By Charles R. McCauley (email: cmccauley@bhamnews.com)
News Staff Writer
Published in The Birmingham News
Nov 3, 2005

Gardendale software developer TekSouth Corp. has begun steps to offer banks, state agencies and other businesses the data-mining products that enable the Air Force to keep up with its $40 billiion budget.

TekSouth has teamed with international consulting group Key West Technologies to market nationwide and abroad the data collection and analysis system it created for the Defense Department about six years ago. The system handles about 100,000 queries a day, supplying answers in about six seconds each.

Officers of the little-known business began discussing working with public and private companies about three years ago because of "the success that the systems have in performing for our government clients," said Larry W. Northington, TekSouth's executive vice president of operations. A business plan to expand was adopted in 2004 and West Palm Beach-based Key West was signed this year, the retired Air Force major general said.

Key West partners Jim Davis, Luis Ismodes and Johann P. Malmquist visited TekSouth recently for a first-hand view of the company's ability to develop a data warehouse, a collection of information designed to support management decision making. TekSouth executives visited with the consultants in August in Iceland, where Malmquist lives.

Many businesses have used Iceland, the most sparsely poulated country in Europe, as a stepping stone into Europe, Malmquist said. "It is the perfect place to test out a product, to get all the bugs out before taking it to bigger markets," he said.

TekSouth plans to have a data-mining system operating in Iceland in the next quarter, a pilot program under way in six months and a revenue-producing company running in 2006, Northington said. The venture likely will create jobs in Iceland and the Birmingham area, he said.

Many companies lack the ability to put statistics in an organized fashion to extract correct information, TekSouth President Staff Ouderkirk said. Marketing Director David Reeves said the system helps get to information quickly so better decisions can be made.

"For a bank, it is really important to get data to use in improving relationships with customers," said Ismondes, who will focus on touting TekSouth to South and Latin America countries. An executive with a desktop computer can see how profitable a client is, who customers are and how customers make transactions, he said.

Chief Executive Stephen Wilsher founded TekSouth 23 years ago to supply mainframe systems and led its development as a veteran provider of data warehouse and data transfer technologies. A year ago, its technical staff was cited by SQL Server Magazine as one of the leading innovators in the industry.

Revenues have doubled over the past four years.

The federal sector is where TekSouth has been honing its data warehouse the last six to eight years, serving the Air Force at 86 sites worldwide. Its development staff - one-third of its 150 employess - is in Gardendale and there's a data center in Salt Lake City.

TekSouth also has a comparable system in place that allows the Air Force headquarters to run the budget for the Pentagon, Northington said. Similar systems were developed for Reserve units of the Air Force and Army.

Davis describes the Key West team as a set of guys who have had successful careers at companies like IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sprint. "Many of us, in our transition, have run small companies ourselves in the last couple of years," he said. They have interests in technology and "focus on finding clients we think have interesting technology and solutions."

Key West has an understanding of technology being developed in Asia, the United States, Latin America and Europe and knows the requirements of those markets, he said.

The consultants will present TekSouth to small to medium businesses with revenues between $25 million and $500 million.