Boulder County Business Report

BOULDER — Amadeus Consulting Group Inc. does not focus on achieving recurring revenues from software maintenance and support.

The company’s stance has mystified bankers and venture capitalists, said Lisa Calkins, company president and co-founder. She insisted that the industry’s usual approach “isn’t right for our customers.

She also pointed to the fact that the Boulder-based company doubled in size and hit revenues of $2.6 million last year. Its 30 employees recently moved into a new 11,000- square-foot facility.

“Many clients come to us after having tried someone else,” she said. “They’re anxious and nervous. They’ve been burned, and they now have (a smaller) budget and less time to get the project done.”

Arlington, Va.-based TotalSecurity.US had developed an analytical model for threat assessment and risk mitigation. It wanted to extend its reach to municipalities, states and large organizations. Two or three software development companies failed in the attempt to adapt the model to large-scale emergency scenarios.

TotalSecurity.US then engaged Amadeus, which delivered the project on time and within budget.

According to Calkins, Microsoft Corp.’s .Net technology has revitalized the custom software development industry. Project costs are a fraction of what they were eight years ago, she said.

“.Net supports software development across a wide range of devices,” she said. “That’s important because in mid- and large-size corporations, vital information resides in a polyglot world of applications, programming languages and operating systems.”

Employees who use laptops and hand-held devices often need easy access to data that resides in corporate mainframes. Sales representatives may need to know the status of a customer service issue before they call on the account. Inaccessible or inaccurate information can kill business opportunities.

Although a rapid exchange of information is a competitive necessity, the various systems used throughout the corporation were typically not built to communicate with one another a short time ago. Using .Net, developers can quickly produce reliable software code that addresses this problem and move data where it’s needed, regardless of operating system, programming language or the type of digital device.

.Net experts from Amadeus helped Boulder-based apparel maker Spyder Active Sports Inc. replace the inefficient manual transcription processes it had used to bridge the gap between its enterprise resource management system and its dealer-order process.

Spyder was then producing 15,000 different items each season. The cumbersome information management system limited its growth potential. Amadeus wrote software to automate the dealer order process and eliminate this obstacle.

Spyder continued to achieve 20 percent to 25 percent annual growth.

Amadeus developed a Web-based survey system to gather data revealing key industry trends for Medical Group Management Association. According to Fran Iannucci, systems manager for the Englewood-based company, the association had specific and complicated requirements for both the database and the Web interface through which members participate in the annual survey.

The development team selected needed expertise with .Net, she said.

During the yearlong project, she found that the Amadeus team was “great at managing projects.”

The first time the association fielded the survey, more than half of the participants chose to respond via the Web rather than using the paper version or the Excel spreadsheets that were also available. That was twice the number Iannucci had expected based on a test run with a prototype survey.

“We get the data faster and it’s cleaner,” she said.

The information technology industry has global giants like Accenture Ltd. at one end of the spectrum and one- or two- person shops at the other. Amadeus is among the few to have grown to its size while remaining focused on custom software development. Others, according to Calkins, have branched out into general information technology.

Amadeus does not limit its market by industry, Calkins said, because lessons learned in one industry translate into solutions for others.

It does focus on smaller projects, which typically require up to 2,000 hours of work. Larger software houses wouldn’t consider smaller project or one that only involved defining the client’s requirements. Amadeus will, but Calkins said a 1,000-hour project is ideal.

That helps insulate Amadeus from the shift toward overseas software developers. The outsourcing model is more appropriate to large-scale projects rather than the custom work Amadeus does, Calkins said.

Amadeus also engages in projects that involve sharing its expertise with the client’s development team. “We’ll even tell clients they don’t need us (if) they have the internal resources to do the project,” she said.

Calkins doesn’t worry about lost sales. “Good things you do come back to you.”