Inside track: IT firm opens Bloomington office, will hire 80

A Washington, D.C.-area IT company is adding local jobs as part of its global strategy.

Digital Intelligence Systems (DISYS) has opened a Bloomington office that will hire up to 80 people for consulting, internal sales, recruiting and support personnel.

CEO Mahfuz Ahmed, a Bangladeshi immigrant who earned degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from George Mason University, said the Minneapolis office will help the company win more IT outsourcing work from low-cost, India and Asia.

"The Minneapolis-St. Paul market has variety of industry and you have a deep talent pool in programmers, call center work, database administration. Under our new pricing paradigm we compete against a lot of pure off-shore companies. If you're going to get into a body-count game, and its 10 people in India vs the U.S., most of the time we lose. Instead, we go to a location in the U.S. that's relatively cost competitive, such as Minneapolis, hire the talent and shift the focus from bodies to the outcome our client is looking for at a price. For example, your health care companies up there occasionally change their software. We do quality assurance and testing. They pay only for the outcome we promise and sell. We take advantage of the U.S. productivity gain we'll get in Minneapolis. I think we can be successful."

Sounds good to me. The Bloomington office is headed by Jim Goodmiller, formerly a senior manager at LabAnswer, a large information management consulting company.

"We've been involved with the Minneapolis market for quite awhile," Goodmiller said. "We've decided to grow the market locally. Our customers are expanding and they asked us to help. We have a number of things happening. It's a great market with diverse clients."

DISYS, founded 16 years ago by Ahmed, said it has had 50 percent annualized growth in recent years.

Terry Commerford, an entrepreneur who literally started selling goods out of a truck years ago, last week broke ground on a $5 million, 52,000-square-foot office-warehouse building in the Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul on what was once industrial, polluted land near Pierce Butler Road.

His River of Goods and Terrybear, wholesalers of specialty products, expects to employ about 45 people at the site.

"We've rented six different warehouse locations in St. Paul as we've grown and boot-strapped these businesses over the last 27 years," said Commerford, a one-time caddie and chef at St. Paul's Town and Country Club. "Building a new building in St. Paul with the help of the Port Authority is a dream come true."

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency granted the Port Authority, the mission of which is to redevelop old properties and help create jobs, a total of $1.6 million in brownfield stimulus money out of $37 million it awarded nationally in 2009. About $200,000 of that grant was used to clean up the former bowling alley site that would become the Port's Chatsworth Pierce Butler Business Center that will include the new Riverofgoods.com headquarters and distribution center.

The Port Authority spent nearly $5 million cleaning up and preparing the site for redevelopment.

"The Port Authority is really proud of this very important project in an area that needs an economic boost," Port President Louis Jambois said.

Unitron, a global hearing aid company, has opened an expanded, 85,000-square-foot U.S. headquarters in Plymouth that cost $3 million to renovate.

The new location houses a growing complement of about 200 employees, including a cutting-edge manufacturing facility designed to support the production of Unitron's next-generation technology, Moxi and Quantum hearing aids that are powered by its new high-fidelity sound processing platform.

After a decade of significant growth and technology advances, Unitron required a new location and redesigned the new building to accommodate manufacturing, customer-service teams, marketing, business development, inside sales, operations and custom-manufacturing space.

"We're passionate about hearing and constantly striving to provide new solutions that improve people's lives in meaningful ways," said CEO Rodney Schutt of Unitron U.S. "Our new headquarters not only benefits our business ... but also supports our customers.

Juhl Wind, the little public company near Pipestone that is a 30-plus year pioneer in community-owned wind power, has agreed to buy a 1-megawatt advanced energy storage system developed by Zinc Air. Juhl plans to install the system at its recently acquired Woodstock Hills wind farm located near the company's headquarters in Woodstock, Minn.

Zinc Air Inc., based in Kalispell, Mont, is the developer of a zinc redox flow battery designed to achieve rapid payback periods. This is a big trend in wind designed to eventually to allow a wind farm to store and shift wind power generated at night for use by utility operators.

Xcel Energy and others are experimenting with different storage systems.

"We have carefully studied the growth in storage technologies because we believe large-scale storage will unlock the full value of wind power," said Juhl founder Dan Juhl. "If we can build a combination wind farm with storage for the cost of a new coal plant, we are confident we can deliver totally clean electricity that can compete head-to-head with the wholesale energy market today and into the future. If we can deliver a 'dispatchable' resource that is head-to-head competitive, wind power can grow even more rapidly."