Mastech Corp.: The Nabobs Of Networking

Sunil Wadhwani and Ashok Trivedi got together 13 years ago over a beer to air some gripes about the computer biz. Trivedi, a product manager at Unisys Corp., was irked that his company was trying to shove bulky mainframes down the throats of clients who really wanted networked personal computers. Wadhwani was hearing similar complaints from fellow graduate business students at Carnegie Mellon University. But the pair did more than grumble; by the time they left the bar, they had taken the first steps toward scraping together $100,000 from their life savings to launch a PC-networking-and-services business, Mastech Corp.

Their plan proved farsighted. It took Mastech several years to get rolling after the stock market crash of '87 slowed corporate investments in technology. But since the early '90s, spending on local-area networks, enterprise software, and the Internet has exploded. And upstart Mastech has carved out a chunk of the market against bigger rivals by offering a wide range of services and some of the lowest costs in the business. The result is sales growth averaging 56% a year over the past three years, to $390.9 million in 1998. Earnings grew 26.7% a year, to $33.4 million. That landed Mastech at No. 79 on our Hot Growth list.