Ciber: Always Reinvent Yourself

For Mac J. Slingerlend, president and CEO of 27-year-old solution provider Ciber, the key to success has everything to do with agility,being able to adapt quickly to market conditions and changes in technology.

In fact, Slingerlend's mandate to his employees is to reinvent at least 25 percent of the company every year.

"Technology is changing probably 100 percent every four years, so if we don't reinvent ourselves quickly, we become less valuable to our customers," Slingerlend says of the company that recorded $622 million in revenue last year. "It puts an additional burden on our branches, but it gives us a long shelf life instead of [being] a flash in the pan or just a company that people forget about."

The company's most recent reinvention was its decision late last year to embrace security solutions and acquire a majority interest in Englewood, Colo.-based network-security specialist Enspherics. "I believe that if people are going to be doing business over the Internet, they've got to be confident that it is a safe, secure transaction," Slingerlend says. "There is nothing [more important] than [having] peace of mind when you are doing business over the Internet. If there is anything that's going to kill electronic business, it's somebody believing that there isn't something safe about doing business that way."

Ciber's other technology bet is on infrastructure solutions,the things Slingerlend calls the "entrance and egress areas to the information superhighway."

While a lot of other services companies burned through cash quickly in 2000, Slingerlend's strategy has been to curb Ciber's spending in the face of a softer market. "You have to keep your costs down in a weak environment...It doesn't make sense to throw a couple of million dollars into your sales model when nobody is buying anything anyway," he says. "Instead, you kind of hunker down to stay profitable and in the game so you can come back to fight another day."

The decision to cut costs seems to be working. While other companies continue to show negative growth, Ciber recently reported earnings for the first quarter of 2001 that outpaced the quarter before. It's just a matter of experience, Slingerlend says. "There are few people who have been in this industry for as long as we have and know how to run companies in [both] up and down cycles," he says. "I think we've demonstrated that."

Part 4: CompuCom Holds the Course