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3-GIS partners with foreign companies
Decatur’s 3-GIS has found the most effective way to deal with foreign competition — avoid it.
Envision global competition as a rainstorm, with every raindrop a competitor. The raindrops have numerous advantages: low wages, lax environmental and labor laws, government-supplied credit.
Many Decatur companies — like Nucor Steel — have no choice but to compete head-to-head with every raindrop, grasping for every competitive advantage.
3-GIS uses an umbrella.
“We have very little competition,” said 3-GIS President Tom Counts, “and we work hard to keep it that way.”
Not only does Counts avoid fighting off foreign competitors in his U.S. market, he is aggressively exporting his product to foreign countries.
“International is one of our prime focuses,” Counts said. “I enjoy it, and actually I am pretty good at it.”
Counts spent three weeks in Europe last year marketing his software product, and he is returning this spring.
Finding a niche market is holy in the business world, and all the more so when the market is global.
The 3-GIS niche involves development of geospatial software.
Its customers typically are companies in the telecommunications, electric or gas industries.
Most industries have the luxury of having their assets contained in a single location. They have inventory in the warehouse and equipment in the plant.
Utilities, however, have assets spread across huge geographical tracts. Decatur Utilities has utility poles in Southwest Decatur, transformers in Northwest Decatur, electric meters in Southeast Decatur.
3-GIS builds virtual warehouses for such industries. Its Web-based mapping software tracks every asset geographically, allowing its customers to find, monitor and maintain those assets in real time.
Using a Blackberry or similar device, an electric company employee can photograph the damaged utility pole or input data about the transformer that lost its battle with a squirrel. The geographically specific information immediately posts to any computer on the Internet, as do parts orders and work orders needed to fix the problem.
Especially when it comes to telecommunications companies, 3-GIS has a near global monopoly on the Web-based version of a virtual warehouse.
“What we do is hard. We’ve been able to take something that historically has been hard (for the customer) and really simplify it,” Counts said.
Counts was not content to enjoy the umbrella that protected him from foreign competition in the domestic market. That same niche, he realized, gave 27-employee 3-GIS the ability to go global.
It does so by partnering with value-added resellers in a growing list of overseas locations. The company has partners in Spain, Russia, Serbia, Greece and Qatar among countries.
The partners combine 3-GIS software and expertise, with their knowledge of prospective customers in their country to make the sale. The partners keep a percentage of the sale.
Counts has no illusions his company is immune from foreign competition. The technological expertise to develop competitive software exists in every market 3-GIS has entered. Counts’ goal is to make sure they have no incentive to do so.
“We want to partner with them and be friends with them and show we are working on the leading edge. Then they think, ‘I can spend all this money to develop a competing product, or I can immediately make money selling this (3-GIS) product that’s already built.’ ”
3-GIS’s international push is in its infancy, but recent U.S. economic conditions reaffirmed the wisdom of the approach.
“The first quarter of 2009 I tried to stick my head in a microwave, but I couldn’t get the door to close,” Counts laughed. “A global market doesn’t make us recession proof, but it really helps level out the business. When one area is having a dip, you can go find business elsewhere.”
Now, he said, 3-GIS is placing its poker chips on both the red and black. If the U.S. economy is in the dumps, it can push its Latin American or European markets. If those markets are struggling, the Middle East may provide the revenue.
Either way, Counts figures the best way to deal with foreign competition is not to beat it, but to preempt it. Is the model working? Counts expects to post close to 40 percent growth this year over last year. The most definitive affirmation of the business model, however, comes when Counts makes a comment that places 3-GIS in an elite group among U.S. companies:
“We’re hiring.”
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