WorldCity Business Magazine

Grabbing Opportunities

by Richard Westlund

Wireless Logix Group is relying on one thing: its abilitiy to capitalize on vertical opportunities.

Abbas Sadriwalla knows how to create profits from thin air literally. In five years, the Fort Lauderdale technology entrepreneur has assembled a diverse group of wireless companies that can do everything from show a hotel employee which room to clean next and create revenue streams for airports to help trucking companies track equipment and guide science students through dissections.

The thing the wireless companies have in common is innovative applications.

“Our mission is to be the most complete solutions company in the wi-fi area marketplace,” said Sadriwalla, referring to the wireless local area network. “Almost every industry today can benefit from the right application of wireless voice and data technology.”

Since 2001, Sadriwalla, the CEO of Wireless Logix Group in Fort Lauderdale, has compiled an eclectic suite of wi-fi enabled solutions. They range from videoconferencing and inventory tracking to multimedia business centers and housekeeping services. Restaurant patrons who get their bills printed right at the table may have Wireless Logix Group to thank. The same is true of scientists in remote locations who use a handheld device to get information from distant colleagues.

“The driving force for us continues to be software applications and business solutions,” Sadriwalla said. “It’s hard to make money selling boxes.”

Through its eight companies many with their own market brands Wireless Logix Group, or WLG, can provide highly targeted business services or integrated packages for business customers. It could be setting up a company’s wireless connectivity infrastructure or a wireless or even wired communications kiosk. Or it could be wireless tracking through bar codes and radio-frequency identification devices, RFID.

The company is not left behind when it comes to voice-over-Internet-protocol technology or videoconferencing systems that rely on the Internet. There is even wireless workflow monitoring and management.

“We are unique in having so many diverse solutions under one roof,” said Sadriwalla. “That’s good for our customers and also for our companies. I don’t think anyone knows which wireless technology will catch fire the quickest. Broadening our base helps us grow. And, at any point in time, we have technologies producing revenue.”

Wireless Logix Group’s strategy of tapping into related vertical market segments can minimize the company’s overall risk, according to Professor Paul Reynolds, research director at Florida International University’s Pino Family Global Entrepreneurship Center.

“One of the continuing myths about entrepreneurs is that they are risk takers,” said Reynolds. “But that’s an outsider’s perspective. They don’t see it that way. In this case, the CEO is trying new things incrementally without betting the company on any one market. The company can expand or contract depending on what happens to the different market segments.”

High-growth company

In its first two years of operations, WLG’s revenue results from $250,000 in 2002 to $10 million in 2004 made it one of the state’s fastest growing companies. Last year, WLG’s revenues rose to $12 million as Sadriwalla focused on hiring more people, training the team and strengthening the corporate infrastructure.

Today, Wireless Logix Group has a staff of more than 60 professionals and eight offices four in the United States, two in Canada, one in India and one in the United Arab Emirates.

“We’re on the march again,” Sadriwalla said, “and we are hoping to grow about 70 percent in 2006 to reach $20 million in revenue.”

When it comes to growth, wireless is one of the speediest sectors of the business communications market. Revenues from U.S. wireless data services reached nearly $8.6 billion in 2005, an 86 percent jump from $4.6 billion in 2004, according to a CTIA, the international association for the wireless telecommunications industry.

“Wireless communications will continue to grow along with our U.S. population and the global flow of goods and services,” said Sadriwalla. “There is no end in sight to the potential growth.”

Other telecom industry experts share Sadriwalla’s views especially with the convergence of voice, data and video services through Internet protocol (IP) applications.

“The wireless field is wide open. It’s only limited by your imagination,” said Matthew Michels, a Florida convergence architect for Nortel, one of the world’s largest telecom manufacturers. “For many companies, wireless can create a new stream of revenue, and deployments are growing in many industries. But for a company like Wireless Logix Group to succeed, it needs to understand the technology and the deployment issues.”

Beyond that, the company must also know how to compete. In an industry so large, Wireless Logix Group has challengers in virtually every one of its markets. And it is not the only company that has embraced a multiple range of offerings as a way to stay competitive.

