SP500 Winner: Company of the Year - At GreenPages, Talent Counts

"I know a lot of competitors, a lot of great guys," said Ron Dupler, president of GreenPages, CRN's Company of the Year. "I think what differentiates us is that the team here has established a leadership position toward cloud computing." That's because the company has been working to provide virtualized solutions for several years. GreenPages, ranked No. 154 on CRN's 2012 Solution Provider 500 list, made a heavy bet on the technology, and back in 2008 started making strategic acquisitions to strengthen its position. However, it's not a company's overall size that dictates success; each acquisition was made as part of GreenPages' overall strategy, to become customers' first choice for virtualization solutions.

"Our people, with their considerable technology talent, have been doing this for several years now, working on the coolest projects with advanced technology. We've gotten a lot of value from the past four years," Dupler said. "We've become truly a consulting company that's focused on virtualization."

For the last several years, GreenPages has focused on its talent pool, continually striving for customer satisfaction that is borne of technical excellence among its staff. "It's all about talent," Dupler said. "You have to create an environment where these folks want to be. We attract and empower them, and then make sure they are working on cool projects."

A related hurdle is that of talent creation. "The demand for what we do is almost infinite," Dupler said. "Our challenge is to scale intelligently and maintain and attract the talent we need to grow our business. That's what keeps you up at night: Finding talent … [Fortunately], we are at the point where we can grow our own talent, and we are defining what we need to grow on."