7 Young VARs To Watch

CTO, C3 Systems and Security

C3 is a Los Angeles-based six-year-old managed services provider that is seeing slow but steady growth in its core market of companies with between five and 50 employees, according to Cunningham. The company has grown through self-investment, not through venture capital. Says Cunningham: "I don't see reason to go anywhere else for money and wear golden handcuffs.

On future plans: "We're moving into employee monitoring for next year. We've only done a handful of implementations, but we've busted quite a few people so far." [READ MORE]

Creative Director, Fresh Tilled Soil

Wellesley Hills, Mass.-based company Fresh Tilled Soil uses Linux Apache, php and open-source vendors. When designing a customer solution with those tools, if challenges or questions arise, they, like other open-source users, will rely either on in-house expertise, or reach out to the Linux community for answers. Rapid prototypes are created and FTS designs without programming functional elements. The company concentrates primarily on design, Flash, Javascript and HTML, moving away from programming, and is also involved with search engine optimization.

On what's hot: "Much of what we do revolves around contact management, blogs and social networking. With content management systems, customers want to be able to update everything, so we make every page editable."

Founder, Gabriel Phoenix Communications

Located in sunny Kanehone, Hawaii, Gabriel Phoenix Communications is a technology consultant specializing in infrastructure management for small businesses, but also has some large corporate clients on its roster, such as Gap and Sprint. That's because these corporations can save money by employing Gabriel's employees rather than maintaining full-time IT staff on the island.

On doing business in Hawaii: "Eighty percent of the businesses on Hawaii are small business. We have a traditional Asian influence, mom and pop entrepreneurs. We dabbled into managed services, but it is way different here than on the mainland. People here are still doing business the old-fashioned wayold cash registers, pens and paper. When we are implementing technology for customers, much or it is setting up their first servers. So managed services are not the wildfire we'd anticipated. We're still doing break-fix work. Things here are very laid back, they run at their own speed: 'Hawaiian time'."

Principal, Altos Technology

Altos Technology is a Sacramento, Calif.-based IT consulting company that provides comprehensive enterprise infrastructure solutions. Unlike some other VAR-trepreneurs that eschew traditional vendors, Altos has many top-tier affiliations -- it's an Enterprise HP partner, a Citrix Platinum Partner and certified Microsoft Gold Partner. Altos' strength is in its IT prowess, but Flaherty also knows that satisfied customers are the real key to success.

On customer relations: "There is huge customer dissatisfaction, whether that's with cell phone providers or IT. There's no difference. Focusing on the fundamentals is what differentiates us. We offer white-glove service; complete, consultative selling. There's no phone queue here. Everyone picks up the phone: 99 percent of the time you will get a person."

President, TriQuest

Tonniges started his business out of a pickup truck 10 years ago, and has certainly seen many changes since then, including a regional business award for local companies in the $1 million to $2.5 million revenue range. TriQuest is a Fort Worth, Texas-based technology company based on three key tenets: strategy, knowledge and professionalism. Case in point: In 2000, its offices were destroyed by a tornado, but the solution provider survived in tact without losing any clients -- a testament to the loyalty of our clients as well as the strength of the company's approach.

On open-source: "The dollars make sense if you have 15,000 PCs. You could spend on that, and then spread it out. But for 100 nodes, the client doesn't want to pay to maintain that expertise. So while Microsoft's system is not the most powerful OS, they supply support, because the install base is huge. Almost never do we have a situation where we are the first to have a problem."

President, Phantom Data Systems

Phantom, based in Norwalk, Conn., is a player in the document management, data storage and recovery segment. The firm uses some mainstream vendors -- such as Intel -- but also employs technology from Linux vendors, such as Red Hat, and alternative vendors such as Katharion (email security systems) and Intronis (backup systems made for small businesses).

On open source: "Alternative vendors help us sell innovation. They know we are selling ourselves as a VAR. They are more open to disclosure of long-term plans. The household names are not."

Founder, Primary Support Solutions

Parisella's goal is to help organizations determine how they can maximize their technical efficiency, and to implement the necessary processes to achieve this efficiency resulting in bottom-line benefits. On top of that, Parisella (pictured with wife Cathy) strives to make his New York-based company a great place to work -- vowing not to do any of the things his bosses used to do that drove him nuts.

On social networking: "My eyes have been opened recently. I never got into Facebook, maybe because I didn't go to college. I figured, 'Who do I need to get in touch with that I don't already?' Still, I joined LinkedIn, and in three weeks you can have 160 connections I didn't know how many people I knew. I pulled up old managers, and 17 recommended me unsolicited. There is 100 percent of value here for business. It also helps me keep up with change, and reminds me to stay in touch with certain people. For example, a headhunter [who once got me a job] will become my client, now that we are back in touch." [READ MORE]