INDUSTRY INTERVIEW: TechniGraphics Inc.
Dee Vaidya
President and CEO
TechniGraphics Inc.
Dee Vaidya is CEO of TechniGraphics Inc., a company he and his wife, Mary, founded out of their family home in Wooster, Ohio. He is a chemical engineer with a master’s degree in industrial administration from Purdue University. Starting with digital flood maps, TechniGraphics has grown at a compound annual rate of 30 percent during the past decade.
Q: Would you please share the interesting history of TechniGraphics with our readers?
A: This company has been in this business for over 20 years now—from before my time. We bought this tiny division of Johnson Controls 10 or 11 years ago, in ’94. So from10 years before that, from about ’82 to ’83, TechniGraphics has been doing this kind of work.
What has happened is because of 9/11, the contracts are bigger now and they cover longer periods of time. We’ve gone through our ups and downs, being a prime at one time, then being a sub[contractor] during the omnibus years, now we’ve become a prime again.
So, we’ve grown over the years and the last few have been kind of wonderful, just because of the size of this GGI [Global Geospatial Intelligence] contract. But, it’s exactly the same kind of work we’ve done historically.
Q: From a military and government perspective, what sets TechniGraphics apart from others companies in the marketplace?
A: What sets us apart is that this is our core business. Our competitors are the likes of Boeing or BAE Systems or other big, corporations like SAIC, Harris, and they do so many other things besides the kind of work we do—which is production of digital maps or digital data sets—and it forms such a small portion of everything else these big companies do that this activity isn’t even on the radar of their senior management, whereas it’s our bread and butter. That’s what we do. That constitutes 90 percent of our business. So, the net result is our customers get a kind of response and flexibility and service that I think is par excellence.
Q: What software products and solutions do you deliver to military users?
A: In terms of software products, very little. The reason we get into the product arena is to make our data either more easily accessible, more easily viewable or things like that.
Most of what we do comes from converting imagery—satellite imagery or, at one time, hard copy maps such as nautical charts and so forth—into digital data sets. So we’re really not all that much in the software end of the business.
What happens though is once these data are delivered, let’s say we’ve delivered some geospatial data to the Department of Homeland Security, our customers might not have people who have the expertise to use higher end GIS software. So, they need some very simple viewers to see what we’ve delivered to them so that the average person can quickly pull up the data and look at it and give it to a congressman who may be calling.
We’ve developed little applications like that, that allow our data sets to be viewed in a much more user-friendly fashion.
We build interfaces of that kind. Those are the kind of solutions we offer in addition to our data.
Q: What new technologies or products is TechniGraphics looking at in the future?
A: A couple of interesting things. SMARTEAM [a Dassault Systemes product marketed by IBM] is very powerful software. Although we didn’t write the software, we’re trying to get our large customers acquainted with it because it is a very good way to manage their supply chains, their workflows and also their data holdings—it tends to be a very good repository of these kinds of things—so that multiple users, within a certain agency or between an agency and its partners, can all work together in real time.
So, we’re trying to get them to see the advantages of using SMARTEAM and particularly with a very user-friendly, map-based interface so that they can quickly go to a critical part of the world and have several people look at it from various locations, and work on those datasets collaboratively in real time.
Those are the kinds of things we’re very excited about. We call it data lifecycle management.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to discuss?
A: One thing I’d pedal back to; you asked me at the very beginning what sets us apart. When we get feedback from our customers, what hear from them is “You guys are so easy to work with.” That makes a big difference. When you’re not a big company you don’t have to say, “Let me open my manual and see if on page 234 … sorry, nope the contract doesn’t allow that.” We say, “You know, that’s great we’ll do it, and what else would you like us to do?” And that, I think, has gotten us very far. ♦
