Reaching A Critical Juncture

usiness Intelligence Technologies (bIT360) has successfully evolved from what began as a software consulting business in 1999 into a system builder that generated $16 million in revenue last year.

The company’s CEO, Mohammed Hashim-Waris, said bIT360 has prospered by concentrating on delivering IT solutions that help businesses enhance their business processes in thriving vertical markets such as financial services, health care, state and local governments and education. “We are focused on delivering business intelligence,” Hashim-Waris said.

During the last market downturn, the Madison, Wis.-based company decided to concentrate on system building and augment the traditional solutions that clients purchase with services such as asset tagging, asset management, burning-and-testing and full-service deployment, even to remote locations. The company’s system sales last year jumped to 651 units a month, up 70 percent from the prior year, bIT360 reported.

Revenue, though, grew much slower, and Hashim-Waris believes the company has reached another critical juncture. He intends to transition bIT360 into a much different business—one specializing in the digital home. He expects to move this year into a more consumer-based business that involves building competitively priced home servers that combine typical desktop functionality with gaming and video applications. Such systems could generate between 50 percent and 60 percent of bIT360’s revenue within the next five years, Hashim-Waris said.

“We will be building systems for the 14- to 23-year-old market, for the student who wants both a computer, as well as a gaming system,” he said, adding: “We see a big opportunity with the home digital center. The way the market is moving is toward converging audio and video.”

He believes such devices would be priced at about $1,200 (without a monitor) and provide much greater functionality than a traditional PC. They could be used, for example, to play hi-definition movies.

Such a strategic move has become necessary because the price differential between desktops and notebooks is flattening as corporate customers replace desktops with notebooks, Hashim-Waris said. His company’s gross profit margin is now in the 10 percent to 12 percent range. “This isn’t really a very high-profit business,” he said.