It’s not uncommon to find startups that double or triple revenue in their early years. But as a company gets bigger and matures, sustaining that kind of growth becomes more challenging.
So it’s notable that a handful of large L.A. companies have managed to grow significantly over the last year, making it on the Business Journal list of Fastest Growing Companies. DataDirect Networks Inc. is one of them. With $226 million in revenue in 2011 and more than 650 employees, the Chatsworth data storage company is one of the 10 largest L.A. companies on the fastest growing list. The company increased revenue by 78 percent from 2009 to last year.
Alex Bouzari, chief executive of DataDirect, said the world’s increasing demand for visual data has driven much of the company’s growth.
“Think of the iPhone and the iPad,” he said. “These devices give us the ability to experience things in a much more visual way. The challenge is that the speed and capacity required to store all these videos, images and content, and make them immediately available to people, is tens of thousands of times more than it was just a few years ago.”
Bouzari said one of DataDirect’s biggest challenges was implementing a standard of communication and corporate processes with employees spread out in offices across the globe.
“Once we got north of roughly $150 million in revenue, the need to have a really solid infrastructure in the company became a big requirement,” he said.
Founded in 1997, DataDirect designs and manufactures equipment that stores digital data. The company caters to the increasing number of industries that must store and quickly process video, images and other large data sets. Customers include universities, media companies and government entities such as the Department of Defense, as well as a growing number of medical centers working with the human genome.
In the last year alone, the company has grown its employee roster by 50 percent. In the third quarter this year, one new employee was hired every day.
DataDirect solidified a management team two years ago, hiring a chief operating officer, a chief technology officer, a chief financial officer and a director of human resources.
“We needed to layer management in the company in order to help scale the business in a predictable way,” Bouzari said.
Earlier this year, DataDirect added a second building to its Chatsworth headquarters to keep up with demand.
Bouzari predicts the company will keep growing over the next decade.
“The phenomenon of videos and images and content making its way into every industry is something that will continue to happen,” he said. “We’re very well positioned to provide our services to all those industries.”
– Bethany Firnhaber
