Unsurprising growth
Friday, November 11, 2005
Twenty-five years ago, Francisco Collazo started Colsa Corp. out of the garage of his Huntsville home.
The company is now housed in a three-story building in Cummings Research Park, has just over 900 employees in Huntsville and its offices in five other cities. Its revenue climbed to $140 million last year.
In just the last three years, the company has nearly doubled in size in terms of revenue and the number of employees.
"The company sort of grew from the get-go," said Van Corum, the executive vice president of the holding company Collazo Enterprises, who joined the company in 1984. "In all honesty, (the growth) doesn't surprise me."
The company specializes in information technology, including the design, integration, maintenance and administration of large computer centers, and systems and software engineering for the Department of Defense, NASA and other government agencies and commercial customers.
Several years after Colsa was launched, the firm was approved for participation in the Small Business Administration's 8(a) program, which helps small businesses just starting or in a growth stage, with services such as support for government contractors and access to capital, management and technical assistance.
"The 8(a) certification really kicked off the company," Corum said. The company graduated from the program early - in seven instead of nine years - because of its significant growth, said retired Maj. Gen. Julian "Al" Sullivan, Colsa's president since July 2003.
"We've managed our growth through the 8(a) years and since then based on customer satisfaction," Sullivan said. "What most defines this company are our customers and employees and the continued vision we get from our founder and director."
One milestone in the company's growth was its selection by NASA two years ago as the prime contractor for the Huntsville Operations Support Center contract. The value of that single contract is $125 million. Another sizable win for the firm late last year was the Air Force's Technical Evaluation and Acquisition Management 3 (TAMS 3) award, a $110 million contract, with Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.
Colsa has also made significant steps in its work with computer clusters, a move the firm took about eight years ago to be able to provide customers with high-performance computing options that would cost less than buying and maintaining a mainframe. "For almost all applications, you get the same performance as a mainframe," Sullivan said.
The company built and operates the MACH5 supercomputer - an acronym for Multiple Advanced Computers for Hypersonics - for the U.S. Army Aviation & Missile Research, Development & Engineering Center in Huntsville. It's being used to study hypersonic flight.
MACH5 consists of 3,132 Apple G5 processors, making it the largest cluster of Apple computers in the world and one of the top 10 fastest computers in the world, according to Dr. Anthony DiRienzo, COLSA's executive vice president.
"When you look at other systems that operate in this speed range, the cost is in the hundreds of millions of dollars to build," Sullivan said. "We built this one (the MACH5) for $5 million.
"We want to continue to build (high-performance clusters) as long as there's a customer for them."
© 2005 The Huntsville Times
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