Adapt, And Grow Like Gangbusters

If you want to be one of the fastest-growing VARs in the country, you need to have a business model that can sustain rapid expansion, an offering that is unique and a passion to drive your solutions successfully to market.

It may sound simple, but executing on that strategy can take a lot of discipline and patience, say some of the new members of this year's CRN Fast Growth 100 list.

Take Caneum Inc., the list's highest-ranking newbie and No. 3 on the Fast Growth list overall. The Newport Beach, Calif.-based solution provider was founded in 2000, but it took several years to develop its model to the point where revenue took off, said its new president, Suki Mudan. Given its 447 percent revenue increase from 2005 to 2007, it's safe to say the evolution has proven successful.

Caneum offers application development and business process outsourcing services through a hybrid model of offshore and on-site presences, Mudan said.

"It's a bit of a clich, but you have to be so nimble. We change models as we go along. When I started, outsourcing was everything. I never thought [a hybrid] would be our model when we started. But you have to be very adaptable. Relationships are very important," he said.

By relying on offshore resources in India, and engineers that can be on a customer's site, Caneum feels it can offer the best of both worlds.

"Pure offshore [companies] compete on price. On-site guys compete more on reaction time and the ability to respond. We're able to do both. It's not the cheapest solution, but it's the most effective. That's what I call a lesson learned," Mudan said.

Caneum's growth has been spurred by acquisitions of Tier One Consulting in California and Continuum Systems in India. The solution provider said it's looking for more targets to continue its growth strategy.

"It's the fastest way to grow. The alternative, building a business development team, hiring salesmen, is a longer path," Mudan said.

Meanwhile, Limelight Networks Inc. (FG2008 #4) has a hyper-growth model in its DNA, according to Jeff Lunsford, who joined the 7-year-old Tempe, Ariz.-based company as chairman and CEO in November 2006.

Limelight's founders predicted an enormous need for businesses to deliver video, music and game content with broadcast quality over the Internet. The company began building an infrastructure capable of delivering that content. In today's YouTube era, that prediction has become a reality. Limelight's revenue has increased from $21.3 million in 2005 to $103.1 million last year, according to the company.

"We had very little marketing budget for the first six years, few salespeople. But we had a network that worked, and the world beat a path to our doorstep," Lunsford said.

Limelight counts some of the world's-largest content providers as clients: Disney, Fox, Microsoft and Netflix. The solution provider has data centers worldwide, and when a customer wants to make a new video file available to customers, the file is propagated by Limelight to its many servers. When a customer wants to access the file, Limelight helps locate the closest data center to deliver the content more efficiently.

"We are still laser-focused on building out the highest-performance network on the planet as more consumers consume everything music, video, games over the Web," Lunsford said. "We see a massive shift from advertising as it is today to move over the Web. We believe the IP network will be the primary mode of content delivery and we will play a major role."

Sometimes, solution providers find unlikely help from the cruel hand of Mother Nature. After Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, end users started lining up to back up their data, according to Stuart Raburn, president of TekLinks Inc., a Birmingham, Ala.-based solution provider that made its name as a Gold partner of both Cisco Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Two years ago, TekLinks invested in a data center in Birmingham to back up those clients' data and the company is now building a second data center in Hattiesburg, Miss., to support clients in that area, Raburn said.

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