In addition to telecommunications giants like AT&T and Verizon, smaller companies are taking a similar approach. For example, California-based LiteScape Technologies offers a suite of voice, data and multimedia applications for markets that run the range from retail to banking. And Massachusetts based Airvana provides technology that supports a wide range of mobile broadband information, communication and entertainment applications throughout the world.

Few South Florida executives have a broader and more practical understanding of today’s global wireless opportunities than Sadriwalla, a native of Mumbai, India, who has been interested in technology from an early age.

“My father started a rubber company in World War II, making balloons and gloves,” he recalled. “That’s the environment I got started in, and I quickly became a fervent supporter and student of research and development. Since then, I’ve always been looking for new horizons to conquer.”

After attending the University of Bombay, Sadriwalla moved to the United States in 1973. He worked in a string of shop floor jobs to finance his education then qualified as a commercial pilot and taught flying at Tamiami Aeronautics in Miami.

The technology buff in Sadriwalla spotted an opportunity to supply special-purpose computers to the aviation industry, so in 1990 he launched a company called Application Designed Systems, or ADS Associates for short. Afew years later, as specialty computers became less relevant in the technology marketplace, he unveiled Pageco International. It manufactured pager crystals using proprietary specifications. As pagers were replaced by cell phones, he moved into wireless technology.

“Going into wireless was not a big leap for me,” he said. “I am a firm believer that you have to keep growing and changing to be successful. And you don’t need a lot of people and overhead to create a successful organization. Today, you can create partnerships that play to the strengths of individuals.”

Sadriwalla’s big step into the wireless arena came in 2001. “I was introduced to a group of young professionals who had started a cyber caf concept in Alaska then moved into the Caribbean cruise ships,” he said. “Their business thrust was to serve crew members when they got off the ships in the harbor. They could use a cyber caf for e-mail or to purchase phone cards or transfer money back home.”

At first, Sadriwalla was hired as a consultant. Then, because of his business experience, he was asked to become the full-time CEO and guide the company’s growth.

“But I didn’t see a big future in this concept without pouring in a large amount of capital and selling franchises, which to me was a very retail approach,” he said. “Instead, I felt that the real value was in the software that addressed the needs and concerns of vendors who were selling high-speed Internet access in cafs around the world.”

Sadriwalla bought into the software development company (now renamed Kiosk Logix) and expanded the sales of its “NetStop Pro” application as a secure browser for self-service business cafs and kiosks.

Domino effect

That became the first in a growing stream of applications. After two years of development work through V-Link Solutions, Sadriwalla’s team launched a Web-enabled wi-fi manager called PASSYM, which enables companies in the hospitality sector to deploy multiple wireless services. “We became a leader in providing 100 percent wireless high-speed Internet access in hotels, including nearly 100 Embassy Suites,” said Sadriwalla.

He felt that the wi-fi access for guests would soon become a commodity in the hospitality industry “like having a mint on your pillow.” So he acquired a Quebec software company with an award-winning application that automated the mundane task of housekeeping. With WLG’s SiteLogix solutions, a housekeeper receives a wireless PDA connected to the hotel’s property management system. Daily chores are transmitted from the hotel server, and the housekeeper checks them off on the PDA when completed.

“Language is a major barrier in housekeeping, so our software is designed to operate on an icon basis with labels in any major language,” Sadriwalla said. The result is that the front desk knows immediately when a guest room is ready and other time-consuming tasks such as checking room minibars can be done far more quickly.

Sadriwalla said WLG’s location in Fort Lauderdale in the heart of the South Florida’s hospitality industry was ideal for introducing and refining this application. “We believe this is an excellent mobile solution for any campus environment and could be applied to hospitals, prisons, airports and other workflow environments.”

In August, Lago Mar Resort & Club in Fort Lauderdale selected WLG as its technology partner to provide wireless high-speed Internet access to its guests and staff. “Lago Mar is a very complicated and complex multi-building property because of the topography and multiple indoor and outdoor amenities available at our resort,” said Walter Banks, who owns the resort. “We selected the Wireless Logix Group to update our wireless technology and have noticed a dramatic improvement, have increased our customer satisfaction and have almost zero complaints or concerns about our guest connectivity anywhere on our property.”

