In search of an entryway into an international market, old-fashioned business
networking led Warwick-based Atrion Networking Corp. all the way to Ghana.
Charles Nault, president and CEO of Atrion, said providing services overseas is something the company had been anticipating for several years. The information technology industry is one of the first places budgetary cuts worked their way down to after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and, Nault said, the company had been working to establish offices capable of handling targeted projects.
The company was looking for a way to have the majority of their business be providing service, as opposed to relying on the small margins of providing equipment.
Atrion had actually been eyeing Morocco, until a project manager at Atrion got to talking to a native Ghanaian who used to work at KPMG in Massachusetts, which does consulting specializing in brokering business deals for companies in the West African nation that is about the size of Oregon.
The CEO of one of Ghana’s largest hospitals was looking for a company to supply the IT work for an automation project. Other than a small computer used for supply inventory, all of the hospital’s functions – from staffing to prescription management – were handled using paper and pen. Nault went to the country to perform a feasibility study and evaluate the existing infrastructure in June 2003. He found a country were electricity was far from stable and a T1 cable Internet connection cost around $12,000.
While there, he met Dr. Sam Somuah, the chief information officer at the Office of the President in Ghana. Somuah talked to Nault about problems the government was having securing Internet communications at the Castle, Ghana’s equivalent to the White House.
Government employees were relying on Yahoo! accounts for internal communications, were regularly downloading viruses and leaks of sensitive information out to the country’s media were commonplace. Nault said the request for proposal the government issued through KPMG was pretty vague, but he decided to put a team of security engineers on the proposal and see what they could come up with.
Atrion eventually ended up winning the project, with a bid of $300,000 that was actually above the proposed budget. Canada, which was providing humanitarian funds for the project, ended up coming with the additional money to install a solution that would incorporate technologies from Cisco, Microsoft, Symantec and RSA.
Nault said the system Atrion put in place included many of the elements that are commonplace for companies in the United States, such as firewalls, a private e-mail system and a backup system. The Cisco Security Agent, which searches for irregular processes running on a computer (as opposed to viruses definitions), was also installed, as was a two-factor authentication system requiring a worker to enter both a person PIN number as well as a password from a hand-held personalized random generator – protecting the system from the outside as well as the inside.
Most of the work was completed in February after about 10 weeks of work, with a technician and Nault working on-site for about six weeks. The last pieces of the system’s firewall were added in late August.
“They’ve been very happy with the system,” Nault said. “The security market is extremely fragmented, and there’s not a single vendor that can offer a complete end-to-end solution, which makes designing a security strategy very difficult. We were proud to provide that.”
Atrion has opened a small office in Ghana with a handful of employees (mostly security) on the site and Nault spends about two weeks out of each month there. Talks are continuing with the hospital about implementing the project that originally lead the company into the country and Nault said Atrion has about $10 million in proposals they’re floating. The U.S. government recently launched a program to funnel $1 billion to 16 different third-world countries, Ghana placing fourth on that list.
“We’re having a lot of ‘pie in the sky’ discussions with people over there,” Nault said. “The country seems to be a lot like the United States was 50 or 100 years ago. …We were lucky the opportunity came our way. The people are English-speaking and very friendly. It’s definitely an up-and-coming country.”
Nault said Atrion will take a loss on their first year of operations in the country, but has high hopes for returns in the future. While margins have been driven down in the United States to the single digits, he said, Ghana offers the chance to again realize double-digit returns.
“There’s nobody in the country with the capabilities Atrion has,” he said. “One of our technicians will see more hands-on in a month than a Ghanaian will see in their entire career. It’s exciting to be a part of that.”
