Software engineering consulting firm aims to double in size

March 9, 2023

The story starts as many classic tech-focused businesses do – essentially in a basement, on the cusp of technology taking off and with a business model that reflects a market need.

For Sioux Falls-based Omnitech, which is marking 25 years, growth is coming at a pace of about 20 percent annually, leading to an office expansion in 2022 and continual hiring needs.

While the Sioux Falls office at 5841 S. Corporate Place includes four dozen employees, its 5,000-square-foot expansion is designed to accommodate up to two dozen more.

“The goal overall is to double the size of our company, both growth in Sioux Falls and in Rapid City,” said Chad Vondra, partner and co-owner, who has been with the company since before there was an office.

That happened in 2000 when “we came out of our basements” and moved into a space near SDN Communications, which is along 10th Street west of Kiwanis Avenue. The current office near the junction of interstates 29 and 229 opened in 2012.

In addition, Omnitech now has seven full-time employees and four interns in Rapid City.

The company’s niche is in its role as “high-end software engineering consultants,” Vondra said. “We’re not just coders. We’re people who can go in and identify business problems and come up with a solution for that problem, develop that solution, implement that solution and hand it off. Our people are able to communicate, analyze, execute and deliver a full product.”

Omnitech also does “a lot of staff augmentation” for various businesses, including in banking, construction, engineering and health care.

Data analytics and business intelligence have been growing areas of demand, Vondra said. The company has four people on the team with master’s degrees in data science.

“Basically what we can do is go into a business and look at all the data repositories they have and take them and assemble a data warehouse for them and scrub all the data and help them with AI in order to do predictive analytics on that data,” he said.

He compares the growth of artificial intelligence to cloud computing a decade ago.

“We’re realizing as an industry all the things we can do utilizing cloud, and AI is no different,” Vondra said. “For us, it’s going to be fantastic because we’re consultants and you still have to have the human mind to know what business problems we’re trying to solve.”

Business comes largely from local and regional companies, though referrals have brought in clients nationwide. The workforce is largely in the office.

“At the end of the day, if we really had a problem to solve, face-to-face across the table is the way to do it,” Vondra said.

Omnitech is focusing on its own workforce needs through ongoing efforts beginning with girls as young as middle school. The company holds an annual event called Inspire, engaging eighth through 12th grade students in STEM and business roles through hands-on activities and speakers.

“We’re not looking to just grow Omnitech’s employee base,” Vondra said. “We want to help the entire region in every facet of STEM and encourage these young girls to be in engineering and science and math because they have the propensity to do it. They just need the encouragement they can do it.”

The goal is to reach 200 girls this year at events in Sioux Falls and Rapid City. At the college and entry employee level, he’s beginning to see such efforts at work. Two out of six interns are young women.

“We are seeing the needle move … but we’ve got a long way to go,” Vondra said. “The cool transition is that we’re getting people who got inspired originally and now are coming back.”

Local colleges have been “absolutely our best” source of workers, with Omnitech connecting with students early in their college careers, he said.

“The funny thing is, if you’re three years in our industry, you’re no longer new because the industry moves so fast and you learn so much.”

To sign up for Inspire by Omnitech, which is March 17 in Sioux Falls and March 24 in Rapid City, click here.

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Software engineering consulting firm aims to double in size

It’s a great Sioux Falls startup success story: A high-end software engineering consulting firm with a bigger office and plans to fill it.

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