Serving other sectors

Having found a promising niche in the hospitality industry, Sadriwalla moved quickly to expand WLG’s position. Last year, the company launched Reach POS, a wi-fi application for PDA devices that lets restaurant servers take a customer order by clicking icons, transmit the order to the kitchen and print the bill right at tableside.

Another promising niche market is videoconferencing. Using the new session initiation protocol, or SIP, technology and high-speed Internet connections, Sadriwalla’s companies could give hotels the ability to offer unlimited videoconferencing for guests or staff at a low monthly rate.

Already, WLG’s Wave Three videoconferencing solutions allow executives, scientific researchers and educators to collaborate over the Internet in almost any setting wired or wireless.

Eric Knutsen, director of technology at Briarcliff Manor School District in New York’s suburban Westchester County, says Wave Three offers an easyto- use platform for videoconferencing with special application to the sciences that is both cost effective and high quality.

“There aren’t many hurricane scientists in New York, but there are in Florida,” said Knutsen, who is also the district’s CIO. “If we have a student interested in hurricanes, or volcanoes or ocean reef, we could hook them up with a distant researcher.”

Briarcliff Manor has hosted student collaborations with marine scientists at Norwalk Maritime Aquarium in Connecticut. “They sent a squid for each student and walked the students through a dissection using videoconferencing,” Knutsen said.

WLG’s videoconferencing lets schools make better use of limited resources. A Latin teacher at one school, for example, can offer classes to other locations. It also opens the door to shared educational programs with rural schools in China.

The ability to offer multimedia business centers and kiosks has been another strong driver of growth at the Fort Lauderdale company. Its subsidiary BizCenter Logix has technology that allows hotels, airports, shopping centers and other facilities to offer a low-cost package of online and print services. The appeal? The services are a new source of revenue for those facilities.

In February, Wireless Logix Group added MyFax, an Internet-based fax service, through a partnership with Protus IP Solutions. “Partnering with Wireless Logix to bring our MyFax service to business people in transit answers a huge demand for mobility, accessibility and the capability to transmit electronic documents as needed,” said Protus IP Solutions CEO Joseph Nour.

Sadriwalla’s partnership approach to the technology sector has allowed WLG to grow quickly without spending large amounts of capital.

“Many smaller tech companies lack the resources to sustain their growth,” Sadriwalla said. “We have the engineering, deployment, marketing, sales and call center support they need. We show them that we can produce more revenue for them and give them an equity share in the business. As a result, we don’t have to pay a lot out of pocket to grow.”

Despite opportunities in the U.S. market, WLG believes international demand for business wireless services will outpace domestic growth. The company recently announced a partnership with Advanced Satellite Media to deliver digital content to North America, India and Pakistan. The goal is to roll out WLG “narrowcasting” media services that provide unique content to individual television screens, computer monitors or other video terminal.

Sadriwalla maintains that developing countries can deploy a wireless infrastructure more quickly and efficiently than a traditional voice-data network. “Our crosshairs are on the Caribbean and Latin America region,” he explained.

Sadriwalla is also planning to use wireless technologies to bring world-class education to less developed countries with a special focus on his native India. “We are talking with government agencies about deploying large LCD panels in villages with satellite programming for adults and children,” he said. “India is encouraging these types of initiatives to move ahead in its race with China.”

Sadriwalla, 57, shares his humanitarian spirit with his wife Deborah, who is active in a number of Fort Lauderdale civic organizations, and their young sons A.J. and Alexander. “Our family believes that success should be shared,” he said, “and it’s important to my wife and me to contribute to our community.”

His long-term goal is for WLG to flourish in the global arena. “We must all remain visionaries and never lose sight of that entrepreneurial spirit and attitude,” he said. “To succeed in the 21st century, we must be willing to listen to new ideas and be able to turn on a dime. That’s how a small company like ours has become such a leader we are able to look beyond the immediate horizon and see farther ahead.”