GovernmentVAR of the Week: Abba Technologies
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When the employees own the company, a universal drive to grow business is inevitable. That was the rationale of president and CEO Andrew Baca when he led an employee buyout in 2001. Now, his 48 employees are benefiting from their own success.
Abba has experienced significant growth in the past several years, winning a Flying 40 Award in 2003 from Technology Ventures Corp. for being among the fastest-growing technology companies in New Mexico. Abba has established branch locations in Arizona and Colorado, winning contracts recently with the State of Arizona and the Colorado Springs office and partnering with Diligent Technologies to implement an IT solution at a U.S. Air Force base near Colorado Springs. In professional services alone, Abba experienced 300 percent growth in 2006.
The key to the company's success? Introducing ways for government and education customers to cut costs and improve efficiency, and not being afraid to use cutting-edge products to do it.
"Our engineering and sales staff routinely evaluate new technology and companies to determine products and services that will benefit our customers with the changing trends," Baca says. "[And] Abba Technologies' strategy is to focus on customers that have the vision and means to improve their organization."
Abba recently deployed PC blades throughout engineering facilities to solve a wide variety of national security issues for the Los Alamos National Lab (LANL), one of the U.S. Department of Energy's multiprogram, multidisciplinary research laboratories. Other areas the company focuses on include clusters, grids and visualization computing for support in heterogeneous and resource-on-demand environments. The trick is to find customers willing to think outside of the box.
"Abba Technologies is extremely fortunate to work with forward-thinking government agencies," Baca says. "[That allows us to take] what we have learned from implementing solutions to other government agencies so that they can improve their organization and reduce costs by implementing better technology and better business practices."