Leaping One Step Forward

ACMA, which saw its unit sales jump 45 percent in 2006, ramped up its deployment of systems integrated with VMWare for virtualization solutions. In doing so, the company hit a hot spot in the market for server consolidation solutions. About three-quarters of the 13,300 units it sold last year were servers.

"Real estate is very expensive," said Kimon Tzaratzouris, ACMA's sales director and the company's ranking executive. "If you have 10 servers, and you use only 20 percent of real capacity of each, you can consolidate 10 servers into four or three. Virtualization in general is making a big difference."

ACMA began to see a significant spark in virtualization-based solutions slightly ahead of the rest of the market. Earlier this year industry consulting firm Gartner Group issued a statement saying the technology will be the name of the game going forward.

"Virtualization will be the most important technology in IT infrastructures and operations up to 2010," the statement read. But with server consolidation a jumping-off point for deployment of virtualization, it is giving companies like ACMA a road into still-larger opportunities. Gartner predicted, and others believe, it will be a game-changer when it comes to determining how an enterprise manages, deploys and uses its business technology.

In 2007, Tzaratzouris said ACMA is shooting for 70 percent growth.

ACMA, an 18-year-old company, maintains two manufacturing facilities, including one that is 30,000 square feet and another, 125,000 square feet, which it shares with system builder AMAX Information Technologies. "Different corporation, same principals, different focus" is how Tzaratzouris describes ACMA's relationship with AMAX.

The company has reported that it has about 50 employees and had $25 million in sales last year.

In its line of business, ACMA builds an entire lineup of systems from notebooks to computing clusters. The company also provides some professional services and training and education, in addition to systems and components for specialized technology, including medical devices and customized interactive televisions.

By line of business, ACMA built about 1,500 desktops, 800 notebooks, 10,000 servers and 1,000 storage units.

"They've been one of our suppliers and from that perspective they've done well," said Ken Fuhrman, chief operating officer of Interact-TV, a Westminster, Colo.-based provider of digital media, broadband and home networking technology. Fuhrman said the company sources systems from ACMA that are integrated into complete media systems.

The system builder is seeing its sales grow both wide and deep. "We have expanded the growth of new customers," Tzaratzouris said. "I would say that, over 2005, we probably doubled the number of customers we have but we also expanded sales to existing customers."

One way to grow your customer footprint is to branch out into a number of different vertical markets. ACMA has done that. The company provides systems for banking, entertainment and semiconductor industries, in addition to systems that are deployed in education and government accounts. Tzaratzouris also specifically pointed to work ACMA is doing in the medical vertical industry.

There, the company has built custom systems for medical supply manufacturers based on Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system; it's developed a practice in the manufacturing of systems in small and pedestal form factors for the veterinary care segment; it builds custom systems for medical testing and imaging applications; and it has begun providing diagnostic devices for integration into larger systems in medical applications, Tzaratzouris said.

"We're trying to expand that part of the business," he said.

In fact, ACMA is looking to continue to expand its customer footprint and believes that zeroing in on specific technology needs of resellers and customers is a key point. "The secret of growth is taking care of customer service, and taking care of our customer needs," Tzaratzouris said.