Trend Spotting
PATRICIA DOMINGUEZ is the founder and president of Triage Partners (www.triage-partners.com), a technology staffing firm in Tampa. She boasts more than 25 years of technical, operational, financial and human resource experience and serves on many local boards.
Dominguez is passionate about the bay area’s prospects in terms of technology – as long as the people can be found. She says a salient trend affecting the local market (and others) is the low unemployment rate. “With it so low – as of December it held steady at 4.5 percent – employers face the challenge of finding the right skill sets and then making a decision quickly before a competitor snaps up the talent.” 
The low unemployment rate leads to higher compensation pack-ages for job seekers too. Triage has seen a strong demand for business analysts; project managers; Java developers; MS developers (.NET, C++); Oracle consultants and database managers; SAP consultants and programmers; and systems architects. “The challenge is always in matching the right culture between company and candidate,” she says. “We find people through our network, referrals and job boards.”
What’s always interesting, she adds, is discovering why people are seeking new employment opportunities. Reasons include lack of recognition, poor communication within the workplace, lack of flexibility and looking for a fun and stimulating workplace. “‘Show me the money’ isn’t the only motivator,” she says
Time for a Trader Chat
IS YOUR INNER TRADER JUST LONGING FOR A HEART to heart with other like-minded folks? TradingEducation.com might just have the answer for you with www.TraderChat.com.
Lane Mendelsohn, VP and son of Lou Mendelsohn, president and CEO of Market Technologies in Wesley Chapel, says the site was designed to provide futures, forex and equities traders with an honest and open forum for sharing trading ideas and strategies. TraderChat was launched in December. “Although we have not yet officially promoted the site, we already have 200 subscribers,” he says. “That speaks volumes.” 
Like TradingEducation.com, he says the site will derive revenues from ads. “Companies like brokerage firms will be interested in advertising because they will like the people going there. Our site is clean and user friendly, and that is important because not all traders are necessarily Internet-savvy people.” Mendelsohn adds that there are already many traders at the site who are creating an online network among themselves. Parent TradingEducation.com itself was created in autumn 2005 to educate traders. Today, it has a weekly newsletter that goes out to 25,000 people. “We are very pleased with its progress and the fact that so many people have signed up – people thanking us for the free content of stuff they used to pay for elsewhere,” he adds. No Infant Mortality Here
Last August we wrote about how Alaka’i Consulting & Engineering (www.alakai.us) chose this area due to its proximity to MacDill AFB and the fantastic offerings of the STAR TEC center. Alaka’i sells sensor and technology services for the defense and security markets. At the time, Alaka’i had six employees and its first R&D contract with the Army Research Laboratory in the works. It had no debt and was profitable since starting roughly three years ago. Revenues in 2004 were $167,000, about half a million in 2005 and they had hoped to double that in 2006.
Because the Army award was delayed due to a logjam in its procurement organization, Alaka’i’s revenues flatlined last year at over $500,000. “At least we topped our first million from inception to date, which puts us well out of infant mortality,” says principal Ed Dottery. “We have always anticipated doubling our annual revenue when the contract came in, and we’ll stand by that to project over a million for 2007.”
The silver lining is the Army has added funding to the contract. “Now our initial award for the Advanced Detection of Explosives program stands at over $2 million,” says Dottery. Doubling Defense Dollars
Speaking of military contracts, another local company is also flush. Tampa’s AC4S (MBR, November 2006) recently received a one-year, $4.5-million contract from the U.S. Army and Intelligence Command (INSCOM) in Fort Belvoir, VA. Hugh Campbell, president (www.ac4s.com), put the award into perspective: “On a one-year basis, this is our largest contract win to date, although we have won a $10.5-million contract before, but that was over five years!”
A Gutsy Recruiter
Some people have guts. Take Rachel Cantor, chair of the Engineering Network for the Tampa Bay Technology Forum (TBTF). Cantor, 25, moved from Philly to Tampa two years ago to start her own engineering search firm, RC Associates (www.rcassociatesllc.com). The young but enterprising woman says that having such a firm has been a lifelong dream since growing up with a father who owned an engineering firm.
Today there are just two employees at her small company, but she envisions 10 in the next few years. “I looked around the country and saw the best opportunity in Tampa,” she says. “Philly is more built up, and Tampa is an emerging city where I felt like I could make a difference.”
To that end, Cantor is working with her firm and TBTF to help retain and attract individuals from architecture, engineering and related fields to the Tampa Bay area – in addition to trying to attract new engineering firms.
The employment shortage is a huge issue in Tampa Bay, says Cantor. “In some engineering fields we are unable to find and bring in enough qualified individuals to fill our jobs, while in other disciplines of engineering there are not enough jobs to support the high-level talent in the Tampa Bay area.”
So, Cantor and a cadre of others are trying to find out what can be done to keep people in the area, attract others to the area and help build the region.
She has found that while there are a lot of different professional organizations here, none are focused on the business needs of the engineering industry. “Ultimately we are trying to bring engineers together as one voice.”
Tech FYI
As part of a new strategic plan to direct its focus toward advanced technology lighting products and systems, Orlando’s Supervision International (www.svision.com) has changed its name to Nexxus Lighting and relocated its corporate headquarters to Charlotte, NC …Tampa’s Bayshore Technologies (www.btfl.com) received the top scorecard by Citrix Systems for the southeast region of the U.S. The scorecard measures Citrix’s top 300 Solution Advisors from around the country in eight categories … Clearwater’s Tech Data (www.techdata.com) launched its Printing Solutions Specialized Business Unit (SBU) and realigned several other SBUs within the company’s Product Marketing divisions. |
