Mahendra Vora strides from his office to greet a visitor and then promptly excuses himself to place a phone call. “Give me three minutes,” he says, and he is off just as quickly, cell phone pressed to his ear.
Sure enough, three minutes later, Vora is back, phone call completed, another contact made in the fast-paced life of one of this region’s most vigorous and prolific high-tech entrepreneurs.
Vora is a one-person information technology hub. There should be a photo of him next to the term “serial entrepreneur” in the dictionary, because the phrase may have been invented to describe him. In the space of about 15 years, he built and successfully sold so many companies, he could be a one-man Chamber of Commerce.
In the midst of his Ph.D. studies in Michigan, Vora moved to Cincinnati in 1987, to join a startup, Intercomputer Communication Corp. (ICC), which he helped build into a $25 million company that was sold to Digital Communications Associates which (later merged with Attachmate). Emboldened by that success, he started a company called Pioneer Systems, which he sold to global IT giant Unisys. Right after that, he co-founded a startup called SecureIT, which merged with VeriSign, the Silicon Valley Internet infrastructure company, in 1999.
For many, even the entrepreneurial sort, that would have been time to sit back and savor the good life. But for Vora, the good life requires innovation, and unable to sit still for very long, in 1997 he founded what became his best known company, Intelliseek, a high-powered search engine that counted the CIA among its customers. Intelliseek eventually merged with Cincinnati-based Planet Feedback, a consumer response Web site, in 2001. That new company was sold to marketing information powerhouse AC Nielsen in 2006-07 to form a new Cincinnati-based Nielsen unit called Nielsen BuzzMetrics.
Even Vora realized he couldn’t keep up that blistering pace and after he sold Intelliseek, he embarked on a slightly different course, but one which may be his most ambitious yet.
Vora and a partner took an old-economy landmark that had been vacant for more than four years, and transformed it into a new-economy hub. The former site of Champion International’s headquarters, a 55-acre office park on the outskirts of Cincinnati in Hamilton, had been vacant for years when Vora and partner Tim Matthews purchased it in 2005. They spent millions to renovate it into Vora Tech Park, with the centerpiece a massive 366,000 square foot building that includes a state-of-the-art data center designed to be one of the best disaster recovery and backup centers in the country.
A major customer is Cincinnati Bell, which invested millions and built a large, 60,000 square foot (about the size of a grocery store) data center there that provides data storage and other IT services in a secure environment for clients. The park also serves as an incubator for high-tech startups. So far, Vora’s efforts have created about 300 new economy jobs in old-economy Hamilton and he has committed to create 500 by 2010.
But creating a high-tech hub out of the ruins of a 1960s-era relic is just one piece of Vora’s job creation and innovation strategy. The other is Vora Ventures, a high-tech private equity firm that maintains a portfolio of 12 companies worldwide that employ about 2,200 people. They include Cincinnati-based Bluespring Software, which provides a suite of business process management software. Vora is chairman of four of them, and a director of two others, imparting his expertise in strategy, finance and business values.
Vora also gives back to his adopted hometown, serving on the advisory board for the University of Cincinnati’s information sciences department, on the Miami University-Hamilton advisory council , and as an active member of InTeralliance of Greater Cincinnati, a group that works to encourage young IT talent in the region.
All this from an immigrant from Gujarat, India who came to the heartland to attend graduate school and then to Cincinnati to work. “I came here with next to nothing,” he says. "I built a bunch of companies, made a lot of money and never once questioned that I should have gone to Silicon Valley.”
“This community is my community,” Vora says.
And what is this high-tech whirlwind’s assessment of the information technology assets in Cincinnati? “We have enough money and enough talent to create a sufficient number of high-tech jobs and high-tech companies in this region,” he says.
Drawing a rough map of the US, Vora spots Silicon Valley, Boston, New York City, Seattle and Washington, DC as national centers of information technology expertise. After those hubs, he says, Cincinnati can compete for talent and funding on a national basis with the likes of Austin, home to Dell Inc. “Can we do as good as Austin? Absolutely we can,” Vora says.
The key to Cincinnati’s information technology assets is its Fortune 500 headquarters and its wealth of financial services companies, all of which require leading-edge computer technology, services and brain power to manage and organize their far-flung enterprises. Companies such as supermarket giant Kroger, consumer products maker Procter & Gamble, insurance giant American Financial and regional banking powerhouse Fifth Third Bancorp each spend millions and hire thousands to build, run and maintain their computer systems, the nerve centers of their multibillion-dollar corporations.
Indeed, Cincinnati’s top 30 IT employers alone account for more than 10,000 IT jobs, says Geoff Smith, who as head of the CIO Roundtable leads a group of senior IT leaders from those companies. The actual number of IT jobs in the region is probably closer to 30,000 when you count the companies outside those top 30.
Beyond the heavy hitters, there are smaller companies that provide services, niche expertise and good-paying jobs. The number of business technology firms in the region numbers about 2,000, according to Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber data.
They are companies such as:
-- Sant Corp., which provides software and expertise for sales proposals, RFP responses, presentations, and other sales documents.
-- Sogeti USA, which, with 300 employees, is one of the area’s largest IT consulting firms.
-- Peak 10, which is opening a data center in the Cincinnati suburb of West Chester to serve both the Cincinnati and Dayton markets.
-- CH Mack, which provides case management software for medical and human services organizations.
-- Ascendum, a Vora company that is based in Cincinnati with offices in New Jersey, Bangalore and Ahmadabad, India.
A Cincinnatian actually helped create the software industry. Tom Nies is in the Smithsonian Institution, along with Bill Gates and Oracle's Larry Ellison, as one of the "pioneers of the software industry," for starting Cincom Systems in the late '60s. But, as the longest actively serving CEO in the tech industry, he's no museum piece, and Cincinnati-based Cincom has grown to 850 employees today, with 40 offices on five continents.
Then there was the major coup of attracting Tata Consultancy Services, a global IT services company, to establish its North American Delivery Center in Greater Cincinnati. The company is a division of the Tata Group, one of India’s largest and most respected business conglomerates, with more than $20 billion in revenue. At the time of its announcement in late 2007, Tata cited the region’s large pool of skilled workers as well as excellent access to customers as reasons for its choice. “We have the workforce, infrastructure and expertise that high-tech companies need to thrive in a global marketplace,” Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland said at the time.
IT professionals and firms in the region are working to ensure that expertise here continues to grow and develop. The InTeralliance is a collaborative effort among businesses and educators to identify and nurture and employ IT talent. A recent program involved bringing 160 11th graders to the University of Cincinnati, Miami University and Northern Kentucky University for IT Careers Camp, where they solved business problems, met executives and worked with students with disabilities to create a communications “enhancer.”
And if those efforts produce just one more Mahendra Vora, they will have been well worth it.
David Holthaus is Innovation and Job News Editor for Soapbox
Portraits of Mahendra Vora by Scott Beseler
Architectural shots of Vora Tech Park courtesy of Vora
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