Asynchrony Solutions, an IT consultancy based in St. Louis, was born in a rather unusual way—as a dot-com start-up and an idea that would change the world around a global collaborative software development platform.
The firm was launched by three brothers—Steve, Dave and Bob Elfanbaum, along with a fourth partner, Nate McKie—in 1999 and quickly had some 35,000 employees from 160 countries working on 500 software development companies. That initiative ended like most others of its day, in a blaze of glory when the dot-com bubble burst. At its low point in 2002, Asynchrony was down to just 18 people.
But all was not lost, and the firm, unlike most start-ups of the dot-com era, got a second act—this time as an IT consultancy.
"By 2003, we had shut down the dot-com side and decided to focus strictly on the consulting side of the business," says Bob Elfanbaum, general manager of Asynchrony Solutions. "We got into Agile Methodology and began to focus more on how do we deliver the products we're building. That's where the business took off."
What also helped was securing a big piece of the Department of Defense budget, doing a lot of work with the Federal Defense Threat Reduction Agency around Weapons of Mass Destruction. Asynchrony has an office location at the Scott Air Force Base in Illinois.
The firm began working with Defense in 2003 with the Joint Explosive Ordnance Disposal group, which was addressing how to facilitate the information flow for roadside bombs to people in the field.
Today, about half of the firm's business is defense. The other half is on the commercial side, mainly in financial services and healthcare, where the firm has developed, for instance, a social media site for diabetes patients.
The next big phase, Elfanbaum says, is mobility, specifically," how do you integrate complex back-end systems to get information onto the mobile devices," such as iPhones and iPads. "Growth of our mobile business is taking off and we'll see a lot of large commercial enterprises adopting mobile technologies as part of their enterprise platform."
Today, Asynchrony Solutions is at about $18 million in sales, 135 employees and 120 billable consultants. The firm has been growing around 20 percent for the last five years, and Elfanbaum says the plan is to double the firm—about $40 million and more than 250 people by 2015. Not bad for a firm that was nearly left for dot-com dead a little over a decade ago.
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