MSP 501 Profile: Technium Successfully Shifts to Biotech/Life Sciences

Company Name: Technium
2020 Hot 101 Ranking: 83
CTO: Michael Joseph
Headquartered: Southborough, MA
Primary Services:

Twitter: @TechniumOps

Technium, the managed networking and security provider, has nearly doubled its customer base by targeting the biotech and life sciences segment.

Co-founders Michael Joseph and Marius Janulis formed Technium in 1999. In 2012, they identified and acknowledged an industry shift toward converged networking and security. To prepare, they began investing in more security-focused partnerships, training and personnel.

As Joseph, also CTO, points out, it’s important to listen and learn. That better ensures success with customers.

Technium’s Michael Joseph

In a Q&A with Channel Futures, Joseph talks about the pivot to biotech and life sciences. He also talks about the satisfaction that comes from owning your own business.

Channel Futures: What is one thing you wish vendors would do that they don’t?

Michael Joseph: This is an important question, and in fact, the answer is extremely simple: Listen. As a small business owner, we have been forced to evolve in step with our customers’ needs, which are always changing. Cloud strategies move to security challenges and then to remote access concerns. As a technology company, the needs of the customer are very important to hear and ensure that as a business we listen and learn. This means regular communication, feedback on the good and bad of the service provided, as well as a focus on innovating and regularly failing.

Our organization has a core value of be the exception. We try to challenge our team to meet this goal in many ways. That includes listening to our customers and thinking about how to meet them where they are going versus where they are today. A particular example is worth sharing to illustrate this important value proposition for small businesses. Our customers have been challenged to understand how to manage the difficult decision of security management and where to invest scarce resources. Instead of creating a poor security add-on to our existing service, we instead listened to the need and found an organization we could bring in that complemented us and was better than our company at this particular security requirement. Instead of losing business, we actually created opportunity by presenting a better overall solution driven by a packaged offering.

CF: What was the single biggest technology or business decision that drove your company’s growth in 2019? How did it do so?

MS: In 2019, we decided to commit to a particular segment of the market, biotech and life sciences. This may have seemed obvious being headquartered in metro Boston. But it was still a significant effort to understand and impact the various organizations and financial funding sources. We nearly doubled the number of customers in less than two years by directing our services to bioitech and life sciences. This decision also was a fortunate one with the COVID-19 pandemic, as the majority of our new customers are relatively insulated from the impact of this sad disease, and in fact …

… several are seeing positive momentum.

CF: Why are you a business owner instead of working for someone else? What is the allure of entrepreneurship to you?

MS: My story here is quite personal and worth telling. I hope it can inspire a few entrepreneurs to take a risk. My father was an immigrant from Lebanon at the age of 11. He was raised in a culture of achievement. All of his siblings reached high levels of success. At the age of 38, he quit a job where he was a highly rated manager on a fast track at General Electric to buy a liquor store and start a real estate business. He did this in order to realize a dream to own his own business. He became a pillar of the community and was a regular and deep part of my childhood. If he had been an executive in someone else’s company, he would have been unavailable and accountable to others.

I started my company at the exact same age, ironically, and for a similar mission, to build a technology company I was proud of and to enable the work-life integration I am so happy with. I never miss a key event for my children. And while I work long hours, it is with the knowledge that I am able to impact a quality outcome for customers and build something special in culture. Both my story and my father’s started with risk, and included small children and a very real chance of failure. But the important message for anyone who truly dreams of owning their a business is that you get one life. And taking risk can have a great benefit if it is your passion.