Your experts in Oracle and Java Solutions
~ By Leah Kellar
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Momentum Technologies has gathered an incredible amount of momentum over the past decade to become a leader in Oracle and Java solutions. A great testament to this is being named one of Canada’s Best Managed Companies of 2014, in its first year of competing in the contest with $12-million in annual revenue and 115 employees. It was also listed as one of Canada’s Fastest-Growing Companies by PROFIT 500 last year.
Momentum has graduated a step above providing Oracle and Java based solutions to target the market for professional services automation, or PSA. In that regard, this latest recognition is also a testament to Momentum’s unique business strategies, operations, financial performance, technology, and technological expertise and training of its employees. Particularly, it is due to the creation of MANITOU—Momentum’s world-class integrated management solution that automates, simplifies, and optimizes all of its business processes. Momentum won Canada’s Best in the selection criteria for “competitive strength” attributable to MANITOU, which automates and simplifies many of the administrative processes involved in its business development, client relations, staffing and task management, by making information available in a single location.
In a rapid era of business technology, that of streamlining processing of complex systems of information and organization for maximum efficiency, the software management solution is a winner on-site among its consultants, in-house team, and clients. Consequently, MANITOU also attributed to Momentum’s win in the criteria of human resources.
“We’re very proud of this recognition. It’s our winning strategy. I had two objectives in participating in the contest: to challenge this strategy, and to analyze the outcome. It has affirmed that my strategy to grow Momentum is a good one,” said Michel Ganache, president of Momentum Technologies in a recent interview with Business Elite Canada.
“We invest a lot in our internal system to be very efficient in our recruitment, in our customer relationships, in all of the operations of the company. We have a fully integrated system to be very efficient, to build revenue at the end of the month to have a very well managed cash-flow, which contributes to our rapid growth and that of our clients,” he added.
Momentum started in 2003 by a group of Oracle and Java solutions technology experts who were former employees of a technology consultant firm in Montreal. The company soon grew from 5 employees in the first year to 40 in the third year and currently they employ 115. Their first customers were primarily in Quebec City to service clients with a need for Oracle and Java based solutions, however in the process they built a revolutionary system of PSA in Quebec. It was after commercializing this system to offer it to their clients that Momentum started to really experience rapid growth. Initially it was just a very efficient system to solely operate their own company. The majority of Momentum’s clients are provincial governments that often require highly intricate systems to sort and manage high volumes of information, public and otherwise. Insurance and financial services, education, business, service companies, and healthcare comprise other sectors they service to a lesser extent. However, an astounding 40 per cent of Quebec colleges use Momentum technologies.
Momentum’s core services through the MANITOU system cover database management, Oracle application servers and specialty components, project management, architecture and support, computer system design and development, business intelligence and data warehousing. Aside from developing a rather revolutionary PSA system, Ganache thinks what has distinguished Momentum from the competition is the extent of the company’s expertise, and the huge shortage of Oracle expertise in particular in Quebec. For a consulting firm like Momentum, Ganache stresses that staff expertise is crucial. So crucial in fact that Momentum actually has a specialized division of the company called the Expertise Center, which functions to monitor technology in order to guide the company and to stay ahead of the learning curve in technological knowledge to enhance the efficiency of its PSA. This consists of the key components of methodological know-how, primarily, the application of best practices, proven methods, and extends to understanding of the technologies’ possibilities and limitations, mentoring with consultants and project partnerships with clients to create practical skills to manipulate applications in real-life scenarios.
“MANITOU is a complete system, it is a fully integrated solution. We customize all of the components with their systems. This includes HTML, project management and even expense building. We even will figure out how to automate the processing of transactions for the payroll system,” said Ganache.
Momentum predominantly sells this technology to consultant firms. The target customers being: IT, HR, accountant, and engineering companies. Momentum also works with Dejardins bank, their personal bank, which offers their services from collective insurance to payroll solutions. Since 2006, Momentum has received numerous recognitions, even recognition from Quebec’s Immigration Minister for how well it has integrated immigrants as employees. This is due in large part to the fact that there was not enough experts in the province in Oracle and Java solutions technologies and PSA systems, this forced Momentum to look outside of Canada. The company proudly has as many as 20 nationalities of employees, and has predominately hired experienced people from France, Belgium and Brazil. Another reason that they had to look beyond the borders of Quebec at least, is that they cannot hire employees from their clients whom they service with the very expertise in technology solutions that they would be trying to recruit to work for Momentum. Their competition in this regard has come from very big contributors like CGI and Futjisu and IBM.
“We invest in a lot of skilled education. We have to specialize our employees. Expertise is big for us, and we have had our experts and clients alike say that they like that and that is really what has distinguished us from the competition from the very beginning.”
Momentum’s goal is to take that experience to a global level. Next year the company has plans to set up an office in Boston, and other parts of Canada.
“The recent recognition has helped to establish us as a company on a worldwide level, and our expertise is leading the way,” said Ganache.
