C-bridge: Right At Home

When Bellini gave C-bridge a makeover, he and fellow company officials stayed close to home in the IT field in choosing one of the key verticals. With clients such as Seagate and Agilent, high-tech manufacturing has become one of C-bridge's best markets.

To counter the IT spending slowdown, C-bridge won't throw new products at customers; instead, it shows customers better ways to use their old products. "Right now, customers are looking for better ways to use what they've already got," Bellini says. "The demand is turning to diagnostic work. Customers ask us to come in and analyze their systems and business strategies."

A recent example of this is C-bridge's work with optical networking company Ciena. The multimillion-dollar deal revolved around several projects, which included providing integration architecture for Ciena's enterprise applications (i.e., Oracle and Siebel), as well as designing a customer-service extranet for both clients and employees. Based on previous solutions for similar clients, C-bridge used its iSolution for high-tech manufacturing to get off to a quick start. Thanks to its expertise with the latest and most popular technology, the extranet system,Ciena Global Services Web,was launched in just 11 weeks.

C-bridge has been thriving in high tech with its knowledge of new tools like XML, which is in higher demand among IT customers. Bellini says he has seen a significant shift of companies using XML to solve problems at the business-process level. "The technology has matured so that you can really focus on the vertical markets with it. We can use XML to implement new business strategies very quickly," Bellini says. "By next year, if a company doesn't have XML capabilities, it's probably going to have problems with its B2B supply chain and e-procurement systems."

C-bridge is continuing its push into the high-tech sector. The company's Asia-Pacific operations have been reorganized entirely around the materials-intensive customer segment, and it's working with Motorola to develop a new supply-chain system for the technology giant.

Part 3: Primix: Ensuring Efficiency
Part 4: Stonebridge; Cure For The Pain