2006 VARs of the Year

Consider Jeffrey Najarian, the CEO of Starpoint Solutions in the heart of New York City, which won VARBusiness' VAR of the Year Award for Custom Systems. In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes in 2001, with Ground Zero just outside his office windows, Najarian gave one of the toughest speeches of his life--though it wasn't the first time he'd pledged to employees that the company would survive.

Starpoint's story is, like many on this year's list, one of endurance and metamorphosis. Nearly 25 years ago, the company was hatched as a financial-services IT placement firm on the 75th floor of One World Trade Center. Ten years later, Starpoint had moved its offices just a few blocks but struggled for most of the next decade to make it through the financial sector's dismal downturn. Then 9-11 hit.

Despite devastating events all around the company, Starpoint has survived and is now a thriving technology-services firm with high-profile customers in several verticals. For instance, it recently built a major Web-development tool for a pharmaceutical giant looking to manage more than 100 different drug brands on a single IT platform.

Starpoint successfully delivered the solution--and wrapped up this year's award--by combining the company's core staffing strengths with custom application and enterprise-software expertise. "A big reason for our success has been the relationships we've made. That is what has given us the business we needed to survive," Najarian says.

Because the company was founded as an IT talent search firm, Starpoint has managed to pull in the right people to land and execute large custom solution deals that demand more than snap-together technology components, says Peter Melomo, Starpoint's executive vice president of application-development services.

"When we first went to the 'pharma' space, we brought in a couple of managers with pharmaceutical expertise and focused on e-commerce," Melomo explains. "Ultimately, on this proposal we offered off-the-shelf products and a custom application that lets our customer use a number of pre-developed templates and access a library of portlets," he says.

For instance, using Starpoint's system, the pharmaceutical giant can quickly create animations or videos that show how particular medications work within the human body. The application relies on BEA Systems' clustering technology and wraps in BEA's WebLogic service-oriented architecture software blended with technology from Oracle and Documentum, among other vendors.

Company officials realized several years ago that Starpoint would need sound scientific expertise to forge into the pharmaceutical industry and used IT staffing skills to build ties in Moscow and Kiev. "Now when we have work like this, we have five PhDs ready to work on the solution at a much lower cost," Najarian explains.

To customize their solution, Starpoint relied on developers both here and in the Soviet Union. "We were really able to use our offshore components to customize this solution," Najarian says.

Starpoint's survival instincts show through in its early quest for offshore expertise and in practical decisions, such as the company's move to branch out from its Wall Street roots to the pharmaceutical IT market that was evolving in neighboring New Jersey, says Najarian, who frequently reflects on 9-11.

"Our offices face Ground Zero. Many of us lost people we knew that day, and many of us were mad. There are only two things you can do when you are mad. You can stay mad or you can get through it by bonding together. We chose not to give up."

--Jennifer McAdams & Lawrence M. Walsh

NEXT: VAR of the Year for Business Ingenuity