When Alan Hecht of Mesa Systems Guild of Warwick says that growth is the biggest challenge facing the company in its 10 years of existence, he means it. In just the last year, the company – which started with a four-person staff working out of Hecht’s home office in 1990 – has grown from 21 employees to the present 75.
”We’ve brought in five people from out of state,” said Hecht, vice president of Mesa’s engineering division, and one of the company’s founders. “And over the past year, we’ve turned five interns into full-time employees. It’s been quite a growth spurt.”
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Mesa Systems Guild began as a small consulting firm founded by three engineers: Hecht, David Fortin and Brian Brady, Mesa’s vice president of product development. Once engineers at Cadre Technologies, the trio formed Mesa to further develop computer programs to allow aerospace engineers to collaborate on projects.
”The need was specifically tools going into Fortune 500 companies as an incomplete solution,” he said. “Nobody was tying the tools together.”
Mesa develops customized solutions by which engineers can share drawings, project schedules, memos and other data – from different geographic locations.
”When you want to see it – the latest version – from wherever you are on the planet, you can,” said Hecht.
The business grew beyond the military/aerospace market when medical equipment manufacturer Abbot Labs saw how Mesa’s process-enabling solutions could enhance product development and document process adherence to stringent FDA requirements.
Mesa’s clients also include such heavyweights as NASA, Lockheed Martin, Lucent Technologies, MediaOne and Daimler-Chrysler.
”They all are building some kind of product or device,” Hecht said. “They have very strict, exact processes they have to adhere to.”
Mesa’s collaboration solutions and mesaVista software prove to be invaluable to companies like these, where there is no margin for error.
“If you’re at an ATM machine, you can wait 10 extra seconds for your money, but you can’t get bad blood information, you can’t get radiation from a cell phone, you don’t want planes falling from the sky,” he said. “NASA just installed mesaVista at all of their headquarters. They use our stuff to do a lot of risk management.”
Using the World Wide Web, Mesa Systems’s mesaVista software (announced in 1997) allows engineers to communicate using a secure Internet portal. The portal is a bridge between dissimilar engineering and design programs, which otherwise would be incompatible.
AOL.com and Yahoo.com are two examples of Internet portals which offer access to any number of Web sites. Similarly, enterprise portals are information gateways that companies establish internally to manage and deliver valuable knowledge resources they have accumulated over time.
SUPERVISING TWO INTERNS is Alan Hecht, vice president of the engineering division, and co-founder. The interns are Steve Smith, left, and Peter Griesse.
Work met play two years ago when, much to the delight of Mesa Systems employees who enjoy sailing – of whom Hecht said there are several – when the company was one of the sponsors of the New York Yacht Club/Young America Challenge. Engineers working on the team’s design project for the yacht were able to use Mesa’s software to share test results on their designs, plans and diagrams with each other.
”They had a small, but geographically distributed team,” Hecht said. “Before, they had to fax each other the information. That was the state of the technology a year ago.”
With the development of its mesaVista software, the company shifted its focus from consulting to product solutions. Two years ago, Mesa sought – and received – $5.6 million in venture capital funds to bring its mesaVista software to market.
“To make the software available to everybody – that’s what the investors saw and that’s why we were able to raise the money,” Hecht said.
Nineteen ninety-eight was a year of big changes for Mesa. Besides the staffing increases the venture capital money allowed, cofounder David Fortin left the company to pursue software consulting and Hecht stepped down as Mesa’s chief executive officer.
C. Clark Jordan, a former director of the Executive/Professional Education Center at Carnegie Mellon University, was hired to take Hecht’s place.
“Part of what the investors were looking for was solid management,” Hecht said.
Hecht added that he doesn’t miss his old job.
“It’s allowed Brian and me to focus on the technological development of the company,” Hecht said. “I’m happy to let somebody else work with the venture capitalists, the lawyers, the numbers. That’s not my forte.”
When it comes to other staff, ironically, in a state notoriously plagued by a lack of IT workers, Mesa has felt relatively few growing pains.
”So far, we’ve been lucky,” he said. “We haven’t had a problem attracting people.”
With the company’s history of rapid growth, Hecht said Mesa is bound to face staffing concerns at some point.
”It will be an issue for us moving forward,” he said. “We’re going to have to look at some acquisitions. We’ll just get the people however we can get the people.”
One way of “getting the people” is through internships. Mesa recruits interns through job fairs at local colleges; the company currently employs 15 interns, the majority of whom are from the University of Rhode Island and Brown University.
”They’re coming to us faster than we can accommodate them,” Hecht said. “It’s been a very successful program for us.”
What are the biggest challenges that have faced the 10-year-old company?
”Growing very fast has certainly been a huge challenge – when you have to invent your processes at the same time you develop your product,” Hecht said. “That’s the biggest issue – hiring in as controlled way as we can in such a short time.”
Hecht also mentioned that many people don’t understand exactly what Mesa Systems’s software does.
”The marketplace is still being educated as to what product development portals are all about,” he said. “It’s an immature market.”
Immature, perhaps, but still able to support Mesa’s half dozen sales offices around the country, as well as the recently opened Mesa Systems International outside Paris, which is a sales and support office for the company’s European operations. In 1999, Mesa Systems posted sales of $2.3 million.
What does the future hold for Mesa? The immediate future, anyway, involves a move from the Warwick office Mesa has called home for the past five years. This fall, the company will settle into new, more spacious offices in West Warwick.
”We need to continue to expand,” Hecht said. “We have a number of investors looking for a return on their investments. Depending on market conditions, going public is a possibility. We’re not sure what will happen.”
