All In The Family

Take Data Systems Worldwide President and CEO Phil Mogavero, who has been with his thriving family business since the ripe old age of 16. You could say they grew up together.

What started as a summer job working for his father, Frank, quickly became a whole lot more interesting when the elder Mogavero gave Phil a Commodore 8032 personal computer and told him to figure out how to make it useful. ‘&My dad had the vision that microcomputers were going to be huge, but he needed someone to look at the applications,&& Phil, now 42, recalls.

Some 26 years later, Phil, who studied to be an architect, helms the thriving, 50-employee regional network integration and managed services pioneer, which expects to generate around $20 million in 2005.

Data Systems is on the cutting edge of security and application hosting, and last year its managed services business grow by 20 percent. To date, Phil and the Mogaveros have spent $3 million to build out the network operations center that supports those services, which is also used by the company&s partners in the 1NService network, an ecosystem of about 20 regional integrators that have banded together to share practices and joint deployments, among other things. The solution provider&s practice in secure hosting grew by 35 percent last year.

Phil says Data Systems&s stature today would not have been possible without the strong foundation and customer relationships established first by his father and now nurtured by him and his brother, Mike.

“It&s an evolving thing. You have to build trust with an organization in order to build any kind of contract that is long term,” Phil said, drawing an analogy to the early days of banking, when people were afraid to give up their cash for safe-keeping.

Phil joined the Woodland Hills, Calif., company virtually full-time in the early 1980s and managed several of the company&s original retail store locations; there was no turning back in 1986 when Frank suffered a heart attack, leaving Phil in charge of day-to-day operations until his father recovered.

Mike, schooled as a civil planner, was harder to convince. More interested in software than his kin, he was turned off by the speeds and feeds and technical jargon that ruled Data Systems&s early business activities. But the early lure of the Internet, which Mike was exposed to while on a civic job in Portland, Ore., changed his mind and he joined up with Data Systems nine years ago. (The eldest Mogavero son is the lone holdout and is an orthodontist in Southern California.)

“I decided that becoming involved in the business meant different things than it did in the past,” said Mike, 38, who serves as the company&s executive vice president of sales and marketing.

Paterfamilias Frank, who will be 75 in November and is still a regular fixture at XChange events along with his wife (and dancing partner) Bea, started the company in 1971 as a typewriter service firm after his previous business building mammoth data centers fell on hard times. Today, as chairman of Data Systems, Frank is involved in formulating high-level ideas and “possibilities for change.”

His background also shines through in another respect: The company prides itself on technical leadership. In 1992, for example, Data Systems became a reseller of Cisco Systems communication products, beating out EDS on a multimillion-dollar project for Prudential. And in 1995, it got involved early in the world of intranets, building out a custom application for Times Mirror that linked Oracle and Netscape Navigator.

So, what&s ahead for the Mogaveros? For the next year, at least, it&s all about security. Mike estimates about 90 percent of the sales team&s discussions with customers and client prospects today involves this issue, which translates into related work in wireless, client security and compliance.

As they look ahead, however, the Mogaveros have trained their team to listen to and assess every opportunity -- no matter how far-fetched.

“Phil and I believe that one day we won&t be a family business anymore,” said Mike. “We&ll be something much more significant than a regional reseller.”