GovernmentVAR Of The Week: Dyonyx

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Back in 2001, things looked pretty grim for Dyonyx. The IT consulting firm lost more than 50 percent of its revenue less than two months after 9/11, largely because of a double dose of bad luck.

Dyonyx's largest client at the time was none other than British Airways, and many other clients were from the energy vertical and did business with Enron. Add to this the general downturn in the economy at the time and the almost abrupt end of spending in the IT sector and things looked pretty dire, said executive vice president Tim Barto. But Dyonyx wasn't about to give up that easily.

"[We] retooled our IT services model and launched a cybersecurity practice to address client's growing concerns with worms, viruses, downtime, reputation risk and regulatory compliance," Barto said. "Within six months, Dyonyx was landing business in nearly every critical infrastructure industry, including energy, financial Services, medical, government and transportation.

"Today, security represents a third of our business, baking it into every IT service and solution we provide," he said. "If you need applications development, we provide secure coding practices and recommendations for application-level security. If you need network and desktop management, we bring an understanding of endpoint security as part of our programmatic approach."

That approach is working. The company grew revenue from $5.5 million in 2003 to $27.5 million last year.

The story of the Dyonyx's government business may be the most impressive. Launching the practice from a dead start five years ago, federal, state and local government agencies now account for 75 percent of Dyonyx's sales. A certified small business, the company's customers include the Department of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, Division of Immigration Health Services and Corpus Christy Army Depot at the federal level; the cities of Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Garland, Texas, at the local level; and the Texas Secretary of State and Children's Advocacy Centers at the state level.

From LAN/WAN infrastructure design, outsourced help-desk support, and COTS tool analysis to audit recovery services, vendor management, program management and secure hosting, Dyonyx is meeting the demands of government customers and growing at record speed in the process. The company also has received a long list of accolades, including from local business groups, national industry organizations and media outlets.

And if that weren't enough to reinvigorate a company, British Airways came back as a Dyonyx customer just as people returned to the skies.

"We recently completed a global desktop rollout of over 4,000 computers for [the airline]," Barto said. "Hurray for the small-business spirit."