NOTE: The following article appeared in the Aug. 29, 2012 edition of The Oklahoma Journal Record.
Business Service Management unit boosts Stonebridge
TULSA – A Tulsa information technology consulting firm has withstood the stormy recession years to bounce back strongly in the first half of 2012.
“We have seen a trend upward since 2010,” said James Ivy, Stonebridge Inc. CEO. “We suffered some as the recession finally made its way from the East and the West to us in the middle of the country.”
Tulsa-based and privately held Stonebridge derives the majority of its revenue from oil and natural gas companies in the Oklahoma-Texas oil country, especially the industry’s upstream and midstream segments.
Stonebridge’s performance for the first six months of the year was the strongest first half in the company’s history, Ivy said. Revenue in the first half of 2012 was 40 percent higher, with earnings more than 200 percent above last year’s figures, he said. No specific figures were available.
The increase was attributed to revenue growth in all three Stonebridge business units: Oklahoma, Texas and Business Service Management, or BSM. The Oklahoma unit achieved 34-percent growth, the Texas operations had 25 percent growth, and the BSM reported 76-percent growth. Each business unit is split into three divisions – geography, performance and accountability, Ivy said.
About two-thirds of the Stonebridge revenues come from its Microsoft consulting, Ivy said.
“We do not want to take credit for the turnaround,” Ivy said. “It was due to old-fashioned economics.”
The rising price of oil helped many energy companies.
“The price of natural gas is still not where it needs to be, but oil prices have a direct correlation on revenues,” Ivy said.
The company used the downtime as an opportunity to retrench and start a new business line, Ivy said.
Stonebridge’s newest unit is BSM.
The unit has a diverse sales strategy, however, and does not target any specific business sector, Ivy said. The BSM unit’s customer base covers many sectors, including banking, insurance, high-technology manufacturing, digital security and state government.
Otherwise, the improvement in the company’s bottom line comes down to getting the right team together and focusing, he said.
“What we do today we do better than we did it three, four years ago,” Ivy said.
Stonebridge allows its clients to improve what they do.
“We walk in the door and, for example, understand the domain of the oil and gas companies,” Ivy said. “We allow the customer to leverage the assets they already own.”
During the second quarter, Stonebridge won consulting contracts with new clients and extended long-term engagements with existing accounts, Ivy said.
Key projects during the quarter included the following:
- Stonebridge won a consulting assessment for a major convenience store operator. The convenience store operator wanted to improve its ability to do reporting and business analysis of its consumer marketing and merchandizing departments. Stonebridge conducted interviews and work sessions in order to help define the state problem and offer defined recommendations on how to solve it, Ivy said.
- A leading international insurance provider engaged Stonebridge to automate business processes utilizing applications and the cloud environment to drive approvals, assignments and automation, Ivy said. Stonebridge trained the client’s workers across three continents to accomplish the goal.
- Stonebridge completed an assessment for a major regional electric company to formulate a strategy for real-time monitoring and management of IT assets and procedures.
- A wholesale landscape nursery renewed its database administration services agreement with Stonebridge to support business applications.
- Stonebridge developed a solution to improve innovation and collaboration at a major midstream oil and gas company.
- Stonebridge completed an upgrade for a leading U.S. independent oil and gas exploration and production company. Stonebridge managed the upgrade effort, including planning, installing and configuring the new software environment.