engineers working on Young America, the New York Yacht Club’s entry to the upcoming America’s Cup race, are using the system to help perfect the boat’s design.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration also recently became a customer, although Mesa executives have no idea what the agency is using the computer tool for. Mesa also counts the Department of Energy, Lockheed Martin, and a number of small consulting firms and software companies among its clients. Those companies all use a Web-based version of Mesa/Vista, which allows them to use the product by accessing a specific Web address, explained Maribeth McNair, who runs Mesa’s marketing programs.
The Web-based program eliminates the need for specific hardware or a system administrator to install it. There is also a software version available. In the Young America case, Mesa’s software lets more than 20 designers, engineers, and consultants communicate about various test results on their design, share plans and diagrams, schedules, memos and other data almost instantly. The designers can almost instantly post results of wind tunnel and water tank tests on a secure Internet site for review by other members of the team around the world.
New Chief Executive Officer C. Clark Jordan said customers such as NASA are “looking for process discipline” with Mesa/Vista, because the software provides people working on complex engineering and design tasks with a built-in way to retrace their steps should problems arise.
Besides gaining a few high profile clients, Mesa has also embarked on at least one potentially lucrative partnership with Artemis Management Systems of Boulder, Colo. Artemis has licensed Mesa/Visa technology and plans to package it with its own project scheduling software, according to Hecht. That product is scheduled for release in summer 1999. Mesa executives would like to secure 10 such partnerships over the course of the next year, said Jordan.
Before joining Mesa, Jordan had worked as an adjunct professor of entreprenuership at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also completed his Ph.D. Mesa executives hired him “to bring some entrepreneurial experience to a mostly engineering-driven company” and to help provide focus for its marketing efforts, he explained.
The marketing department will soon, however, be occupied with helping roll out the latest version of Mesa/Vista. Hecht said there are some significant additions to version 3.0, including a sophisticated search engine, which Mesa licensed from another software developer. Users can only access information they are authorized to see, he explained. The new version also provides users with the ability to create templates for new research projects, using information for similar work that has already been conducted, Hecht said. Release of this latest version is expected in the next two weeks.
