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TWST: We'd like to begin, if you will, with a brief historical sketch of
Miller Systems, and a picture of the things that you are doing at the
present time?
Mr. Miller: Sure. I founded Miller Systems in February, 1995 so we're
actually coming up on our 10th anniversary. We were established as an IT
consultancy that, very quickly, over the course of the 1990s, became a
user experience oriented development shop supported by IT infrastructure
consulting to solve many different business problems. We built this
focus through custom development of solutions because the market was so
immature. However, over the last few years, our efforts have been more
on orienting ourselves towards partnerships and becoming a value-added
reseller and systems integrator of enterprise software products for the
middle market and the smaller end of the enterprise space. As a B2B
provider we work primarily in the high tech, manufacturing,
distribution, and health care markets, and to some degree in the non-
profit and financial services sectors. TWST: I read that you did very well between 1997 and 2001. How were the
next few years for you?
Mr. Miller: They were tougher; they were very challenging. Much of our
competition, actually, went out of business. It was very difficult for
middle-size shops to survive. A lot of the companies, such as Scient,
Viant, resurfaced like Razor Fish, but a number of them went out of
business altogether. Zefer is another one that comes to mind. We were
able to survive that because we didn't grow too quickly--we didn't take
on a lot of headcount; we turned business away, where we felt it was
important for us to not overextend ourselves; and we followed the golden
road to quality and integrity. And that's really what allowed us to
survive. It wasn't easy to turn some of that business down. During the
dot-com era we had a lot of opportunity to grow the business, and a lot
of money was being thrown at us, but we were concerned about the overall
sustainability of some of that business and our ability to really scale
our work. So, for instance, we might have been able to earn $100,000 or
$200,000 on a given project, but then the relationship was such that we
would not have been able to do that again. It was more that companies
were coming to us with ideas more than they were actually coming to us
with businesses. In the end, we found that steering clear of those
things led us on the path to survival, and now back to growth. However,
there were definitely some challenging years. We were fortunate to break
even during fiscal 2002, do a little bit better than that in 2003, and
we definitely think 2004 is going to be a growth year for us.
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